Historicizing Renaissance selfhood: Poggio Bracciolini's practice of self -representation.

摘要

Ever since Jacob Burckhardt, among Renaissance students, the theme of "the discovery of the individual" has been one of the most contentious issues as the pivotal ground for political and social interactions between Renaissance individuals and society. Unlike prevalent studies which have focused on the perfunctory opposition between individual and corporate, this dissertation examines how the Renaissance constructed a new sense of "selfhood." Particularly, in order to "historicize" the problem of the self without having recourse to "essentialism" or socio-cultural "determinism," this study concerns itself with one's discursive relation to social worlds, by conceptualizing selfhood as the nexus between the individual and outer worlds. Methodologically, this study adopts a new textual approach that draws special attention to the process of textual representing, rather than traditional approaches, which have been devoted to revealing the meaning of the contents embodied in any text. This new reading of a text, by considering author, text, and society as an inseparable continuum, enables us to gain access to the discursive textual interpretive process, in which an author conceives of himself as the object of his perceptive scheme.;In light of the above perspective, the novelty of Renaissance selfhood, which Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian humanist of the early Ouattrocento, manifested, lies in an individual's "objectification" of his self. For elucidating this point, the present study begins with the discussion of Poggio's ontological philosophy as the epistemological ground for his self-fashioning, and then, explores his figurative, literary self-representation construed in his relation to outer worlds. The final chapter compares Poggio's self-fashioning with that of his younger contemporary, Leon Battista Alberti. As a cultural and intellectual history, the dissertation claims that in Quattrocento Italy, significant socio-political and intellectual changes, ultimately controlling one's self-fashioning, took place, and Poggio's new sense of selfhood testifies to these changes, by revealing the specific way of self-making in which Poggio constructed his self-image within the context of his socio-cultural relations, based on his keen awareness of the double-ness of a self both as a subject and an object.