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Gordon Braden, University of Virginia. Katherine Eden, Columbia University.
Strier is a sophisticated critic who yet does not stray from the highway of sound common sense and so avoids the pitfall of over-refinement. Readers will want to accompany him on this surprising and exciting journey to a strangely modern—freewheeling, worldly, pleasure-loving, and essentially happy—Renaissance. My summary of this rich, complex book does little justice to its subtlety and nuance.
Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Its thesis and its chapter-by-chapter analyses will provoke readers to argue, limit, and extend its conclusions, with an expanded awareness of the historical meaning at stake in specific texts. Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical?
Its thesis and its chapter-by-chapter analyses will provoke readers to argue, limit, and extend its conclusions, with an expanded awareness of the historical meaning at stake in specific texts. In the clear steady light of its critical argument, we can only welcome this reminder that Renaissance values were not so gloomy as some approaches over the past thirty years have made them appear.
More than simply references, they trace the origins of his arguments, cite the full range of scholarship, and also give admirably generous and scrupulous credit to sources not often cited—anonymous press readers, panels at conferences long ago, even his own former students. Unrepentantly thoughtful and incisive himself, Strier has made another worthy contribution to Renaissance studies with this fine book.
The book The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton, Richard Strier is published by University of Chicago Press. The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. Front Cover. Richard Strier. University of Chicago Press, Sep 1, - Literary Criticism.
For more information, or to order this book, please visit https: Strier wants to reclaim the high-spirited, sensual Renaissance originally portrayed by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy One of the many pleasures of this book is seeing Burckhardt actually engaged with, rather than simply treated as a straw scholar. In this work recently released in a new translation under the title Writings on the Sober Life , 1 Cornaro relates that until he learned to regulate his appetite, he was sick and miserable but through a careful dietary regimen, he lived happily into his eighties.
As this example demonstrates, ideas of regulation continually frame the expressions of pleasure Strier highlights. In the Renaissance, moderation is not the conceptual opposite of pleasure, but its necessary precondition. Patience and anger, for example, are both profoundly circumstantial virtues and can easily become vices in the wrong situation.
As always, Strier is an excellent reader of Shakespeare, of both the sonnets and the plays. He is particularly illuminating on the critique of patience in The Comedy of Errors , showing that the patience that lords and husbands demand of servants and wives is merely another tool of coercion and oppression. This fine chapter also contains a wonderful discussion of bourgeois marriage, demonstrating how Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication.
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Subscriber Login Email Address. Introduction Back to Burckhardt Plus the Reformations. Petrarch and Shakespeare at Sonnets. Chapter 3 Against Morality: The Case of Macbeth.