The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare

By Robert Appelbaum

Many have wondered why the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers are so filled with violence, with murder and mayhem. This work explains how and why, putting the literature of the European Renaissance in the context of the history of violence. Personal violence was on the decline in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, but warfare became much deadlier and the stakes of war became much higher as the new nation-states vied for hegemony and the New World became a target of a shattering invasion. There are times when Renaissance writers seem to celebrate violence, but more commonly they anatomized it and were inclined to focus on victims as well as warriors on the horrors of violence as well as the need for force to protect national security and justice. In Renaissance writing, violence has lost its innocence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839981494

Robert Appelbaum

Robert Appelbaum is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP, 2002), Dishing It Out (Reaktion, 2011), Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption (Zero, 2014) and Terrorism Before the Letter: the Mythography of Political Violence in England, Scotland and France (Oxford UP, 2015).

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The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare

The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare

Robert Appelbaum

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

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Copyright © Robert Appelbaum 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946791

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-147-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-147-4 (Hbk)

Cover credit: Tintoretto, The Rape of Helen / Museo Nacional del Prado collection / Wikimedia Commons

This title is also available as an e-book.

To Peter Herman and Mihoko Suzuki, Renaissance People

Also by Robert Appelbaum

Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

Envisioning an English Empire, coedited with John Wood Sweet

Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture and Food among the Early Moderns

Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience

Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption

Terrorism before the Letter: Mythography and Political Violence in England, Scotland and France, 1559–1642

The Aesthetics of Violence: Art, Fiction, Drama and Film

CONTENTS

A Note on the Texts

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter One

Overture: The Show of Violence

Chapter Two

The Moral Economy of Violence in the Renaissance Novella Collection: Straparola, Bandello and Marguerite de Navarre

Chapter Three

Pacifism, Erasmus and More

Chapter Four

Violence as Labor: The Heroic Narrative

Chapter Five

Tragedy Shows Us What We Must Flee From

Afterword

Select Bibliography

Index

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

For all of the texts discussed in this study I have availed myself whenever possible of reliable modern editions. I have also availed myself of modern reliable translations. As much as possible, however, I have checked the translations against their original language, whether Italian, French, Spanish or Latin, and where the meanings of words have seemed especially sensitive or potentially ambiguous, I have added the original language in the text. If no translation is attested to, then the translation is my own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for this project was generously supported by a grant from Vetenskaprådet, the Swedish Research Council. Further support was provided by residencies at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study and the Sofia Centre for Advanced Study. I am especially grateful to Tomas Forsberg and Kaisa Kaakinen in Helsinki, for all their assistance in making my stay in Helsinki successful; and similarly, to Diana Mishkova and Dimiter Dimov in Sofia. I lectured on parts of this project to audiences at both facilities and received very helpful feedback from participants, for which I am grateful. While I was in Sofia the coronavirus epidemic hit, and we all suffered from the lockdown conditions wisely imposed by the government, but even at a distance we all suffered together.

Anthony John Lappin helped me with my Italian, my Latin and my Spanish. The translation of the prologue to Cinthio’s Hecatommithi in Chapter Two was a joint effort, but it was mainly Anthony’s work. Roberto del Valle Alcalà also helped me with Spanish and has been a great calming presence in my life. For their camaraderie in difficult times I also wish to thank Peter C. Herman, Richard Strier, Anthony Barthelemy, Arthur J. Bradley, Josip Novakovich and Alexandra Urakova. I presented some of the material from this project at a seminar of the Shakespeare Association of America, in a session organized by Yan Brailowsky—it was a great experience, so thank you, Yan. When I needed to find a new home for this project, I was welcomed by the K3 division at Malmö University, and I am especially grateful to Magnus Nilsson and Sara Bjärstorp for making that possible. I presented some material from the project at a seminar at Malmö organized by Bo Reimer, and received great feedback there too. And then there is the gang at Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics, Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja. Under the leadership of Cassandra, we organized two workshops, one in Uppsala and one in Turku, and I was privileged to play a part, to present material and learn from my fellow workshop members. A special callout goes to Molly Andrews, who was also a companion in Helsinki, along with Stuart Carroll and Lorenzo Magnani. And finally, there was a seminar on Thomas More and Utopia at the University of Cyprus, organized by Stella Achilleos and Antonio Balasopoulos, where I presented some material from Chapter three, which has been reformulated as an essay to be published in Utopian Studies, under their editorship.

