Studies in Renaissance Literature

This course provides an introduction to the European Renaissance and Reformation from about 1500 through 1700. We will focus in particular on the topic of political theology. Political theology has been the subject of much recent theoretical discussion, in the work of such figures as Claude Lefort and Giorgio Agamben. Yet one of the main texts to analyze the problem of political theology–Carl Schmitt’s 1922 text by that title–locates the modern formulation of this problem in the early modern period. In this seminar we will explore both the understanding of political theology in the early modern period and the seventeenth-century European critiques of political theology, some of which have their origins in the secularizing tendencies of Renaissance humanism. We will read texts by Luther, Calvin, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. Students who encounter this description before the fall may want to read Carl Schmitt’s  Political Theology to get a head start on the course. I also recommend Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza for popular (and enjoyable) accounts of some of the relevant issues.