Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies
Authors: McDowell Sean 
Published: December 2007

Author's Introduction

The value of Renaissance historical phenomenology, as it is being recovered by the modern interpreters described in my essay (‘The View From the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies’, Literature Compass 3/4 [2006]: 778–91), becomes evident as soon as we move from discussions of cultural assumptions (e.g., the humoral construction of the body, the interplay of the microcosmic with the macrocosmic, the relations between passions and the rational faculties, the process of sense perception, the functions of the imagination in the soul‐body, etc.) to their aesthetic application by writers, artists, musicians, and other creators. Because of a shared training in rhetoric (classically defined and Christianized), creators of all kinds in the Renaissance assumed their work would have an affective as well as an intellectual impact on those who read, saw, heard, or otherwise experienced it. Indeed, they worked to produce reactions in the soul‐bodies of their ‘consumers’, to use our modern word. Consequently, their treatment of the emotions, desire, perception, sensation, cognition, sanity, madness, and more generally speaking, human experience often is more sophisticated than it first appears because the vocabulary they employed was more precise than we tend to think it was, and because their psychological imagery was less metaphorical than we tend to treat it today.

When we speak of a ‘broken heart’, for example, we almost invariably speak metaphorically. For a Renaissance person, however, for whom the heart was the seat of primary passions capable of overwhelming the soul‐body, a heart overwhelmed by frustrated desire might just well be capable of breaking. The same thing is true of the phrase, ‘losing one's temper’. Most people today who use this term often lack a clear conception of what ‘temper’ means. Many might consider it to mean ‘mental balance or composure’ (OED sense 3), a kind of default mode or normalcy of feeling. For a Renaissance person, though, the word carried a much richer frame of reference in regard to personhood: it meant the ‘due or proportionate mixture or combination of elements or qualities’ or the ‘condition or state resulting from such combination’ (OED sense I.1); the ‘constitution, character, or quality of a substance or body’ (sense II.4); the ‘condition of the atmosphere with regard to heat and cold, dryness and humidity’ (sense II.6); the ‘relative condition of a body in respect of warmth or coldness’ (sense II.7); and ‘bodily habit, constitution, or condition’ (sense II.8) – all definitions that the Oxford English Dictionary considers obsolete today. The range of definitions attached to this single word illustrates the degree to which a person was believed to be composed of discrete elements constantly vying with one another for supremacy and constantly in dialogue with the material world. To ‘lose one's temper’ in 1600 meant something more serious and potentially less localized than simply a temporary loss of poise; it meant a loss of ‘proportionate constitution’, a kind of insanity and/or an attack on bodily health not easily remedied.

Artists of all kinds, including writers, were fascinated by the potential for both order and instability in the faculty model of personhood. So were those who sought their work. We can gain a greater understanding and appreciation of literature and the arts if we study how they were created and to what ends. Historical phenomenology allows us to recover the crucial contexts we need in order to undertake such a study. The course described below –‘Human Nature in Early Modern Literature and the Arts’– aims to introduce upper division undergraduates to an ‘insider view’ of the treatment of human nature in early modern Europe. It enables students to become, in effect, semiotic interpreters of plays, poems, paintings, and other artistic productions in much the same way that the original consumers of these works were. It also treats English literature within a European context, the context within which the English themselves perceived their works. The supplemental materials both before and after the syllabus are intended to aid instructors who might be interested in teaching a version of this course or in creating a similarly designed course. Also, throughout the syllabus itself, I give occasional notes and suggestions for ways to enrich the content of a given day.

Author Recommends

Given the prevalence of early modern ways of thinking about the body, the mind, the soul, and their interrelations, a variety of approaches could be devised to sensitize students to this crucial psychophysiological context. Thus, a bibliography of useful scholarship could be quite large, depending on an instructor's interests. My own approach is comparative, in that I am interested in probing relationships among the various creative arts, and therefore transnational because of the internationally oriented mindset shared by many writers, painters, and others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The following selective list of sources emerges from these biases. These are the scholarly sources that most obviously inform my approach to historical phenomenology in the classroom.

