Vindication? Or Damnation? The Problem with Context

Photo by Flickr user yaili

It may sound a little blasphemous coming from an undergraduate studying English, but the part I love most about studying old literature isn’t actually reading the text. I often feel like I should have spent more time studying history than English because I get so much more out of piece when I understand the historical context.

The problem with that enjoyment, however, is that we as people have a very hard time getting every aspect of the context down when we start looking backwards. Despite carefully kept records and trustworthy accounts, my little problem becomes magnified when we start going back hundreds of years to the Renaissance and try to accurately guess why people wrote and did things. A good example of this to me is the controversial Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli. His notorious writings have stretched down through the ages to gently mold our pop culture and character tropes with an influence akin to the much more recent H.P. Lovecraft. Because of Machiavelli, we have (for better or worse) House of Cards, Game of Thrones, and The Tudors. His works are the bread and butter of political intrigue and sound like a much more ancient, bitter, and cynical version of How to Win Friends and Influence People. 

But, the jury is still out on whether those words are serious or satire. And the debate centers around the context. 

Machiavelli wrote some fairly horrible things that are offensive to an ethical mind, but it doesn’t seem he spent his whole life living them. He was a republican during a time of monarchy who suffered publicly for his attempts to undermine the authority of the ruling Medici’s. There is a strong foundation for a belief that Machiavelli was one of the world’s most incredible satirists and critics of absolute power. We, however, can't be sure because we just don't fully know. 

You can learn more here.  

Somewhere Between the Man and the Madness

In the Renaissance, man was regarded in a much lighter sense then he had been before. Of course, as is usual in the world, that didn't mean the same thing to every person, even in the same field. Humanism has no finite, structured meaning now, just as it didn't back then. Comparing the works of Italian, Niccoló Machiavelli and Spanish, Miguel de Cervantes is a great indication of that. These two men we both prominent writers during the Renaissance period, but their views on the ideals of the time couldn't be more different. 

Don Quixote de la mancha by Andrey Zhelkovsky (2005)

Cervantes viewed man as a being whose potential was being above all the malice and drudgery of the world. His version of man had the responsibility of overcoming the negativity that surrounded him in and ever-darkening world. He felt that the real success was not climbing a social ladder but proving that man truly was not fallen and could be kind and virtuous.

Machiavelli, being a politician, had a different sense of man as a being that held no moral responsibility for his actions. His version of man had the duty to take any measures in order to achieve his potential. He felt that "it is better to be fear than be loved." He saw the darkness in the world and felt that there was no way to overcome it, and a man had a better chance of success if he used the darkness to his benefit.

The idea of humanism in the Renaissance was a relatively new concept: the idea that man had potential and was more than a depraved, fallen being. However, the ways that people felt that man could best reach this potential was vastly different. It's common to believe that there was a sense of unity in past eras of the world that isn't found today, but in reality, there always has been conflicting ideas, even when the foundation of the belief is the same.