2-1-Q Chapter 10
LIL 120 A – Fall 2024
Professor Cripps
2 – Offer 2 Specific Details from the chapter. For each ID/quote add 3-8 sentences of your own explanation.
Page 225, para 2: “what mattered was not adherence but mobility…”: In this excerpt, Greenblatt focuses on the significance of mobility in the context of intellectual and cultural transmission. He contrasts adherences, which implies conformity or inaction, with mobility, a concept central to the rebirth and spreading of ideas–emphasizing how ancient works like On the Nature of Things, were rediscovered and reintroduced into society. In this sense, I see mobility as not just physical but intellectual, as Greenblatt discusses the circulation of ideas, doubts and dangerous thoughts to challenge the established worldviews. Greenblatt’s language–”daydreams”, “half-formed speculations” –suggest that suppressed ideas, once dormant, have the potential to spark intellectual revolutions once they regain freedom of movement. Which makes it crucial to the progress of knowledge, as it allows ideas to escape confinement, spread and evolve–the whole basis of this book and how these precedents evolve into the Renaissance and modernity.
Page 232, para 3: “By the standards of More’s age, the Utopians are amazingly tolerant…”: I found this part of the Chapter humorous and ironic. Greenblatt share’s the Utopian way of the world: their permittance to worshiping any god, the allowance of their own beliefs…except for the belief that the soul will disintegrate at death along with the body. The Utopian society drives away those who believe such things, ironically. Here is a society that says, “come, join us, and believe what you want to, except this and this, and stop yourself from doing too much of what you please…”; a society that fears moral anarchy, but preaches the allowance of individuality; a governance that finds ideal in tolerance, but a practical need for control–just like the Catholic Church. And just like the Catholic Church, I’ve found that even imagined Utopias rely on fear as a tool to maintain order.
1 – Make 1 Connection to Self, to World, or to Text – or Extended by offering a little detail about something mentioned in the text (some light research needed to Extend)
Connection to Text: Bruno’s childhood readings of On the Immense and the Numberless–a poem modeled on Lucretius. Brunno uses this poem to explore his own beliefs to guide his life. This paragraph, and the entirety of the book in general, led me to the article “The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem. Like Lethem describes in this article, Bruno has succumbed to the plagiarist way of taking a piece of work and having it influence your own thought and work–though unlike Lethem I believe the term “plagiarism” to be unconventional in this context. However, I do agree with the idea that much of writing or art tends to be modeled after a piece that preceded it, and find it to be true throughout this novel–the evolution of the Renaissance from novels and poems written centuries before, and how you can spot the parallels between modernity and events/ideas/movements that took place in Poggio’s time period…
Q – Give us a Good Question to chew on – 1-3 sentences
Take into consideration the governance of imagined utopias, where it is often predicated on the assumption that fear is essential for social cohesion. In excluding non-believers, utopians are reinforcing the idea that society order depends on belief in a higher power. Can a society truly be tolerant if it marginalizes those who do not share its fundamental beliefs? Is fear of divine or state-imposed consequences necessary to ensure that citizens behave morally?
