What are “Things” Saying in Renaissance Studies?

Abstract

This essay takes up the recent turn to “things” in Renaissance literary studies and attempts to adjudicate the kinds of advances this turn might offer beyond the New Historicist project of the 1980s and 1990s. Offering thumbnail sketches of key contributions by variously Marxist or materialist critics and also by the eclectic group of approaches that name themselves “historical phenomenology,” it argues that the new volubility of “things” in our discipline augurs a return to the urgent theoretical questions of the early 1980s on the interrelation between form and history. In order to keep this field of possibilities open to further experimentation, the essay concludes by introducing readers to two theorists whose work shapes the current conversation, anthropologist William Pietz and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, and suggests some ways in which their work might further be used by literary critics and historians.