Renaissance Posthumanism

Too often contemporary work in posthumanism presents itself as a rejection of Renaissance humanism when what it rejects is a straw man--albeit a straw Vitruvian Man--that bears little, if any, resemblance to Renaissance humanism qua the skeptical, critical, and irreverent close readings of ancient texts and cultures. Ironically what is being repressed, fantasized, and evaded in these accounts is nothing other than Renaissance humanism itself. Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of "critical posthumanisms" in 21st-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human but it does so not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today's "critical posthumanisms," even as they distance themselves from particular iconic representations of the Renaissance (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man), are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the 14th to the 17th century, where "the human" is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice that allow us to reach beyond the pre- and post- of historical periodization, contributors to this collection focus on moments where Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny "contemporary"--and ally--of 21st-century critical posthumanism.

Joseph Campana is Alan Dugald McKillop Chair and Associate Professor at Rice University. He is the author ofThe Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham, 2012), which won the South Central MLA Book Prize, and two collections of poetry,The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), and Natural Selections (Iowa, 2012), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. His essays appear inPMLA, Modern Philology, ELH, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and elsewhere. He is currently completing two studies, The Child's Two Bodies, which considers children and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare, andBee Tree Child, which explores scale, multiplicity, plasticity, and other new rubrics for calibrating the relationship between human and non-human worlds in the Renaissance.

Scott Maisano is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His most recent publications include "Shakespeare's Revolution: The Tempest as Scientific Romance", about Prospero and particle physics inThe Tempest: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare); "Now," about Einsteinian spacetime inThe Winter's Tale, for Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford University Press); "Rise of the Poet of the Apes," about intelligent apes and monkeys in plays from the beginning to the end of Shakespeare's career, forShakespeare Studies; and "Seen / Not Seen" about "behind-the-scenes," "offstage," and "bawdy" (or in a word "obscene") matters inA Midsummer Night's Dream for iPad (Luminary Digital Media). He is currently co-authoring a book on Shakespeare and Primatology with Holly Dugan and writing a new Shakespearean comedy entitledEnter Nurse, or, Love's Labour's Wonne.