Thoughts on the Renaissance

A couple of thoughts on the Renaissance, inspired by Spenser: First, Spenser’s emphasis on the proper use of the body (Book 2 of the Faerie Queene , the book of temperance) highlights the anti-Platonic thrust of Spenser’s viewpoint. That was, if Greenblatt is to be believed, a central thrust of Renaissance ethics, in which “style” or “self-fashioning” and “ethic” were not sharply distinct. Or, to put it another way, aesthetic and ethic were not sharply distinct. Something to investigate further. Second, it increasingly seems that the Renaissance was not, as Schaeffer had it, the overthrow of medieval Christendom but its climax. At least, there are features of Renaissance that are more like a climax than like an overthrow. Another something to investigate further.