"Renaissance studies are currently dominated by a historicist horizon. Accordingly, the task of the critic is to explain the author’s work in light of its context. On this view, the critic is vigilant against the charge of anachronism, of falling prey to the alleged universalism and ahistoricism of literary theory (deconstruction or psychoanalysis, for instance). Benjamin Boysen to his credit rejects this way of proceeding in engaging the works of Petrarch and Shakespeare. Anachronism is constitutive of any reading of a historically distant author, so to read Petrarch and Shakespeare today is to read them anachronistically. The author reinfuses the field of Renaissance studies with theoretical innovations, reminding readers of the potential richness that a theoretical framework brings to Petrarch and Shakespeare.
 

Having said that, Boysen displays attentiveness to the historical/literary contexts of both Petrarch and Shakespeare. The author also recognizes that the appeal to contextual markers (cultural, historical or authorial) might very well elucidate aspects of a literary work but can never exhaust that meaning nor fully meet or answer its demands. The approach adopted in Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch is a kind of synthesis of the purely historicist reading—that would determine Petrarch and Shakespeare according to either their intellectual formation and literary sensibilities, or to the ideological structures of the period—and the contemporary reading—that would reduce Petrarch and Shakespeare to the specificities of the critic’s theoretical orientation. In this study, Petrarch and Shakespeare are neither historically self-contained object of study nor narcissistic theoretical projections of its author. What we get is a complex portrait of both Renaissance authors informed by a hermeneutical approach.
 

The study takes the perplexing expression, I am not what I am found explicitly in Shakespeare and in a slightly altered form in Petrarch (I am not my own, no) as the inspiration for the project. The author proceeds to interpret the full force of this saying in light of the Nominalist revolution of the early modern period. Displacing medieval Realist ontology, Nominalism foregrounded the role of the particular and language in the quest for knowledge. The author carefully traces the impact of Nominalism on the ways Renaissance poets and philosophers constructed their understanding of the world. Nominalism invalidated the prior belief that reason and nature mirrored each other in the world, and that God’s presence was marked and discernable via reason. Nominalism rendered problematic the image of God as creator, whose trace was left for us to observe in the very structure of the world.

 

This Renaissance shift away from God to the human subject was, at times, experienced as a shock by the early modern period. Petrarch’s meditations on his exilic self, underscoring an ontological gulf between himself and God, is interpreted as at once disabling (he is lost in the world) and enabling (he is the creator of his world). It is the latter that concerns this project: the author examines how Petrarch and Shakespeare harness this negativity poetically and intellectually. In two chapters on Petrarch, the author pursues the poet’s ambivalent subject in relation to his loved object Laura, disclosing the degree to which his desire for self-knowledge, his Stoic desire of self-sufficiency, is frustrated by his exposure to the other—this other is at odds with the Realist view of the other as identical to the self.
 

The chapter on Shakespeare offers a sustained reflection on the poet’s metaphorical playing and punning on the word “nothing.” Tracing Shakespeare’s “‘nihilist’ anthropology” allows the author to tie a variety of topics and problematics in innovative ways; for instance, anxiety, destruction, and the crisis of representation are read alongside Shakespeare’s musings and meta-reflections on gender, sexuality, and art.
 

This is a very well-constructed study. Its arguments are compelling and original. The author takes up the challenge of writing on two giants of Renaissance studies and succeeds admirably. This study provides insightful arguments about the poetics of Petrarch and Shakespeare in light of Nominalism and will be of great interest for new and savvy readers of both literature and philosophy."

-Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eels professor of philosophy and literature, professor of indigeneity, race, and ethnicity studies (Whitman College), author of Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (Charlottesville, 2005)