knowing pictures: John Donne's Renaissance
We think in pictures, both simply and as a way of understanding abstractions. The academy has always pictured the Renaissance as a re-birth of classical interests and values, the intellectual energy of the past animating the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I wonder if it’s not the other way around. Recognizing the failure of medieval images, generating new mental pictures, surely these acts are the causes, not the results, of cultural change; the pictures must come first. These new images may have more in common with classical cognition than with the medieval worldview of the Roman Church, but they don’t arise from the classics. They arise from the need for new maps, new models of the cosmos, new science, new theology and politics, new articulations of reality. John Donne’s poetry provides a visual lexicon for this new apprehension of the cosmos. Through these images we may re-know the English Renaissance.
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