Renaissance Self 6h1ri

How was the self represented in the Renaissance? Stock One of the techniques for describing the self that evolves during the later ancient period involves the real or imagined use of reading and writing. He describes relationships between reading, writing, and the self in unprecedented detail. His much discussed "modernity" and "individuality" are best understood in the context of his search for the manuscripts of ancient authors and his accompanying reflections on his own literary activities Burke central development in Italian culture in that period was what he called 'individualisni' or 'the discovery of man'. (burckhardt) In the Middle Ages, according to him, people were aware of themselves only as of a group; in the Renaissance, on the other hand, 'man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such'. The rise of self-awareness or subjectivity was reflected by the rise of autobiographies and portraits he underestimated the importance of the preoccupation with the individual self in the Middle Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards. cultural movement we call the Renaissance, or whether they simply happened at the same time 'self-presentation', 'self-stylization' and 'impression management'. They are interested not only in the person but also in the 'persona', the mask which the individual wears in public, the role which he or she is playing Self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-cultivation, self-examination and self-reliance also deserve to be considered. Equally important was the presentation of self to others. 'Giving a good impression of oneself The uniqueness of the individual was also a concern at this time. Burckhardt's later remark that in the Middle Ages 'man' was only conscious of himself as a member of some general category, while in the Renaissance a sense of the individual developed. new term suggests that people were becoming more aware of the difference between an inner and an outer self, a difference which was given it5 classic formulation by Descartes Outside Italy, few biographies were written before the sixteenth century, but then the trickle turned into a flood. witness to its author's sense of a divided or fragmented self. - the secret the city, which offers alternative ways of life, encourages a sense of individual choice. The sixteenth century was an age of urbanization. It was also an age of travel, and travel encourages selfconsciousness by cutting o f f the individual from his or her community. There was also a more personal, confessional

style in the manner- of St Augustine, whose example was followed by Petrarch, among others, and also by St Teresa, A si~nilar tension between stereotype and spontaneity or authenticity car1 be.found in another form of self-presentation, the letter. Petrarch and Erasmus put a good deal of themselves into their letters; indeed, both men used letters as a tool of self-presentation or self-fashioning Montaigne made a comparison between autobiography and self-portraiture, taking the example of Rerii: of Anjou. 'Why is it riot legitimate for every man to portray himself with his pen, as it was fi)r him to do it with a crayon?' Material culture was, and is, an important vehicle for expressing views of the self. Palaces and country houses expressed the self-images of their owners, all the more effectively when they were decorated with the owner's coat of arms, badge, device, name or initials, Painted and sculpted portraits, which became increasingly numerous in the course of the Renaissance, can also be read as expressions of the sitter's self-image an increase in self-awareness in the course of the Renaissance physical appearance as an expression of the inner self'. The concern with fame was reflected in portraits and biographies alik It should be added that the cult of the outstanding individual did not appeal to everyone. Some upper-class Venetians, for instance, were sr~spicious of this fomm of individualism and cultivated an alternative, communal tradition. related not only to selfawareness but also to the rise in the status of the artist the variety of' Rrriaissaricr selves or concrptions of the self. A remarkably wide range of people portrayed themselves

In India, the Mughal emperor Babur wrote his rriernoirs early in the sixteenth century assumption that self-consciousness arose in a particular place, st~chas Italy, at a particular time, perhaps the fourteenth century. It is better to think in of a variety of categories of the person or conceptions of the self (more or less unified, bounded and so on) in different cultures, categories and conceptions which underlie a variety of styles of self'preseritation or self-fashioning.

How was the self represented in the Renaissance? Stock One of the techniques for describing the self that evolves during the later ancient period involves the real or imagined use of reading and writing. He describes relationships between reading, writing, and the self in unprecedented detail. His much discussed "modernity" and "individuality" are best understood in the context of his search for the manuscripts of ancient authors and his accompanying reflections on his own literary activities Burke central development in Italian culture in that period was what he called 'individualisni' or 'the discovery of man'. (burckhardt) In the Middle Ages, according to him, people were aware of themselves only as of a group; in the Renaissance, on the other hand, 'man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such'. The rise of self-awareness or subjectivity was reflected by the rise of autobiographies and portraits he underestimated the importance of the preoccupation with the individual self in the Middle Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards. cultural movement we call the Renaissance, or whether they simply happened at the same time 'self-presentation', 'self-stylization' and 'impression management'. They are interested not only in the person but also in the 'persona', the mask which the individual wears in public, the role which he or she is playing Self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-cultivation, self-examination and self-reliance also deserve to be considered. Equally important was the presentation of self to others. 'Giving a good impression of oneself The uniqueness of the individual was also a concern at this time. Burckhardt's later remark that in the Middle Ages 'man' was only conscious of himself as a member of some general category, while in the Renaissance a sense of the individual developed. new term suggests that people were becoming more aware of the difference between an inner and an outer self, a difference which was given it5 classic formulation by Descartes Outside Italy, few biographies were written before the sixteenth century, but then the trickle turned into a flood. witness to its author's sense of a divided or fragmented self. - the secret the city, which offers alternative ways of life, encourages a sense of individual choice. The sixteenth century was an age of urbanization. It was also an age of travel, and travel encourages selfconsciousness by cutting o f f the individual from his or her community.

