An Age in Love with Wonders: The Philosophical Context of Renaissance Literature

Abstract

This article offers a sketch of certain currents of Renaissance philosophy, and of the ways in which they infuse the work of Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. It uncovers a striking disparity between Renaissance constructions of philosophy and science and those prevalent today. This dissonance represents a challenge to theories of knowledge and accounts of the historical conditions of the emergence of philosophical worldviews. The central question is that of how to articulate Renaissance thought from the standpoint of today's philosophical sensibility, and of how literature can contribute to this task. In their different ways, both philosophy and literature function as arenas in which the very structure of reality is contested, and the goal is to furnish a dialogue between the two which could contribute to the history of ideas.