Renaissance Matters

Well, it has been just over a month since my last post. I must apologize to any regular readers of this blog for this extend period of silence, yet there is a very excusable reason. Early last month, I was sent the pageproofs for my forthcoming book, the release date for which is Oct. 11th, 2011, to read over one last time for any minor corrections that I would like to make. In addition, I had to compile my index. Now, if you have not created an index before, it actually is a fascinating intellectual exercise. A writer is forced to map the book’s discussion in such a way as to offer entrance points for readers. I think it is comparable to the connect-the-dot coloring books I use to have as a child, the ones where the picture of a dragon or whatever begins to form as one draws the individual lines.

Moreover, I received some very exciting news: Carolyn Merchant has written an endorsement for the book! Here it is:

A fascinating, well-argued comparison between Francis Bacon’s narrative of recovering human dominion over nature and 17^th century skeptics who deny its possibility. Funari draws insightful parallels with today’s proponents of technological solutions and environmental philosophers who propose new ways of living with the more-than-human world. Of interest to anyone who wishes to see how history and literature can inform the roots of today’s environmental crisis.

So my part with regards to the book is over. That is, a project that has been 4 years in the making has reached its final form. Some of my family and friends have asked how it feels to be done with this project. My honest answer to them is that I am trying not to think about it. I suppose it is comparable in a much lesser degree to sending a child out into the world, hoping that you have done everything to prepare them for the harshness they may encounter. In this way, I think that the Latin poet Catullus captures it best: “Cui dono lepidum novom libellum/ Arida modo pumice expolitum?” (“To whom do I give this new little book,/ polished by the dry pumice stone?”)

Also, I want to suggest a new blog to any readers interested in history and cinema. Gabs Roman, a close friend who was invaluable in helping me with different facets of getting my manuscript ready for the printers, has a new blog, entitled Historic Histrionics.  You’ll find here insightful, witty, and, hopefully, irreverent commentaries on Hollywood’s often inaccurate depiction of the past. This is a blog very well worth your time.  (Gabs and I are planning a live Tweeting session for Robert Emmerich’s Anonymous.)

Alright, then, now to the Renaissance in today’s culture. Some of you may know that today actually commemorates Henry VIII’s beheading of arguably the greatest intellectual figure of English history, Sir/St. Thomas More.

The portrait of More as Lord Chancellor.

In 1534 to further his attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Ann Boleyn, Henry VIII pushed through Parliament the Act of Supremacy, essentially establishing the Episcopal Church and declaring himself supreme head. To add a side note here, Henry’s break with the Roman Catholic Church was partially precipitated by events happening on the Continent: Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, was essentially holding the Pope Leo X hostage while Henry petitioned him for a divorce.

Back to More. Having resigned his position as Henry’s Lord Chancellor in 1532, a position that he had held since 1529, More tried to escape from public view and quietly retire away from a political scene that was increasingly become hostile to him. Unfortunately this did not work out. More was the intellectual figure of Henry’s England: he had an international reputation as a scholar and corresponded with much of the European intelligentsia. (Erasmus was a close personal friend of More, but more on that in a bit.) So when More remained silent when asked to take the Oath of Supremacy, much was made of it. (More’s strategy was that as long as he remained silent on the question of the King’s Supremacy over the Church, he was not committing high treason.) When brought to trial, Henry’s Solicitor General, Sir Richard Rich, claimed that More had told him in prison that Parliament did not have the legal authority to declare the King the Head of the Church. Though no other evidence was offered against More, the verdict was pretty much a forgone conclusion. Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Season (1966), portrays More as struggling to hold onto his convictions while seeking the safety of his family.  Here’s a clip from the film adaptation of Bolt’s play, starring Paul Scofield as More and Robert Shaw as Henry VIII. In this clip More has just been convicted of high treason  and at last speaks his conscious:

And just because I thought that Jeremy Northam did a superb job portraying More, here is a clip from the Tudors, season 2:

In the image of the martyr who died resisting Henry VIII’s tyranny, I think an important facet of More’s character is often overlooked – his sense of humor. (Erasmus, the European intellectual of the early 16th c., dedicated his most well-known book, The Praise of Folly (1509), to More. The Latin title of The Praise of Folly  [Moriae Econium] is actually a pun on More’s name.) The work of More that best conveys his sardonic wit is Utopia (1519).

This is the frontispiece for the 1516 edition. It is a map of the fictional Isle of Utopia.

