Introduction

A Japanese Friend

Ex ungue leonem

The lion from its claws

—Latin commonplace

One summer. Rome. After a morning of Italian lessons, a Japanese friend invited me to a walk in the Forum. As we ambled between the Temple of Saturn and the Arch of Septimus Severus, she turned to me and asked, “Andrew, why are there ruins here? Why are they not rebuilt or just demolished?” This question perplexed me, for it was a moment of cultural dissonance for me as much as it was for her. Hailing from the hypermodern metropolis of Tokyo, she was unused to seeing the monumental detritus of antiquity occupying prime real estate in the city center. Instead, in the heart of her capital, nestled within innumerable twentieth-century high-rises, is a fully functioning imperial palace, the residence for a royal line that claims to be the longest continuing in the world. Her query unsettled a large archive of cultural assumptions I had held: from the Tower of Babel to the Fall of Troy, from Pausanias’s records of abandoned Greek temples to the Old English elegy “The Ruin,” from the prints of Piranesi to the paintings of Hubert Robert, from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” to W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, Western culture has always expressed its fascination with the physical past through its monuments and ruins. (I discuss some East Asian examples in the epilogue.) I returned to her question again and again over the years, for it made me wonder about Europe’s relationship to classical culture: Why is it in love with the past as past?

This book is a long answer to her question. The ruins are still there in the Roman Forum because they are the invention of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, if I may say so, the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse that became an inspirational force in the poetic imagination, artistic expression, and historical inquiry of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. The ruin functions as a privileged cipher or master topos that marks the rupture between the world of the humanists and the world of antiquity. The discourse of Roman ruins coincides with a renewed interest in the classical past: architects used ancient buildings as models for their own construction; antiquarians systematically collected their remains; artists illustrated the desolate urban views as exercises in spatial and historical perspective; philologists sought to understand the past through inscriptions on buildings and fragments of manuscripts.

And poets? They used ruins as a way to think about the production and reception of the texts of the ancients as well as their own work. Confronted with the monumental detritus of antiquity, Renaissance writers hoped to craft a more enduring artifact. And faced with the contingency of cultural survival, they reached back to classical literature for an answer. Already in Homer, Simonides, and Pindar we see the striving for “undying songs,” but early modern authors knew their Latin texts best: Ovid at the end of the Metamorphoses boasts, “And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo,” iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas (15.871–72). Virgil in the Aeneid promises to Nisus and Euryalus, “If my poetry has any power, no day shall ever blot you from the memory of time,” si quid mea carmina possunt, / nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo (9.446–47). Horace, perhaps most memorably, proclaims, “I have constructed a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids,” Exegi monumentum aere perennius, / regalique situ pyramidum altius (Ode 3.30).1 What all three poets share is a confident assertion that the powers of poetry, realized in evanescent performances (carmina) or labors of writing (opus, monumentum), will outlast all other solid materials—wood, stone, bronze—as media for cultural preservation.2

This bid for immortality became a favorite topos of humanist poetry.3 Upon Petrarch’s coronation as poet laureate in 1341 on the steps of the Capitoline (the first since Statius, he is proud to claim), the Italian poet cites the authors above verbatim and explains that immortality comes in two forms, “both the immortality of the poet’s own name and the immortality of the names of those whom he celebrates.”4 Du Bellay translates Horace’s ode as J’ay parachevé de ma main / Un ouvrage plus dur qu’airain, and the final lines of the Metamorphoses as Un œuvre j’ay parfaict, que le feu ny la fouldre, / Ny le fer, ny le temps ne pourront mettre en pouldre.5 Spenser at the end of the Shepheards Calendar similarly invokes:

Horace of his Odes a work though ful indede of great

wit and learning, yet of no so great weight and

importaunce boldly sayth.

Exegi monimentum aere perennius,

Quod nec imber nec aquilo vorax etc.6

As summations of the poet’s craft, the hope that is enshrined in these lofty lines embodies their highest ambitions. We also find this dynamic in post-Augustan Roman authors. Lucan writes, “The poet snatches all things from destruction and gives to mortal men immortality. Posterity shall read my verse and your deeds; our Pharsalia shall live on, and no age will ever doom us to oblivion,” omnia fato / eripis et populis donas mortalibus aevum / . . . venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra / vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aevo (9.980–81, 985–86). So too Statius at the end of his epic: “My Thebaid, on whom I have spent twelve wakeful years, will you long endure and be read when your master is gone?,” durabisne procul dominoque legere superstes / o mihi bissenos multum uigilata per annos Thebai? (12.810–12).7 Usually appearing at the conclusion of a work (or at moments of high emotive intensity), these verses seek a coalescence of literature’s ultimate power. Yet when juxtaposed, they seem to replicate each other rather than encapsulate any definitive, conclusive omega.

In light of this catalogue we see that the topos of poetic immortality, reprised in early modernity, is not so much a given fact as a circular wish-function. Its fulfillment comes not by the authors’ bold demands but by repetition, by transformation, and by those who come later, in their reception and re-creation. The task of this book is to show how the Renaissance poetic response to ruins is not to strive for fixity or permanence but to create a work of art that absorbs the past and is in turn open to future appropriation and mutation. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature imagines fluid multiplicity rather than fixed monumentalization as a survival strategy in the classical tradition.

