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The 2006 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture

A Postmodern Renaissance?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Randolph Starn
Randolph Starn*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The place of the Renaissance in historical narratives of modernity was problematic long before recent bouts of dismissal, denial, or indifference. However, the idea is a hardy survivor and the old phoenix is at it again. Has the Renaissance gained a new, postmodern lease on life? Plurality, discontinuity, and contingency are hallmarks of that protean, much-contested label and of current Renaissance studies, not to mention the Renaissance boom in pop culture. Is this a mirror reflecting only our own preconceptions or a window that discloses a Renaissance that was never convincingly modern in the first place? What are the implications, one way or another, for the present and future of Renaissance studies?

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to The Renaissance Society of America’s Advisory Board for inviting me to deliver the Bennett Lecture and to Renaissance Quarterly Articles Editors Jeffrey Chipps Smith and Martin Elsky for encouraging me to publish it much as delivered at the Annual Meeting in San Francisco on 23 March 2006.

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