Hanan Yoran, Carmen Nocentelli and Eric Griffin kindly read portions of my manuscript and made invaluable suggestions for improvement. The faults that remain are my own. I also wish to thank Megan Grieving and François Xavier-Gleyson of Anthem Press for all their support and hard work, as well as the two anonymous readers at the press for their insights. And to Marion Appelbaum, I owe more thanks than I can express.

PREFACE

This book addresses the representation of violence in Renaissance literature. It tries to account for the impulse to put violence into words or, in the case of drama, to put violence into words spoken on stage, coupled with gesture, movement and spectacle. And it tries to measure that impulse against the actual conditions of violence in the period. There were many sides to this impulse. Violence was often represented in literature as an expression of rage or desperation, but it was also frequently represented as the means toward a reasonably desired end, or an end that could be rationalized before or after the fact, however brutal or cruel. Violence could be undertaken by noblemen or commoners, by magistrates and thieves, by legitimate agents of the state or by rebels against the state. It could be individual or collective. It could be defensive or offensive. It could follow established codes of conduct (as in a duel) or provocatively defy all rules (as in an insurrection or a massacre of civilians). It could be tidy or horrendous. But it was always—or at least so this study will conceptualize the phenomenon—an action that was performed. Representations of violence in the Renaissance were in effect performances of performances or, in other words, re-presentations of presentations.

Exploring these performances of performances, this study focuses on four genres or modes of writing¹—the novella, the Menippean prose satire, the epic romance and tragic drama—and it emphasizes how these writings both contextualize the performance of violence and undergo contextualization by the pressure of events beyond their control. Along the way the study examines how storytelling (about violence and other matters) emerges from oral tradition to become a self-consciously literary pursuit, as well as how it discovers the historical dimensions of everyday life, treating such topics as vengeance, war and sexual assault as encounters not only between rivals or enemies but also between the individual and society, or between private aspirations and public actualities. When discussing satirical prose this study examines just war theory and pacifism, referring their progress, on the one hand, to ancient theoretical and ecclesiastical traditions and, on the other, to new developments in the technology, the ideology and the undertaking of war. What does it mean to go to war? these writings ask disapprovingly. Satire was the mightiest means for humanists to raise these questions and underscore the horrors of war, but the choice of satire also indicated a limitation on what could be written, as well as what could be expected to be done in response to what was written. On the subject, next, of epic romance, this study highlights the combination of literary innovation and the demise of chivalry—a strange brew, since the innovative epics all depended upon chivalric conventions, even as they upended them. Heroes go mad; they go AWOL; sometimes they go so far as to be complicit in genocide, an altogether unchivalric offence against humanity, all but unheard of in courtly medieval literature.² Finally, on the subject of tragedy, the study will focus on the generation of pity and fear, those two affects of serious drama originally pinpointed by Aristotle’s Poetics. It examines how and why the new genre (and mode) of vernacular tragedy in Europe made violence visual, visceral and terrible, appealing at once to the passionate judgment of its spectators and to something at once ineffable and necessary—the unseen power of the symbolic order, the God or gods to which characters and audience members alike might appeal but from which they could not expect any answers. Shall I never live to see the day / That I may come by justice to the Heavens? So says Thomas Kyd’s Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy.³ The appeal is conventional, but it indicates a fundamental motion of tragic drama toward unrealizable satisfaction. Lacan called this power the Big Other, and though I normally hesitate to apply the terms of twentieth-century psychology to events in the distant past, here I think the idea is both appropriate and useful: tragic theatre in the Renaissance cries out toward a resolving authority it cannot name.

