The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

By Andrew Hui

The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Release date: Jan 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780823273362

Andrew Hui

Andrew Hui is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale–NUS College, Singapore.

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Verbal Arts :: Studies in Poetics

Series Editors : : Lazar Fleishman & Haun Saussy

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature

Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

Marc Shell, Talking the Walk & Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm

Ryan Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events

Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (eds.), Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics. Foreword by Eric Hayot

Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise

Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies. Foreword by Olga Solovieva

Andrew Hui, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

Andrew Hui

Fordham University Press   New York    2016

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This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, and a subvention grant from Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

To my mother, father, and wife

Contents

List of Figures and Color Plates

Introduction: A Japanese Friend

Part I

1. The Rebirth of Poetics

2. The Rebirth of Ruins

Part II

3. Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence

4. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Erotics of Fragments

5. Du Bellay’s Cendre and the Formless Signifier

6. Spenser’s Moniment and the Allegory of Ruins

Epilogue: Fallen Castles and Summer Grass

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Figures and Color Plates

Figures

1. Giambattista Vico, frontispiece, New Science, 1744

2. Maso di Banco, from The Life of St. Sylvester, ca. 1341

3. Anonymous, Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse miniatures, ca. 1290–99

4. Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maestà, Nativity panel, ca. 1308–11

5. Sebastiano Serlio, frontispiece of book 3 of Tutte l’opere d’architettura, 1537

6. Authorship uncertain, frontispiece of Antiquarie prospettiche Romane, ca. 1499–1500

7. Giorgio Vasari, Paul III Farnese Directing the Continuance of St Peter’s, 1546

8. Maarten van Heemskerck, pillar of the crossing of new St. Peter’s Basilica, 1532–36

9. Maarten van Heemskerck, interior view of the nave of old St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1532–36

10. Donato Bramante and Bernardo Prevedari, Ruined Temple, 1481

11. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499

12. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499

13. Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 3, Theatre for Worldings, 1591

14. Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblems, 1568

15. Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, 1609

Color Plates

1. Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait with the Colosseum, 1553

2. Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of Christianity, 1585

3. Li Cheng, Reading the Stele, mid-tenth century

4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, detail of ruins, Allegory of Good and Bad Government, ca. 1338–40

5. Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1478–82

6. Herman Posthumus, Landscape with Ancient Ruins, 1536

7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

8. Roma, directed by Federico Fellini, 1972

Introduction

A Japanese Friend

Ex ungue leonem

The lion from its claws

—Latin commonplace

One summer. Rome. After a morning of Italian lessons, a Japanese friend invited me to a walk in the Forum. As we ambled between the Temple of Saturn and the Arch of Septimus Severus, she turned to me and asked, Andrew, why are there ruins here? Why are they not rebuilt or just demolished? This question perplexed me, for it was a moment of cultural dissonance for me as much as it was for her. Hailing from the hypermodern metropolis of Tokyo, she was unused to seeing the monumental detritus of antiquity occupying prime real estate in the city center. Instead, in the heart of her capital, nestled within innumerable twentieth-century high-rises, is a fully functioning imperial palace, the residence for a royal line that claims to be the longest continuing in the world. Her query unsettled a large archive of cultural assumptions I had held: from the Tower of Babel to the Fall of Troy, from Pausanias’s records of abandoned Greek temples to the Old English elegy The Ruin, from the prints of Piranesi to the paintings of Hubert Robert, from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey to W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, Western culture has always expressed its fascination with the physical past through its monuments and ruins. (I discuss some East Asian examples in the epilogue.) I returned to her question again and again over the years, for it made me wonder about Europe’s relationship to classical culture: Why is it in love with the past as past?

This book is a long answer to her question. The ruins are still there in the Roman Forum because they are the invention of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, if I may say so, the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse that became an inspirational force in the poetic imagination, artistic expression, and historical inquiry of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. The ruin functions as a privileged cipher or master topos that marks the rupture between the world of the humanists and the world of antiquity. The discourse of Roman ruins coincides with a renewed interest in the classical past: architects used ancient buildings as models for their own construction; antiquarians systematically collected their remains; artists illustrated the desolate urban views as exercises in spatial and historical perspective; philologists sought to understand the past through inscriptions on buildings and fragments of manuscripts.

