RENAISSANCE
LITERARY THEORY
AND PRACTICE
Chapter I
THE RENAISSANCE AS A LITERARY PERIOD
The word renaissance suggests a state of mind, the sense of recovering something neglected by one’s literary ancestors. “Ours is a new day,” says the fifteenth century. “We have escaped from the decadence of our fathers into the purer poetry. We have recovered the great tradition and are setting it forward.” So the English eighteenth century, which had again repudiated “gothic night,” was in turn repudiated in the manifesto of the Lyrical Ballads and scorned by Keats as “a schism nourished in foppery and barbarism.” The Renaissance, then, is it only one such instance of self-consciousness among the many that mark so-called periods of literature? The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were regarded not only at the time, but long and widely, as an actual new day, the Renaissance. Histories of literature, no less than those of politics and society, have treated it as a distinct period. Though more recent histories have found it less distinct, it still claims attention as a widespread cult of the ancient classics. Its leading ideas permeated western Europe; and its new day, though it was bent toward nationalism, was conceived but secondarily as national progress, primarily as a general reanimation from ancient ideals long neglected. Thus it is not only the most familiar example of a typical recurrence in literary history; it remains the cardinal experience of classicism. Though we may no longer speak of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a reawakening of literature equal to that of painting, we may still speak of the Renaissance.
The common sixteenth-century view of accomplished restoration after medieval decadence is expressed (1527) by Guillaume Budé.
The best part, I think, we now have in our hands, saved from the deluge of more than a thousand years; for a deluge indeed, calamitous to life, had so drained and absorbed literature itself and the kindred arts worthy of the name, and kept them so dismantled and buried in barbarian mud that it was a wonder they could still exist (De studio literarum, 1527; Basel ed. 1533).
In 1558 the sober Minturno is merely less certain as to dates.
For who of you is unaware that from the time when the Roman Empire, for all its power and eminence, began to totter and lean, literature was asleep, not to say overwhelmed and buried, till the time of Petrarch? From then on, it has been so steadily regaining the light that now it has been almost recalled from that [medieval] rude and barbarous teaching to its ancient cult (De poeta, 1559, p. 14).