The sum result is a long look at what I have called a discovery of violence. Discovery may be a loaded term, it has to be acknowledged. The Renaissance used to be known as an age of discovery, but the idea nowadays smacks of the worst wrongs that can be associated with Eurocentrism. After all, Columbus discovered the New World only for Europeans; the natives already knew about it. Moreover, he made all kinds of mistakes about America, so many that it might be said that he mis-discovered it—and such mis-discovering, repeated again and again by conquistadors, missionaries, state officials and settlers to follow played a large role in the devastation the Europeans wrought on the peoples of the Americas, a catastrophe that at least one respected historian has characterized as a holocaust.⁴ The discovery of the Americas, of sub-Saharan Africa, and other parts of the world was an eruption of deadly dominion, set a stir by guns and germs, and enforced by an unforgiving will to power—believed by all too many Europeans to be an expression of the will of God and the fulfilment of providential history. So, the term discovery may make one pause and look for other words.

But discovery also has less incendiary associations. The word indicates in the first place an uncovering, a disclosure. Go draw aside the curtains, says Portia in The Merchant of Venice to her servants, and discover the several baskets to this noble prince.⁵ In law courts a discovery is a production of the relevant facts of a case, sometimes under compulsion. It is a matter of showing evidence that hadn’t been reckoned with before. I shall discover a thing to you says Ford to Sir John Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, wherein I must very much lay open mine own imperfection (2.2). Says Volpone in Ben Jonson’s play by that name, maliciously, to officials in a court of law,

Then know, most honor’d fathers, I must now

Discover to your strangely abused ears,

The most prodigious and most frontless piece

Of solid impudence, and treachery,

That ever vicious nature yet brought forth

To shame the state of Venice⁶

In cases like this, a discovery can also be a betrayal, in the sense of betraying a confidence, of violating someone’s trust or unfairly exposing someone to danger. Discovery can be false, misleading, even downright mendacious. In the field of poetics, meanwhile, discovery indicates an unravelling, a denouement. Says John Dryden, listing the parts of drama, according (so he says) to Aristotle, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry,

Lastly, the catastrophe, which the Grecians called lysis, the French le dénouement, and we the discovery or unravelling of the plot. There you see all things settling again upon their first foundations, and the obstacles which hindered the design or action of the play once removed, it ends with that resemblance of truth and nature, that the audience are satisfied with the conduct of it.⁷

So a discovery can be many things: a finding, a presentation of evidence, a betrayal, an unravelling that undoes obstacles and exposes a truth. If you train a telescope (a Renaissance invention) on the heavens, you will discover objects that you could not see before. But if, as was common among alchemists (followers of a Renaissance pastime), you add ammonia to silver oxide, you will produce an object that didn’t exist before, in this case a batch of Argentum Fulminans, an explosive. You will have, as it were, betrayed the silver oxide while making something new from it. And your results are combustible. But yes, the result is a discovery. Scientists often refer to an observer effect, where observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon itself. Throwing a light on a dark object adds light to the object; and so, what is discovered is the object plus light. Other manipulations, like adding acid, have even grander effects. We talk today about discovering a vaccine—but that of course means producing a vaccine where none had existed before. Surely Renaissance writers thus participated in changing violence while discovering it, playing a role in what is now called the history of violence. This study explores the many sides of discovery that Renaissance writers applied to the performance of violence, and how those discoveries both responded to and impacted the ongoing history of violence, engaging in what Heidegger has called the basic task of art, to un-conceal.⁸

But let us start, then, with some general observations.