There was also a more personal, confessional style in the manner- of St Augustine, whose example was followed by Petrarch, among others, and also by St Teresa, A si~nilar tension between stereotype and spontaneity or authenticity car1 be.found in another form of self-presentation, the letter. Petrarch and Erasmus put a good deal of themselves into their letters; indeed, both men used letters as a tool of self-presentation or self-fashioning Montaigne made a comparison between autobiography and self-portraiture, taking the example of Rerii: of Anjou. 'Why is it riot legitimate for every man to portray himself with his pen, as it was fi)r him to do it with a crayon?' Material culture was, and is, an important vehicle for expressing views of the self. Palaces and country houses expressed the self-images of their owners, all the more effectively when they were decorated with the owner's coat of arms, badge, device, name or initials, Painted and sculpted portraits, which became increasingly numerous in the course of the Renaissance, can also be read as expressions of the sitter's self-image an increase in self-awareness in the course of the Renaissance physical appearance as an expression of the inner self'. The concern with fame was reflected in portraits and biographies alik It should be added that the cult of the outstanding individual did not appeal to everyone. Some upper-class Venetians, for instance, were sr~spicious of this fomm of individualism and cultivated an alternative, communal tradition. related not only to selfawareness but also to the rise in the status of the artist the variety of' Rrriaissaricr selves or concrptions of the self. A remarkably wide range of people portrayed themselves

In India, the Mughal emperor Babur wrote his rriernoirs early in the sixteenth century assumption that self-consciousness arose in a particular place, st~chas Italy, at a particular time, perhaps the fourteenth century. It is better to think in of a variety of categories of the person or conceptions of the self (more or less unified, bounded and so on) in different cultures, categories and conceptions which underlie a variety of styles of self'preseritation or self-fashioning.

Intellectual and cultural historians who focus on the Middle Ages, for instance, have mustered considerable evidence that many of the humanistic and even individualistic ideals Burckhardt viewed as originating in Italy in the Renaissance had in fact emerged much earlier in the period if the individual was not a central concern of the Middle Ages, this was due to a veil "of faith, illusion and childish prepossession"; that, finally, what emerged in the Renaissance was man as he really is. postmodern arguments and insights, have begun to argue that individualism itself is a construction, As Michael Mascuch has recently cautioned in his study of the self in seventeenth-century England, "individualism is a multidimensional phenomenon, an amalgam of practices and values with no discernible center. A variety of forces-social, economic, political, intellectual-contributed to its making, each one of which was paramount at some time or another, either separately or tly with others. -shift in moral vocabulary played a significant role in the construction of new notions of individualism in the Renaissance world New Historicists such as Jean Howard, also view the self, like a text, not as an autonomous entity but rather as a site on which broader institutional and political forces are inscribed. Self fashioning is deployed in a variety of fields: in social history, art history, intellectual history, the history of science, and it even has important implications for the study of the self in other times and places Greenblatt notes, "the simplest observation we can make is that in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.117 self-fashioning appears to make sense of a world in which the court was central to literary life-conscious of fashioning particular selves in order to survive or advance in the highstakes world of court society Greenblatt himself notes, "self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life." (One can view Galileo's insights, that is, not exclusively as the consequence of external social and political factors impinging on the scientific imagination nor as merely the result of developments within Renaissance mathematics and astronomy but rather as the outcome of Galileo's own efforts to navigate courtly culture and its patronage expectations in relation to late Renaissance or baroque science)

The Galilean revolution is thus a result neither of social change per se nor purely of developments intrinsic to science but of the way these two spheres intersected in Galileo's studied "self-fashioning." certain political and religious forces in the Renaissance created the fiction of individual autonomy Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning offers a view of the self as a cultural artifact, a historical and ideological illusion generated by the economic, social, religious, and political upheavals of the Renaissance Montrose – identity is shaped form the outside it becomes possible to read a painting such as Durer's Self-Portrait of 1500 (see cover illustration) simultaneously as a submersion of the self in the identity of Christ and as an expression of artistic individuality and genius. The tide has shifted, then, from Burckhardt's notion of the discovery of the individual to a New Historicist analytics of self-fashioning. Renaissance notions of the self portray an explicitly layered quality, which represented a sense not only of inwardness but also of mystery about what Renaissance writers, drawing on a long tradition, imagined as their inner selves. - Petrarch Secret In the sixteenth century, however, this concern reached a new level of intensity. The Venetian reformer Gasparo Contarini conveyed a sense of this inwardness in a celebrated letter, his epistle to Tommaso Giustiniani of April 1511: "if you were to know me from within, as I really am (but even I do not know myself well), you would not make such a judgement about me." Montaigne, one of the preeminent architects of inwardness in the sixteenth century, made a similar observation: "I, who make no other profession, find in me such infinite depth and variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn."' in the Renaissance court as well, the issue of the representation of the self was a central dimension of the life of the elites. The very popularity of Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier in Italy and throughout Europe provides evidence of this. The experience of self in the Renaissance world was, in short, often the experience of a divided self - frequently forced to erect a public façade that disguised his or her convictions, beliefs, or feelings. In the Renaissance generally and the sixteenth century in particular - new emphasis on inwardness or the idea of an interior self as the core of personal identity. Though, Medieval society, especially in the wake of the cultural and monastic revivals of the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, had numerous writers and theologians who fashioned a deep sense of inwardness e.g. Abelard's ethics.

