Renaissance Posthumanism

Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of critical post-humanisms in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Post-humanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today s critical post-humanisms, even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if the human is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny contemporary and ally of twenty-first-century critical post-humanism.