UC Berkeley

My dissertation, “Ibi et cor tuum: The Twin Perils of Studium and Otium in English Renaissance Intellectual Culture,” investigates the ways in which the temptations posed by intellectual labor were conceptualized and navigated by English Renaissance humanists. The competition pitting the vita activa against the vita contemplativa, which every age—including ours—must resolve anew, generated a spate of writings engaging with the mixed legacy of classical and medieval Christian attitudes towards the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake.

My first chapter traces the discourse of intellectual labor as leisure from the Aristotelian concept of schole through its transformations in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, Petrarch, and Erasmus. I discuss humanists’ attempts to draw upon traditions of monastic exemption and classical political exemption in order to add cachet and legibility to their “uselessness.” In doing so, I address the difficulties, both ideological and logistical, of integrating intellectual labor into an economic system.

Chapter 2 explores the creation of an intellectual realm defined against both the (masculinized) public sphere and the (feminized) domestic sphere in More’s Utopia. On one hand, the humanist who retreats into the intellectual realm runs the risk of opting out of his responsibilities as breadwinner of the oikos without providing any social utility; on the other hand, otium litteratum can be used to serve public as well as domestic interests. Luisa Sigea’s Duarum virginum colloquium de vita aulica et privata (Dialogue of Two Young Girls on Courtly Life and Private Life) treats the activa-contemplativa question from the female perspective; I read this document against the Dialogue of Counsel that takes place in book 1 of Utopia.

Chapter 3 on Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus focuses on what happens when the ends of learning are perverted for personal gain. I argue that the sin Marlowe is most interested in is Faustus's failure as a humanist; in both the production and consumption of knowledge, in the realms of both scholarly engagement and academic collegiality, Faustus is hobbled by his solipsism above all.

Chapter 4 examines the challenges that John Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis poses to the assumptions about the connective power of letters and learning that underpinned humanist conceptions of the respublica litteraria (Republic of Letters): relying too much on virtual communities for companionship runs the risk of devolving into solipsism. Milton finds a potential solution to this problem in the unlikeliest of places—Catholic Italy.

My discussion concludes with the archetypal example of the perils of intellectual labor—the Fall of Man story as depicted by Milton in Paradise Lost. Milton, extending the work of predecessors in the hexameral tradition such as Guillaume du Bartas and Francis Bacon, places intellectual life at the center of his Paradise; accordingly, his Adam and Eve struggle with the same issues that confounded contemporary humanists—questions of solitude vs. sociability, public good vs. private interest, embodied vs. virtual relationships, and, perhaps most important in Paradise Lost, the role of women in intellectual life. Not even in Paradise can Milton imagine a simple or straightforward resolution to these issues.