On the Possibility of Early Modern Nostalgias

We certainly do our utmost to equal the Ancients in every sort of ostentation, in debauchery and in the devising of gratifications, in comforts and in luxuries, for our wills are as vitiated as theirs were but our ingenuity cannot bring it off. Our powers are no more capable of competing with them in vice than in virtue, both of which derive from a vigour of mind which was incomparably greater in them than in us: the weaker the souls, the less able they are to do anything really good or really bad.¹

—Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Ancient Customs’

In this passage from ‘On Ancient Customs’, Michel de Montaigne dwells on the fact that, try as they might, his sixteenth-century contemporaries could never be as vicious as the ancients. But they could never be as virtuous, either. For the human soul has been in decline: the ‘weaker souls’ of Montaigne’s countrymen would never equal the goodness or wickedness of their forebears. In this image of decay, Montaigne intimates a nostalgic longing for the past’s ‘ingenuity’ that the present currently lacks. Yet this Ovidian hint of an Iron Age, of history as decline, is undercut by Montaigne’s implication that nothing has changed between past and present: ‘Our wills are as vitiated as theirs’, he claims. Moreover, and contrarily, he suggests that history is progress; our present vices are not as vicious as the past’s. Thus, is Montaigne’s reflection ‘nostalgic’? His chastisement of French society suggests a longing for a preferable, unknown past. His observation that ‘we’ strive to be like ancient Greeks and Romans voices a desire to collapse perceived temporal distance and difference through imitation, through repetition. But Montaigne destabilises such longing by naming the past’s imperfections and by making that past proximate through ‘our’ and ‘their’ unchanging ‘vitiated wills’. To attempt to characterise Montaigne’s temporal ambivalence here raises the question: what do we talk about when we talk about ‘nostalgia’? More specifically, what do we talk about when we talk about ‘early modern nostalgia’? Approaches to Early Modern Nostalgia addresses this question through historicist analyses of early modern English poetry, prose, and drama.

This Special Issue cannot answer the former question in its entirety, but by looking both at the field of Renaissance and early modern scholarship, and the world outside the academy, it becomes clear that nostalgia is both an important topic and an apt one for 2016. Indeed, nostalgia studies offer a rare intersection between the global critical interest in the history of the emotions and the renewed scholarly interest in time and temporality.² With the international memorialising of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the more attenuated celebrations of the 400th anniversary of The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, 2016 has been a significant year for thinking about nostalgic process and discourses in the field of early modern literature. Yet when I proposed this Special Issue, I did not realise just how timely a discussion of nostalgia would be outside of early modern studies. In the Anglophone world, nostalgia currently circulates in virulent political discourses of making a nation great again, of securing homelands and origin points, and of displacement and forced exiles. As both the success of the Brexit campaign and the election of Donald Trump have demonstrated, these discourses have a national and international impact, one that it is now hard to overstate. Leave campaigners employed nostalgic discourse for a past Britain that membership in the EU eroded; post-Brexit, pro-Remain responses seemed to enact or encourage immediate nostalgia, as past and present Britain were redefined in the wake of the referendum. Jonathan Freedlund writes decisively that ‘The Britain that existed until 23 June 2016 will not exist anymore … This is not the country it was yesterday. That place has gone for ever’.³ These sentiments and this sense of immediate loss were echoed by Americans confronting Trump’s largely unexpected victory on 9 November 2016: ‘What happens next [after Trump’s election] promises (and threatens) to make history as nothing has in America’, Ross Douthat...