The first of them is this: violence is a universal of human experience, but not all of humanity has experienced violence in the same way. The historical record is full of examples concerning how violence has changed from time to time and from place to place. Technology has had a huge impact. Swords and knives eventually replaced stones, clubs and axes in the arsenal of violent assault; guns and cannons replaced swords; bombs were added to the arsenal of firearms; so were missiles, first as shot by catapults and then by cannon, dropped by airplanes, and later blasted into the air by jet engines and rockets, becoming a terror from the air.⁹ Violence is determined by the technology that can be mustered to put it into action. Even unarmed brute force comes with a technology, for the use of naked hands, torsos and feet as weapons requires a technology of the body, and the technology is variable from place to place and from time to time. The abolition of weapons in early seventeenth century Okinawa, subsequent to its annexation by Japan, is said to have played a major part in the development of Okinawan Karate.¹⁰ Although it is best known today as an art form and a sport, Karate was originally practiced as a tool of self-defense, and therefore also of assault.

But technology is only one part of the history of violence. For the history of violence is all but indistinguishable from the history of human relations as a whole.¹¹ To commit an act of violence is to commit a quintessentially social (and human) act. Even suicide is at bottom a social act. To commit an act of violence is to engage in a sequence of events whose motivations and consequences are understandable, and in the first place possible, only by reference to a social context through which the symbolic lives of persons, those doing and those being done to, can be identified and characterized. Whether the act involves the domestic violence of a husband against a wife, a madman striking against a child he mistakes for a demon, the quasi-public violence of a brawl, a stealthy armed robbery, a police shooting at a political demonstration, the hanging of a criminal, human sacrifice, child abuse, the detonation of a bomb in a public square, a pitched battle waged in the course of international warfare, kidnapping, a tactical missile launch, an individual mischievously shouting fire in a theatre, or even, again, suicide, violence always means something—there is no such thing as a senseless act of violence¹²—and it is from the social relations of the persons, places, and things involved, and the institutions that govern them, that violence derives its meaning.

Of course, violence is not only social, but frequently anti-social as well. Any act of violence may be considered as the breaking of a fundamental bond among all human beings, a covenant of peace among both intimates and strangers that is required for the co-inhabitation of the planet. Several prominent thinkers of the Renaissance, as well see, were on board with this insight, which had originated in antiquity, arguing that peace was the natural condition of all humans, and all nations as well. History corrupted us and made us brutal, first to animals and then to one another. But even in situations where such a fundamental bond is not respected, where for example human beings are understood to be divided between friends and enemies, or rightful members and un-rightful non-members, violence will be considered a breaking of bonds: internal violence breaking bonds among members of the social group, external violence breaking the bonds sustaining the social world (or even the natural world) of intramural relations. Violence disrupts, irrupts, and injures, or at least tries to disrupt, irrupt and injure—and that will be its social meaning. But violence can also be socially constitutive. Law enforcement relies upon violence. The self-defense of a social group, a family, a clan, a town, a nation, often requires violence. Law-establishing, as in the case of revolution or war, where one political system is put in the place of another, usually relies upon violence. Violence fondatrice, one critic calls it, as opposed to violence banale.¹³ Law-making violence, as Walter Benjamin would put it, as opposed to law-enforcing violence.¹⁴ One can go even further in this line of thought, where violence is held to be social rather than anti-social. For the very bond uniting all human beings, or at least all human beings in a given society, may itself depend upon the coercive powers of its leading institutions, including the family and the state, if a state there is, along with the traditions, statutory laws, religious practices and other instruments of social discipline that the society will have at its disposal.¹⁵ And again, all of this—law enforcement, self-defense, war, religious practice, statutes, the family, the state—are historically and geographically variable. If you want to know how any given society works, one of the first things to look into is how it practices violence. Look at how a society appropriates, assembles, regulates and engages in violence, even as it also endeavors, as all societies must do, to restrain, constrain and prevent it, and you will have a good idea of what the society is.¹⁶

