Atheism and the Matter of Representation in the English Renaissance

One of the great Procrustean epithets of the Renaissance, “atheist” in the first century of its use in the English language could imply anything from Italianism and excessive learning to libertinism and tobacco-smoking. Its historical reception has been typified, in turn, by the scholarly slurs of categorical vacuity and semantic looseness. The first claim of my dissertation, however, is that the inclusivity of Renaissance atheism signifies vital connectivity rather than speciousness. Reading canonical works of English Renaissance poetry and drama alongside their antique and contemporaneous sources, I contend that atheism responds to the precarious hold on emergent accounts of materiality by the forms of belief. Rather than systematic denial of theology, atheism coalesces in the imagination of the English Renaissance like the remnants of a vivid but inchoate dream; it shares its content, abject material existence, with the moral, religious, and social authorities to which it is opposed. Evidence for this interpretation does not primarily emerge in clear records of confessional states or legal remains, but from the correspondingly dreamlike efforts of aesthetic representation. My dissertation follows their often-obscured contours and reveals that Renaissance atheism is as much a mode and function of verbal expression, energized by particularized language and the details of material reality, as a discrete category of devotion. Chapters on Edmund Spenser’s mutable universe and John Donne’s interrogation of the soul explore how humanist syntheses of antique texts mingle pagan philosophy with Christian doctrine, smuggling fragments of atheist cosmology into otherwise orthodox discourses. In a reading of Ben Jonson’s pathologized London, I explore how a chorus of Christian denominations proclaiming singular access to divine truth also uncovers its potential impossibility in the position of atheism. Pessimistic meditations about the place of human life within historical and natural orders challenge Providence and anchor two chapters on the reordering of private and public life in Shakespeare’s drama. Each of these focused studies finds a renewed understanding of premodern atheism in the imaginative topography of the English Renaissance, its spectral presence suggesting a world that begins, ends, and finds signification in the terms of material experience.

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Estabillo, John Charles

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Harvey, Elizabeth D.

• Atheism
• Drama
• Poetry
• Religion
• Renaissance
• Shakespeare

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/101609

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/101609