And poets? They used ruins as a way to think about the production and reception of the texts of the ancients as well as their own work. Confronted with the monumental detritus of antiquity, Renaissance writers hoped to craft a more enduring artifact. And faced with the contingency of cultural survival, they reached back to classical literature for an answer. Already in Homer, Simonides, and Pindar we see the striving for undying songs, but early modern authors knew their Latin texts best: Ovid at the end of the Metamorphoses boasts, And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo, iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas (15.871–72). Virgil in the Aeneid promises to Nisus and Euryalus, If my poetry has any power, no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time, si quid mea carmina possunt, / nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo (9.446–47). Horace, perhaps most memorably, proclaims, I have constructed a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids, Exegi monumentum aere perennius, / regalique situ pyramidum altius (Ode 3.30).¹ What all three poets share is a confident assertion that the powers of poetry, realized in evanescent performances (carmina) or labors of writing (opus, monumentum), will outlast all other solid materials—wood, stone, bronze—as media for cultural preservation.²

This bid for immortality became a favorite topos of humanist poetry.³ Upon Petrarch’s coronation as poet laureate in 1341 on the steps of the Capitoline (the first since Statius, he is proud to claim), the Italian poet cites the authors above verbatim and explains that immortality comes in two forms, both the immortality of the poet’s own name and the immortality of the names of those whom he celebrates.⁴ Du Bellay translates Horace’s ode as J’ay parachevé de ma main / Un ouvrage plus dur qu’airain, and the final lines of the Metamorphoses as Un œuvre j’ay parfaict, que le feu ny la fouldre, / Ny le fer, ny le temps ne pourront mettre en pouldre.⁵ Spenser at the end of the Shepheards Calendar similarly invokes:

Horace of his Odes a work though ful indede of great

wit and learning, yet of no so great weight and

importaunce boldly sayth.

Exegi monimentum aere perennius,

Quod nec imber nec aquilo vorax etc.⁶

As summations of the poet’s craft, the hope that is enshrined in these lofty lines embodies their highest ambitions. We also find this dynamic in post-Augustan Roman authors. Lucan writes, "The poet snatches all things from destruction and gives to mortal men immortality. Posterity shall read my verse and your deeds; our Pharsalia shall live on, and no age will ever doom us to oblivion," omnia fato / eripis et populis donas mortalibus aevum / . . . venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra / vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aevo (9.980–81, 985–86). So too Statius at the end of his epic: "My Thebaid, on whom I have spent twelve wakeful years, will you long endure and be read when your master is gone?," durabisne procul dominoque legere superstes / o mihi bissenos multum uigilata per annos Thebai? (12.810–12).⁷ Usually appearing at the conclusion of a work (or at moments of high emotive intensity), these verses seek a coalescence of literature’s ultimate power. Yet when juxtaposed, they seem to replicate each other rather than encapsulate any definitive, conclusive omega.

In light of this catalogue we see that the topos of poetic immortality, reprised in early modernity, is not so much a given fact as a circular wish-function. Its fulfillment comes not by the authors’ bold demands but by repetition, by transformation, and by those who come later, in their reception and re-creation. The task of this book is to show how the Renaissance poetic response to ruins is not to strive for fixity or permanence but to create a work of art that absorbs the past and is in turn open to future appropriation and mutation. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature imagines fluid multiplicity rather than fixed monumentalization as a survival strategy in the classical tradition.

Beneath this exultant sheen of poetic everlastingness, however, early humanist poets were never entirely comfortable with such hyperbolic claims, since so much of ancient letters clearly did not survive. In the era before print they were poignantly aware that texts, including their own, were often destroyed, expurgated, lost, or simply ignored. In one of his Letters to Dead Authors, Petrarch laments that Cicero’s manuscripts are in such fragmentary and mutilated condition that it would perhaps have been better for them to have perished (Familiares 24.4).⁸ Addressing Livy, he writes, We know you wrote 142 books on Roman affairs. Alas, with what enthusiasm and labor! Scarcely thirty of them survive! (Familiares 24.8).⁹

