Читать книгу A Companion to the Global Renaissance - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Daniel Vitkus’s opening essay, titled “The New Globalism: Transcultural Commerce, Global Systems Theory, and Spenser’s Mammon” (Chapter 1), examines the usefulness of applying “global systems theory” to early modern English literature and culture in the context of two critical trends shaping studies of the period: a “micro-material historicism,” drawn from de Certeau and Foucault, in terms of “an archeology of local knowledge that traces the private life of objects and everyday lives of people in the past” and a “new globalism” that focuses on England’s role in the era of expansion and on how its “culture changed through interaction with other peoples in both the New and Old Worlds.” Material historicism, according to Vitkus, has produced some interesting studies in print history, archival investigations into the early modern “book,” and a history of reading. However, cautioning against a nostalgia – and fetishization – of the printed book, he promotes recent globalist approaches that weave into their scholarship capitalism’s rise to global dominance and its role in shaping cultural production, including the production of literary texts in early modern England. Global systems theories proposed by Wallerstein and others, Vitkus suggests, enable scholars to connect the most domestic-seeming texts to broader transcultural and global elements.

One such canonical work, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – perhaps among the more nationalistic English texts – is also a work that “is restlessly global,” Vitkus argues. Beginning with the proem to the second book of The Faerie Queene, with its allusions to Peru, the Amazon, Virginia, and “unknowne lands,” which suggests linkages with global networks, the essay focuses on the poem’s treatment of Mammon, “both a devil and a false god, and as a personification of wealth and worldly goods.” While Guyon’s trial in the cave of Mammon (Book II, Canto seven), namely, his resistance to the temptation of gold, is often described in theological terms, this essay places that narrative within a global context: that Mammon’s attempts to seduce Guyon associate gold not with the Spanish colonies but rather with a global phenomenon that includes both Spain and England in its worldwide sweep. Thus, ultimately, Spenser’s epic, with all its harkening back to the Crusades and Middle Ages, is also an important site for unresolved tensions between “a residual code of honor that rejects money as corruptive and a desire to obtain wealth and power … under an emergent capitalist economy.”

Crystal Bartolovich’s essay, “‘Travailing’ Theory: Global Flows of Labor and the Enclosure of the Subject” (Chapter 2), maps the emergence of capitalism by following “both local and global flows of labor power – and resistance to its privatization” while arguing that both were “implicated in the formation of early modern subjects at the dawn of capitalist accumulation.” Exploring both the labor and laborer in a trajectory that moves from the domestic enclosure acts which led to a growing landless population, often labeled “vagrant” in England, to narratives of travel and colonization, such as The Journal of Richard Norwood (1590–1675), the colonial surveyor of Bermuda, Bartolovich demonstrates how the common labor in domestic and foreign locations did not result in the creation of a global community but rather “[it led] to securing its opposite: the estrangement and atomization of laborers.”

Richard Norwood is known today mainly as the first cartographer of Bermuda. The famous shipwreck of 1609, recounted in William Strachey’s narrative (a part of the Bermuda sources of Shakespeare’s The Tempest), produced conditions of social egalitarianism without any claims of private property so that the “common people” did not want to leave Bermuda for Virginia. When their demands were quashed and a year later Bermuda was officially colonized, Norwood (also a Puritan) became the surveyor of this Edenic island, imposing private property relations on it for potential investors. Showing the formation of his growing individualist self-consciousness, Bartolovich makes a clear connection between capitalism and individualism as she shows us how “Norwood’s Bermuda writings … [are] entirely suppressing the early Edenic period,” which implies that “the compensation for giving up Eden and commonality was individualism, improvement, and ‘order.’” To sum up, as a Puritan as well as a surveyor, Norwood marks a site in which religious self-consciousness and technological “improvement” worked together to produce the “individual” that is now often, paradoxically, taken for granted as the fundamental unit of “modern” society.

John Michael Archer engages with globalism via an analysis of map-making, representation, and Islam in the Renaissance world-picture as contexts for Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays in his essay, “Islam and Tamburlaine’s World-Picture” (Chapter 3). Approaching Marlowe’s play as an epic on a global scale, this essay examines Marlowe’s “world-picture” – as Heidegger defines it: “not a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture.” Archer begins with a consideration of how contemporary map-making projects influence the play’s epic sweep of geographical locations; second, he questions the extent to which Islam was represented within “the human geography of the world pictured on the early modern stage.” Muslim strictures on the image and the Qur’an’s cosmography figure in the play, though representations of Islam remain distorted. But we are nonetheless reminded that representation itself was at stake in the relations between Islam and Christianity in the early modern global world (as it is today).