Hoeniger, F. David, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992).

One of the most accessible and comprehensive accounts of Galenic and Paracelsian in modern scholarship, this book is divided into five sections: 1) three chapters on the social history of medical practice in Shakespeare's time; 2) three chapters on Galenic and Paracelsian medicine; 3) four chapters on the relationship between physiology and psychology; 4) five chapters on disease and treatment; and 5) three chapters analyzing the portrayal of illness and treatment in Macbeth, All's Well that Ends Well and King Lear, respectively. Throughout, Hoeniger provides a wealth of readings of moments and episodes from Shakespeare's plays.

Jensen, H. James, The Muses’ Concord: Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts in the Baroque Age (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976).

This book is one of the most important books in my teaching because it builds from the ground up a detailed explanation of the interrelationships of theories of knowledge and perception, rhetorical principles, and the literary, visual, and musical arts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jensen demonstrates how plays, poems, paintings, and musical compositions all relied on the phenomenology of the time for their design and the effects they were intended to achieve. The opening chapters explain the integral nature of psychological beliefs in rhetorical theory and practice. In sum, The Muses’ Concord provides a mini‐education in the bases for comparisons among the arts. Jensen is copious in his examples, which draw from both England and Continental Europe. Indeed, as he argues in the ‘Preface’, ‘sometimes a seventeenth‐century French theoretician or a cinquecento Italian painter will be more important to our understanding of an English Restoration poem than an English contemporary’ (xii). His comparisons of creators from different countries demonstrates the truly international character of discussions of the human person and aesthetics during the early modern period.

Jensen, H. James, Signs and Meaning in Eighteenth‐Century Art: Epistemology, Rhetoric, Painting, Poesy, Music, Dramatic Performance, and G. F. Handel (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1997).

Signs and Meaning is an entire volume devoted to Handel's oratorios. Jensen recovers the rhetorical, psychological, and aesthetic contexts informing their composition, performance, and early reception in much the same way as explicates the influences these contexts exerted on the arts in the seventeenth century. This volume is particularly helpful to those who wish to make use of Handel's work in their courses, the way I do in the sample syllabus below.

Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Humoring the Body collects many of Gail Kern Paster's seminal essays on what she calls the ‘psychophysiological self’, the early modern body that emerges from Galenic thinking about the humors and the passions. Paster successfully shows how mutable the body was thought to be in this earlier view of phenomenology, how susceptible it was to both internal and external influences. The book is particularly strong on the gendering of emotional and humoral states.

Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd‐Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

This collection contains provocative essays on subjects ranging from Renaissance praises of affect, to the passions in portraiture, to individual readings of The Faerie Queene, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, and Davenant's Macbeth. Collectively, the volume advances the importance of cultural emotion scripts in early modern literature and illustrates the range of readings that fall under the category of ‘historical phenomenology’ in Renaissance studies.

Schoenfeldt, Michael C., Bodies and Selves in Early Modern Literature: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

This book examines relationships between embodiment and selfhood in the work of some of the most major figures of the English Renaissance. Schoenfeldt's introductory chapter usefully delineates major points of connection and difference between early modern and modern ways of looking at psychological drives. He argues that a ‘central difference’ between early modern faculty psychology and Freudian influenced psychology concerns the ‘status of what we have come to call repression’: the ‘early modern regime seems to entail a fear of emotion that resembles our own fear of repression’. The book is particularly interesting on the relations between psychology and digestion within Galenic medicine.

Smith, Bruce R., ‘Premodern Sexualities’, PMLA 115.3 (2000): 318–29.