Two hundred fifty years later, with the full capacity of the printing press, Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605) writes:

ANTIQVITIES, or Remnants of History, are, as was saide, tanquam Tabula Naufragij [only the plank of a shipwreck], when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence and obseruation, out of Monuments, Names, Wordes, Prouerbes, Traditions, Priuate Recordes, and Euidences, Fragments of stories, Passages of Bookes, that concerne not storie, and the like, doe saue and recouer somewhat from the deluge of time.¹⁰

The most poignant word in this passage is somewhat, for the chancellor of England knows full well how impossible complete retrieval is, no matter how industrious and scrupulous a scholar be. In the course of this book we shall see how, from Petrarch to Bacon, philological reconstruction, literary production, contemplation of fragments, and gazing on ruins exist on the same humanist continuum.

To be a poet in the Renaissance, then, was to think about ruins. When Petrarch gazed at the obsolescent grandeur of Roman decay in the 1340s, the dilapidated city was little more than sad farmlands: "As in our travels through the remains of a broken city [fracte urbis], there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins [ruinarum fragmenta] lay before our eyes."¹¹ These words are from the Rerum familiarium libri (Letters on Familiar Matters, written 1325–66), and the epistle has rightly been considered the founding document of the cult of ruins.¹² In the cultural efflorescence of the fifteenth century, Rome’s gleaming churches, palaces, and monuments were built from stones pilfered from ancient buildings. By the mid-sixteenth century, when Du Bellay spent four ambivalent years there, the city was still suffering from the aftershocks of its re-ruination in the devastating Sack of 1527.¹³ The Petrarchan sonnet sequences Les Antiquitez de Rome and Les Regrets (1558) document his responses to the decayed grandeur of the city. In the 1580s Spenser, never having visited Rome, was composing The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) literally under the shadow of ruins; he lived in New Abbey, County Kildare, and his Irish homestead Kilcolman Castle while he was colonial administrator and settler there.¹⁴ Across the Irish Sea the landscape of England, bearing the scars of Henry VIII’s Act of Suppression, was dotted with hundreds of ruined monasteries, abandoned churches, and wayside shrines.¹⁵ Shakespeare’s evocative line bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang bears witness to these damaged topographies.

What, then, is the poetics of ruins? As readers will know, poetics is from the Greek poiesis and the verb poiein, to make, to do.¹⁶ Ruin is from the Latin verb ruere, to fall with violence . . . to hasten, hurry, rush, to fall, and the noun ruīna, a rushing or tumbling down . . . a downfall, fall; accident, catastrophe, disaster, destruction.¹⁷ Etymologically these two words seem to have contrary meanings; one is about the crafting of artifacts, while the other is about the dissolution of things already created. One way of rephrasing the poetics of ruins would be the order of disorder, the discourse of falling things, or putting back together broken things. This book, in short, explores the dynamics of these oppositions and explains how Renaissance poets used the topos of architectural ruins to think about the life cycle of their own works—from conception, composition, print, revisions, and circulation to afterlife. A conjoined interest in poetics and monuments certainly existed in antiquity, as we see already, but I wager that the intertwining of poetics and ruins emerges only in the period now known as the Renaissance.¹⁸ The Renaissance sees a new understanding of both ruins and poetics, made possible by sustained meditation on the crumbled monuments of antiquity. This rumination requires a new understanding of the ruin as neither monumentalizing the past nor making a gesture toward something extrahistorical (i.e., immortality) but as gesturing toward a poetic practice that is deeply invested in time, leaving traces for others to follow and ultimately transcend.

Whereas classical poets used ruins as a way to think about the endurance of art and the brevity of life, ars longa vita brevis, the Renaissance writers I study—Francesco Petrarch, Francesco Colonna, Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare—problematize this dichotomy. As they self-consciously constructed their work on the ruins of antiquity, they reflected intensely on this ambivalent foundation. They were not artists given to liturgical rituals of exact replication; each insisted on the freedom to reject, appropriate, or absorb his predecessor. At times they wanted ancient buildings to be rubble so that they could have the space—the clearing—to construct their own monuments. In a moment of exasperation Du Bellay laments, The broad fields of Greek and Latin are already so full that very little empty space remains (La Deffence 2.12).¹⁹ In Les Antiquitez de Rome he promises, I would, with the ardor that inflames me, undertake to rebuild with the pen what hands cannot construct in stone, J’entreprendrois, veu l’ardeur qui m’allume, / De rebastir au compas de la plume / ce que les mains ne peuvent maçonner (Sonnet 25).

