Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

Introduction: Renaissance Tropologies

1 Introduction Renaissance Tropologies The essays in this volume focus on the textual activity of major cultural tropes that enunciate and transform the cultural imagination on matters of love and power in the world, the body politic, and the rising sphere of personal life in early modern England. The inspiration for such discussion of Renaissance tropologies can be found in the scholarship of Gale H. Carrithers Jr. and James D. Hardy Jr. In their last published volume, Age of Iron: English Renaissance Tropologies of Love and Power Carrithers and Hardy identified four tropes—journey, theater, moment, and ambassadorship—as preeminent in the cultural imagination of Renaissance England.1 According to Carrithers and Hardy, “These four tropes...were the way in which the Renaissance citizenry imagined action, order, and being and in which they longed for all things human finally to be put right. The tropes thus described a broad religious dimension of life, adding depth of meaning to ordinary occurrences, any of which could become a moment of conversion, an example of God’s theater, or a showing forth of ambassadorship for God, which was part of the human journey toward God” (see chapter 1, below). 2 Introduction Age of Iron also argued that tropologies functioned as a collective means of self-understanding in a language community, and as conscious movements of will, or response to the divine will. Carrithers and Hardy recognized that in a society with a common base in belief (that is, most premodern societies ), this process is not hidden or unreflective, but open to the resources of interpretive reflection. Consequently, they argued, the dynamism of the tropes can be construed within the “metalanguage” that embraces them all—“the dialectic of love and power” (17). As they observed, “The general cultural tropes of self-conception were psychologically antecedent to the choices of daily life and communal history, were the standards by which life and history were judged and understood, and were, finally, the intellectual matrix through which the future was anticipated” (42). Age of Iron further coined the term “interorality” (similar in mode and function to the intertextuality of the literate) to express the concept of “oral referentiality to a written text known by all and to voices heard therein” (14) as a condition facilitating the promulgation of these tropologies across classes and literacy barriers, disseminated in part—but crucially—by the Book of Common Prayer. Carrithers and Hardy argued, “The steady pressure of a centrally imposed religion, conducted in English and accompanied by growing semiliteracy and genuine literacy,...gave rise to an interoral culture above the level of lore and within the realm of tropic expression” (14). Finally, Age of Iron elucidated habits of thought based in religion but shared through many cultural forms: “from processions to sermons to marriages and funerals to common expressions of language (e.g., zounds)” (43). It offered a dual view of the world (as conceived in general cultural tropes and as lived) and a means of negotiating between them: “not cause and effect...but rather a more generally hermeneutic analysis of continual recirculation and reciprocation between life as it was lived and trope as it was understood and interpreted.... Introduction 3 Life had about it a character of synchronicity, of experience having two meanings at the same time, one known by perception , the other by faith and trope” (42–43). In Age of Iron, and in their subsequent publications, Carrithers and Hardy recognize the historical moment as at once a specific time and yet no longer fixable in language or representation, and they establish a newer historical grounding for integrating literary, religious, and social experience, elegantly conceptualized by the word “trope”—like Eric Auerbach’s figura, a “middle-term” between history and language.2 As they define them, tropes provide access into habits of thought and worldview, and can be as useful for articulating the cultural imagination of an age long past as of one still in process. Tropes animate more static explanatory structures—such as the Great Chain of Being—by evincing an experiential dimension. Most importantly, the work of Carrithers and Hardy invites a less metonymic understanding of historical change (the linearity of historical causality following the pattern of “part-part-whole, that and that and that, this and then this and then this” [Age of Iron, 10–11]), one more responsive to lived experience represented both synchronically and diachronically in...