A key to understanding the performance of violence in any given time and place is certainly its literature, if it has one. Literature does not tell the whole story, to be sure, in the Renaissance or in any other time, for literature is not omniscient; it cannot see everything even if it wants to, and sometimes it misrepresents or occludes something that has to be found by other means. Moreover, literature is not simply the envisioning (whether in fiction or factual writing) of an object independent of it. Violence can be in the literature itself. That is to say not that literature generally does the work of violence, although sometimes it might do so, at least on a symbolic level (where violence is verbally encouraged, or where a people may be harmed or put in harm’s way by words themselves) but that literature may appropriate the system of meanings of the social world around it that makes violence possible. Literature takes the system in, and has to do so in order to render its subject intelligible. It formulates it.¹⁷ Such is the case both for literature that celebrates violence and for literature that critiques it, as well as literature that falls between the two extremes. Violence is inside the writing as a possible representation, a subject matter, a motivation and a form—and also, very importantly, as something that has been chosen to be represented. I do not subscribe to the idea that representation is in itself violent, or that language is in itself violent, popular as either idea has been in Continental theory.¹⁸ If everything is violent, as some philosophers seem to say, even the merest whisper of a word, then nothing is violent; and the whole concept of violence, as theologian Grace Jantzen has argued, loses its ethical meaning.¹⁹ It cannot be morally evaluated anymore. Removing the idea of an act [from our concept of violence], historian Stuart Carroll similarly argues, replaces an analytical category with a metaphor, and leads to an inflation of the concept of violence. If every form of social structure is an act of violence, it becomes ubiquitous, and the concept loses its power of differentiation, preventing any sensible distinction ….²⁰ By this line of thought, it would be a great mistake to equate literary expression with a palpable act of physical violence, even if not all acts of violence directly cause physical harm; for then, in effect, literature would be unable to represent violence; it would only be violent.²¹

But certainly, literature is part of the conversation about violence in any literate society, and that conversation is part of the history of violence as well. It makes a difference whether a culture is predominantly silent about violence or, by contrast, obsessively noisy about it, even if neither silence nor noise are fair indicators about the amount or kind of violence actually taking place. Our relation to violence, whether we are agents, victims, witnesses or bystanders, depends on what we think we know about it, what we have heard or seen or thought about it—and, of course, what we have read about it. What is violence to us, and we to violence? That is a subject which every society, whether through its literature or by some other means, has to account for, however reticently or extravagantly.

The boundaries between violent and non-violent acts shifts from time to time and place to place. A common example is child-spanking, which is in some countries today illegal and taboo and in other countries a legal, accepted and recommended form of discipline. Another example: unlike today in much of the world, in Renaissance Europe it was not possible, technically or legally, for a man to rape his wife. But cursing a neighbor could be a capital offense, if a complaint was made and magic or witchcraft was suspected. Heresy and blasphemy could be capital offenses. In Protestant England, a Catholic priest practicing his trade—leading a mass, hearing a confession—could be convicted of treason, and executed in the gruesome manner reserved for traitors. So boundaries shift, and one of the tasks of the history of violence is document the when, where, why and how of boundary shifts. When it comes to literary history, boundary shifts need to be registered not only with regard to concepts of violence and legal jurisdiction over violence, not to mention the different meanings assigned to the term violence and its synonyms, but also with regard to the cognitive and emotional life of violence, the way sequences of action, images, themes and symbols are attached to them; the way acts of violence are tied to structures of feeling, to sympathy and antipathy, to joy and to dread, to hopes and fears, to admiration and disgust. For violence could be admired as well as abhorred, hoped for as well as feared. What literary texts discovered in violence was a great range of facts, passions, dispositions and ideas, of revelations, presentations and betrayals—and also a great range of literary strategies through which violence could be revealed, presented, or betrayed. It is one thing to know how many people were murdered in London in 1605. It is another thing to know what murder meant, what it felt like to live in a town where murders were being committed, what people heard and read about it, or what they saw about it on the popular stage.