Non Finito

Since at least Horace it has become commonplace to refer to a finished work of art as a monument. Yet many humanist authors had precisely the problem of finishing their literary creations. What, then, is the relationship between the aesthetics of the unfinished and the ruin? Petrarch was the first man in European letters to call his works fragments, as the title of his poetic collection, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things), attests. This is more than a conceit: he obsessively reorganizes and edits the order of his poems until the night of his death.²⁰ Petrarch had many other projects. He wanted to write an epic in Italian (distinct from his Latin Africa), a biography of the Neapolitan king Robert, an encyclopedia on the origins of the arts, a treatise against Averroes, and much else. But true to his roving interests, he never got around to completing them.²¹ The Africa itself remains unfinished. Ronsard’s Franciade (begun in the 1540s, the first four of a projected twenty-four books published in 1572), Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (first three books appeared in 1590, second three books in 1596, also a part of a projected twenty-four books), Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (printed in 1590, 1593, 1598, 1621, each with substantial additions) are all famously, magnificently incomplete. All great Renaissance authors had their own monumental ruins.

Though we instinctively associate the unfinished or unfinishable work of art with the Romantic yearning for the infinite, the non finito was already an aesthetic category in the Renaissance.²² This was anticipated in antiquity, when Pliny in the Natural History writes, Another most curious fact and worthy of record is that the latest works of artists and the pictures left unfinished at their death are valued more than any of their finished paintings. . . . The reason is that in these we see traces of the design and the original conception of the artists, while sorrow for the hand that perished at its work beguiles us into the bestowal of praise (35.145).²³ Vasari remarked on Michelangelo’s sculpture the Medici Madonna that though the parts are unfinished, what is left roughed out and full of chisel marks reveals, in its incomplete state, the perfection of the work, nella imperfezzione della bozza la perfezzione dell’opra.²⁴ Montaigne is conscious of the interminable project of his life-writing: Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?²⁵ Ruins and the incomplete work of art commingle in Renaissance aesthetics.

And even the invention of print did not arrest the mutability of supposedly finished literary texts. The codex often did not exist as a fixed unit: printers would frequently issue texts in loose sheets, leaving it to the reader to collect, arrange, and bind them.²⁶ Authors themselves were happy to incorporate fluidity into their process of revisions and editions, encouraging translations, imitations, performances, and even forgeries.²⁷ When a correspondent complained to Erasmus that he revised his multidecade Adages too much, the Dutch humanist shot back, No book is wrought such that it cannot be made more perfect.²⁸ Similarly Montaigne writes, My book is always one. Except that at each edition, so that the buyer may not come off completely empty-handed, I allow myself to add, since it is only an ill-fitted patchwork, some extra ornaments.²⁹ And we know very well the instability of the oxymoronic true, original copy from the riddles of Shakespeare’s quartos and folios.³⁰ My point is that the unfinished, the complete, and the ruin are usually plotted on different points of a work of art’s time graph; in the Renaissance these three modalities intersect in the matrix of the fragment.

Gilded Monuments

The conjunction of architectural survival, cultural loss, personal recovery, and poetic endurance is hauntingly explored in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). In an extraordinary cluster of poems, roughly from Sonnet 55 to 65, the poet grapples with the power of words to keep in abeyance the degeneration of the world.³¹ (This sequence is treated in depth in chapter 1.) But for now I want to show how Shakespeare rehearses many of the late Renaissance anxieties about the corrupting forces of time and the fragile powers of verse to combat them. In exploring his poetics of preservation, he turns again and again to the figure of the ruin:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defacèd

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razèd,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate

That Time will come and take my love away

This thought is as a desire, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.³²

Sonnet 64 is an exercise on the reality and imagination of ruins, presenting an encyclopedia of decay and destruction. The ruin’s lesson is didactic, personal (me), and logical (thus). The sonnet’s narrative arc brings us from surveying this vast, impersonal panorama of the world to an intimate, singular my love. The syntactical buildup of the multiple when creates a sense of anticipation that is finally resolved in the melancholic insight of the volta, the turn: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / that Time will come and take my love away.

