A Readable Earlier Renaissance: Small Adjustments, Large Changes (original) (raw)

"Readability" of several kinds is a problem in Renaissance or early modern literature. One way to enhance the readability of early modern texts is to adjust the (admittedly artificial) period boundary that begins the traditional "Renaissance." Unlike the historically-based boundaries of regnal years (1485, 1509), a slightly earlier date, 1476, implies a conception of "Renaissance" that takes as its pivotal starting point the establishment of the printing press in England. The earlier date thus refocuses our analysis of the period to systems of production, distribution, and reception that directly create and shape Renaissance literature. Such an adjustment also accomplishes a wider category challenge, since the literature of the early print period is qualitatively different from the more familiar literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. This essay explains that to shift the starting point of inquiry about "Renaissance" is to challenge the whole period concept and to invite new critical narratives about the period that will make it more "readable" in several senses (legible, historically comprehensible, lisible, literally accessible, etc.). The essay also reviews similar, recent, challenges to other critical concepts in early modern studies: to authorship, genre, theme, canon, method. Such challenges have been generative of greater "readability" and growth in the field. What's unread ultimately becomes unreadable. Many Renaissance bestsellers are nearly unreadable now, in several senses, 1 and a "Renaissance" literary canon limited to the now-readable is, at least in part, an effect of normal human cognitive processes. As Piaget explained, we can only assimilate what we can recognize, that for which we have mental concepts and categories in place. 2 Over time, likewise, canons include, and critics discuss, that literature for which we have concepts, organizing categories, and critical vocabularies. What isn't edited, taught, reprinted in paperback, alluded to, translated, filmed, parodied, or banned fades away like brown ink on washed paper. However, some small adjustments to our organizing categories can have surprisingly large effects, not only on the readability and continued presence of specific texts in the canon, but also, on our ways of thinking about and "reading" the whole field. I'd like to continue, in this slightly different direction, our Editors' initial interrogation of perhaps the central organizing category of our discipline