Renaissance Materialities: Introduction

Recent work in Renaissance studies has focused on the formation of what we have come to call the "early modern" subject. Scholars have aimed to discover exactly where in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature the modern conception of the free-standing, rights-bearing individual had its earliest origin (usually somewhere in the plays of Shakespeare). As part of a move to question what Margreta de Grazia has called this pressure for the Renaissance to be "modern before its time," we may more helpfully look not to the early modern subject, but to those Renaissance material objects which still retain the traces of their specific historical situation. If we ask what such objects and the material practices associated with them might look like if we didn't insist that they mark early modernity, but remain embedded in a particular moment in time, we might be in a better position to understand how historically deracinated our sense of the "early modern" subject has become.

The essays collected here look again at the objects manipulated by Renaissance people, which they made and which therefore not only made up their physical environment but which constrained and contextualized their own sense of bodily existence. Miniature manuscript books by a woman, new-fangled glass mirrors, imported silk, printed sheets pasted on particular walls—such objects locate themselves in specifying histories and allow us to see the subjects they encompassed in far greater historical particularity. By looking at Renaissance manuscript production, for example, we may be better able to understand not only the period's profound continuity with the medieval past, but also the very specific fault lines of discontinuity which punctuate the tradition of handwritten bookmaking across periods. Or again, if we look at the newly invented crystal mirror and its uses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we may more accurately locate the fissure where something authentically different has entered the picture—and, simultaneously, still see how the new-fangled object at first serves to reanimate a medieval metaphor built upon an older technology. A focus on objects as objects is able to resist the ease with which the study of subjectivity has been able to transcend historical context. Rather than looking to the narrative details of broadsheet ballads for a textual representation of the experience of underclass subjects, we can, for example, begin where Patricia Fumerton does, with the physical walls upon which the cheap paper sheets were displayed, in the alehouse. In this context their status as aesthetic artifacts, decorative wallpaper for the poor and intinerant, becomes an aid to understanding how the placeless population of London felt about the idea of home.

The collection opens with two essays which test one of the most widely shared assumptions about the period of the Renaissance: that, in Elizabeth Eisenstein's influential formulation, the printing press was "an agent of change." By resituating printed books in relationship to other notable objects, precious manuscript volumes and cheap trinkets, James Kearney and Susan Frye recalibrate the rate of change brought about by the technology of moveable type. In "The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero's Text," James Kearney addresses the strange status of Prospero's books which never explicitly appear on the stage as physical props. Attentive to the status of objects at a time when they were at the leading edge of their commodification in global commerce, Kearney revises the prehistory of the fetish to reveal the impact Reformation assumptions had on Europeans' attitudes toward pagan religious practices. Opposed to the fetishlike trinkets and fripperies so parodoxically important to the European (but aptly named) Trinculo—Prospero's books are thought by Caliban to contain the European colonizing power which has enslaved him: insofar as they do represent a fetishized literacy itself, he is right. Reifying unlettered Ariel's and Caliban's actual physical labor, Prospero's books, according to Kearney, reveal the "magic" of New World productivity to be based on slavery...