Renaissance Studies and Cultural Studies: the two names share a term, "studies," that for those in literary fields immediately signals a difference from the word "literature." Studies in these contexts means to some of us a certain distance from literature, capital L, insofar as: 1) the object of study is concerned (the object now being a text rather than a literary work); and 2) insofar as the disciplinary approach is concerned (studies signals a desire for or a will to interdisciplinarity, normally in these contexts, a bricolage of literary methods, anthropology, history, perhaps sociology¼). When I was receiving my degree in a newly instituted graduate program called Renaissance Studies, "studies" meant that the object of knowledge was "culture" as a whole, but culture still nevertheless understood as high or elite culture: art, literature, history, music, philosophy, and science of what was then still usually called the Renaissance. "Studies" in that context also meant that students were to learn a variety of disciplinary techniques: history, music theory, philosophy, paleography, philology, linguistics, literary interpretation. Renaissance Studies thus constituted itself as an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of the (high) culture of the Renaissance (which then meant Europe—Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands--between 1350 and 1750, approximately). In this regard one might say that Renaissance studies was always already cultural studies, if we make that "c" a lower case rather than an upper case "c." It was said back then that one had to know everything about the Renaissance (in all of Europe) to know anything about any one part of it, and so even if one’s discipline were Renaissance literature, the "studies" part of it was strongly implied or assumed.

This is of course a very different conception of "studies" and of "culture" from what now goes by the term Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies with a capital "c" has come to the United States as a discipline in and of itself already, primarily from the United Kingdom, specifically the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham during the years that Stuart Hall, a Black British Marxist sociologist was there. Cultural studies in this sense carries a similar interdisciplinary thrust: it involves the use of methodologies from sociology, anthropology, literature, history, media studies, philosophy, etc. but its object, "culture," means something quite different from the term used to describe Renaissance "culture." It means, as the British Marxist and critic Raymond Williams argued, "a whole way of life," that is: ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, structures of power; and a whole range of cultural practices, usually thought of as "popular" rather than elite—everyday practices, in other words--cultural practices that came to be understood as "texts" to be read (interpreted): commodities, musical forms, mass mediated images, representations of all sorts, etc. What has also been called "material culture," in other words. It aims precisely to delegitimize the notion of "high culture," the notion that is that there is a hierarchy of cultural forms (low to high) and that only high art merits canonization, notions to which a field as "elite" as Renaissance Studies has in fact devoted itself. Furthermore, Cultural Studies did not understand itself as a politically neutral endeavor: it grew out of the enterprise of educating working class people with a commitment to the political applications of knowledge and criticism, and it shared what might be called Marxist or post-Marxist goals of empowering people to understand and overthrow the oppressive conditions of their material and ideological existence. Thus part of the Cultural Studies tradition involved the work of Marxist theorists of ideology (because ideology was the domain of culture) such as Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and later Frantz Fanon.

This last remark, that Cultural Studies has been characterized by a political positionality, makes explicit what remains implicit in Renaissance Studies, which is that it too has a politics. Post World War II Renaissance Studies in Europe and the United States might be said broadly to maintain a cold war ideology (nothing behind the iron curtain gets studied, because it is seen as backward, anti-Humanist, caught in a totalitarian grip) and a liberal ideology in the sense that Humanism is always the hero of the story, and Humanism is characterized as the liberal democratic ideal of the free individual who acts upon the world unfettered from the restraints of narrow political concerns in celebration of the pinnacle of human achievement—culture or art. Renaissance Studies has also traditionally adopted the liberal enlightenment model of progress that views the world as improving gradually over time with the aid of modernization, representative democracy, and liberal capitalism. Thus, unlike Cultural Studies, Renaissance Studies does not aim to change the world in major ways, but only to suggest improvements in what is a reasonably good though at times flawed model for human existence. Finally, and perhaps importantly, Renaissance Studies, as a discipline and an institution, has not seen itself as ideological at all; on the contrary, and unlike Cultural Studies and other recent disciplines that have arisen from the struggles of identity politics in the United States, such as Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies, it is a discipline that has eschewed this notion of the political. It values instead the ability to transcend politics. Its politics thus have remained latent or implicit, rather than explicit.

There are other points of disparity and convergence between these two fields, approaches, or disciplines if you will, besides the ones I have mentioned thus far (a) object of study; and b) approach). To focus on the first part of the term, Renaissance, which as I said originally designated a specific period in Western European history, it is obvious that when we speak of this time period we are speaking of a time that we generally consider pre- or early modern, not conceptualized in other words as wholly capitalist (although of course there are debates about when capitalism begins and how extensive it is thought to be by this time), or as industrial, or as primarily urban. Cultural Studies focuses instead mostly on capitalist post-industrial societies and targets primarily urban culture.

