BA in Tutorial Studies, University of Chicago, USA; MA in English Literature, San Francisco State University, USA; PhD in English Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Field of Study: Renaissance Studies
Look into thy heart and write, Sir Philip Sidney’s muse once said. But one of the things that Renaissance writers discovered when they looked there was violence. Violence was nothing new, of course (no more than the New World was actually new when it was discovered), but seeing it with fresh eyes was at once thrilling and discomfiting. Whether writing realistic stories about everyday life or fantastic stories about chivalric warriors, comic tales about degenerate monks or tragedies about the falls of princes, Renaissance writers repeatedly found violence at the heart of the world they were representing and very rarely as a phenomenon about which they thought one could be complacent. Violence appeared to be a motor force of history, of social life, of art. But the European Renaissance, from the time of Boccaccio to the time of Shakespeare (ca. 1350 – 1620) was in principle committed to a Christian view of the world, ruled by the Prince of Peace, aiming toward beating swords into ploughshares and committed to an ethic of turning the other cheek. How was violence to be represented and accounted for under such conditions? Why should it be represented at all? Those are the questions my project intends to answer. In effect, this study will place the literature of the Renaissance in the context of the history of violence itself.
