Grasping Kairos at RSA Berlin 2015
One of the first initiatives of the Grasping Kairos network has been to organize a panel for the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting, held next March in Berlin. We’re very pleased that our panel submission “Seizing the Moment: Rethinking Occasio in Early Modern Literature and Culture” was selected to be part of the conference. Network member Marina Ansaldo and directors Kristine Johanson, Sarah Lewis, and Joanne Paul will participate in the panel; their respective papers use diverse lenses—from printers’ devices to Tudor political thought to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—to examine the significance of early modern occasio. Their titles and abstracts are below. Another network member, Simona Cohen, will also be presenting on the panel "Translatio as Key Renaissance Concept: a Reappraisal" and we've also included her abstract in what follows.
We hope to see some of you in Berlin!
Marina Ansaldo, ‘Fortuna, Occasio, and Early Modern Printers’ Devices’
The relationship between the Fortuna/Occasio of emblem books and early modern literary representations of Fortune has been discussed by a number of scholars, highlighting the influence of visual emblems of Fortune on contemporary drama and poetry. This paper explores the issue further by focusing on a less commonly noticed, but surprisingly popular, category of visual representations of Fortune: those appearing in contemporary printers’ marks. Not only does Fortune appear frequently both in the mottos and devices of a vast number of Renaissance printers, such as Lucantonio Fiorentino (fl. 1503-1520), Andreas Cratander (1490-1540) and Antoine Bertier (1627-1678); the markedly positive way in which the Fortuna-Occasio complex is represented here contrasts with the more nuanced nature of similar representations in emblem books and contemporary literature. This paper investigates such representations further, discussing how the printer’s choice of iconographical elements may inform our understanding of the early modern perception of the Fortune/Occasion topos.
Joanne Paul, ‘Att some time good is badd’: The Occasion in Late Renaissance Political Thought’
Recently, there has been a ‘temporal turn’ in the study of political thought, both historical and contemporary. This paper advances this new perspective by analysing the political implications of a certain kind of temporal thinking in the late English Renaissance. The Renaissance had renewed scholarly interest in the classical kairos or occasio, both in England and on the continent, most influentially by its use in the political writing of Machiavelli. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, the idea that politics was built around the right handling of the kairotic moment was deeply ingrained, prompting an understanding of the political as a separate realm of moral flexibility and expediency, which provided a temporal foundation to the modern development of sovereignty. Using the case study of Elizabethan England, this paper argues that our understanding of the political thought of the period cannot be understood without a thorough examination of the tradition of kairos.
Sarah Lewis, ‘‘A kind of pleasure follows’: delay and the moment of revenge’
Characters on the Jacobean stage confirm their identities as revengers when they seize the kairotic moment and take action against their enemies at precisely the right time. However, in this paper I will explore the ways in which inaction – periods of delay, or of waiting – are also foundational to these revengers’ identities. Would-be revengers fail to revenge for two reasons: either because they wait for too long and allow the moment of occasio to pass them by, or because they attempt to seize revenge before it is due. Choosing the right moment to act is thus dependent on the revenger’s ability to accept the correct period of inaction and the timely delay of their desires. In this paper, I will explore the temporal identities of those characters engaged with plots of revenge on the Jacobean stage to consider the ways in which the concepts of kairos and occasio are paradoxically dependent on temporalities of inaction and delay. Furthermore, I will consider the broader religious temporal contexts – particularly the rejection of kairos that is necessitated by the doctrine of Predestination – as foundational to the popularity of the revenger and their dual temporality on the Jacobean stage.
Kristine Johanson, 'Refusing Melancholy: Occasio as Mediator of Emotion on the Early Modern English Stage'
This paper engages both the temporal and affective turns that recent humanities scholarship has taken in its investigation of occasio’s role as a negotiator of emotion on the early modern English stage. In particular, it explores how melancholy is mediated on stage and what a rhetorical response grounded in occasio might suggest about early modern cultural attitudes towards melancholy as an emotion and its possible attenuation. To investigate such attitudes, I examine Shakespeare’s invocation of kairotic rhetoric in The First Part of the Contention and Richard II. In both plays, characters articulate a melancholic longing for a time past, and their respective auditors respond to that longing by advocating action by seizing the moment and abruptly refusing to participate in melancholy. Significantly, this paper claims that the lens of temporality can form a new mode of thinking about emotion in English Renaissance drama. Simona Cohen, "Transmission and Transformations of Time Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance translatio Propaganda"
Jacques Le Goff connected the concept of translatio imperii with the idea of linearity of time and history that was typical for the Middle Ages (Medieval Civilization Part II, Chapter VI, on "Time, eternity and history"). Modern scholarship, relating to the sources and media of translatio imperii et studii and its applications to the Renaissance, has concentrated on the transference of literary, philosophical and political texts, and on the transfer of learning first through Greek and Latin and then through vernacular translations. But the associated cultural and political concepts of translatio have consistently found expression in the visual arts of post-classical eras, for example, in literal visualizations of the transmission of learning, in depictions of Greek and Roman art reinterpreted in new allegorical and metaphoric contexts, in the application of imperial iconography to the image of the ruler, and in the adoption of imagery from classical history and mythology to demonstrate political power.
But how was the concept of linear time, inherent to the message of translatio, depicted in art? This presentation will demonstrate how the image of Kairos (opportune time or the propitious moment) and related temporal personifications replete with meanings, were transmitted from classical to medieval and Renaissance art. The Hellenistic concept of Kairos was applied in legal, political and rhetorical contexts, associated with assessment of the appropriate time, place and situation for an expedient or ethical course of action, virtues eventually attributed to the Renaissance ruler. In the process of transmission, the medieval image was variously recruited in ethical and didactic contexts, both religious and secular. These associations were adopted in Renaissance humanistic theory, political ideology and allegorical iconography. These concepts will be demonstrated in 16th century Italian art.
