Renaissance Error: Digression from Ariosto to Milton

Renaissance Error proposes that the formal key to early modern literature is digression. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers compose works that persistently imitate moral and cognitive wandering, often in an attempt to remedy such wandering. Their powerful sense of human error spring...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Taylor, Luke
Other Authors: Teskey, Gordon
Language:en_US
Published: Harvard University 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11089
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11169782
Description
Summary:Renaissance Error proposes that the formal key to early modern literature is digression. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers compose works that persistently imitate moral and cognitive wandering, often in an attempt to remedy such wandering. Their powerful sense of human error springs from the humanist and reformist view of the Middle Ages as a gigantic detour from classical civilisation and from the apostolic Church. This sense deepens as the intellectual disciplines and religious paths of the Renaissance divide. And it culminates in a radical picture of all human desire, thought, and history as continually digressive from beginning to end.