Additional information
by Richard Strier (Author)
Dedicated to discussing writings of the European Renaissance that dissented from the dominant values of the period.
Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and belong to a Renaissance far more unconstrained and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed. The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions; the book aims to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays), Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier's lively argument, expressed in lucid prose, is meant to stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.Author Biography
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.