Now then, to go on to some particulars: the major literature of the Renaissance was if not obsessed at least preoccupied with the subject of violence. Its greatest achievements, from the satirical dialogue to revenge tragedy, are unthinkable without the violence that captivated it. Yet it was preoccupied with it in its own way. Taking up models from classic and medieval literature, while responding to developments that ranged from new forms of warfare to new ways of administering justice, the literature of the Renaissance involved several substantial departures from earlier modes of thinking, feeling and writing about violence. Short stories had been composed and circulated, either orally or in written form, the world over, and many of them were tales of violence. But Boccaccio, in his Decameron, provided a new framework for establishing what I call the moral economy of short fiction with regard to violence, placing violent acts on a controversial scale of profits and losses. Pacifism had been extolled by many world religions, including Christianity, for millennia, and was touched on, philosophically and imaginatively, by a number of Greco-Roman writers. But Christian humanists, centered around Erasmus of Rotterdam, responding to new technologies of warfare and a new system of governance, the nation-state, developed a new ideology of peace-making, and articulated a newly authoritative contempt of the warrior ethics that had dominated European social life for centuries. One of the expressions of this new pacifism was also a newly minted literary genre, the utopia, along with a general revivification of the Menippean satire. Another expression, though it would not come to full fruition until after the period studied in this book (in 1648) would be the development of international law, leading ultimately, in the next century, to Immanuel Kant’s dissemination of the idea of perpetual peace.²² As for heroic narrative, as epic, romance, or religious legend, they too had been around for millennia, and were particularly well-suited to glorify violence, either as an end in itself or as a necessary means for the founding of states, the amassing of empires, and the keeping of peace between contending factions. But Renaissance writers found themselves challenged to adopt the forms of heroic narrative in a way that accommodated new forms of warfare, led by the cannon and the harquebus, and new forms of destruction, even in the face of the Christian humanist point of view which said that all of this injury was inimical to both Christian faith and the happiness of Christian society. One of the results was the development of heroic narrative in the form of parody; another was an intensive allegorizing of violence such that violence was caused to mean something that it wasn’t: a movement of the soul, a discovery of self-identity. And then again there was drama. The terror, the horror, and the cosmic absurdity of violence had been a theme of the great Greek and Roman playwrights. But never had the dramatists reached the despair of violence registered in Shakespeare’s King Lear: Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl!—at least in this writer’s opinion. Nor had any drama in Europe before the Elizabethan period taken such pains to visualize violence, to make it into a spectacle, though the practice of visualization goes back, as will be seen, to Italian tragedy, especially in the work of Giovanni Batista Giraldi Cinthio (d.1573).

The concept of violence was not well theorized during the Renaissance, even though the thing itself was very much a part of everyday life—a good deal more so than we would find tolerable today. There were many words with which to denote it, the most common (in my reading) being force, often used in an adverbial expression, as in the French par force, the Italian per forza, or the Latin vi. The first work I have encountered which systematically uses the umbrella term violence, in Latin violentia, and using it in just the sense most common today, as an alternative to non-violence, is Justus Lipsius’s treatise Politicorum sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex (1582). That does not prevent us from seeing violence in a lot of places before Lipsius’s time, but it does alert us to be cautious. To call anything violent today is to express disapproval. But there were many incidents in the Renaissance, in fact and in fiction, when an occurrence that is obviously violent to us would not be so obviously violent to the people of the Renaissance, and not so effortlessly disapproved. In Othello the title character at one point smacks his wife in public. I have not deserved this, Desdemona objects, implying that if she had in fact deserved it the smack may have been permissible. The ambassador from Venice remarks,

My lord, this would not be believed in Venice,

Though I should swear I saw’t: ‘tis very much:

Make her amends; she weeps. (4.1.272-4)

One implication of those remarks is that Othello was wrong to act in this way publicly. Privately would have been another matter. Another implication is that such violence would have been appropriate if it had been deserved. But then again, it appears that Othello has wronged Desdemona, since she has not deserved it. He must make her amends—although there is no suggestion that Othello’s offense is punishable by law. The ambassador’s main worry is that Othello has acted out of passion rather than reason, and seems to be going mad; it is not that he committed a felonious assault on another human being.

Is this the nature

Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue

The shot of accident, nor dart of chance,

Could neither graze nor pierce? (4.1.300-304).