Beneath this exultant sheen of poetic everlastingness, however, early humanist poets were never entirely comfortable with such hyperbolic claims, since so much of ancient letters clearly did not survive. In the era before print they were poignantly aware that texts, including their own, were often destroyed, expurgated, lost, or simply ignored. In one of his “Letters to Dead Authors,” Petrarch laments that Cicero’s manuscripts are “in such fragmentary and mutilated condition that it would perhaps have been better for them to have perished” (Familiares 24.4).8 Addressing Livy, he writes, “We know you wrote 142 books on Roman affairs. Alas, with what enthusiasm and labor! Scarcely thirty of them survive!” (Familiares 24.8).9

Two hundred fifty years later, with the full capacity of the printing press, Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605) writes:

ANTIQVITIES, or Remnants of History, are, as was saide, tanquam Tabula Naufragij [only the plank of a shipwreck], when industrious persons by an exact and scrupulous diligence and obseruation, out of Monuments, Names, Wordes, Prouerbes, Traditions, Priuate Recordes, and Euidences, Fragments of stories, Passages of Bookes, that concerne not storie, and the like, doe saue and recouer somewhat from the deluge of time.10

The most poignant word in this passage is “somewhat,” for the chancellor of England knows full well how impossible complete retrieval is, no matter how “industrious” and “scrupulous” a scholar be. In the course of this book we shall see how, from Petrarch to Bacon, philological reconstruction, literary production, contemplation of fragments, and gazing on ruins exist on the same humanist continuum.

To be a poet in the Renaissance, then, was to think about ruins. When Petrarch gazed at the obsolescent grandeur of Roman decay in the 1340s, the dilapidated city was little more than sad farmlands: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city [fracte urbis], there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins [ruinarum fragmenta] lay before our eyes.”11 These words are from the Rerum familiarium libri (Letters on Familiar Matters, written 1325–66), and the epistle has rightly been considered the founding document of the “cult of ruins.”12 In the cultural efflorescence of the fifteenth century, Rome’s gleaming churches, palaces, and monuments were built from stones pilfered from ancient buildings. By the mid-sixteenth century, when Du Bellay spent four ambivalent years there, the city was still suffering from the aftershocks of its re-ruination in the devastating Sack of 1527.13 The Petrarchan sonnet sequences Les Antiquitez de Rome and Les Regrets (1558) document his responses to the decayed grandeur of the city. In the 1580s Spenser, never having visited Rome, was composing The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) literally under the shadow of ruins; he lived in New Abbey, County Kildare, and his Irish homestead Kilcolman Castle while he was colonial administrator and settler there.14 Across the Irish Sea the landscape of England, bearing the scars of Henry VIII’s Act of Suppression, was dotted with hundreds of ruined monasteries, abandoned churches, and wayside shrines.15 Shakespeare’s evocative line “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” bears witness to these damaged topographies.

What, then, is the “poetics” of “ruins”? As readers will know, “poetics” is from the Greek poiesis and the verb poiein, “to make, to do.”16 “Ruin” is from the Latin verb ruere, “to fall with violence . . . to hasten, hurry, rush, to fall,” and the noun ruīna, “a rushing or tumbling down . . . a downfall, fall; accident, catastrophe, disaster, destruction.”17 Etymologically these two words seem to have contrary meanings; one is about the crafting of artifacts, while the other is about the dissolution of things already created. One way of rephrasing the “poetics of ruins” would be the “order of disorder,” the “discourse of falling things,” or “putting back together broken things.” This book, in short, explores the dynamics of these oppositions and explains how Renaissance poets used the topos of architectural ruins to think about the life cycle of their own works—from conception, composition, print, revisions, and circulation to afterlife. A conjoined interest in poetics and monuments certainly existed in antiquity, as we see already, but I wager that the intertwining of poetics and ruins emerges only in the period now known as the Renaissance.18 The Renaissance sees a new understanding of both ruins and poetics, made possible by sustained meditation on the crumbled monuments of antiquity. This rumination requires a new understanding of the ruin as neither monumentalizing the past nor making a gesture toward something extrahistorical (i.e., immortality) but as gesturing toward a poetic practice that is deeply invested in time, leaving traces for others to follow and ultimately transcend.

Whereas classical poets used ruins as a way to think about the endurance of art and the brevity of life, ars longa vita brevis, the Renaissance writers I study—Francesco Petrarch, Francesco Colonna, Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare—problematize this dichotomy. As they self-consciously constructed their work on the ruins of antiquity, they reflected intensely on this ambivalent foundation. They were not artists given to liturgical rituals of exact replication; each insisted on the freedom to reject, appropriate, or absorb his predecessor. At times they wanted ancient buildings to be rubble so that they could have the space—the clearing—to construct their own monuments. In a moment of exasperation Du Bellay laments, “The broad fields of Greek and Latin are already so full that very little empty space remains” (La Deffence 2.12).19 In Les Antiquitez de Rome he promises, “I would, with the ardor that inflames me, undertake to rebuild with the pen what hands cannot construct in stone,” J’entreprendrois, veu l’ardeur qui m’allume, / De rebastir au compas de la plume / ce que les mains ne peuvent maçonner (Sonnet 25).

Non Finito

Since at least Horace it has become commonplace to refer to a finished work of art as a monument. Yet many humanist authors had precisely the problem of finishing their literary creations. What, then, is the relationship between the aesthetics of the unfinished and the ruin? Petrarch was the first man in European letters to call his works “fragments,” as the title of his poetic collection, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things), attests. This is more than a conceit: he obsessively reorganizes and edits the order of his poems until the night of his death.20 Petrarch had many other projects. He wanted to write an epic in Italian (distinct from his Latin Africa), a biography of the Neapolitan king Robert, an encyclopedia on the origins of the arts, a treatise against Averroes, and much else. But true to his roving interests, he never got around to completing them.21 The Africa itself remains unfinished. Ronsard’s Franciade (begun in the 1540s, the first four of a projected twenty-four books published in 1572), Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (first three books appeared in 1590, second three books in 1596, also a part of a projected twenty-four books), Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (printed in 1590, 1593, 1598, 1621, each with substantial additions) are all famously, magnificently incomplete. All great Renaissance authors had their own monumental ruins.

