Learning to Curse

The Renaissance was an age of both beauty and barbarism. Its extraordinary cultural flowering gave us the theatrical genius of Shakespeare, the boundless creative power of Leonardo, and the humane intelligence of Montaigne. Yet it was also a time of murderous religious intolerance, rigid class hierarchies, and a ruthless acquisitiveness raised to a fever-pitch by the encounter with the New World. Pursuing a 'poetics of culture', Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of this age could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'new historicism' drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and, in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it. Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex, contradictory epoch.