There is a tradition going back to antiquity where violence was defined not by the presence of an injured party but by a perpetrator’s lack of self-control. Montaigne frequently uses violence in this sense: violence being defined not by the harm it does to victims, but by the harm it does to the subject engaged in it, and the contagion of such violence from one subject to another.²³

With or without an umbrella concept, Renaissance writers presented their readers and playgoers with incidents like these which demanded some kind of response. Violence in Renaissance writing was sensational. It was provocative. It could summon the thrill of triumph over one’s enemies or the sorrow of loss and defeat, along with the indignity of having been unrightfully assaulted or punished. It was a medium of aesthetic pleasure whose effects ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, from revulsion to empathy. Violence was on edge, as it were, in the literature of the Renaissance, and in this study, I try to recreate this edginess, this anxious partnering with the devil with which the literature had to engage in order to give violence its due.

As for the geographical and chronological range of the study, I take my idea of the Renaissance following such historians as William Bouswma, Quentin Skinner, Peter Burke, John R. Hale, and Guido Ruggiero, to indicate the world of what was at bottom a cultural movement, a generally self-conscious but by no means homogenous wave of learning, artistic creation, construction, urban development, manufacture and social thought that spread from Florence through most of Western and parts of Central and Eastern Europe.²⁴ Many scholars have come to prefer the term early modern for this period; but in many interpretations early modern extends into the eighteenth century, and whatever its chronological limits it is held to specify not only a cultural movement but also the whole matter of social life, of which cultural movements are only a part, and of which the Renaissance then is only a part. Early modern, taken to designate the total material and mental life of an era demarcated between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, includes developments ranging from the fortunes and misfortunes of aristocrats and merchants to the joys and ordeals of artisans, peasants and slaves; it includes all the cultural forms and technical practices of the era, from the oral folklore of the peasantry to the written doctrines of the Catholic and Protestant churches, from rites of birth and death and the observance of the liturgical calendar to the collection of taxes, the manuring of fields, the milling of grain and the brewing of beer; from the weaving of linen and the laundering of shirts to drinking in taverns and harassing newlyweds in charivari; from playing sports on Sunday and getting sick on Monday to the building of churches, palaces, hospitals and roads; from the formation of constitutional nation-states to wars of conquest and extermination, and new inroads into or against international piracy as well. The Renaissance is only a part of all that, a very small part if one adopts the outlook that the Renaissance was the creature of rather selective, mostly male elite.²⁵ Ruggiero, whose idea of the Renaissance is more inclusive, claims that the cultural movement of the Italian Renaissance was itself anchored in a form of social life—the fourteenth century city-state, with its quasi-republican political institutions, its proto-capitalist economies, and its free-wheeling social mores.²⁶ But in France, England, Spain and much of the rest of Europe, when the Renaissance came, there was no such dominant form of social life; instead there were monarchies and fiefdoms; there were nascent empires, nation-states and regional polities with fundamentally different practices of social life, and an attitude toward personal conduct and its pleasures that was much less libertine. That means that there is a definitive difference between the Italian and the European Renaissance. But still, they went hand in hand. The European Renaissance cannot be understood without reference to its Italian forbear; and it is possibly also the case that the Italian Renaissance cannot be fully understood without reference to its effects and to the new developments it spawned elsewhere, often enough by itinerant Italians, from Christopher Columbus and Leonardo da Vinci to Matteo Bandello, Catherine de’ Medici, Giordano Bruno and Ludovico Castelvetro. Randolph Starn thus speaks of the European Renaissance as a cluster of genealogies, including renewal, world-making, self-fashioning and transmission as lines of descent through which intellectual and cultural life was motivated.²⁷ These genealogies have beginnings and endings. Hale talks of this period as the long sixteenth century, 1450 to 1620, and associates it with the spread of the idea of Europe—a tremulous unity at once geographical, cultural, and mythological—born out of the ashes of the idea of Christendom.²⁸ The focus of this book is the long sixteenth century too, but in literary matters one has to go back, as many writers of the Renaissance went back, to Petrarch and Boccaccio in the late fourteenth century, and so there is my starting point.

