Group Identity in the Renaissance World (review)

Six vignettes, meaningfully ordered as one would expect of any carefully constructed theatrical masterpiece, constitute the core of this study: (1) In 1506, Pope Julius II took hold of the recently excavated ancient marble masterpiece wherein the Ancient Greek god Laocoön vainly attempts to protect his two sons from a lethal tangle of snakes, a grouping that seduces the viewer with its portrayal of excruciating, sexually charged pain. (2) Reports from the New World about cannibalism, a linguistic corruption of the term Caraíba (Caribbean), evoke subliminal anxieties about the symbolic eating of Christ's body and blood. (3) Thomas More's Utopia (1516) incongruously allows for slavery. (4) In 1561 at Goa, Portuguese inquisitors fighting the devil's dentist defeat mercantile profiteers to capture and execute by fire the dalada, Buddha's left canine tooth, a relic as powerful as any in the Christian panoply. (5) In his love letter to Ophelia, Hamlet's reference to his body as a machine, or perhaps he refers to his penis, suggests an image first seen in Leonardo da Vinci's drawings nearly a century earlier. (6) Italian wandering humanist Pietro della Valle encounters a hospital in Gujarat, India, where loving care is provided for birds that have lost their mates, evoking memories of how death has taken his beloved wife Sitti Maani Gioerida, a Christian warrior whom he describes as being armed in "the manner of an Amazon" (274).

Wojciehowski weaves this erudite, exotic array of six historical moments to challenge in a fundamental way our understanding of the Renaissance. Her approach is fiercely psychoanalytical. Readers of lesser tolerance for this discipline's iconic formulations may prefer Stephen Greenblatt's prize-winning but heavily diluted version of post-Freudian analysis, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York, 2011). The present book is for those who prefer their Freud straight up, at most splashed with a twist of wry humor and spiked further with theoretical formulations from Didier Anzieu.

Space precludes treatment of the wonderful nuances and suggestive possibilities found on virtually every page of this labor of love, almost Dantean in its careful, chiseled expression and richly illustrated with eight color plates and thirty-two additional illustrations. Instead, a raw condensation must suffice. Wojciehowski asserts that the key to Renaissance dynamics is group identity, first in the emergence of the significance of group (Italian gruppo) as an organizing principle and second in the rapidly shifting challenges to group identity that flowed from the contact of the European-Christian group with grouped "others" during the long sixteenth-century age of discovery and expansion. In her account, Burckhardt's emphasis on individualism, humanism, and Greco-Roman culture are turned inside out, starting with a re-dating of the inception of the Renaissance by two centuries.¹ Thus does she set aside the classical revival initiated by such Florentine artists as Cimabue and Giotto in favor of the travel journals of amazed European explorers suddenly stripped of their recently formed group identity.

The group is a body, as in the "body politic," and the Renaissance Euro-Christian body behaved as any (Freudian) body would—incorporating, biting, expelling, penetrating, reproducing, and maiming. Look at any sixteenth-century map of the New World and see the image of a female monster, with a giant breast and an enticing belly. The very term "America" was an instant success because of its maternal phonemic forms. But watch out for the cannibals guarding access to her womb, wherein lay the hidden treasures of golden civilizations in contact with the waters that also washed upon fabled China. The future of Renaissance studies, Wojciehowski concludes, is in the application of emerging theories of embodied cognition to the analysis of historical group subjectivity.