Smith provides an excellent discussion of the directions pursued by new scholarship on the body. His essay is particularly useful for its definition of the term, ‘historical phenomenology’, as it relates to desire and sexuality in early modern Europe. ‘The basic premise of phenomenology’, Smith writes, ‘is simple: you cannot know anything apart from the way in which you come to know it. That applies to both historical subjects and contemporary critics. With respect to eros such a way of knowing recognizes the embodiedness of historical subjects and attends to the materiality of the evidence they have left behind at the same time that it acknowledges the embodiedness of the investigator in the face of that evidence’ (325). The essay is approachable enough for advanced undergraduate students.

Online Materials

Throughout the sample course below I refer to several paintings or other works of art. The images presented either come from the course texts (especially the Holt and Norton anthologies) or from web sources. Images of the following paintings are available online and can be projected with little difficulty in any technology based classroom:

Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Lightmatter_Sistine_Chapel_ceiling.jpg

Michelangelo, Creation of Adam (detail from the Sistine Chapel):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/God2‐Sistine_Chapel.png

Michelangelo, David:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Michelangelos_David.jpg

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Rome_Sistine_Chapel_01.jpg

Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Judgment:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Leonardo_da_Vinci_%281452‐1519%29_‐_The_Last_Supper_%281495‐1498%29.jpg

Paul Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi:

http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/mcclymer/images/examples/VeroneseLarge.jpg

Caravaggio, The Betrayal of Christ:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Takingofchrist.jpg

Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew_by_Carvaggio.jpg

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St. Thomas:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas_by_Caravaggio.jpg

Georges de La Tour, St. Joseph the Carpenter:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/La_Tour.jpg

Georges de La Tour, three Nocturnes of the penitent Magdalene:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Georges_de_La_Tour_007.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Georges_de_La_Tour_009.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Georges_de_La_Tour_006.jpg

Charles Le Brun, The Entry of Alexander into Babylon:

http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/view.php?nr=1102

Sample Syllabus: Human Nature in Early Modern Literature and the Arts

Required Texts

Julia Conaway Bondanella and Mark Musa, eds., The Italian Renaissance Reader (New York, NY: Plume, 1987) 452010136.

John Dryden, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2003) 192840770.

Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) 0691003440.

Stephen Greenblatt et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1B (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006) 0393927180.

H. James Jensen, ed., The Sensational Restoration (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 1996) 0253210593.

Molière, The Misanthrope & Tartuffe, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York, NY: Harvest Books, 1965) 0156605171.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare Library) (Washington, DC: Washington Square Press, 2003) 0743477103.

Course Description

This course explores the concept of human nature as it influenced the development of the literary, musical, and visual arts of Renaissance Europe. The idea of human nature has always been at the center of culture for as long as civilizations have existed. In the seventeenth century, profound changes occurred in thinking about this subject, and these changes eventually resulted in modern views of what constitutes a human being. This course focuses on the crucial shift from the older transcendent, faculty psychology to the more materialistic, associationistic view of humanity as it appeared in poetry, plays, music, and paintings. The ideas related to this shift are important because they explain differences in national tastes and aesthetic preferences. They make clear, for example, the ways monarchs presented themselves to their peoples and each other; the ways people defined love and desire; the major points of contention in religious, philosophical, and scientific debates; conceptions of sanity and insanity; and the reasons audiences found comedies comic and tragedies tragic. As a result, they provide a convenient window onto European culture for students of European history, literature, and the arts. We will study ideas about human nature as they were communicated in Italy, England, France, and to a lesser extent, Germany, and our approach will be cross‐disciplinary by including philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, medicine, and political history. The remnants of past views about human nature are still found in the present – from the magnificent paintings in the Louvre and elsewhere, to the many performances and revivals of earlier plays, to the architectural achievements that define the skylines of European cities. Understanding these past views of human nature not only aids in the aesthetic appreciation of Western European art, music, and literature but also gives insights into the ways Europeans characterized (and characterize) each other.

Requirements

The course grade will consist of a midterm (25%), an independent semiotic analysis between eight and ten pages long (40%), a non‐cumulative final exam (25%), and in‐class participation (10%). We will discuss each of these components at greater length in class.

