INWARDNESS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE

This paper presents some historical, cultural and literary elements which are essential to understand the emergence of inwardness from the Middle Ages onwards. It discusses that Shakespeare did not invent inwardness or subjectivity by himself as Bloom and Fineman propose in their works. Rather, he developed a mimesis of inwardness specifically in the drama and that was his greatest innovation in literature. Beforehand, it is necessary to exemplify the emergence of inwardness in mediaeval writings, especially in Augustine’s Confessions and in Dante’s Vita Nuova. Thus, the analysis by Harrison in his book The Body of Beatrice (1988) is helpful to understand such process. He analyses Dante’s Vita Nuova and demonstrates that Dante represented sensual inwardness in his work. Also, it is worth discussing some ideas in Montaigne’s Essays and how he depicted inward feelings, sensations, thoughts and anxieties in his work. Shakespeare introduced the mimesis of inwardness in his drama in an on-going process of the development of inwardness.