Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies (Pluralisierung & Autoritat)

288 Pages·2011·3.75 MB·English

by  Andreas Höfele

Humankinds
The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies
Pluralisierung & Autorität
Herausgegeben vom
Sonderforschungsbereich 573
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Band 25
De Gruyter
Humankinds
The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies
Edited by
Andreas Höfele · Stephan Laque´
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-025830-1
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025831-8
ISSN 2076-8281
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Contents
Andreas Hçfele and Stephan Laqu(cid:2)
Introduction ........................................ 1
Literary Sites of the Human
Aleida Assmann
Liminal Anthropology in Shakespeare’s Plays ............... 21
Verena Olejniczak Lobsien
The Space of the Human and the Place of the Poet: Excursions
into English Topographical Poetry ....................... 41
Religious Beings
Brian Cummings
Among the Fairies: Religion and the Anthropology of Ritual in
Shakespeare ......................................... 71
Enno Ruge
Golding’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and
Puritan Anthropology ................................. 91
Negotiating the Foreign
Richard Wilson
When Golden times convents: Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise .. 109
Bettina Boecker
“Cony Caught by Walking Mort”: Indigenous Exoticism in the
Literature of Roguery ................................. 137
VI Contents
Cornel Zwierlein
Renaissance Anthropologies of Security: Shipwreck, Barbary fear
and the Meaning of ‘Insurance’ ......................... 157
Human and Non-Human
Paul Yachnin
Shakespeare’s Public Animals ........................... 185
Markus Wild
“Fellow-brethren and compeers”: Montaigne’s Rapprochement
Between Man and Animal ............................. 199
Ulrich Pfisterer
Animal Art/Human Art: Imagined Borderlines in the
Renaissance ......................................... 217
Thinking the Human
Tobias Dçring
“Now they’re substances and men”: The Masque of Lethe and the
Recovery of Humankind............................... 247
Stefan Herbrechter
Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare ...... 261
Index .............................................. 279
Introduction
ndreas Hçfele tephan Laqu(cid:2)
A and S
“Humankinds” is a strange and uneasy word, for if ever there was a word
that one feels confident is safe from pluralization–grammatical or other-
wise–it is the term used for the title of this volume. While there are ob-
viously all kinds of human beings, surely, there is and can be only one
humankind. Indeed the very acknowledgement of the fact that there
are all kinds of humans requires an all-encompassing singular ‘kind’
which includes and unites these various ‘kinds’, a hypernym under
which all existing and all thinkable ethnic, cultural, religious, genetic,
etc. varieties of humanity can be subsumed. One could argue that the
more we are politically and ethically committed to the protection of plu-
rality,themoreweneedtoinsistonacommonsingularreferenttowhich
thispluralityis moored.If weholdhumanrightstobeuniversal,inalien-
ableandindivisible,if wewanttoavoidahypocriticalstateofequalityin
which some are more equal than others, it would appear imperative to
maintain that emphatically there is and can be only one humankind
just as according to a related political agenda there is and can be only
OneWorld.Thepluralof theword“humankinds”isthereforedeliberate-
lyawkwardsinceitservestopointtowardsadisconcertinganddisruptive
process in the history of European culture or, more specifically, in the
way in which that culture conceives of what it means to be human.
So “humankinds” appears to be an impossible plural, but during the
early modern period which this volume addresses it became possible to
think otherwise. Giordano Bruno is a thinker who comes readily to
mind. He regarded the notion of an infinite world theologically inevita-
bleanddeemeditnotonlythinkablebutregardeditasacertaintythatan
infinite universe contain an infinite number of worlds1 and if “that spa-
ciousfieldwhichistheairortheheaven,orthevoid”containsaninfinite
number of worlds, then it follows that “all those worlds […] contain an-
1 For the classical and medieval ancestry of this thinking cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy’s
magisterialandstillrelevantdisquisitiononthe“principleofplenitude”inLove-
joy 1974, 99–143.
2 Andreas Hçfele undStephan Laqu(cid:2)
imals and inhabitants no less than can our own earth.”2 Which is not to
saythattheseotherhumankindsnecessarilyalldifferfromus;theymight
in fact be replications of ourselves, but they might–and according to
Bruno must–also be improvements on us. Since God is infinite and un-
stintinginhisgrace, hemusthavecreatedaninfinitenumberof worlds–