Schedule

Unit One: Human Nature in the Renaissance

Week One: Humanism, Neoplatonism, and the Artistic Representation of Desire

Humanism, The Renaissance Philosophy of Humanity, Neoplatonism

Read: Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, selections from Oration on Dignity of Man (Bondanella 178–83); Francesco Petrarca, ‘Letter to Posterity’ and ‘The Ascent of Mount Ventoux’ (Bondanella 1–21); Leonardo Da Vinci, selections from the Notebooks (Bondanella 185–96); and Michelangelo, selected poems (Holt 21–4)

Study: Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Lightmatter_Sistine_Chapel_ceiling.jpg

Michelangelo, Creation of Adam (detail from the Sistine Chapel): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/God2‐Sistine_Chapel.png

Michelangelo, David:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Michelangelos_David.jpg

Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Judgment:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Leonardo_da_Vinci_%281452‐1519%29_‐_The_Last_Supper_%281495‐1498%29.jpg

The Artistic Representation of Desire

Read: Sean McDowell, ‘The View From the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies’, Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 778–91; Petrarca, selected poems from Canzoniere (Bondanella 1–59).

Week Two: Theories of the Passions, Rhetoric, and the Arts

Faculty Psychology, The Passions, and The Workings of Desire

Read: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (Greenblatt 1077–139); Robert Burton, selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy (Greenblatt 1573–80).

Study: Isaac Oliver, Portrait of a Melancholy Lover (Greenblatt C11) and Nicholas Hilliard, A Young Man (Greenblatt C14).

(Note to instructors: H. James Jensen's discussions of ‘Theories of Knowledge and Perception’, ‘Rhetorical Theory and Practice’, and ‘Passions, Rhetoric, and Characterization’– chapters one, three, and five, respectively – of The Muses Concord would be invaluable as background for Shakespeare's methods of characterization and his rhetorical assumptions in this play.)

Week Three: The Faculties as a Means of Characterization

The Imagination

Read: Shakespeare, Macbeth (entire).

(Note to instructors: This play readily lends itself to an examination of the imagination because in its opening acts, Shakespeare implicitly compares the proper workings of the imagination in Duncan, Banquo, and the other nobles with the problems of an overactive imagination in Macbeth. Also, Gail Kern Paster's ‘Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Other Passionate Animals’, chapter three in Humoring the Body, provides useful commentary on the ways in which Macbeth's maladjusted body‐soul lends itself readily to animalistic behavior. Paster reads the play alongside others that similarly rely on animalistic descriptions of characters. During the last week of the course, we will discuss the paintings of Charles Le Brun, First Painter to Louis XIV, who theorized that people with excessive passions assume the physical characteristics of various animals. The issues raised in weeks two and three extend throughout the course.)

Unit Two: Ideas about Harmony and Disharmony

Week Four: Harmony as a Universal Principle

Ideas of Harmony, Disharmony, and the Passions

Study: ‘The Universe According to Ptolemy’ (Greenblatt A79).

Read: Dryden, ‘St. Cecilia's Day’ and Shakespeare, King Lear, Acts 1–3 (Greenblatt 1139–95).

Study: Michelangelo, The Last Judgment:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Rome_Sistine_Chapel_01.jpg

(Note to instructors: Playing for the class contrasting musical compositions and paintings that were designed to appeal to the passions or the rational faculties, respectively, enlivens the discussion of the relationships between cosmology, psychology, and the arts. Contrast, for example, Pachelbel's Canon in D Major with Vivaldi's ‘Winter’ from The Four Seasons. The former clearly appeals to the rational desire for order and harmony, while the latter evokes a scene meant to arouse a more obviously emotional response. One needn't be a musicologist to not the difference between these compositions or find evidence of each composer's intentions about hearer response. Dryden has the affective power of music in mind in ‘St. Cecilia's Day’ and later in the course, in Alexander's Feast. A similar scheme of contrasts appears in the contrasting faces of the elect and the damned in Michelangelo's The Last Judgment. These kinds of contrasts inform the representation of psychological harmony/disharmony in the workings of Shakespeare's tragedies.)

