Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Koerner
Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Sackler 521
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
Jakob Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance invented the self has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at something that happened in the representation of personal identity first in Italy in the 14th century and then throughout the rest of Europe. This course will consider several of the writers whose self-representations have long drawn critical attention– More, Elizabeth I, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton – but now accompanied by such figures as Mary Sidney, George Gascoigne, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Carew, Francis Bacon, Anne Clifford, and Margaret Cavendish. The English examples will be set alongside key figures in the European Renaissance: Petrarch in Italy, Montaigne in France, and Cervantes in Spain. Students will be encouraged not only to reach out to a broad range of geographical possibilities but also to cast a wide cultural net (so as to include, for example, Osman of Timisoara or Glickl of Hameln). As represented in such works as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Michel de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, inquisitorial inquiries and witchcraft testimonies will also fall within the range of ego-documents that we will investigate. The seminar will be coordinated with a related course in the Art History Department taught by Professor Joseph Koerner, so that textual representations of the self will be set alongside a wide array of comparable representations in the visual arts. A central question will be the relationship between words and pictures in the fashioning of identity.