To speak of convergences, the most important in my experience has been the presence of English scholars who themselves shared the cultural materialist values of Cultural Studies but who were scholars of the English Renaissance. These scholars’ work became known and circulated in the United States around the same time that British Cultural Studies was also gaining currency at conferences and universities in the U.S. Thus the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, to mention a few, brought the notion of cultural studies to bear on what had come to be called, no longer Renaissance, but early modern studies. Several things are of note in this development. First of all, these cultural materialists, which is what they called themselves, incorporated not only the Marxist and post-Marxist insights of British Cultural Studies, but also some of the critiques that had been launched in its direction by feminists and gays and lesbians. Thus this form of early modern English cultural materialism also included feminist theory and criticism and sexuality studies in its analytical and political approaches, connecting with the rise of feminist theory and criticism in English departments in the United States (and actually anticipating and helping to inaugurate what would come to be called Queer Theory, whose literary proliferation was intimately connected to English Renaissance studies).

Another thing to note is that the term "early modern" began to take precedence over the term Renaissance, in an attempt to deconstruct the ideology/concept represented by that term: whereas Renaissance designated a rebirth (in arts, letters, science, music, in short, high culture), critics pointed out that the period could not be said to be a "rebirth" for everyone and everything. This was perhaps most famously formulated by the feminist historian Joan Kelly, who in her essay, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?," critiqued the Burkhardtian category of the Renaissance as it applied—or rather did not apply—to women during this period. In addition, the term "early modern" attempted to displace the values of Humanism conveyed by the term Renaissance, the dominance in other words of a Eurocentric, masculinist, elite historical and cultural world-view. Early Modern brought Renaissance Studies and Cultural Studies closer together, finally, by opening up the domain of culture to include everyday practices and ways of life rather than the high artistic forms signaled by that term Renaissance. As it turns out, in practice, early modern has not successfully ideologically and institutionally displaced the term Renaissance, or perhaps the Renaissance has undergone a renaissance even as the national political climate in the United States during the decades of which I speak has undergone a right-leaning turn. Instead, the two terms seem to be used interchangeably, with people resorting to Renaissance when their audience fails to understand what, when and where they mean by "early modern." Nor has early modern successfully displaced the Eurocentric focus of Renaissance Studies, which continues to suffer from its institutional origin as a term that supposedly designates a period in European history. Finally, "early modern" as a term still situates itself in a traditional temporal trajectory—a progress narrative—from the primitive to the modern, relegating the Middle Ages to the position of the primitive against which the modern defines itself.

As you will have noticed from my phrasing, the early modern cultural materialists to whom I referred were mostly, if not exclusively, scholars of English; and they were also literary scholars. The U.S. history of the dissemination and institutionalization of early modern cultural studies looks for the most part like a post-colonial narrative: how the post-colony freed itself from a certain hegemony of high cultural periodization and, using the tools it acquired from the metropole, turned its critical gaze back upon the empire to dismantle its canon. The transatlantic migration of English early modern cultural studies also coincided with what came to be called the New Historicism among English Renaissance scholars, a development sometimes attributed to Stephen Greenblatt (and the Berkeley journal Representations) that also used cultural materialist techniques, a Foucauldian focus on disciplinary regimes of power/knowledge, and a combination of historical and literary interdisciplinarity. This particular version of New Historicism resembled cultural materialism. Some of the debates about power and ideology, the role of the state, and the relation of cultural production to hegemonic regimes, for example, were similar: what Stuart Hall identified as kinds of meaning that could be articulated from texts (oppositional, negotiated, dominant) sometimes took the form of New Historicist debates about "subversion" versus "containment": whether the text or a reading contributed to the subversion of dominant ideology or, by articulating oppositionality, allowed for a containment of that very subversion. In addition, like cultural materialism, the New Historicism also focused on non-traditional objects of study within Renaissance Studies, namely power and the forms that it took in early modern colonialism. But true to its US origins, New Historicism—at least in its Greenblattian form--seemed more liberal than Marxist in orientation. In any case, early modern cultural materialism came to be associated primarily with English departments and with English Renaissance literature in part because of the hegemony enjoyed by the New Historicism in English departments in the 1980s.

Continental early modern studies converges with Cultural Studies via a different route: much of what influenced literary cultural studies of early modern France and Italy, for example, came from French social historians associated with the Annales school, from medievalists such as Lucien Febvre, Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jacques Le Goff, among others. Thus before U.S. scholars of French literature began to think of themselves as cultural materialists, French social historians were practicing a social historical approach to culture that was materialist and popular. Here the perspective was "premodern" from the start: in France of course, the Middle Ages has a lot more currency as a period than it does in the U.S.; it also has more currency than the sixteenth century (even its designation as sixteenth century, rather than Le Moyen âge, suggests its more restricted scope), which is not the case, I suspect, for the Renaissance in England. Ferdinand Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie, among others, contributed significantly to the new social historical approaches adopted by U.S. literary and historical scholars of early modern France and Italy, which up until recently continued to be more influenced by French Marxist philosophy and poststructuralist literary theory than their English counterparts. Indeed, some of the most renowned practitioners of what I would call early modern French and Italian cultural studies are historians: Natalie Zemon Davis, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Guido Ruggiero, etc. And although continental early modernists apply many of the techniques or approaches associated with the New Historicism, fewer, if any, polemics seemed to have accompanied this move. Rather, in the case of continental early modern studies, we might say that it is the historians who have "borrowed" the techniques of literature, rather than the other way around, by making greater conscious use of narrative and narrative techniques in the writing of history. Occasionally, French scholars from France working in the United States have lamented a turn of events that Antoine Compagnon once called "the Durasification of French Studies," (Stanford French Studies), though that seemed more of an attack on feminism in U.S. French studies than on cultural studies per se. All in all, there is less at stake in French Studies, for the United States, than there is in English.