since he is perfect, he must also somewhere have created a perfect race
above the strikingly fallible and imperfect species which inhabits our
modest planet. However, regardless of the exact nature of these infinitely
pluralworlds,theemphatic singularity andcentrality thatmanlays claim
toinageocentricuniversecanherebeseentodissolveintoendlessmulti-
plicity. Though science fiction has by now familiarized us with a host of
extraterrestrial fellow beings, Bruno’s infinity of parallel worlds with its
concomitant infinity of humanoid populations is still awaiting empirical
proof. At the same time, however, the sublunar world of early modern
Europe did, in fact, offer a plurality of humankinds. This world was
an intellectual hothouse, an arena of heightened pluralization in all fields
of knowledgeandspeculationandthecomfortablecollectivesingular‘hu-
mankind’ was, of course, not immune to this intellectual energy. ‘Hu-
mankind’ increasingly came under pressure and came to yield a plurality
of different ‘humankinds’.
Of course, a plurality of ‘humankind’ is not a notion that would ac-
tually have been entertained at the time, let alone a notion that would
havebeenperceivedaspositive,butitisanotionthatmayserveasaheu-
ristic focusforthepressure thatwasworking onaunifiednotionof what
it means to be human. While the Renaissance did not in any emphatic
sense ‘invent’ the human, the period that gave rise to ‘humanism’ wit-
nessed an unprecedented diversification of the concept that was at its
very core. The question of what defines the human became increasingly
contestedasoldcertaintieswerechallengedbynewdevelopmentslikethe
emergence of the natural sciences, religious pluralisation and colonial ex-
pansion bringing confrontation with non-European peoples. The result-
ing plurality–though in noway exclusive to the Early Modern period–is
a cultural formation which emerged in particular ways, in particular con-
texts and with particular force during the Renaissance.
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that “in or about December 1910
human character changed.”3 We venture to suggest that it is possible to
make a similar claim for an earlier date and say that “in or about 1500
2 Bruno 1584. Argument of the Third Dialogue, ninethly.
3 Woolf 1992, 70.
Introduction 3
humancharacterchanged”.Withoutwantingtoconfusethebeginningof
20th-century modernism which Virginia Woolf is addressing with the in-
cipient modernity of the Renaissance, it is instructive to briefly consider
the sense of mission which caused Virginia Woolf to make her bold pro-
clamation. Thenewhumancharacter whichshesawemerging at thatcu-
riouslyprecisedate,December1910,waslessdistinct,lessclearlycircum-
scribed than the realist tradition of English writing had been willing to
acknowledge. The meticulous precision with which attire and the physi-
calandsocialenvironmentwasdescribedin19th-centuryfictionappeared
to Virginia Woolf to be woefully inadequate for the characterization of
individuals whowere increasingly waiving the rules of standard social be-
haviour and striking up new and unexpected relationships, inscribing
themselves in new and disconcerting contexts. Virginia Woolf ends her
essaywithapleatorespecthumanindistinctness:“Toleratethespasmod-
ic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”4 While Virginia Woolf is
here, at the beginning of the 20th century, defending the elusiveness of
theindividual,Early Modern cultureatthebeginningof the16thcentury
was faced with the elusiveness of the whole species, which found itself
caught up in new and problematic contexts, related in uneasy proximity
to non-human animality and inscribed in disconcerting contexts which
defied the medieval ordo that had defined an authoritative and stable po-
sition for humankind.
There is another peculiar detail of Virginia Woolf’s dictum that is
worthhighlightingand,indeedadopting.Inheressayitisnothumanna-
ture or humanity itself that changes, but human character. In borrowing
her phrasing we want to suggest that around 1500 not some essence of
humanity, but human character changed. The Greek etymolgy of “char-
acter” (“charatte(cid:3)n”) links the word to engraving, and thus to an artistic
practice of creating pictorial representations. When human character
changes what changes is ‘the engraving of the human’. What changes is
the picture of humankind which a culture holds. In his seminal essay
“The Age of the World Picture”, Martin Heidegger posits an even
more fundamental shift. The modern age (die Neuzeit), he explains, is
not defined by a change in the world picture–in “the character of the
world”, as it were–but by the emergence of the world as picture:
Theworldpicturedoesnotchangefromanearliermedievaloneintoamod-
ernone,butratherthefactthattheworldbecomespictureatalliswhatdis-
tinguishestheessenceof themodernage[Neuzeit].FortheMiddleAges,in
4 Woolf 1992, 70.