I make no apology for choosing the authors and texts I have chosen, although I am aware that much more is excluded from this study than included. This book is no attempt to arrive at a statistical average of the intellectual and emotional life of violence in the Renaissance, or to look at the history of violence from below. Valuable as either kind of study might be—and there have been such studies, and I have drawn upon them as much as I have been able—in this book I examine the literary forefront of thought and feeling with regard to violence in the period. For example, with regard to chivalric romance, though there were dozens if not hundreds of chivalric romances written in the period with an eye to recapturing the medieval point of view—for example, the many continuations of Amadis of Gaul²⁹—I focus on works that took the chivalric romance in new directions, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1483-95), Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516-32), Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581). There is no denying the residual life of chivalry in the sixteenth century, to use one of Raymond Williams’s categories (the residual life of a cultural form being in contrast with the dominant and emergent lives of other forms);³⁰ but the literary innovations undertaken by masters of literary expression take us much farther into the symbolic life of violence in this period than more old-fashioned and derivative works. Those literary innovations take us to the edge of what was possible to discover about violence in the period. Their authors were more diligent not only in thinking with the forms they adopted, but also in thinking through them, and making their way toward new insights, structures and articulations. And it is to them, though with an eye toward counter-developments, toward material circumstances that those texts might occlude as well as express, and toward the blindness as well as the insight of the texts, toward betrayals as well as revelations, that this study is devoted. There was no dominant discourse of violence in a Foucauldian sense in the period, and no single controlling episteme; there was instead a proliferation of discourses, modulated by the genres of writing through which they multiplied. This is therefore a study of many discourses and modulations, as authors adapted, invented or re-invented forms of discovery, and especially then of how genres were developed in order to accommodate the material at hand.

So now, as to the form of the book to follow: I begin with an Overture, an opening to my subject matter, featuring the range of the texts and dilemmas of interpretation to be studied, along with the background of the history of violence toward which the study attempts to make a contribution. Each of the following chapters is devoted to a genre or mode of writing: the Boccaccian novella collection, especially as developed by Straparola, Bandello, and Marguerite de Navarre; the Erasmian rhetoric of pacifism and its characteristic form, the Menippean satire; the Renaissance romantic epic, with reference especially toward Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; vernacular tragedy, with an account of Shakespeare’s handling of violence along with readings of Cinthio’s Orbecche, Robert Garnier’s Les Juives, and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. There are many other genres and modes that could have been added to the analysis, had I time and space: comedy, for example; historiography, to give another. Reported accounts of violence whether in peace or war constitute important bodies of evidence, and I have drawn on some of those reports in what follows, but I have had to omit making a systematic study of them, given the emphasis of this book on artistic expression, and, again, the limits of time and space. The same more or less goes with the essay and the treatise; I have drawn upon essays and treatises, but haven’t highlighted them. The discourses of imperialist and colonialist violence, to my disappointment, a subject to which I have devoted much study, I have not been able to dilate on, though I touch upon it from time to time, especially in my treatment of romantic epics. Imperialist and colonialist violence is a concern of the novella, pacifist writing, romance and drama, and many of my writers address it in passing. That violence itself is as it were on the recto of the folio pages I examine; it is always there, the other side of Renaissance moral life. Even love stories, like Marguerite de Navarre’s Floride and Amadour (which eventually becomes a story of rape) needs the reality of Spanish battles against Muslims to complete the picture of romance and violence she draws. But though I deal at length (in Chapter three) with the just war tradition, and pause to consider Thomas More’s application of it to colonial expansionism in Utopia, I have not been able in the space allotted to delve into some of the most significant documents on the subject, such as The Letters of Hernán Cortés, the memoir of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the condemnation of colonialist violence in the hands of writers like Bartolomé de las Casas and Michel de Montaigne, or the defense of it in writers like the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the historians Gomára and Oviedo. In any case, recent work on