Introduction to the Renaissance/Early Modern Thought
Big questions
- When we consider death, should we really be considering life?
- What were some of the Renaissance attitudes to life and death?
- Can we call this period the beginning of ‘modernity’?
The texts
Hamlet, William Shakespeare (1601)
The Duchess of Malfi (1623)
The monarchs
1558-1603 – the reign of Elizabeth
Preceded by Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, Queen of Scots
1603-1625 – the reign of King James
Followed by Charles I and Cromwell’s Commonwealth
Life and death
• Average life expectancy: 30 years old
• Frequent plague and disease, high infant death rate
• Human butchery commonplace and suffering made public a key part of justice
• ‘Memento mori’ – everything must die
“Ballard the priest, who was the first broacher of this treason, as the first that was hanged, who being cut down...was dismembered, his belly ripped up, his bowels and traitorous heart taken out and thrown into the fire, his head (also severed from his shoulders) was set upon a short stake on the gallows, and the trunk of his body quartered and imbrued in his own blood, wherewith the executioner’s hands were bathed and some of the standers-by besprinkled. Now when these venomous vipers were thus hewn in pieces, their tiger hearts burned in the fire and the sentence of law satisfied: their heads and quarters were conveyed away in baskets to be fixed upon poles and set over the gates of London, that all the world might behold the just reward of traitors.” (Account of the execution of John Ballard in 1586 – an alleged Catholic plotter)
Medieval/feudal world view
• Feudal world – religion used as a means of control
• Focus on the unseen, the spiritual, the after-life
• Human beings at the centre of a fixed and stable cosmos
• Hierarchical, fixed social order
• Disputes settled by personal combat
Early modern world view
• Outlawing of Catholicism; monarch the head of the Church
• Science disproving long held beliefs and discover of ‘new worlds’
• Emergence of humanism – the belief that man was the pinnacle of creation and efforts should be directed towards perfecting the worldly, physical life, rather than the unseen or spiritual
• Disputes settled by diplomacy, scheming and plotting
TWO WAYS OF CATEGORISING
Renaissance 1400s to mid 1600s
• Re-birth and interest in the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome.
- Questioning of existing beliefs
- Revival and review of thought and opinions about the universe.
The Early-Modern period - 1400s to mid 1700s
• An alternative to ‘Renaissance’ as this implies restoring or looking back
• ‘seeds of a new modern world’
• Signs of modernity: complexity, scepticism, doubt
• Misgivings about supernatural beliefs; the divine and secular; stability of social order
• Growth of early capitalism, foreign markets, exploration, colonialism and exploitation
‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little cruded milk, fantastical puff paste; our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in – more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body; the world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives as a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.’
(The Duchess of Malfi, 4.2)
Worm seed- dried flower heads of plant used for intestinal remedy
salvatory – ointment box
green mummy – medicine made from mummified corpses
contemptible – hateful
lark - songbird
‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that his goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man - How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is thisquintessence of dust?’
(Hamlet, 2.2)
firmament – the arch or vault of heaven with its clouds and stars; the sky/heavens
fretted – decorate with an interlaced pattern
paragon- pattern or model of excellence
promontory – a point of high land jutting out into sea; a headland
quintessence – the purest, most typical, or most perfect form of a quality/class