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Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of “realistic” fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in medieval studies and Renaissance literature.

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Renaissance

Anglais

Musique irlandaise

Scottish

Welsh

European

Poetry

English

Irish

Idioma galés

Idioma inglés

Literary Criticism

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Publié par	University of Notre Dame Press
Date de parution	30 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780268101695
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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VOLITION S FACE
ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern
S ERIES E DITORS : D AVID A ERS , S ARA B ECKWITH, AND J AMES S IMPSON
R ECENT T ITLES IN THE S ERIES
Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 (2009)
Robert W. Barrett, Jr.
The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700 (2009)
Patricia Badir
The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700 (2010)
Nancy Bradley Warren
The Island Garden: England s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (2012)
Lynn Staley
Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2012)
Clare Costley King oo
The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (2012)
Alice Dailey
Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry (2013)
Katherine C. Little
Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More (2013)
Thomas Betteridge
Unwritten Verities: The Making of England s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549 (2015)
Sebastian Sobecki
Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 (2015)
Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith, eds.
The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (2015)
Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano
Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600 (2016)
Ryan McDermott
VOLITION S FACE
PERSONIFICATION AND THE WILL IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
ANDREW ESCOBEDO
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2017 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016058504
ISBN 9780268101695
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu .
For Garey and Ford, whose faces are always before me
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
Personification, Energy, and Allegory
Chapter Two
The Prosopopoetic Will: Ours, though Not We
Chapter Three
Conscience in the Tudor Interludes
Chapter Four
Despair in Marlowe and Spenser
Chapter Five
Love and Spenser s Cupid
Chapter Six
Sin and Milton s Angel
Epilogue: Premodern Personification and Posthumanism?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Free Will. Detail from Caesar Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (1603; repr., London, 1709), 49. Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library .
Conscience. Detail from Caesar Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (1603; repr., London, 1709), 19. Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library .
Desperatio. Giotto di Bondone, wall painting from Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (1306). Photo: DEA/A. Dagli Orti, De Agostini Collection, Getty Images .
Love, the Most Powerful Passion. Andrea Alciato, Emblemes (Paris, 1549), 128. Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library .
Sin. Detail from Caesar Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (1603; repr., London, 1709), 59. Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library .
PREFACE
I have modernized the poetry and prose quoted in this book except for the verse of Edmund Spenser, in accordance with the longstanding view that he seeks to produce the impression of archaic language.
A prefatory comment about terminology and usage is in order. I employ prosopopoeia as a close synonym for personification , despite the many centuries that separate the emergence of these two terms, and I do not italicize the former. Regarding the plural form of prosopopoeia : in an effort to avoid the pedantry of prosopopoeiae and the archaism of prosopopoeias , I use this single term both as a mass noun (like advice or evidence ) and as an uninflected count noun (like series or sheep ). Thus prosopopoeia always adds a face where there was none before, but some prosopopoeia add voices as well as faces.
As for the adjectival form, many historical options present themselves: prosopopoeial, prosopopoeic , and prosopopoeical , among others. I have opted for prosopopoetic , since we already have a modern analogue in the English word onomatopoetic . I briefly considered employing a separate adverbial form, but reason prevailed.
Brief sections of chapter 5 appeared in two previously published essays: The Sincerity of Rapture, Spenser Studies 24 (2009): 185-208, and Daemon Lovers: Will, Personification, and Character, Spenser Studies 22 (2007): 203-25. Likewise, portions of chapter 6 appeared previously in Allegorical Agency and the Sins of Angels, English Literary History 75, no. 4 (2008): 787-818. My thanks to AMS Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reproduce those sections in this book.
I DID MUCH of the early research for this book during a 2009-10 residency at the National Humanities Center, and I remain very grateful to the staff who provided me with so much assistance, as well as to the fellows who provided intellectual comradeship. Friends and colleagues have supported this project the entire way through. I cannot name them all, but the following people commented on whole chapters: Neil Bernstein, R diger Bittner, John Curran Jr., Jeff Dolven, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Genevieve Guenther, Theresa Krier, Jennifer Lewin, Susannah Brietz Monta, Melissa Sanchez, and Jennifer Waldron. This book is far better than it would be if these kind readers had not shown such generosity. My coeditors at Spenser Studies , Anne Lake Prescott and Bill Oram, have for years offered nourishing food for thought about Spenserian personification. I am also deeply grateful to the three series editors at the University of Notre Dame Press-David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, James Simpson-for their interest in this project and their criticisms of the initial typescript, as well as to the two anonymous outside readers who offered helpful suggestions for improvements. My wife, Beth Quitslund, has been a sympathetic and acute reader throughout the process, even as she worked to meet her own obligations and deadlines.
Our books are always in a sense like children, but this book sometimes robbed my sons, Garey and Ford, of time that could have been spent sword fighting, reading together, playing games, or practicing our sarcasm. I am thankful for their forbearance and dedicate this book to them.
INTRODUCTION

Personifications have become almost spooky in the modern literary imagination. Critics have compared them to zombies, freaks, sadists, automatons, death-dealers, fanatics, robots, and clinical compulsives. Personifications, it seems, travel on a trajectory toward fully realized characterhood but do not quite arrive. They are failed persons. When modern critics think of personification, they implicitly start with a notion of a psychologically deep, mimetically probable literary character and then subtract from this character until all that remains is a narrow strip of that character, a strip that cannot feel, think, or choose. For us, by and large, personification transforms subjectivity into objecthood.
This perception goes beyond the assessment of fictional character. Modern feminist philosophers, such as Jennifer Saul, explore the degree to which pornography personifies women, thereby reducing actual women to the single function of providing sexual satisfaction for men. 1 Modern ethicists, such as Ian Ashman and Diana Winstanley, explore the degree to which business corporations personify people, thereby compromising the moral responsibility of actual individuals. 2 For a deconstructionist critic such as Paul de Man, personifications signal the haunting potential of language to undo the category of the human: They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of the table or the face of the mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia, and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters. 3
Not all modern assessments of the dehumanizing effect of personification find it reductive or haunted, however. Some recent commentators see a productive dimension in the prosopopoetic confusion of people and things. The sociologist Bruno Latour has celebrated the degree to which prosopopoeia give agency to nonhuman objects under the rubric of the Parliament of Things. 4 Heather Keenleyside suggests that the poetry of James Thomson, by imbuing the features of the landscape with personified agency, works to conceive of a social order that would include everything under the sun, and to imagine an ethics that could serve such an expanded system. 5 Sheryl Hamilton has surveyed examples of modern personifications in legal discourse-corporations, computer bots, genetic clones, property-and she concludes that such instances help us see that personhood is an always incomplete normative project and that personification supplements the naturalized person with the socially constructed persona , toward which we can productively refocus our gaze. 6
The modern response to personification, then, is not univocal: it ranges from accusations of moral obfuscation and bad literary taste to praise for it