Unrepentant Renaissance

Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and the College at the University of Chicago. He has published numerous articles and coedited several interdisciplinary essay collections, including Shakespeare and the Law. Aside from The Unrepentant Renaissance, which won the Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism in 2011, he is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism and Renaissance Texts, and Shakespearean Issues: Agency, Skepticism, and Other Puzzles.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)PART 1    In Defense of Passion and the Body1    Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert2    Against Judgment: Petrarch and Shakespeare at Sonnets3    Against Morality: From Richard III to Antony and CleopatraAPPENDIX 1    Shakespearean SeductionAPPENDIX 2    Morality and the Happy Infant: The Case of MacbethPART 2    In Defense of Worldliness4    Sanctifying the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Work of The Comedy of ErrorsAPPENDIX    Sanctifying the Aristocracy: From Ignatius Loyola to François de Sales (and then to Donne and Herbert)PART 3    In Defense of Pride5    Self-Revelation and Self-Satisfaction in Montaigne and Descartes6    Milton against HumilityAPPENDIX    “Lordly Command?”Index

“Well articulated, intelligent, and written with the ease and confidence of a mature scholar, there is nothing in this book that isn’t freshly thought through in an energetic and open way. Strier’s close readings of the Renaissance literary texts are done with diligence and vigor. The Unrepentant Renaissance offers a refreshing dissent from a dominant tendency in the field.”