Prologue and acknowledgements

Summary

The matter of this volume, which attempts to give part of an explanation for the vehemence of debates about ‘method’, the deep change in nature of the attention paid to language, and the concomitant rise in importance of mathematics as a science of discovery in the European sixteenth century, has been in my mind for many years now. My debt to friends, colleagues, commentators and opponents is considerable. In earlier books, I have discussed the process and ‘meaning’ of apparently dramatic changes in discourses of what was afterwards called ‘literature’, trying to catch something of the complexity of these changes as well as the continuities that they nevertheless maintain. This book and its companion, on the historically vexed and theoretically fraught issues of subject and self, take on two of the more controversial areas of consideration: controversial both for those who argued and fought about them in the late fifteenth century, through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth, and for intellectual historiography today.

Since Jules Michelet (La Renaissance, 1855), Jacob Burckhardt (Die Zivilisation der Renaissance in Italien, 1860), and Walter Pater (Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873), this era in European history has been defined above all in terms of three main elements, one historiographical, the second ‘psychological’, the third philosophical.