Though we instinctively associate the unfinished or unfinishable work of art with the Romantic yearning for the infinite, the non finito was already an aesthetic category in the Renaissance.22 This was anticipated in antiquity, when Pliny in the Natural History writes, “Another most curious fact and worthy of record is that the latest works of artists and the pictures left unfinished at their death are valued more than any of their finished paintings. . . . The reason is that in these we see traces of the design and the original conception of the artists, while sorrow for the hand that perished at its work beguiles us into the bestowal of praise” (35.145).23 Vasari remarked on Michelangelo’s sculpture the Medici Madonna that “though the parts are unfinished, what is left roughed out and full of chisel marks reveals, in its incomplete state, the perfection of the work,” nella imperfezzione della bozza la perfezzione dell’opra.24 Montaigne is conscious of the interminable project of his life-writing: “Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?”25 Ruins and the incomplete work of art commingle in Renaissance aesthetics.

And even the invention of print did not arrest the mutability of supposedly finished literary texts. The codex often did not exist as a fixed unit: printers would frequently issue texts in loose sheets, leaving it to the reader to collect, arrange, and bind them.26 Authors themselves were happy to incorporate fluidity into their process of revisions and editions, encouraging translations, imitations, performances, and even forgeries.27 When a correspondent complained to Erasmus that he revised his multidecade Adages too much, the Dutch humanist shot back, “No book is wrought such that it cannot be made more perfect.”28 Similarly Montaigne writes, “My book is always one. Except that at each edition, so that the buyer may not come off completely empty-handed, I allow myself to add, since it is only an ill-fitted patchwork, some extra ornaments.”29 And we know very well the instability of the oxymoronic “true, original copy” from the riddles of Shakespeare’s quartos and folios.30 My point is that the unfinished, the complete, and the ruin are usually plotted on different points of a work of art’s time graph; in the Renaissance these three modalities intersect in the matrix of the fragment.

Gilded Monuments

The conjunction of architectural survival, cultural loss, personal recovery, and poetic endurance is hauntingly explored in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). In an extraordinary cluster of poems, roughly from Sonnet 55 to 65, the poet grapples with the power of words to keep in abeyance the degeneration of the world.31 (This sequence is treated in depth in chapter 1.) But for now I want to show how Shakespeare rehearses many of the late Renaissance anxieties about the corrupting forces of time and the fragile powers of verse to combat them. In exploring his poetics of preservation, he turns again and again to the figure of the ruin:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defacèd

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razèd,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate

That Time will come and take my love away

This thought is as a desire, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.32

Sonnet 64 is an exercise on the reality and imagination of ruins, presenting an encyclopedia of decay and destruction. The ruin’s lesson is didactic, personal (“me”), and logical (“thus”). The sonnet’s narrative arc brings us from surveying this vast, impersonal panorama of the world to an intimate, singular “my love.” The syntactical buildup of the multiple “when” creates a sense of anticipation that is finally resolved in the melancholic insight of the volta, the turn: “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / that Time will come and take my love away.”

As readers of the Sonnets know, the arrangement of polysemous words contributes to a dizzying array of their interpretations. The magic combination here is “state,” “ruin,” and “ruminate.” From the Latin status, “state” primarily means “a particular manner or way of existing” or “original, proper, or usual condition of a person or thing” (OED). But of course it also refers to a political entity. Hence line 2, “The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,” can be additionally glossed as an expansive sense of “state” as “costly and imposing display associated with monarchs and other persons of high rank; splendour, pomp, magnificence” (OED). The course of the poem turns from the flux of material “states” to the collapse of political institutions, from architecture to ruin, from metal to rust, from soil to water. By conjoining the word with “interchange” and “decay,” Shakespeare destabilizes the meaning of “state” itself.

Like “state,” “ruin” has ample semantic range. Similar to its Latin roots, the English noun can signify a state, a disposition, or a person; as a verb it is an event, an action that is both transitive and intransitive. The ruin can be internal or external, allegorical or real. When Shakespeare uses “ruin” in the plays he is interested in human action, not architecture. A minor character in Antony and Cleopatra complains of “the noble ruin of her magic, Antony” (3.10.19).33 In the last act, as Cleopatra prepares for her suicide, she threatens, “This mortal house I’ll ruin, / Do Caesar what he can” (5.2.50). The mother in Coriolanus shouts, “Come all to ruin; let / Thy mother rather feel thy pride than fear / Thy dangerous stoutness” (3.2.125). And the son says, “Though there the people had more absolute power, / I say, they nourish’d disobedience, fed / The ruin of the state” (3.1.117–18). Gloucester, in an existential vein, asks King Lear, “O ruined piece of nature, this great world / Shall so wear out to naught. Dost thou know me?” (4.61.30–31). “Ruin” in these tragic examples denotes imminent existential calamity brought upon by political ambitions. In the Sonnets, however, “ruin” is brought upon by Time herself. She doesn’t need anyone’s help.