As readers of the Sonnets know, the arrangement of polysemous words contributes to a dizzying array of their interpretations. The magic combination here is state, ruin, and ruminate. From the Latin status, state primarily means a particular manner or way of existing or original, proper, or usual condition of a person or thing (OED). But of course it also refers to a political entity. Hence line 2, The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, can be additionally glossed as an expansive sense of state as costly and imposing display associated with monarchs and other persons of high rank; splendour, pomp, magnificence (OED). The course of the poem turns from the flux of material states to the collapse of political institutions, from architecture to ruin, from metal to rust, from soil to water. By conjoining the word with interchange and decay, Shakespeare destabilizes the meaning of state itself.

Like state, ruin has ample semantic range. Similar to its Latin roots, the English noun can signify a state, a disposition, or a person; as a verb it is an event, an action that is both transitive and intransitive. The ruin can be internal or external, allegorical or real. When Shakespeare uses ruin in the plays he is interested in human action, not architecture. A minor character in Antony and Cleopatra complains of the noble ruin of her magic, Antony (3.10.19).³³ In the last act, as Cleopatra prepares for her suicide, she threatens, This mortal house I’ll ruin, / Do Caesar what he can (5.2.50). The mother in Coriolanus shouts, Come all to ruin; let / Thy mother rather feel thy pride than fear / Thy dangerous stoutness (3.2.125). And the son says, Though there the people had more absolute power, / I say, they nourish’d disobedience, fed / The ruin of the state (3.1.117–18). Gloucester, in an existential vein, asks King Lear, O ruined piece of nature, this great world / Shall so wear out to naught. Dost thou know me? (4.61.30–31). Ruin in these tragic examples denotes imminent existential calamity brought upon by political ambitions. In the Sonnets, however, ruin is brought upon by Time herself. She doesn’t need anyone’s help.

Meditation upon the transience of the world occurs by way of alliteration: "ruin and ruminate. (If we omit m, ruminate becomes ruinate.) Although this lexical pun might suggest a semantic equivalence or even a shared ancestry, the etyma of ruin and ruminate are quite different: ruin, as previously stated, means an impulsive action or a headlong rush, headlong fall, downward plunge, collapse (of a building), fallen mass of debris. To ruminate is to revolve, turn over repeatedly in the mind; to meditate deeply upon," derived from rumen, the first and largest stomach of a ruminant . . . and from which it may pass back to the mouth as cud for further chewing (OED). Thus the direction and velocity of both words go in contrary directions: to ruin is precipitous thoughtless action, whereas to ruminate is recursive slow contemplation. For Shakespeare, thinking about falling things makes us philosophers and poets, not cows.

Ruminating on ruins provokes the poet to ruminate on the general state of the world and on the particular mortality of his beloved. Sonnet 64 thus vividly illustrates the central crisis of the Sonnets: how to stop Time from taking the poet’s beloved away. In the early sonnets the poet’s solution is that this nameless beloved must have children. But as the rhetoric of biological reproduction gradually collapses, the poet must take the task of his friend’s survival into his own hands. What children cannot do perhaps the poet’s pen can. The rest of the sonnet sequence thereby becomes metapoetic, in the sense that it increasingly broods on the function and efficacy of its own existence. In defiance of the kingdom of the shore and the conceit of inconstant stay, Shakespeare recuperates Horace’s celebrated vaunt in Sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room,

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Given the nonsequential development of the sonnet sequence, Sonnet 55 proleptically resolves the crisis presented in Sonnet 64: both sonnets are preoccupied with the destruction of material things: when sometime lofty towers I see down-razed, / And brass eternal slave to mortal rage (64) is equivalent to when wasteful war shall statues overturn, / and broils root out the work of masonry (55). Yet whereas the ruminations in Sonnet 64 result only in an affective paralysis (the poet can only weep), Sonnet 55 realizes that writing itself—even writing about the poet’s anxieties—already means that he has produced a living record of your [the young man’s] memory. In short, Sonnet 64 reaches an impasse with the poetics of ruins. Sonnet 55 presents, with the help of the classical tradition, a lyric solution.