Begun while on a diplomatic mission in Antwerp, Utopia is fictional account of a supposedly ideal society that has been isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. From the beginning of the book, More demands a very attentive reader. The text this layered: it appears as More’s letter to Peter Giles which includes More’s transcription of Raphael Hythlodeaus’s description of his travels in Utopia that does not begin until the second part. More removes the reader thrice textually from Utopia itself. Moreover, More gives a few puns, often lost in translation, that signal to the reader the irony of the text. Hythlodeaus’s name is an amalgamation of two Greek words, hythlas that translates to “non-sense” and daiein, “to distribute.” So the person offering an account of a utopian society is a peddler of non-sense. Furthermore, utopia, a word which More himself originated from Greek, can be translated one of two ways, either as eu-topia, essentially a “good” place, or as ou-topos, “no place.”

Rather than summarize the entire window into Utopian civilization that More creates via Hythlodeaus, here are just some highlights:

1) Utopians have a communist economy: there is no conception of private ownership, nor is there any monetary system. While there is an abundance of precious metals and gems, these are used to pay foreign mercenaries to fight their wars. Hythlodeaus notes how the wearing of gold actually marks one as a slave, while citizens wear leather jerkins of the craftsmen. (You can see why More’s text appealed so much to Marxist scholars of the 1960s.)

2) In his description of the cultural rituals, Hythlodeaus recounts the custom of the betrothed couple having the opportunity to see each other naked prior to being wedded. If we take More as being sincere here, he is being incredibly progressive, suggesting the importance of sexual compatibility for a successful marriage.

3) The Utopians live in a rigid society, that constantly polices its citizens. For example, the size of the households, of which there are sixteen in each of the fifty-four cities that make up Utopia, is strictly maintained between ten and sixteen adults. Or in order to travel between the different cities, one must gain the permission of the local magistrate, or in Utopian language, the syphogrant. Idleness is not tolerated. As Hythlodeaus claims, “So you see that nowhere is there any chance to be idle; there is no excuse for laziness, no wine taverns, no alehouses, no brothels . . . no hangouts.”

Before delving into his account of Utopia, Hythlodeaus tells More that had he seen Utopia firsthand like he himself had and live there for five and half years, “then doubtless you would grant that you never saw people well ordered, but only there.” Here Hythlodeaus voices the irony that pervades More’s text: unless you have actually lived in Utopia you will never be able to live in Utopia. Or as Clarence H. Miller states in his introduction to the Yale University Press edition: “We are always being brought back to the basic paradox: the institutions cannot be introduced unless they have already been introduced” (xvi).

To those weekly readers of Renaissance Matters:

This week’s post will be a bit late. I have just started teaching an intensive one-month long composition course. This week’s post dedicated to Scottish nationalism will be up tomorrow.

In the meantime, I wanted to give you an advance preview of my first book’s cover design.

The release date for the book is Oct. 11,2011.

So the Department of Justice has decided to move forward with charges against John Edwards for possibly illegally using campaign funds to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter. The price to hide his infidelity from the public eye while campaigning for the presidency with his cancer stricken wife: approximately $1 million. I have to give credit to my wife who couldn’t see the logic to the government’s case: not spending the funds to hush up the affair would have hurt his election chances. In other words, the money was spent on a legitimate campaign expense.

The news of the DOJ’s indictment of Edwards comes on the heels of another very prominent politician admitting to an extramarital affair. A week after announcing his separation from, Maria Shriver, his wife of 25 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger publicly admitted to his affair with a member of his household staff, who bore him a son ten years ago. (Let’s be honest, though, Schwarzenegger’s affair can hardly come as a shock to most, considering the numerous women who came forward during his 2003 gubernatorial campaign with charges of his having molested them, charges, btw, that he did not dispute.)

While this blog is not the space to begin exploring the intersection of male power and infidelity nor the long tradition of American’s scrutinizing of our politicians’ sexual lives I did come across an excellent opinion piece on Salon.com, “The upside of ‘puritanical’ politics.” In her article, Alyssa Battistoni argues that while the American tradition of “finger-pointing” and “redemption” regarding male politician’s sexual indiscretions has become essentially an empty ritual, or “pageantry,” the French mode of turning a blind eye simply effaces the underlying imbalanced access to power, that “men have the power, and women have sex with the power.”  For Battistoni, neither the American nor the French model offers a means of critiquing in a nuanced way the relationship between sex, gender, and power: whereas the American model focuses on the individual failings of the man, eschewing the personal and the political, the French simply tacitly sanctions the mindset that presents women as “prizes” for successful men. As Battistoni sums up, “The fact is that for all their differences, neither the French nor the American approach really takes seriously the challenge of addressing the culture of deference to powerful men, or of talking about the difficult and often ambiguous questions around the public relevance of sexual politics.”