Meditation upon the transience of the world occurs by way of alliteration: “ruin” and “ruminate.” (If we omit “m,” ruminate becomes “ruinate.”) Although this lexical pun might suggest a semantic equivalence or even a shared ancestry, the etyma of “ruin” and “ruminate” are quite different: “ruin,” as previously stated, means an impulsive action or a “headlong rush, headlong fall, downward plunge, collapse (of a building), fallen mass of debris.” To ruminate is “to revolve, turn over repeatedly in the mind; to meditate deeply upon,” derived from rumen, “the first and largest stomach of a ruminant . . . and from which it may pass back to the mouth as cud for further chewing” (OED). Thus the direction and velocity of both words go in contrary directions: “to ruin” is precipitous thoughtless action, whereas “to ruminate” is recursive slow contemplation. For Shakespeare, thinking about falling things makes us philosophers and poets, not cows.

Ruminating on ruins provokes the poet to ruminate on the general state of the world and on the particular mortality of his beloved. Sonnet 64 thus vividly illustrates the central crisis of the Sonnets: how to stop Time from taking the poet’s beloved away. In the early sonnets the poet’s solution is that this nameless beloved must have children. But as the rhetoric of biological reproduction gradually collapses, the poet must take the task of his friend’s survival into his own hands. What children cannot do perhaps the poet’s pen can. The rest of the sonnet sequence thereby becomes metapoetic, in the sense that it increasingly broods on the function and efficacy of its own existence. In defiance of the kingdom of the shore and the conceit of inconstant stay, Shakespeare recuperates Horace’s celebrated vaunt in Sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room,

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Given the nonsequential development of the sonnet sequence, Sonnet 55 proleptically resolves the crisis presented in Sonnet 64: both sonnets are preoccupied with the destruction of material things: “when sometime lofty towers I see down-razed, / And brass eternal slave to mortal rage” (64) is equivalent to “when wasteful war shall statues overturn, / and broils root out the work of masonry” (55). Yet whereas the ruminations in Sonnet 64 result only in an affective paralysis (the poet can only weep), Sonnet 55 realizes that writing itself—even writing about the poet’s anxieties—already means that he has produced a “living record of your [the young man’s] memory.” In short, Sonnet 64 reaches an impasse with the poetics of ruins. Sonnet 55 presents, with the help of the classical tradition, a lyric solution.

Although Renaissance poetry seems merely to mimic ancient thought in its poetic hopes of immortality, Shakespeare has something in his lyric arsenal that his ancient sources lacked: the Christian Apocalypse. “Till the judgment that yourself arise” and “ending doom” in the final lines are clear references to the belief in the resurrection of the body, something that can happen only through the Messiah. Recently Ramie Targoff has explored how post-Reformation poetry saw a lack of posthumous love between poets and their beloved, as opposed to an earlier Petrarchan continuum of love in this world and in the next. According to Targoff, poets had to develop other ways of lyric compensation: “The idea that death would bring an absolute end to tortuous erotic affections does not lead to a consoling vision of a heavenly afterlife with the divine. Instead this poetry is overwhelmingly secular, often suggesting a strain of materialism that seems more consonant with classical than with Christian models for the afterlife.”34 True, but much of Renaissance poetry is in fact preoccupied with the Apocalypse and the resurrection of the body, as we see here. The response that this book offers is that meditation on love, whether posthumous or not, is contiguous with meditation on ruins, and that poetic survival is accomplished not so much through the physical leaves of a codex, which, after all, are no more permanent than brazen statues or unswept stone, but through the experience of reading by later generations. As such, poetic “immortality” in the fullest sense will always fall short of providential time. The way verbal works become immortalized is always within secular time, “in the eyes of posterity.” The life of the poet, his poetry, and his beloved endure beyond the confines of the page in the lived hermeneutic experience of the reader, dwelling “in lovers’ eyes.”

We see from Shakespeare’s Sonnets how Renaissance poetics is proleptic and analeptic, inscribing its hopes about its own survival through the repetition, imitation, and appropriation of its classical predecessors. Moreover, Doomsday was never far away from early modern poets’ minds. This is why ruins appealed to them so much, since ruins, like poetics, are by nature Janus-faced, looking backward and forward. By saving their predecessors poets create an implicit contractual obligation that future readers and other poets will do the same for them. The promise of literature, then, is that the author can survive his own death. As Horace put it: “I shall not wholly die,” non omnis moriar (Carm. 3.30). Yet this hope is accompanied by a fear, for this future is contingent upon others. The poetics of ruins is thus the shadow of the poetics of immortality.

The Lion’s Claw

The method of this book is avowedly philological. I believe this approach is particularly appropriate to my subject matter since both philology and the study of ruins are fundamentally concerned with the figure of synecdoche, about imagining the whole through their parts. By definition, philology takes the ancient past—always in fragments—as its object of inquiry and therefore cannot but think about ruins in their textual and material forms. Indeed to look at ruins and to do literary history we meditate on some enduring fragment from which we try to reconstruct some image of the past.

One of the most provocative recent interventions in the theory of philology is Werner Hamacher’s Minima Philologica. Hamacher’s bold claim is that to think about philology, to think philologically, is to penetrate nothing less than the origins of language: “Language is archiphilology” (thesis 1). But philology must ultimately escape from itself to go above and beyond language. This results in a tragic failure, a “transcending without transcendence” (thesis 4), for the antinomy of philology is such that philology asks questions that it cannot answer, or by answering them it annihilates itself. As philology advances in its inquiries, its goal is nothing less than “the entirety of language.” But because this totality is infinite, philology cannot but collapse in its overreaching ambition. Even with all its virtues of meticulous patience, it cannot but ultimately puncture, sever, implode upon itself. This leads Hamacher to posit that “philology is decreation.”35 For Hamacher, philology necessarily thinks about ruins but itself ends in ruin, hence method and subject collapse on each other.

