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1 results

  • Chapter 18 - The Renaissance

  • from Part III - In the Name of Time
  • Edited by Sarah Parker, Loughborough University
  • Book:
    Michael Field in Context
    Published online:
    03 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025, pp 163-171

  • Summary

    Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper caught the new enthusiasm for Renaissance Italy among writers, artists, critics, and historians that was so prominent a feature of British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly influential was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which celebrates the multiple temporalities of the Renaissance, its reconciliation of pagan and Christian, and its capacious embrace of the ancient past and a dynamically conceived modernity. Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic lyrics Sight and Song (1892) is dominated by the Renaissance art that inspired the art and writing of many in the poets’ circle, including Pater himself, Ruskin, Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, the Berensons, Vernon Lee, Ricketts, Shannon, Beardsley, and Wilde. This chapter argues that it was these artists and writers, all drawn to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, who collectively established the most significant context for Michael Field’s creative engagement with the Renaissance.