Ita Mac Carthy Renaissance Keywords

Reviewed work(s): Renaissance Keywords. Edited by Ita Mac Carthy. London: Legenda,
2013. Pp. ix+141.

Pablo Maurette
University of Chicago

A tendency to go “back to basics” has become more and more pervasive in the last ten
years of Renaissance and early modern studies. This tendency, perhaps the sign of a larger
revisionist turn, manifests itself in two vast areas of interest: history and philology. Historians
of the period have in the past decade become ever more interested in topics such as the
history of the senses, of corporeality, and of material objects, thus revealing a concern with
the primal and most immediate categories of perception and aesthetic appreciation of the
world. But, philology has reawakened the sense that in order to understand a historical period
it is absolutely indispensable to trace words’s meanings at the time and their linguistic
development.

Ita Mac Carthy’s Renaissance Keywords combines both methodologies aptly and
fruitfully to focus on seven words that are crucial to understanding some fundamental topics
of Renaissance culture that range from rhetorics to theology, literature, and natural
philosophy in 1450–1650. The words are “sense,” “disegno,” “allegory,” “grace,” “scandal,”
“discretion,” and “modern.” This collection of essays came out in the same year as Roland
Greene’s Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (2013)
and served as a timely prelude to the 2014 Renaissance Society of America Convention in
New York City, March 26–30, which featured several panels named after and centering on
“keywords.” Of course, as Richard Scholar acknowledges in the introduction to the volume
(“The New Philologists”), the debt these new philologists have with Raymond Williams’s
canonical study Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) is enormous. Like
Williams, the authors of the essays that make up Renaissance Keywords believe that a focus
on “language in history and on language ashistory” (2) is the key to “unlock a culture” (1).
These essays, however, as Scholar rightly points out, have a strong comparative component,
which Williams’s work lacked. All seven articles in this book approach the study of their
targeted Renaissance keyword from a perspective that is both multilingual and transnational.
And therein resides the greatest value of their contribution to the field.

The first essay, Guido Giglioni’s “Sense: Renaissance’s Views of Sense Perception,”
constitutes the strongest contribution in the volume. The scope of Giglioni’s piece is
ambitious as it aims to consider the word “sensus” from a multilingual and interdisciplinary
approach. According to Giglioni, 1450–1650 saw the advent of a new attitude toward the
senses, in particular touch, which grants “the embodied nature of sense perception” a
privileged role in epistemology (14). In the first half of the essay Giglioni focuses mostly on
the philosophies of Telesio, Campanella, and Bacon to show that a revaluation of the senses
is the basis of the paradigm change that allows for a scientific revolution in early modernity.
In the second part, he turns his attention to physicians such as Monteux, Fernel, and Harvey,
whose reexamination of the physiology of the lower senses, touch in particular—made
possible by new laws that allowed them to experiment with human cadavers—played a
crucial role in the new epistemologies of the time. Giglioni concludes that this revaluation of
the role of the senses is a transitory stage in the search for “independent and objective
standards of truth” (24) that the seventeenth century would eventually find in rules and
methods.

Other essays in this volume include Ben Thomas’s “Disegno: Superficial Line or
Universal Design?,” which focuses on the polysemous versatility of the Italian
term disegno in debates centered on the nature of painting. Disegno, Thomas argues, retains
its ambivalence as both a technical term in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century treatises on
painting and a more encompassing concept that describes an “intellectual process” (33)
characteristic of artistic creation. In her essay on the keyword “allegory,” Ann Moss follows
the changes in the understanding on the term as its importance is downgraded in theological
and epistemological spheres. In the Renaissance—Moss claims—the term “allegory”
acquires value “as a set of practices” (59) in the aesthetic realm, both in literature and in the
fine arts.

The editor, Ita Mac Carthy, undertakes the study of the term “Grace” in a compelling
essay that tracks down the evasive semantics of this keyword in the long sixteenth century.
Mac Carthy analyzes the use of the term in contexts as diverse as art criticism and theory,
theology, rhetorics, and others to conclude that “grace became key in the contest for
supremacy that made Renaissance art as a whole so distinctive” (76). In a fascinating essay
on the keyword “scandal,” Emily Butterworth and Rowan Tomlinson explain the different
theological meanings (at least three) of the word in the works of Calvin. In its original
theological sense, “scandal” refers to any heretical teaching, deliberately misleading doctrine,
libel, or rumor that leads to someone’s loss of faith. The authors then tackle profane French
literature of the time (e.g., Rabelais) to show how the word slowly acquires its current
meaning both in English and in most romance languages: the public revelation of a sin and
the concomitant social embarrassment this revelation brings upon the sinner. In a similar
vein, Timothy Chester’s essay on the keyword “discretion” shows how in early modernity the
term normally associated with epistemology acquires a stronger sense in the discourse of
rhetorics as “reservation in speech” (113). Finally, Patricia Seed focuses on the fascinating
evolution of the word “modern,” from its derogatory meaning in Dante, who used it to
criticise the lack of decorum of his contemporaries, to its consolidation as a praise in the
Renaissance. By the mid-fifteenth century the adjective “modern” acquires the sense of
“relevant,” “daring,” and “sophisticated.” Consequently, early modern intellectuals identify
themselves with a “modernity” that draws inspiration from classical antiquity, only to
overcome its limitations and leave behind most of its obsolete conceits.

By bringing together intellectual history and philology in ways that are both rigorous and
ambitious, the essays in Renaissance Keywordsconstitute a great contribution to the field of
Renaissance and early modern studies. The book, however, transcends the limits of its field
and offers anyone interested in the history of ideas important insights of the ways in which
language in its ever-evolving nature determines ideas and worldviews.