Although Renaissance poetry seems merely to mimic ancient thought in its poetic hopes of immortality, Shakespeare has something in his lyric arsenal that his ancient sources lacked: the Christian Apocalypse. Till the judgment that yourself arise and ending doom in the final lines are clear references to the belief in the resurrection of the body, something that can happen only through the Messiah. Recently Ramie Targoff has explored how post-Reformation poetry saw a lack of posthumous love between poets and their beloved, as opposed to an earlier Petrarchan continuum of love in this world and in the next. According to Targoff, poets had to develop other ways of lyric compensation: The idea that death would bring an absolute end to tortuous erotic affections does not lead to a consoling vision of a heavenly afterlife with the divine. Instead this poetry is overwhelmingly secular, often suggesting a strain of materialism that seems more consonant with classical than with Christian models for the afterlife.³⁴ True, but much of Renaissance poetry is in fact preoccupied with the Apocalypse and the resurrection of the body, as we see here. The response that this book offers is that meditation on love, whether posthumous or not, is contiguous with meditation on ruins, and that poetic survival is accomplished not so much through the physical leaves of a codex, which, after all, are no more permanent than brazen statues or unswept stone, but through the experience of reading by later generations. As such, poetic immortality in the fullest sense will always fall short of providential time. The way verbal works become immortalized is always within secular time, in the eyes of posterity. The life of the poet, his poetry, and his beloved endure beyond the confines of the page in the lived hermeneutic experience of the reader, dwelling in lovers’ eyes.

We see from Shakespeare’s Sonnets how Renaissance poetics is proleptic and analeptic, inscribing its hopes about its own survival through the repetition, imitation, and appropriation of its classical predecessors. Moreover, Doomsday was never far away from early modern poets’ minds. This is why ruins appealed to them so much, since ruins, like poetics, are by nature Janus-faced, looking backward and forward. By saving their predecessors poets create an implicit contractual obligation that future readers and other poets will do the same for them. The promise of literature, then, is that the author can survive his own death. As Horace put it: I shall not wholly die, non omnis moriar (Carm. 3.30). Yet this hope is accompanied by a fear, for this future is contingent upon others. The poetics of ruins is thus the shadow of the poetics of immortality.

The Lion’s Claw

The method of this book is avowedly philological. I believe this approach is particularly appropriate to my subject matter since both philology and the study of ruins are fundamentally concerned with the figure of synecdoche, about imagining the whole through their parts. By definition, philology takes the ancient past—always in fragments—as its object of inquiry and therefore cannot but think about ruins in their textual and material forms. Indeed to look at ruins and to do literary history we meditate on some enduring fragment from which we try to reconstruct some image of the past.

One of the most provocative recent interventions in the theory of philology is Werner Hamacher’s Minima Philologica. Hamacher’s bold claim is that to think about philology, to think philologically, is to penetrate nothing less than the origins of language: Language is archiphilology (thesis 1). But philology must ultimately escape from itself to go above and beyond language. This results in a tragic failure, a transcending without transcendence (thesis 4), for the antinomy of philology is such that philology asks questions that it cannot answer, or by answering them it annihilates itself. As philology advances in its inquiries, its goal is nothing less than the entirety of language. But because this totality is infinite, philology cannot but collapse in its overreaching ambition. Even with all its virtues of meticulous patience, it cannot but ultimately puncture, sever, implode upon itself. This leads Hamacher to posit that philology is decreation.³⁵ For Hamacher, philology necessarily thinks about ruins but itself ends in ruin, hence method and subject collapse on each other.

Perhaps philology in this rarified, theoretical sense does lead to the unwording of language. In its praxis, however, I would argue that its goal is actually the healing of linguistic and cultural rupture. To understand this, let us turn to a much earlier reflection on philology, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Genealogia deorum gentilium. An encyclopedic synthesis of ancient myths, it stands as one of the first works of classical scholarship in early humanism.