Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

12. Habits of Thought, Structures of Feeling

Habits of Thought, Structures of Feeling Stephen Pender Intheirexplorationofthe“generalculturalhorizon”inRenaissance England, Gale Carrithers and James Hardy Jr. embrace “habits of thought” over the “taxonomic spatiality” of a world-view. For Carrithers and Hardy, the concept “habits of thought” captures the “changing and semipermeable boundaries between high literacy and (much more common) semiliteracy ...and the large terrain of oral culture.” Rejecting the notion that “central cultural metaphoric self-conceptions of a people are...divorced from the daily rounds of life,” Carrithers and Hardy propose the “continual recirculation and reciprocation between life as it was lived and trope as it was understood and interpreted” as their areas of inquiry. Moving freely between “general cultural circumstance” and “recirculatory, incremental understanding,” they argue, ensures scholarly fidelity both to experience and to the “standards by which life and history were judged and understood” in the period. To Carrithers and Hardy, scrutinizing—or, to use their term, construing—English Renaissance habits of thought promises both light and fruit: in order to render the “daily rounds 12v 281 282 Habits of Thought, Structures of Feeling of life” perceptible, a largely opaque oral culture and its “interorality” (“oral referentiality to a written text known by all”) are prised open with a delicate, nuanced reading of the Book of Common Prayer; emblems are explored as resonant incarnations of power; Donne’s “dialogic” politics are established via attention to the temporal and the peripatetic in his sermons; and the tropes of theater, moment, journey, and ambassadorship are deftly interrogated in a diverse array of texts and contexts, figures and grounds. Throughout Age of Iron, the concept “habits of thought” ballasts and sustains Carrithers and Hardy’s excursions.1 Carrithers and Hardy borrow the term “habits of thought” from Debora Shuger.2 Exploring “drastic ideological pluralism ” in the ruling orders of early modern England, and arguing against both old and new historicists, Shuger offers “habits of thought” to describe “a culture’s interpretive categories , which underlie specific beliefs, ideas, and values” (9). In Shuger’s view, traditional, analogical forms of thinking coexist with rational, empirical thought in dominant culture ; dominant culture itself has “less to do with formulated doctrines...than with barely articulated assumptions and feelings about how the pieces of the world fit together, about what counts as fitting.” Early modern English dominant culture was both “more radical, probing, and self-critical than has often been assumed,...[and] more primitive, more alien from our own habits of thought, closer perhaps to those of traditional societies” (14–15). In order to expose the conflicts and contradictions in dominant culture—all too often presented as lapidary, stiltedly orthodox, or monolithic—Shuger employs habits of thought to elucidate “the subterranean mechanisms determining individual or collective behaviour” in the early modern ruling classes. She insists that cultures are “inseparable from the beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, values, and representations of persons.” Habits of thought are pressed into service in order to explore this “experiential Stephen Pender 283 aggregate,” for ideas have no determinate meaning apart from their use within a given milieu (252).3 For Shuger, habits of thought encompass the “interpretive categories and relations” by which members of dominant cultures in early modern England “order and analyze experience” (26). They are, in effect, ideologies, though not in the “Marxist sense of false consciousness” (8).4 Differences in conceptions of the self, of God, and of the sociopolitical order, Shuger writes, are “best considered differences not of propositional content—the traditional ‘history of ideas’ approach—but of ideology.” In early modern England, these differences do not “manifest doctrinal disagreement but exist in that more obscure and nebulous realm of assumptions, desires, and senses of the real, which determines both the kind of questions asked and the kind of answers acceptable—both logically and psychologically” (12; compare 17). Thus, “habits of thought” as a concept includes diverse senses of the real, diffuse pulsions and desires that nevertheless seem to remain substantially homogeneous, for such divergent impulses are present in the same mind. Indeed, individuals—Andrewes and Hooker, Herbert and James I, Donne—rule her study, and Shuger settles on the psyche as the tertium quid between concept and matter, idea and event, meaning and experience: the “only way, in fact, that ideas and events can touch each other or that structures can be said to do anything is through the mediation of individual psyches” (Habits of Thought, 253). In the late 1980s...