Perhaps philology in this rarified, theoretical sense does lead to the “unwording” of language. In its praxis, however, I would argue that its goal is actually the healing of linguistic and cultural rupture. To understand this, let us turn to a much earlier reflection on philology, Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Genealogia deorum gentilium. An encyclopedic synthesis of ancient myths, it stands as one of the first works of classical scholarship in early humanism. In the preface Boccaccio vividly states:

[As] if I were collecting fragments along the vast shores of a huge shipwreck, I will collect [vastum litus ingentis naufragii fragmenta colligerem sparsas] the remnants of the pagan gods strewn everywhere in a nearly infinite number of volumes, and once found and collected, even if they are ravaged and half eaten by time and nearly worn to nothing, I will reduce them into a single corpus of genealogy [unum genealogie corpus]. (Book 1, preface 1, §40)

Later he uses the same imagery of catastrophe but adds the arresting figures of Aesculapius and Hippolytus:

I can quite realize this labor to which I am committed—this vast system of gentile gods and their progeny, torn limb from limb [membratim discerptum] and scattered among the rough and desert places of antiquity and the thorns of late, wasted away, sunk almost to ashes; and here am I setting forth to collect these fragments, to consolidate [collecturus] them together, like another Aesculapius restoring Hippolytus. (1.1.50)36

Readers will know that the terror of mortal disembodiment by the divinities is a mainstay of classical mythology. Boccaccio now hauntingly imagines the entire archive of antiquity—even the gods themselves—as dispersed and scattered. His membratim discerptum recalls membra disjecta, a term from Horace’s Satires that is used proverbially to describe the surviving fragments of ancient text.37 The Roman poet, when talking about the strategies of writing verse and how to arrange syntax, quotes Ennius: “‘When foul Discord’s din / War’s posts and gates of bronze had broken in,’ where even when he is dismembered, you would find the scattered limbs of a poet,” ut si solvas postquam Discordia taetra / Belli ferratos postes portasque refregit / invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae (1.4.60–62). What started for Horace as a poetic invention has come down to us as philological discovery. Both are about Orphic sparagmos. The goal of a scholar, then, is restorative. As logos is from legein, to “collect, gather, assemble,” humanist philologia, out of love of the ancients, as an act of philia, reassembles the fragments of myth from its “infinite number of volumes” into a “single corpus of genealogy.”

Interestingly, like Boccaccio, Hamacher also associates textual criticism with mythological figures from antiquity: “Orpheus is a philologist when he sings” (thesis 74); “The ground of philology is a wound. It screams. But no one hears this Philoctetes except, maybe, himself” (thesis 82); “Philology is the Trojan horse in the walls of our sleeping languages. If they awaken [sic]” (thesis 91). Boccaccio reveals the necessity of philology as the science of restoration and conservation. Hamacher polemically reveals, if we align him to this unlikely Italian interlocutor, that philology is both the wound and the cure, the pharmakon of language. With its tutelary deity Aesculapius and its mortal subjects Hippolytus and Orpheus, wounding and disembodiment and violence become the starting grounds of the humanist enterprise.

When it comes to historical, textual inquiry, philology is still the most effective art of healing we have for the broken torso of antiquity, pace Hamacher’s claims about philology’s own wounding. It is instructive to read Hamacher alongside World Philology, edited by Sheldon Pollock, for both wrestle with the relationship between linguistic and hermeneutic understanding.38 Informed by cross-cultural comparisons of textual scholarship, the volume is notable for the ways it regrounds philology as the foundation of the cultural sciences. Constanze Güthenke’s chapter insightfully discusses one of the most highly developed visions of philology in nineteenth-century Germany, August Boeckh’s Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Philologischen Wissenschaften (posthumously edited 1877).39 Like Hamacher, Boeckh is concerned with the potential failure of philology: “Like every other science, [it] is an infinite task of approximation. . . . Antiquity is more remote, more alien, more incomprehensible and fragmentary and thus in need of reconstruction to a far higher degree.” Yet he takes a much more constructive stance. Knowledge, for him, can be achieved by means of a collective enterprise,

in a thousand heads, partial, dismembered, broken, not to mention strange and in a broken tongue; but the great love alone . . . is nothing other than the reconstruction of the constructions of the human mind in their totality. . . . [The philologist thus] stands at the highest level together with the artist and the philosopher, or rather they merge in him. His task is the historical construction of works of art and science, the history which he must grasp and represent in vivid intuition [in lebendiger Anschauung].”40

We see how the language of fragmentation—and the hope of total reconstitution—pervades discourses on classical scholarship in its long arc from Boccaccio to Boeckh to Hamacher. So does the fear of ruination. Yet unlike Hamacher, both Boccaccio and Boeckh posit the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences.

My work is closer to this more affirmative strand of philology. In particular my methodology embraces the principles of close reading and cultural semantics developed by Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, the two great twentieth-century representatives of this humanist enterprise. Auerbach proposes that, faced with myriad sources, a secure reading must locate a point of departure, what he calls the Ansatzpunkt, “the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy.”41 Spitzer saw that semantic change is an index of larger human phenomena: “Word change is cultural change and spiritual change.”42 Starting with the etymology of a particular word and examining its stylistic shifts as patterns of broader intellectual development, the philologist would finally arrive at a correspondence between the “inward form” and the “spirit of the age.”