Week Five: Disharmony and Madness

Madness

Read: Shakespeare, King Lear, Acts 4–5 (1195–227).

(Note to instructors: David Hoeniger's account of the onset and treatment of Lear's madness is particularly useful. See chapter 18 of Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance.)

Week Six: Love as a Primary Passion

Unrequited and Other Forms of Imbalanced Love

Read: Donne, selected Songs and Sonnets (Greenblatt 1263–81).

Study: Anonymous, John Donne, or the Lothian Portrait (Greenblatt C19).

Mutual Love

Read: Donne, selected Songs and Sonnets.

Unit Three: The Passions in Early Modern Religion

Week Seven: Religious Uses of the Passions

The Passions in Religion

Read: Council of Trent (Holt 62–5); excerpts from the Trial of Paul Veronese (Holt 65–70).

Study: Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Judgment:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Leonardo_da_Vinci_%281452‐1519%29_‐_The_Last_Supper_%281495‐1498%29.jpg

Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi:

Holt Fig. 3 or

http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/mcclymer/images/examples/VeroneseLarge.jpg

Caravaggio, The Betrayal of Christ:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Takingofchrist.jpg

Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew_by_Carvaggio.jpg

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St. Thomas:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas_by_Caravaggio.jpg

The Art of Meditation

Read: Donne, Holy Sonnets (Greenblatt 1295–99) and ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’ (Greenblatt 1299).

Study: Georges de La Tour, St. Joseph the Carpenter:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/La_Tour.jpg

Georges de La Tour, three nocturnes of the penitent Magdalene:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Georges_de_La_Tour_007.jpg (this image also is reproduced in Greenblatt as illustration C24)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Georges_de_La_Tour_009.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Georges_de_La_Tour_006.jpg

Week Eight: Affect and the Religious Life

Read: George Herbert, selections from The Temple (Greenblatt 1605–1624)

Midterm Exam

Week Nine: ‘Fallen Nature’ as Psychophysiological Disharmony

Read: Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 1–3.

Study: Tintoretto, God Creating the Animals (Greenblatt C 18).

Week Ten: Redemption as Love/Order

Read: Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 4, 5, 9, and 10.

Study: Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (Greenblatt C 22).

Unit Four: Aesthetics and National Taste – England and France

Week Eleven: Hobbesianism and Neoepicureanism in England

Associationistic Psychology

Read: Jensen, ‘Introduction’ (ix–xvi) and Thomas Hobbes, excerpts from Leviathan (Jensen 1–41); Rochester, ‘A Satyr Against Mankind’ (Jensen 79–96).

Neoepicureanism

Sir Walter Charleton The Ephesian Matron (Jensen 42–78).

Week Twelve: Hobbesian Assumptions in Restoration Drama

Read: George Etherege, The Man of Mode (Jensen 97–180).

Week Thirteen: Aesthetics and National Taste, Part I – French Rules Criticism

Read: Roger de Piles on ranking painters according to ‘the rules’ (Holt 176–86); Molière, The Misanthrope (entire).

Week Fourteen: Aesthetics and National Taste, Part II – Englishness

Read: William Wycherly, The Plain Dealer (Jensen 181–282).

Week Fifteen: Dryden's Defense of Englishness

Defense of the English ‘Genius’

Read: Dryden, Essay on Dramatic Criticism.

The Celebration (and Detraction) of Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’

Read: Charles Le Brun (Holt 159–61, Prater 54).

Study: Bernini, Portrait Bust of Louis XIV (Holt fig. 5) and Le Brun's Alexander the Great series of paintings, originally painted for the then newly constructed palace at Versailles. Read: Dryden, Alexander's Feast.