Marlowe’s play is very much preoccupied with mapping the globe and problems of representation; with medieval and Ptolemaic maps, terrestrial globes, and Ortelius’ orbicular, round, three-dimensional volume on a flat surface. Both the medieval and Ptolemaic maps cancel each other out in Tamburlaine’s initial dreams of conquest, and, by the end of Part II, even when a world map quite similar to that of Ortelius appears on stage, Tamburlaine can only enumerate “unconquered regions,” accepting the failure of his global imagination of conquest. Archer’s larger point here is to show that while the Qur’an (or Alcoran) and the world map both appear on stage, the authority of both “image-objects” is flaunted and then forgotten, as Tamburlaine burns the Qur’an. Ultimately, not only Islam itself but also religion in general “produces an effect antagonistic to representation.” Archer’s claims serve as a reminder of intractable religious divisions even in the face of cross-cultural exchanges.

As we have seen in the case of Spenser’s epic poem, Norwood’s biography, Marlowe’s play, and in maps and terrestrial globes, the English (and the Europeans) responded to the global currents by producing cultural forms for mapping, interpreting, and imaginatively and cognitively grappling with this changing world. Chloë Houston further explores this engagement via the genre of utopian literature, rooted in classical and Christian modes of thinking about an ideal way of life but popularized following the invention of the word “utopia,” and the revival of the utopian mode by Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516. Titled “Traveling Nowhere: Global Utopias in the Early Modern Period” (Chapter 4), Houston’s essay approaches utopias in a global context, demonstrating how they constitute a discourse preoccupied with physical and imaginative experiences of travel beyond European borders and imagining new societies where people may live better lives. Utopian literature, Houston argues, is closely aligned to travel writing and since both forms are concerned with “journeys, discovery … cultural exchange, and the development of networks, and with the recording of these phenomena, [they] have something to do with this process of globalization and can be understood as both producing and productive of a ‘global Renaissance.’”

First examining Lucian’s Vera Historia as a classical source for the satiric and ironic aspects of early modern utopianism, Houston draws on three texts for her analysis of the status of utopias: Thomas More’s Utopia set somewhere in the Americas; Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in the Pacific; and Johann Valentine Andreae’s Christianopolis in an unknown “Academic” ocean. While the latter two seem to describe somewhat ideal societies, all three were simultaneously enthusiastic about useful possibilities of travel yet also implied that the ideal society must be kept separate from the rest of the world. Thus, the Renaissance utopia’s concern with borders and boundaries reflects and even prefigures an interaction with “contemporary processes of globalization,” in which the discovery of new lands by English (and European) travelers would become “spaces in which territorial claims would be contested and borders and boundaries redrawn and reestablished.”

The final essay in Part I, by Stuart M. McManus, “Understanding Slavery in Early Modern Asia: Jesuit Scholarship from Seventeenth-Century Iberia and Asia” (Chapter 5), explores how the Iberian world participated in and contributed to the era of expansion and specifically how its culture changed through interactions with other peoples in Asia. Here we witness the emergence and growth of a distinctive world system of the period: the European slave trade, revealing both its inhumane practices and moral justifications. In this chapter McManus argues that the work of Iberian Jesuit scholars in both Asia and Europe created what amounted to an international and comparative law related to slavery that aimed to understand and regulate the global trade in human beings by Iberians and others in the early modern period. Here, the focus is on Luis de Molina’s brief but highly suggestive treatment of Asian slavery in De iustitia et iure, which is usually hastily passed over in order to highlight his discussion of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as its development in Gomes Vaz’s De mancipiis Indicis. In this way, this chapter contributes to the ongoing project of building up a connected and comparative picture of slavery in the early modern world that reveals its multiethnic and interconnected nature in an era of global expansion. In conjunction with Chapter 17, this study of Iberian ideas about slavery demonstrates how the slave trade was intrinsic to the capital flows and the exploitation of labor underpinning the European and English economies at the time.