The World of Renaissance Scholarship

W hat follows in this brief essay may strike some as worrisomely personal for amodern scholar raised at first on the principles of the “old new criticism” and the methods of, e.g., I. A. Richards, whose course at Harvard pleased but baffled me, and then on a number of approaches that seemed scary atfirst but now sometimes are, tomany, if not laughably dated then fairly dusty. My academic career has been stupidly scary to me, although English Literary Renaissance has been a major consolation—not for being old-fashioned but for being both legible and alert.