Study: Charles Le Brun, The Entry of Alexander into Babylon:

http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/view.php?nr=1102

(Note to instructors: For those interested in exploring further comparisons among the arts during this final week, G. F. Handel's oratorio Alexander's Feast, based on Dryden's poem, is a fascinating study. In dramatizing the sequence of passions that Timotheus induces in Alexander, it not only celebrates the power of music, the way Dryden's poem did, but it also misses Dryden's implicit satirical jibe at Louis XIV. See H. J. Jensen's account of ‘Comparisons of the Arts’, chapter nine of The Muses’ Concord, for more information.)

Final Exam during Finals Week.

Focus Questions

In what ways do Neoplatonic assumptions about the composition of human beings inform Italian humanism, especially in the writings and artistic works of Petrarca, da Vinci, and Michelangelo?

How do scholars define the term, ‘historical phenomenology’? What is the relationship between passions, humors, and madness in the field of historical phenomenology?

In addition to popularizing the Italian sonnet (or Petrarchan sonnet) as a literary form, Petrarca also is significant for introducing an imagistic and linguistic vocabulary for describing the condition of unrequited love. Later poets heavily imitated Petrarca's example – or parodied it. What are the essential features of ‘Petrarchan love poetry’, based on your reading of his poetry? In what ways is the struggle to cope with unrequited love also a struggle for self‐definition, specifically within a Renaissance Christian cosmos?

To what extent is Duke Orsino's struggle with love melancholy material (bodily) as well as psychological? How does Viola function as a cure for his condition?

How does Shakespeare employ imagery to convey the emotional states of his characters to audiences (and readers)?

In the opening acts of Macbeth, how does Macbeth's imagination work differently from, say, Duncan's or even Banquo's? What is the significance of Macbeth's observation that he has ‘murdered’ sleep?

What are the primary passions responsible for Lear's increasingly erratic behavior in King Lear, and how do we know? In what ways does the play show the relationships between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic in its treatment of the themes of harmony and disharmony?

In what ways does Donne define the condition of unrequited love differently from Petrarca? How does love as a passion influence perception in Donne's accounts of mutual love in such poems as ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’ and ‘The Canonization’?

In what ways do the paintings of Caravaggio respond to the artistic strictures suggested in the Council of Trent excerpt?

Donne's Holy Sonnets are famous for their psychological tempestuousness, to the point where some readers have been tempted to read them as evidence for actual spiritual troubles in Donne's personal life. Yet as the editors of the Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne have shown, the first sixteen of the Holy Sonnets were circulated in two distinct sequences during Donne's lifetime. How does this fact about their circulation affect our reading of the emotional states represented in the individual poems?

In the selected poems from The Temple, what connections does Herbert draw between the act of writing (‘versing’) and emotionality?

In Paradise Lost, how does Milton use soliloquies to convey Satan's emotional states?

How does faculty psychology help explain the transition between the speeches of Eve before the Fall and her speeches immediately afterwards?

In his ‘A Satyr Against Mankind’, Rochester takes to task a Neoplatonically oriented member of the clergy. What are his main arguments against ‘reason’ as the religious man defines it? In what ways does Rochester's poem reveal an indebtedness to the psychological assumptions of Thomas Hobbes?

After reading The Ephesian Matron, what would you say is the difference between hedonism and neoepicureanism?

In our text of The Man of Mode, H. James Jensen glosses the term, ‘coxcomb’, to mean ‘one who exists solely for the amusement of others’. In what ways does this definition fit into a Hobbesian view of social power?

What are the aesthetic strengths of French rules criticism, as evidenced by Molière's The Misanthrope? From the standpoint of the faculty psychology of the seventeenth century, which psychological faculties is art closely adhering to ‘the rules’ most explicitly geared toward?

What would you say is most ‘English’ about Wycherly's The Plain Dealer, in light of Molière's play?

On what basis does Neander (a mouthpiece for Dryden) in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy defend English literature against its critics, who prefer the more rules‐oriented literature of the French?

In Alexander's Feast, what does Dryden suggest is the relationship between skillful music and an unsteady temperament? How would you explain the last stanza of the poem, given the subject matter of the rest of the poem?

