Renaissance Error: Digression from Ariosto to Milton

Abstract

Renaissance Error proposes that the formal key to early modern literature is digression. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers compose works that persistently imitate moral and cognitive wandering, often in an attempt to remedy such wandering. Their powerful sense of human error springs from the humanist and reformist view of the Middle Ages as a gigantic detour from classical civilisation and from the apostolic Church. This sense deepens as the intellectual disciplines and religious paths of the Renaissance divide. And it culminates in a radical picture of all human desire, thought, and history as continually digressive from beginning to end.