Essaying the Essay: Wrapping up the Renaissance & Reformation

As we conclude this unit on the Renaissance and Reformation within this Rhetoric & Civilization course, I'd like my students to return to the essay form -- not the college essay form with its overt structure of argument and support, but the essay form as first practiced by Michel de Montaigne: exploratory, informed, and conveyed with a sense of personal reflection and style.

We just had a classroom activity, a "salon" where, in small groups, the students practiced sprezzatura -- spirited and witty conversation informed by the historical figures, texts, and concepts we've studied in this period. I want their written essay to be something of an extension of this lively dialogue. In short, I'm hoping that in about 500 words each student can demonstrate 1) knowledge of specific concepts, people, events, and texts of the Renaissance and reformation; and 2) ability to meaningfully explore such ideas within the genre of the Renaissance "essay." In that spirit, they are to essayer ("try" or "prove") their ideas as those ideas bump into one another, and as they play off of people and ideas.

A simple formula:

1. Begin with a quotation
   This can be quoting a fellow student from the salon exercise, or quoting a representative text from the period.
2. Test and debate its ideas
   Restate, expand upon, and possibly take issue with that quotation. Use this as a jumping off point and begin linking it to key themes from the period.
3. Make it personal
   As you reflect on the history and the themes from this period, find a way to bring in your personal history. Also, make it personal by your style. 

Do not report on the salon event, nor simply register a few opinions about texts or concepts we've covered. Instead, demonstrate that you understand the humanist practice of using writing to reflect upon others' ideas and develop one's own. Wax philosophical and allow yourself to move in an associative way through ideas (like a conversation) but also show that you can bring some reflection and rigor to your written thought. I will be looking for the following:

• Does the essay addresses key themes? -- but not by going down a list. These should come out organically. Not all themes need to be represented, but those that are should be connected.
• Does the author refer to specific texts, people, and events from the period? 
• Does the author raise the topic of rhetoric / communication?
• Does the author responds to / refer to other students (from their blog posts or from our classroom instruction or recent salon exercise)?
• Does the essay demonstrate an understanding of the Renaissance essay form? 
• Ideas are engaged but not conclusive; exploratory and provocative, but not definitive; more about raising a question well rather than settling an issue.
• The essay isn't just about ideas; its style and approach give us a sense of the life and personality of the author

EXAMPLE

This is just under 500 words, so about the right length.

Sizing Up Style

"Le style, c'est l'homme même" ("Style is the man")  

So said Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in the 18th century. He might as well have been a spokesman for Renaissance humanists, however, who equally valued the role of style and worked ceaselessly to perfect their own. I try to imagine what it must have been like for students who pored over the De copia of Erasmus -- first trying out this Latin phrase and then another as they learned variation in how to express the same thought. Would such imitation lead to more originality or less? How much do we become ourselves in the act of trying to be someone else? 

I observed my students -- some of them -- showing off for one another in a classroom exercise. Did Joseph really just compare the whole period to a Centaur? I'd as much as invited them to do such performing as part of Renaissance sprezzatura. Have I hurt their education by asking them to feign intelligence through superficial social wit? In a period partly dominated by the concept of a return to the sources of ideas -- to grounding things in better thought, better texts,  better intellectual discipline -- I may have unwittingly embroiled them in a contradiction: we come into our own by acting or pretending. I'm not sure Plato or Socrates would be proud. And all of those serious Reformers of the day -- well, I can imagine their displeasure at the superficial court culture as demonstrated by the characters in Castiglione's Courtier. 

"The play's the thing," says Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but the type of playing that takes place in the metaphorical theater of day-to-day life, is this also the thing? Or is it more deception, misdirection? 

When I was younger I played Billy Bigelow, the troubling protagonist in the musical Carousel. At 13 I was too young to reflect on concepts like misogyny, and I simply found myself imitating some of the worst behaviors of men toward women before I had even emerged from puberty. People noticed. Chief among these was my mother. She was not very keen on my new character, rubbing off on me from play practice, where I was brash and manly in a not-so-respectable fashion. 

But Billy Bigelow was someone I sloughed off. He didn't fit me. I tried this style of character and it didn't connect with me. Perhaps, though, it taught me who I was by contrast. We learn more perhaps by way of contrasts than by direct identification. And there is the safety in imitation. We know ourselves, our style, in a series of approximations -- almost as though finding ourselves through echolocation, like a bat. First this formation and then that sends back its configuration to us, and we then fly closer or further as seems fit.