With this recent spate of powerful men having their philandering brought to light, I am reminded of the libertine court of Charles II.

John Malkovich as Charles II in The Libertine (2004)

Now here was a realm where drunken debauchery was the order of the day. Before I get into the epic sexcapades that were the hallmark of the Restoration court, let me give a bit of context. Kings and their affairs/ illegitimate children were nothing new to the English monarchy. (Royal marriages were political arrangements that in no way resembled the highly romanticized ideal of Kate and William.)  Typically, these bastard offspring of the kings would be made into lesser nobles, see Henry VIII’s son Henry FitzRoy (“Son of the King”) who was made 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset. Charles II, however, out did himself in this aspect of his reign.

Culture has a pendulum-like dynamic to it –  a swing one way in social, political, moral attitudes is often corrected by an equal movement in the opposite direction. Such a correction happened in England at the beginning of 1660. Following an almost two-decade long Puritanical rule, that concluded with the brief reign of Cromwell’s inept son, Richard (a.k.a “Tumble Down Dick”), the Stuart monarchy was brought back, or restored. After yet another army coup of Parliament in 1659, led by Generals Lambert and Monk, Charles II was invited back to London on May 1st, 1660 to be crowned. Throughout his reign, Charles would be linked to numerous mistresses, such as Louise de Kéroualle (Duchess of Portsmouth) and Barbara Palmer (Countess of Castlemaine). Charles’ taste for mistresses was not confined to the aristocracy; he often found lovers on the stage. (It was during the Restoration that England adopted the Continental practice of allowing women actresses.) The most famous of Charles’ “common” mistresses was Nell Gywn, an actress who would bear Charles two sons. (Interestingly, with all of the illegitimate children Charles would have, nine in all, he would die without an heir, paving the way for his Catholic brother, James II.)

Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. 1682 by Pierre Mignard

Nell Gwyn depicted as Cupid, circa 1672

Now there was reasonable public concern about how much influence these mistresses had over Charles. For example, Kéroualle, being French, was thought to be attempting to convert Charles to Catholicism. Worry over the French Catholic influence via Kéroualle was so palpable that she would often have her carriage pelted with mud and rocks by Londoners. One time, Nell’s carriage was mistaken for Kéroualle’s and was likewise attacked. The story goes that Nell leaned out the window and shouted, “Nay good people, I am the Protestant whore.” All of this philandering took its toll on the royal coffers. When Charles lamented his financial straits to his “good Nelly,” she told flatly how to remedy the situation: “Send the French [Kéroualle] to France again, set me on the stage again, and lock up your own cod-piece.”  (Moll Davis, another one of Charles’ mistresses from the stage, supposedly received an annual pension of a £1,ooo. Although, as Nell Gywn’s biographer, Charles Beauclerk remarks, with the death of Charles on Feb. 14th, 1685, his mistresses were for all intents and purposes thrown out into the cold.)

If it seems that I am reducing Charles II’s time on the throne to merely his affairs, I do not mean to. Charles was a great patron of the emerging scientific community – it was under his reign that the Royal Society was granted its initial charter. However, even those in his closest circles felt Charles was easily swayed by his sexual desires. John Wilmot, the 2nd earl of Rochester, satirized Charles’ susceptibility to his mistresses in a lampoon that he accidently gave to the King. (A heads-up: the language may be offensive to those who have never read Rochester’s poetry before. Hell, it may even be offensive still to those who have.) 

Rochester was certainly not a prude himself. On his death, he claimed to having been drunk for three years straight. Moreover, Rochester's wife and mistress both shared the same first name, Elizabeth, and each gave birth to daughters, named Elizabeth.

Rochester portrays Charles as entirely given over to the whims of his penis, placing the fate of England in the hands (pun intended) of his mistresses: “Nor are his high desires above his strength:/ His scepter and his prick are of a length;/ And she may sway the one who plays with th’other” (lns. 10-12). Rochester expresses an anti-monarchial sentiment in voicing his fear that Charles appears to care less for the welfare of his people than for satisfying his lust: “Though safety, law, religion, life lay on’t,/ ‘Twould break through all to make its way to cunt” (lns. 18-19) Rochester finishes by describing the efforts that “Nelly” has to go through to “raise the member she enjoys.” (Earlier in the poem, Rochester hints at Charles’ impotence.)

With all of the sex scandals of men in power – Schwarzenegger, Edwards, and, to be Continental, Berlusconi, Rochester’s lampoon of Charles II may have some more currency for our conversation about sex, power, and gender.