We begin to see a hidden kinship between the study of words and the study of ruins, for both abide by the hermeneutic presupposition that “the detail can be understood only by the whole and any explanation of detail presupposes the understanding of the whole.”43 As an adage of Erasmus has it, ex ungue leonem, “[one deduces] the lion from its claws.”44 For Giambattista Vico, since human beings made their own institutions and laws, human beings themselves alone are able to know fully their own origins, developments, and ends. Hence ruins become intelligible since human beings made them. “The great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered,” he states in the New Science (1744), “shed great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored.”45 The visual enigmas of the work’s frontispiece capture the contingencies of civilization (fig. 1). In the foreground are its fallen artifacts: an altar, a columbarium, a toppled column, an alphabet-chiseled stele, a cracked pedestal on which the blind Homer stands. In the background a muse bestriding the globe has her gaze fixed on the effulgent, cloud-dispelling rays of the all-seeing eye of providence. Vico insists that from their broken remains one can piece together the archives of history and deduce the forms of the true: whereas philosophy articulates the intelligibility of the universal, philology illuminates the empirical artifacts of the particular. Because ruins are fundamentally about parts and wholes, they prompt the beholder toward an interpretation, the movement of the imagination to fill absence with presence. The ruin’s empty space thus creates an opening, an aperture, toward the hermeneutic creation of meaning.

Under the shadow of contingency, loss, and oblivion, the poetics of ruins thus reaches out in two directions: backward in an attempt to sustain the past, and forward in the hope of future survival. In making silent monuments speak, in giving a voice to inert matter, poetry aspires to a higher condition of permanence. The Sonnets, philology, and the contemplation of ruins have this in common: the play of desire across vast historical and physical expanses. In all three practices the temporal distance between antiquity and modernity allegorizes the space between absence and presence: Shakespearean meditation on “bare ruined choirs” tarries between fullness and emptiness; the lyric seeks to unite the lover and the beloved; philology tries to bridge the gap between historical distances. It is no accident that the humanist’s relationship to antiquity is often described as one between the lover and his unrequited beloved. Philology—in its etymological sense of “love of words”—underlies the humanism’s passion, whether its object be a text, a beloved, or a ruin.

Figure 1. Giambattista Vico, frontispiece, New Science (Naples, 1744). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Three Authors, Three Words

As philology served as a rallying cry for humanist erudition from Petrarch to Vico to Auerbach, more recently, along with Hamacher and Pollock, there has been a concurrent philological and rhetorical revival in early modern English studies.46 Most notable is Roland Greene’s Five Words (2013), an attempt at a cultural semantics of early modernity through, in particular, the vexed words “blood,” “invention,” “language,” “resistance,” “world.”47 By way of a lexical methodology, Greene asks not simply what a word denotes in one text, author, or national language but how it functions in a wider network of European intellectual discourse. I too believe that a single word contains within itself a microhistory of ideas, resonating with overtones beyond its literal sense. Auerbach’s magisterial essay “Figura” (1938) is a brilliant demonstration of how careful attention to the capacious career of one word can reveal the Weltanschauung that underlies historical development.48 Barbara Cassin, in her project Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004), reminds us that all words belong to a network, often in languages that become before, besides, and after it.49 To map the trajectory of a word is to map out a history of a concept. At the same time, Cassin uses Deleuze’s idea of deterritorialization to demonstrate that meaning does not reside in any origins or fixed center but is diffused throughout a semantic network. Through its accumulations and juxtapositions from text to text, language to language, century to century, a word gains philosophical complexity and poetic density.

As such, I have chosen three words with expansive semantic reach and deep etymological roots: vestigium in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. On the one hand these dense, pregnant words are the metamorphic rocks, the materia prima, of my project. On the other these three words also form “word clouds” in their authors’ oeuvres, verbal constellations of associations that provide different iterations of the materiality of memory. We may use them as heuristics to think about how each writer’s engagements with ruins tap into a larger discourse about ruins, prompting writers to think more deeply about the material conditions and metaphysical aspirations of their writing. The conceit of this book, then, is that the career of words mirrors the flux of architectural instability. Through their diachronic shifts words can be considered either linguistic ruins in need of renovation or monuments that are adorned and refurbished from century to century. Starting with the smallest unit of linguistic speech—the word—and expanding to the larger world-picture that it embodies, my book not only revisits some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be but also offers a renewed cultural philology for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large.

As Erasmus says in De Ratione Studii (1511), “In principle, knowledge as a whole seems to be of two kinds, of things [res] and of words [verba]. Knowledge of words comes earlier, but that of things is the more important.”50 The first two chapters establish this Renaissance opposition of words through poetics and things through ruins. Chapter 1, on verba, “The Rebirth of Poetics,” is a diachronic history that presents a literary trajectory of ruins and monuments from antiquity to the Renaissance. Poetics, in particular the lyric desire for literary immortality, was born from reflections on architecture.

Chapter 2, on res, is a synchronic portrait of Renaissance Rome. The recognition of ruins arose with the Renaissance self-invention as a period distinct from its medieval forebears. “The Rebirth of Ruins” explains how the architectural detritus of ancient Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sparked its urban rebuilding and inspired countless artistic representations.

The central chapters examine Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Spenser, with a glance at the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. These authors are not only the most illustrious writers of their vernacular literature who talk about ruins, but they also talk to each other precisely on the subject of ruins. From this perspective Renaissance literary production and the reflections on ruins go hand in hand: Du Bellay in his poems on ruins translated Petrarch, and Spenser in his own poems on ruins translated both Du Bellay and Petrarch. Together they form a larger trajectory of intertextual production in which the figure of the ruin serves as the key topos (or rather, atopos) of cultural transmission. Petrarch was one of the first to mourn the tragedy of antiquity’s disappearance. He did so by conflating cultural and erotic loss in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (or the Rime Sparse, 1374). The prose fantasy Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) exhibits a Petrarchan obsession with the ruins of antiquity that verges on delirium. A French translation of the Hypnerotomachia, entitled Songe de Poliphile, appeared in 1546 and deeply influenced La Pléiade’s imagination of Roman ruins. Du Bellay was captivated by Rome’s faded grandeur, and his Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) explored the ruin’s kaleidoscopic complexities and ambiguities in a Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Appended to the end of Les Antiquitez, his apocalyptic Songes unmistakably imitates the visions of destruction in Rime Sparse 323, with perhaps a nod to Songe de Poliphile. Spenser translates Du Bellay as well as Petrarch in his Complaints (published 1596, written much earlier).

