Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse

This path-breaking study attempts to view both Reformation discourse and Renaissance fiction (and, by implication, the Elizabethan theater) as constitutive of an early modern paradigm change in the authorization of discourse. The profound crisis in traditional locations of authority, affecting religious, political, and poetic courts of appeal, is traced as interactive with an unprecedented proliferation of both signifying practices and communicative technologies. Representation itself seeks to cope with these changing uses of language and power vis-à-vis deep divisions (but also new patterns of socialization) in contemporary culture and society. Authority, now that it is less given before an utterance begins, comes to constitute itself through the competence, cogency, and efficacy of representational practice itself, even as this practice privileges, and draws upon, pictorial form in diverse cultural contexts.

This book continues to search for answers to questions of why and under what conditions in the early modern period the representation of authority could increasingly be challenged by the authority of signs. Initially raised in Weimann's Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis, these questions are developed towards a theory and history of early modern representation that involves close encounters with a wide variety of texts, from Luther, Henry Tudor, Edward Seymour, Gardiner, and Bancroft to Malory, Erasmus, Rabelais, Sidney, Nashe, and Cervantes.

"Robert Weimann is one of the world's most eminent and intellectually formidable scholars of early modern culture — and he has written a work of the utmost importance to the theory and practice of cultural and literary history, and to the study of sixteenth century English and European culture in particular. The book is an intellectual tour de force, yet one utterly devoid of the flourishes of academic self-display. This work genuinely impresses without ever seeking to impress." — Louis A. Montrose, University of California, San Diego

Robert Weimann is professor in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition and Structure and Society in Literary History both available from Johns Hopkins. David Hillman teaches in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.