To what extent are Charles Le Brun's renderings of Alexander consistent? How does his commentary on Alexander's personality differ from Dryden's?

Now that we have reached the end of the course, how would you define a phenomenological approach to literature in comparison to/or contrast with other approaches to literature you have undertaken in the past?

Seminar/Project Idea

Independent Semiotic Analysis

(Note to instructors: The project assignment described below asks students to undertake independent analysis of a work unfamiliar to them. Because I stipulate that students must choose works we do not discuss in class, the variety of works students choose could place a burden on the instructor. One could easily remove this restriction and include both familiar and unfamiliar works on a menu of choices, or confine student selection to the course texts, or even narrow the scope still further to a single major work –King Lear, say, or Paradise Lost.)

This course emphasizes the recovery of meanings now lost to us over time. We seek to discover how people in the Renaissance understood and reacted to the plays, poems, art works, and musical compositions we study together. This recovery effort not only adds to our knowledge of European aesthetic and intellectual history, but also, and more importantly, it enhances our appreciation and enjoyment of the great works of the past. Our effort requires a form of semiotic interpretation, which in its simplest terms, entails finding the meanings of a sign – the heart, say, or a compass or a violet or an angry outburst – by reading the sign against the system of meanings that inform it. For example, in the Renaissance, 1) the face was thought to reflect the emotional disposition of a person in specific ways, and 2) specific facial expressions resulted from specific emotions. When you consider the facial expressions of figures in a Nicholas Poussin painting, for example, with knowledge of the grammar of facial expressions, you can read the story depicted in the painting with greater understanding. Indeed, you can read the painting as a story. (In Poussin's case, knowing the actio section of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, an ancient Roman rhetorical treatise, also helps: many of the hand gestures in Poussin's paintings also have particular meanings described by Quintilian.) Knowing how to read Renaissance or Baroque paintings will cause you to spend more time with them the next time you are in a gallery. You can stop being one of the people who rush through the Baroque wing of a gallery because you see that these paintings of figures really aren't the same. They resemble short stories, in a way.

For your seminar project, I want you to write an eight‐ to ten‐page semiotic analysis of a work we did not discuss in class. The idea here is simple: now that you are armed with several bodies of related knowledge and a method of interpretation we've used throughout our sessions together, you can apply both to a new case. Most likely, the work you choose will not be familiar to you. I want you to browse our course texts for a work that might interest you. To aid you in your browsing, take note of the subjects and/or class sessions that interested you most. Then select a promising work and write a detailed analysis of how someone from its time period would have responded to it, again using your knowledge of cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic history as a guide to meaning. A great variety of works suggest themselves. Below is a preliminary list. It is not all‐inclusive by any means, but the works listed here lend themselves well to semiotic analysis.

A canto of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Any of Shakespeare's play besides Twelfth Night or King Lear

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Ben Jonson's Volpone, or the Fox or The Masque of Blackness

Any of Donne's poems not discussed in class

Any of Herbert's poems not discussed in class

The poems of Mary Wroth, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, or Andrew Marvell

A painting or a group of paintings by Caravaggio, Poussin, Charles Le Brun, or Georges de la Tour

Some part or dimension of Milton's Paradise Lost not discussed in class

Dryden's devastating satire, Macflecknoe

Aphra Behn's The Rover

Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso

Your success with this assignment will depend on your honesty with yourself and with me about your interests. On the one hand, you do not wish to restrict your interests to the familiar. Indeed, one becomes educated by willingly and enthusiastically venturing into personally uncharted regions. On the other, you should make every attempt to follow your genuine curiosity. If none of the above suggestions works for you, approach me with an alternative.

Regardless of what you choose, you will submit to me a preliminary proposal for your subject by the midway point in the course, during the week after the midterm exam. Then during week twelve, you will submit a draft of your thesis paragraph. Both of these assignments will figure in the overall assignment grade.