Following this poetic itinerary, the layers of translations from Latin to Italian to French to English form a literary palimpsest in which one can explore the metaphors of textual erasure and additions. As the architectural ruins of Rome are demolished and transported bit by bit throughout the empire in Europe and beyond, the production and reception of literary works express the desire for monuments that transcend the contingency of the material. This practice thus becomes one of the “building blocks,” so to speak, of the classical tradition.

Chapter 3, on Petrarch, argues that his encounter with the past can be conceived of as a search for vestigia—traces, footprints, remnants. Sequi vestigia, “to follow in the footsteps,” can mean both imitation and investigation. Petrarch the lover followed the footsteps of Laura by following in the footsteps of his vernacular predecessor, Dante. He created an ideal, imaginary Rome in the Africa by imitating Virgil and Lucan. But his fragments are not only textual; his impulse to collect the remains of ancient manuscripts exists in a continuum with his attempts at gathering together the existential fragments of his self. Haunted by a world of absence, Petrarch produced perfectly composed fragments.

The apotheosis of Renaissance fascination with ruins reaches perhaps its ludic culmination in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The short chapter 4 explores Francesco Colonna’s wild and wonderful novel of pagan mysteries and magical gardens, at the center of which is a very weird protagonist obsessed with architecture. The novel makes us wonder: What does it mean to have sexualized dreams about antiquity in ruins?

Chapter 5 shows that, unlike Petrarch, Du Bellay wanted Rome to be in ruins, to lie in cendre (ashes), so that he could plunder its scattered remains and export them to France. Du Bellay frequently uses la poudreuse cendre in Les Antiquitez de Rome to imagine Rome as a human body lying in ruins. His poetic ambition is to transport its dislocated fragments to adorn the architecture of his own nation. For his lyric to emerge from the smoldering ashes of antiquity, he willed, dreamed, needed Rome to be in ruins, in order to create his new vernacular monument.

In chapter 6 I argue that Spenser’s career, punctuated by the word moniment maps a larger itinerary of his poetic project that engages in a fundamental rethinking of the activities of monument making and its dialectical other, ruination. He deliberately uses moniment (a variant form of monumentum that more audibly evokes their common root, monēre, “to warn”) to think about the limitations of the poetic immortality topos. His poetic monuments are as much about the allegory of ruins as the ruins of allegory.

The epilogue, “Fallen Cities and Summer Grass,” departs from the Renaissance and returns to my Japanese friend’s perplexing question: Why ruins, after all? As it turns out, even though there might not be physical ruins in premodern East Asia, there is a long tradition of poems about ruins.

Transnational, Philological

In the past generation Thomas M. Greene has been the most eloquent and erudite reader of Renaissance ruins. Primarily concerned with the practice and theory of imitation, The Light in Troy (1982) uses the topos of the ruin to think about how Renaissance writers coped with cultural devastation.51 My book takes a somewhat different approach from his question of imitatio: I argue that the ruins topos dramatizes its own dynamic agency in its production and reception, contrary to Greene’s emphasis on the ruin as a symbol of the indeterminacy of language. His title alludes to a line in Yeats’s “The Gyres,” “Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy,” and exudes Greene’s melancholic vision of the Renaissance: any glow is but a residue of the smoldering ashes of a primary culture. Though Greene was right in identifying the significance of the ruin for the period, he was wrong, I hold, in diagnosing it as a “pathology of failure.” The ruin is much more generative. It inspired an entire generation of poets, painters, architects, antiquarians, and other humanists to reflect on antiquity and produce their own works. Moreover Greene’s Derridean view of language as “drift” is problematic. With my three selected words, I argue that within each word is embedded a compressed history of ideas, a rich accumulation of semantics that carry traces of cultural memory. These traces, in my view, are sufficient to outweigh the “drift” of semantic instability.

Some of the richest recent contributions to Renaissance studies have been a reexamination of material culture and aesthetics in the period’s formation. The works of Leonard Barkan, Christopher S. Wood and Alexander Nagel, and Jonathan Gil Harris all reveal the profound multifolded historicity of cultural artifacts in early modernity.52 This book intervenes in these critical conversations by arguing that our concepts of “poetics,” “ruins,” “Renaissance” all emerge from and are interwined in the same aesthetic phenomenon. Ruins inspire poets to create works that aspire to be monuments but often end up as ruins themselves; this anxiety gives rise to a poetics that is deeply self-conscious of its own historicity, endurance, and artistic survival. The idea of “rebirth” in the period that we have defined as the Renaissance cannot be understood without recognizing that it is also the rebirth of “ancient monuments” as “early modern ruins.” Hence the ruin is “anachronic” and “untimely” matter par excellence.

The phenomenon of ruins in Renaissance literature has not been ignored by other scholars either. Margaret M. McGowan and Eric MacPhail explore how Rome as idea and place gripped the aesthetic imagination of sixteenth-century France, while Margaret Ferguson and Hassan Melehy tease out the dynamics of cultural exchange between Italy, France, and England.53 Philip Schwyzer and Rebeca Helfer argue that the discourse of archaeologies and memory were formative to early modern English literary production.54 Still, a more ample comparative and philological study is necessary because, as Ferguson and Melehy rightly recognize, ruins and texts are in fact not rooted to their native geography or language. In the Renaissance, material and literary fragments are endlessly mobile, traveling as spolia across national boundaries, as raw material and conceptual models. Situating the poetic discourse of ruins within diachronic literary history and the synchronic rediscovery of Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth century requires that we take a transnational and philological perspective, one that excludes neither historical change nor poetic recurrence.

