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The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. By RICHARD STRIER. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. $50.00 cloth.
Reviewed by MICHAEL SCHOENFELDT
This is a challenging and rewarding book that should be read by all who are interested in early modern studies. Since the birth pangs of new historicism, Richard Strier has reminded us that whatever excitement a theory or approach of the moment generates, it ignores at least as much as it includes. In The Unrepentant Renaissance, Strier admonishes those critics who articulate a dour, anxious Renaissance that the period was, in fact, filled with expressions of exuberant pleas- ure and unrestrained emotion. It is perhaps appropriate that the title of this new book repudiates repentance, because Strier has been, and remains, our gloriously unrepentant revisionist, swimming deliberately against the tide of current trends.
In this book, Strier argues that "Renaissance" is a better term for this lively period than the cool, imprecise, relational "early modern" installed by historians and literary scholars. Moreover, he maintains that this period was in fact "more bumptious, full- throated, and perhaps perverse" than standard accounts would allow (2). He chal- lenges the "dark and dour terms" in which Stephen Greenblatt, Gail Kern Paster, and I have characterized the period (17). Strier wants to reclaim the high-spirited, sen- sual Renaissance originally portrayed by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1870). One of the many pleasures of this book is seeing Burckhardt actually engaged with, rather than simply treated as a straw scholar. One of the signal heroes of Burckhardt's history is the Venetian Alvise Cornaro, whom Strier describes as a "model of happy and flourishing worldliness" (21). But Cornaro proves an awkward poster child for a book dedicated to unrestrained energy; Strier devotes only one sentence to the fact that Cornaro's reputation throughout Europe was largely a product of his Treatise of Temperance and Sobrietie, a...