Early modern cultural studies in both French and English have also been deeply influenced by their Spanish counterparts and the focus in Spanish and Latin American Studies on racialization and on the conquest. The post-colonial theoretical work of scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Saïd has been particularly important in this area. English Renaissance scholars from Peter Hulme to Greenblatt to Louis Montrose to Jonathan Goldberg, as well as French early modernists such as Frank Lestringant and Michel De Certeau, have made use of postcolonial theory and cultural studies to examine pre- and protocolonial "encounters" in early modern Europe and the Americas. Thus, although early modern studies remains primarily European in focus, it has incorporated, again through the example of Spanish and Latin American Studies, a notion of the hybridity or racial and ethnic mixed-ness of what was "Europe" and an attention to Europe’s "encounters" with cultural alterity. Early modern studies has thus also begun to take greater account of the genealogies and histories of race and racialization.

One of the things I find lacking, both in Renaissance Studies and in Cultural Studies to date, is sufficient attention to the question of subjectivity and its historicization. Psychoanalysis is the discipline and method most closely associated with the description and analysis of subjectivity, yet resistance to psychoanalytic approaches seems strong within both of these disciplines. The resistance most often seems to be accompanied by the charge that psychoanalysis is: a) anachronistic with regard to early modernity; b) excessively historically specific (or, to put it ungenerously, classist and Eurocentric) to have any kind of general applicability; c) delusional with respect to its object of study (there is no unconscious). I argue for the possibility of a "psychoanalytics" of early modern subjectivities and look forward to the time when more practitioners of early modern cultural studies seek to historicize psychoanalysis rather than repudiate it. Recent work in the area of sexuality studies—a particularly burgeoning area of early modern cultural studies both in English and continental fields—moves in this direction.

The most recent institutional development in Italian and French has been a move from "literature" to "studies": with the rapid decline of students interested in studying Italian and French literature, departments have sought to consolidate enrollments by offering interdisciplinary "cultural studies" programs in these areas. Thus, although in general I have been speaking as though Cultural Studies were a welcome arrival in the domain of early modern literary studies, some of the forms that its institutionalization are taking may be responding to less cheerful intellectual developments and more practical material necessities within institutions of higher learning. This latter concern is one I am interested in highlighting for the enterprise of Cultural Studies in the United States as a whole: no intellectual trend occurs in isolation from its institutional and historical context, and it is important to see the ways in which moves to Cultural Studies programs in colleges and universities may not be altogether progressive or innovative developments. As interest in the Humanities in the United States declines, many academic administrations have been eager to capitalize on the trend toward Cultural Studies as a means of reducing the number of departments and so too faculty that they need to employ in order to provide students with a Humanities course of study. Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity thus can at times mean downsizing, and so it is to my mind important to be aware of the strategic deployment of these terms. By the same token, I have noticed that the resurgence of the term Renaissance is sometimes accompanied by narratives that argue the strategic necessity of recuperating traditionally valued categories to preserve endangered pre- and early modern species in a presentist postmodern academic landscape (this may be more true here in California than elsewhere in the country). This too is a development to be resisted. Indeed, perhaps we can use our cultural studies’ orientation to practice a kind of ideology critique on the kinds of intellectual trends I have been discussing so as not to consider them as texts in isolation but as specific cultural practices within a network of economic, political and cultural institutions, subject to multiple and contradictory ideological articulations and deployments.

Finally, in my opinion, one of the greatest challenges for early modern cultural studies now and in the future is to let go of the fetish of periodization that makes of the so-called Renaissance a distinctive and unique bounded moment in historical time, "the time when ¼" As Michel de Certeau points out, every historical scholar attributes to his or her period the "beginning" or "end" of something, and yet these beginnings and endings are somewhat arbitrary, having more to do with the perspective of the researcher than the moment in time itself. But Renaissance Studies has made a veritable industry out of itself as the "beginning" or "end" of something: secularism, Humanism, modernity, capitalism, the liberal arts, community, intolerance, superstition, etc. Troubling the fetish of periodization will enable "early modernity" to become a more capacious category, allowing not for the study of Euromodernity’s "birth" or "rebirth," but for the study of early modern world cultures and global geopolitical formations that displace the centrality of European modernity in world history and produce multiple and proliferating genealogies for a modernity that also includes the United States.