A brilliant postmodern critique of Renaissance subjectivity, "Cultural Aesthetics" explores the simultaneous formation and fragmentation of aristocratic "selfhood" in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patricia Fumerton situates the self within its sumptuous array of "trivial" arts including the court literatures of chivalric romance, sonnet, and masque and the arts of architecture, miniature painting, stage design, and cuisine. Her integration of historicist and aesthetic perspectives makes this a provocative contribution to the vigorous field of Renaissance cultural...

Renaissance Culture and the Everyday Edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt "A lively and illuminating collection of essays that extends the recent trend away from a concentration on structures of state power and religious authority and toward the domestic, the local, and the ordinary. But the ordinary, in the skillful analyses brought together in this volume, proves to be extraordinarily charged with conflict, strangeness, and dramatic intensity. Fumerton and Hunt have assembled some of the most interesting voices in Renaissance studies today."--Stephen Greenblatt It was not unusual...