Poetic discourse on ruins takes place within the complex literary network of Petrarchan imitation and anti-imitation. The study of this ubiquitous phenomenon has produced some of the most fruitful scholarly inquiries on the lyric genre.55 Yet almost all criticism focuses exclusively on questions of subjectivity, nationhood, gender, or style, while very little is said about Petrarchan lyric’s engagement with materiality. This book demonstrates that erotic poetry is in constant dialogue with the poetry of ruins. Contemplating ruins and yearning for the beloved both play with desire for the whole through its parts (fragments, the anatomy of blazon) and are often about the wish for something impossible and idealized (the resurrection of Rome and the dead Laura, the eternity of verse). Corpus, after all, means “a text” and “a body.” Textual recovery, existential reflection, and love poetry are all about searching for what has been lost. In vernacular Petrarch lyric, the strands of erotic voice, fragments of antiquity, and fascination with architectural decay are all entangled.

Nachleben

Cultural phenomena are always aleatory, susceptible to rupture, regression, extinction. Aby Warburg (1866–1929) used the term das Nachleben der Antike, “the afterlife of antiquity,” to describe how ancient images persist and haunt artistic production across vast chronology and geography, even though some cultural periods do their best to exorcise this spectral lingering.56 Though ruins were never extensively discussed in his work, they would be the prime exemplars of the Nachleben that give form to what he called the “engrams” or “memory traces” retained in the cultural archive of the present. We may put it in even stronger terms: the ruin is always already a Nachleben; it never had a prior Leben since, as I later argue, there is never a perfect building, for it is always in the flux of becoming and unbecoming.

Walter Benjamin, a thinker much attuned to Warburg’s sensibilities, states in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925) that the ruin is the perfect emblem to capture the late Renaissance baroque aesthetic, for its practice is “to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification.” For Benjamin this practice, in which the Renaissance artist plunders the fragments of antiquity, is nothing other than allegory. But since allegory is put under so much pressure to subsume everything in its all-embracing domain, it collapses, like a ruin. Thus “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”57 In the Spenser chapter we shall interrogate these enigmatic claims.

For Georges Didi-Huberman, an astute reader of the Warburg school, “a surviving image is an image that, having lost its original use value and meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a moment of ‘crisis,’ a moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity, and its ‘anthropological adhesion.’”58 The ruin is precisely this surviving image for it manifests in the dynamic energies of Renaissance thought. Yet if the ruin embodies continuing identity in the midst of material change, we must emphasize that the ruin not only instantiates Didi-Huberman’s metaphor of a ghost; it is also equally a corpse. As a dismembered body that has lost its vital spirit, the ruin has long lost its use-value, yet it assumes a new monument-function as a sign of its former glory, stubbornly fixed to its geographical habitus; all the while its specter is ubiquitous, haunting the cultural imagination far and wide.

Ruīna

The question remains: What is a ruin? As I mentioned, etymologically the Latin ruīna is derived from the verb ruere, falling, collapsing, tumbling, rushing headlong or downward, or in the substantive, the aftermath or residual of such activity. A ruin can be a person, a building, a city, a civilization, the earth, or the cosmos itself. How do ruins come to be? The causes of architectural ruin are many: time, weather, the elements, divine intervention, human destruction or neglect. A ruin can emerge from a single catastrophe, from a fire or a deluge, or it can come about gradually, by the creep of vegetation that smothers polished stones. “For what are ruins if not the partial, still incomplete dissolution of the solidity of form?” asks Robert Pogue Harrison in Dominion of the Dead, a beautiful meditation on the ways we remember and bury.59 Indeed the ruin always stages a dialectical encounter between art and nature. From his study of the movement of water, Leonardo imagined nature herself to be both the agent and the object of destruction. In his notebooks he recorded scenarios of deluge from a mountain valley: “Descending in devastation from these precipices let it pursue its headlong course striking and laying bare the twisted and gnarled roots of the great trees overturning them in ruins; and let the mountains as they become bare reveal the deep fissures made in them by ancient earthquakes.”60 For Leonardo the process of ruination is a manifestation of the infinite complexity of nature and a symptom of her internal dynamics.

Or the ruin can be wrought by divine punishment. Ruination runs like a red thread through the Old Testament: from the expulsion from the garden to the worldwide flood, the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt, or the prophetic lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem. Writing after the destruction of the Holy City, the prophet Isaiah foretold, “The earth shall be utterly laid waste and utterly despoiled; for the Lord has spoken this word. The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. . . . The city of chaos is broken down, every house is shut up so that no one can enter” (24:3–4, 10, New Revised Standard Version). The biblical ruin is a curse for transgressing the laws of God; such cataclysm is necessary for the cleansing of iniquities.

“To ruin” is active and passive, transitive and intransitive; remnants can be pondered, reflected on, meditated upon, or removed, recycled, and further destroyed. A ruin is an ontological paradox: as the degeneration of material and form, its perfection is its very nonexistence. The ruin exists to remind one of what has endured, what has been lost, but most importantly, what is yet to be. Floating at the edge of nonbeing, the fallen monument embodies an intriguing set of binaries: transient and persistent, a source of alienation and recognition, upright and fallen, scarce and abundant, visible and invisible, matter and metaphor. In short, a thing that is and is not.