The sense of chance in the English Renaissance

The Sense of Chance in the English Renaissance considers certain poems by Wyatt, Marlowe, and Milton as actions and events in language that articulated, and in some cases stimulated, contradictions in the religious and ethical imperatives of early modern England. I focus in particular on the sense these poems make of "chance," which I map onto the broad discursive shift that occurs between Petrarch's aversive theorization of Fortuna in the mid fourteenth century and Pascal's conceptualization of probability in the late seventeenth century. I show the ways in which the ongoing encounter of humanism and Protestantism, with their competing descriptions of human potency (cf. Machiavelli) and providential supremacy (cf. Calvin), generated contradictory models for action, and suggest that as a consequence the question of causation in general and of chance in particular became marked as an area of urgent ethical pressure.;My argument seeks to expand the study of contingency in early modern England in two ways: first, by focusing on chance as such (and not on "fortune" or "accident" alone); and second, by theorizing the relevance of poetry writ large (i.e., not only drama) to such an investigation. Rather than ceding a conceptual monopoly to Aristotle's elimination of chance in his Metaphysics and his domestication of contingency in the Poetics, I turn to Aristotle's account of prudence in his Ethics and his Rhetoric, which, I show, offers a more supple relationship to chance that can enhance our sense of the ethical possibilities it held for early modern writers not only of drama, but of lyric and epic as well. My wager is that this expanded field of poetry is especially well suited to the work of giving shape to the apparent gap between the nunc stans God's-eye-view of providence and the palpable in situ experience of what Calvin derogates as "the reason of the flesh" (carnis ratio). Poetry in this sense, I suggest, can serve to interrogate, exacerbate, or sometimes negotiate and resolve the gap between human experience and the concepts to hand for describing it.;Following an introductory chapter, the dissertation is comprised of three author-centered chapters. Each chapter situates its poet in a conversation about contingency and works with a heuristic model for how poems handle chance. The first chapter shows Wyatt reaching past Petrarch's aversive Remedies for Fortune (a text Catherine of Aragon had asked him to translate) and replacing it with Plutarch's briskly prudential Quyete of Mynde, and considers this switch in relation to Machiavelli's radical revision of the prudential tradition. The poem, for Wyatt, is a device for testing this variety of advice and a means for finding "equipment for living" (in Kenneth Burke's phrase) adequate to the accidents and hazards of power and love. More aggressive in their engagement with the normal forms for handling chance, Marlowe's plays, by contrast, actively "perform the form of fortune" (as he puts it plainly in the prologue to Faustus). His interlocutors range from Calvin and Sidney to Aristotle and Longinus to Heraclitus and Saint Paul. Rather than control chance, I argue, Marlowe is interested in unleashing it, and shows us how a poem can be one tool, or toy, for the job. For Milton, finally, the poem is an experimental means for resolving the contradiction between providence and free will. This resolution depends on a decisive moment in Satan's crossing of Chaos in Book 2 of Paradise Lost, which, I argue, alludes to the atomic swerve that anchors Lucretius's account of free will. I situate this inarguable but also counterintuitive incursion of chance into Milton's providential narrative in relation to Hobbes (who says there's no such thing as chance) and Pascal (whose theory of probability devises new means for reconciling chance and faith). Milton's poem thus serves as the telos of the study, marking limits and signaling apertures in old and new ways of theorizing chance, and propelled in no small part by their inconcinnities.