Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions

Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare, by Ronald Levao, explores how three pivotal figures of the Renaissance—Nicholas of Cusa, Sir Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare—grappled with the power and limits of human invention. Levao situates their works in a cultural moment when traditional frameworks of meaning were under strain from religious upheaval, scientific speculation, and expanding horizons of time and space. What emerges is a portrait of the Renaissance imagination as both audacious and unsettled, alive to the creative energies of fiction-making yet haunted by doubts about its legitimacy and consequences. Moving from Cusanus’s speculative theology, with its bold emphasis on conjecture, to Sidney’s poetics of fiction in the Apology for Poetry, Astrophil and Stella, and the Arcadias, and finally to Shakespeare’s history plays and Hamlet, Levao traces a progression in the ways Renaissance writers confronted the instability of their world. Each case study highlights how invention could illuminate, console, and delight, but also mislead, deceive, and unsettle. Through detailed readings that interweave philosophy, criticism, and drama, Levao shows how Renaissance texts not only reflected their culture’s fissures but also enacted them, creating works that reinforce tradition even as they subvert it. Rich in literary and intellectual history, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions demonstrates how three distinct voices converge in their exploration of human feigning—whether as fiction, conjecture, or theatrical artifice—and reveals the tensions that animate some of the era’s most brilliant achievements. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.