Fumerton 1991

Fumerton, Patricia Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Introduction, A Still Life: Clock, Jewel, Orange

"My focuse is the trivial selfhood of the aristocracy in the English Renaissance: a sense of self, as we will see, that was supported and, indeed, constituted by bric-a-brac worlds of decorations, gifts, foodstuffs, small entertainments, and other particles of cultural wealth and show." (1)

"to study history as a broken confection or disjointed pile" (1)

"the past aestheticized itself. It was precisely the broken, disconnected, and 'detached' quality of historical fact that enabled the Renaissance to achieve an aesthetic understanding of itself as cultural artifact" (2)

"what would a total, wholly representative, or nonfragmentary reading of history and/or literature look like?" (11) -- impossible, undesirable

"In sum, that part of us that hearkens back to a continuous historical universe wishes to say, 'The King is dead; long live the King.' But continuity, I would argue, is not history as Charles lived it or as our own scholarship has most recently tried to understand it in breaking with traditional intellectual history. As epitomized in my story of Charles's life and death, history can also be perceived as truncation. AS every moment, history is the interregnum felt within the continuum." (12)

"it is not the case that the breakaway moments in history that have always been the great motivators of new historical methods inhere only in such loud political events as interregnum or civil war. Rather, the moment of fragmentary history I seek to elucidate saturates cultural and literary history even in its quietest and smallest events.

"history as truncation or fissure" (13)

"I create a mosaic or collage of broken history from passages and events that are often themselves about the broken, the detached, or the trivial. And I use my collage to model history as brokenness rather than to reach back to some impossibly whole scene in the background." (18)