-There was something significantly new about the way men and women in the Renaissance began to conceptualize the relation between what they saw as the interior self on the one hand and the expressions of one's thoughts, feelings, or beliefs on the other. - This ideal (of Prudence) underwent a significant shift in the Italian Renaissance, especially in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when humanists began reading and interpreting Aristotle's works - prudence was no longer the equivalent of providence but rather an ethical strategy that gave new emphasis to the individual's will. - in the early sixteenth century, in the work of Machiavelli's the Prince, prudence was divorced entirely from ethics. -In Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, the humanist Pietro Bembo states that one should never trust anyone, not even a dear friend, to the extent of "4communicating without reservation all one's thoughts to him," Piccolomini's- stress on the need for the individual "to project an impressive image of himself, training himself to be all things to all men, while at the same time preserving his own inner freedom and remaining detached from the world in spite of his dealings with it"

The Renaissance refashioning of prudence indicates a significant shift in the understanding of the self. From the fifteenth century on, by contrast, the will was seen as increasingly free of these external (and internal) constraints and more emphasis was placed on the feelings, emotions, and expressiveness of what we might describe as the individual subject.72 -a growing moral imperative to make one's feelings and convictions known - a characteristically modern concern: to see particular utterances and works of art and literature as essential expressions of individual selves, above all, to desire to connect speech with feeling What was novel about sixteenth-century views of the self was the new understanding of the relation of one's thoughts and feelings to one's words and actions. -Renaissance writers, especially by the sixteenth century, placed new emphasis on differences between individuals -Protestant reformers gave a new legitimacy to the expression of one's emotions-an expressiveness of feelings that would, increasingly, be subsumed under the ideal of sincerity. -In Renaissance Europe, many men identified themselves with a personal emblem. Calvin designed his as a hand-held heart, THE DISCOVERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL was

to a large degree, therefore, the result of fundamental shifts in the ethical visions of Renaissance humanists and Protestant reformers – men and women could fashion their religious, social, political and even personal identities. -Renaissance notion of the self as an individual and expressive subject -the new sense of the self views the human being as agent, subject, or author-as someone

responsible for his or her actions and assertions

Montaigne connected his emphasis on self-knowledge and on the individual with his decision to retire in 1571 and devote his leisure to the study of himself-a project he ultimately realizes in the Essays -perhaps best known for the image he created of the individual cultivating freedom entirely apart from others. -For Greenblatt, in short, Montaigne's individualism or self-fashioning is primarily a consequence of the dynamics of an emerging capitalism; the self is implicated in the structures of an economy that would place a supreme value on separating one's private from one's public life – Sincerity and Prudence - both these virtues emphasized the need for the individual to fashion the public self from within, to know when it was most appropriate to present in one's expressed life a reflection of "true" feelings (as in the case of the Protestants) or "true" nature (as in the case of Montaigne) or when, by contrast, it was more appropriate to project or to wear a mask, to dissemble-in short, to exercise prudence in one's affairs, whether public or private - The ideals of prudence and sincerity, that is, were not fashioned at one particular moment or even in one particular context but developed gradually over the course of several generations.

Montaigne's point is rather obvious. There are multiple layers in the make-up of a particular person: a natural temperament, a cluster of (often conflicting) emotions, a primary language, a particular family and education, as well as broader political, social, and cultural forces-all of these go into shaping us, making us who we are. portrayal of oneself in public becomes popular Greenblatt's view that, in the Renaissance period, "there is no layer deeper, more authentic, than theatrical self-representation.1 –

what Burckhardt long ago called "the development of the individual"-cannot and should not be confined to one particular historical moment or context -Elias has written concerning such as "civility" in his magisterial The Civilizing Process, "fashionable words, concepts current in the everyday speech of a particular society. This shows that they met not merely individual but collective needs for expression Renaissance men and women were shaped with a new awareness of the self as subject, as an individual. Princes may have controlled the outward gestures of their courtiers, but they continued to fear what lay in the hearts of their "subjects.” The primary cultural factors in the making of Renaissance individualism were the emergence of humanism and the development of Protestantism, both of which deeply

problematized the relation of what contemporaries viewed as the internal self to one's words and actions The primary social factors were the rapid expansion of urban life and the burgeoning size of the courts the individual came to see him or herself as a unique entity, largely responsible for his or her words and deeds, and capable of either concealing or revealing his or her feelings and beliefs as circumstances dictated. the growing importance of the ideals of prudence and sincerity-as well as the tensions between them-made it increasingly possible in the Renaissance and in the early modern period generally to view a particular person as a complex individual, who was self-conscious about the degree to which the inner self, now viewed as largely cut off from God, directed the outer, public self in its daily interactions with one's fellow citizens, subjects, or courtiers.