Studies in Renaissance Literature

Is it time to abandon “the Westphalian label” of territorial states as the main actors on the global stage? The question is justifiable at a moment when corporate and civic, religious and secular, as well as academic “globalizers” all around see the trans-nation as the only real present and the only possible future political form (this in spite of a neo-Westphalian attention to ensuring ‘national security’ around the world). In this course, in addition to actually reading the Treaty of Westphalia, we will consider how a series of literary and visual texts as well as texts of political theory responded to nearly a century of modern European political and confessional conflict, asking what it was that called for the erection of the (nation) state as the sole legitimate source of sovereignty. Readings will include select narratives of the tensions both between the Church, the Empire, and the (national) State and within the State between the center and its internal and external peripheries, in texts by Rabelais, Tasso, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, and Corneille, as well as the devastating account of the Thirty Years War in Grimmelshausen’s novel, Simplicissimus, and the artist Diego Velazquez’s highly ambiguous image of Spinola’s siege of Breda in the painting, “Las Lanzas.” Using works by Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, Bodin, Hobbes, and Grotius, we will also investigate how, at a rhetorical and ideological level, the realm of the secular state eased its way into the shaky monopoly on power that the literary texts so often address. Among topics to be discussed: the shift from sacred to temporal legitimations of the polity and the ensuing new definitions of sovereignty, the rise of modern military culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the spilling over of internal European conflicts into politically and commercially motivated colonial enterprises across the Atlantic and into the Pacific as well, and the inconvenient truth that the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and the lingering Islamic threat from North Africa, on the other, may well have been the only reasons that select European states occasionally saw themselves as allied.

Of interest to students in Art History, CL, English, French, German, History, Religious Studies, and Political Theory. Students are encouraged to read Richard Falk, “Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia” (The Journal of Ethics 6, 2002) in any case, but also as preparation for this seminar, and to contact the instructor (Prof. Jane O. Newman, Dept. of CL, UC Irvine: jonewman@uci.edu) for a reading list and to discuss possible research topics.