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Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature
This book examines the ways in which the literary genre of hagiography and the hermeneutical paradigm of Biblical typology together entered into the construction of “the Renaissance” as a canon and period. It is not about saints’ lives in themselves, as either literary or historical phenomena, but instead addresses the structural effects of hagiography in the secular literature of the Renaissance.
The central texts analyzed—Boccaccio’s Decameron, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—all manifest key moments and aspects in the creation of a Renaissance canon for the post-Renaissance world. The epochal significance of these works, saturated in religious allusions as well as scenes of profane life and classical art, is shown to rest in neither the normative piety nor the subversive heresy of any of these writers, but rather in their crafting of myths of modernity precisely out of the religious material that formed such an important part of their daily vocabularies.
The central texts analyzed—Boccaccio’s Decameron, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—all manifest key moments and aspects in the creation of a Renaissance canon for the post-Renaissance world. The epochal significance of these works, saturated in religious allusions as well as scenes of profane life and classical art, is shown to rest in neither the normative piety nor the subversive heresy of any of these writers, but rather in their crafting of myths of modernity precisely out of the religious material that formed such an important part of their daily vocabularies.
- GenresNonfiction
304 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1996
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July 13, 2016
Works of natural history [as opposed to a traditional, chronological 'world history'] tend to conceptualize time as a series of sedimented, unevenly distributed layers, strata of abandoned positions that record the drama of historical progress through its accidents and effluvia. Whereas from the perspective of world history, one position follows and subsumes another, from the perspective of natural history, one layer can contaminate, wrinkle, or undermine a contiguous one.
Lupton is interested in how narratives and literary forms from one cultural epoch can survive into another in fragmentary or distorted shapes, sometimes almost entirely striped of their original meaning. Her focus, in this instance, is on hagiography in the Renaissance.
Typology describes the exegetical relationship between the Old Testament and the New, in which the prior text forms both the hallowed origin and the superseded beginnings of the latter work, a relationship that produces a network of figural correspondences and allusive ligatures between the two halves of the biblical canon. Typology has also been used... to describe the possible rapprochement between pagan antiquity... and the new order represented by Christianity.
"Classical culture," rather than being an accurate picture of pagan religion or society, becomes a dialectical construction of a Christian humanism that synthesizes the Greek ideal of truth immanent in beauty with its own doctrine of Incarnation. (xviii)
Lupton's theoretical contextualization includes Northrop Frye, Eric Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan. And she makes sure you know this because name-dropping theorists makes her look smart. No, that's unfair of me. I did feel that there were unnecessary moments of pretension and obfustication, but it is a complicated topic and she does an intelligent and readable (stylistically, that is -- having a background in theology and Renaissance studies is strongly recommended) job of exploring it, bringing in art and literature.
Here is an example of a quite insightful but rather annoying sentence: Framed by hagiographic parody on the one hand and the palinodic reversal of parody on the other, the Decameron establishes a divine comedy/economy that resanctifies desanctification by ironizing the text's own secularizing tactics. But to be fair, that is how we were encouraged to write in grad school, so I shouldn't criticize for making a successful choice. I guess that's how one gets published by the better academic presses.
Note for further reading: when we were assigned this, it was paired with Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, which addresses a different type of concealed narratives: those which are made invisible (either occluded or deliberately silenced) because they do not belong to the narrative of the dominant class. Like Lupton, Spivak is mistrustful of historical periodization and construction of time. She is even more pessimistic about the possibility of recovering the suppressed and forgotten narratives of the subaltern.
Lupton is interested in how narratives and literary forms from one cultural epoch can survive into another in fragmentary or distorted shapes, sometimes almost entirely striped of their original meaning. Her focus, in this instance, is on hagiography in the Renaissance.
Typology describes the exegetical relationship between the Old Testament and the New, in which the prior text forms both the hallowed origin and the superseded beginnings of the latter work, a relationship that produces a network of figural correspondences and allusive ligatures between the two halves of the biblical canon. Typology has also been used... to describe the possible rapprochement between pagan antiquity... and the new order represented by Christianity.
"Classical culture," rather than being an accurate picture of pagan religion or society, becomes a dialectical construction of a Christian humanism that synthesizes the Greek ideal of truth immanent in beauty with its own doctrine of Incarnation. (xviii)
Lupton's theoretical contextualization includes Northrop Frye, Eric Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan. And she makes sure you know this because name-dropping theorists makes her look smart. No, that's unfair of me. I did feel that there were unnecessary moments of pretension and obfustication, but it is a complicated topic and she does an intelligent and readable (stylistically, that is -- having a background in theology and Renaissance studies is strongly recommended) job of exploring it, bringing in art and literature.
Here is an example of a quite insightful but rather annoying sentence: Framed by hagiographic parody on the one hand and the palinodic reversal of parody on the other, the Decameron establishes a divine comedy/economy that resanctifies desanctification by ironizing the text's own secularizing tactics. But to be fair, that is how we were encouraged to write in grad school, so I shouldn't criticize for making a successful choice. I guess that's how one gets published by the better academic presses.
Note for further reading: when we were assigned this, it was paired with Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, which addresses a different type of concealed narratives: those which are made invisible (either occluded or deliberately silenced) because they do not belong to the narrative of the dominant class. Like Lupton, Spivak is mistrustful of historical periodization and construction of time. She is even more pessimistic about the possibility of recovering the suppressed and forgotten narratives of the subaltern.
Displaying 1 of 1 review