ABSTRACT
Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare was one of the first examples of the methodology which he later named new historicism. The chief intellectual and linguistic tool in this creation was rhetoric, which held the central place in the humanist education to which most gentlemen were at least exposed. One of the most penetrating Renaissance studies of this feigning and indeed of the whole mentality of the courtier is Philibert de Vienne's brilliant mock encomium, The Philosopher of the Court. If all of civilization rests, as Freud argues, upon repression, nevertheless the particular civilization people produce and inhabit rests upon a complex technology of control whose origins we trace back to the Renaissance. In the Bower of Bliss, Guyon's 'stubborne brest gan secret pleasaunce to embrace', and he does not merely depart from the place of temptation but reduces it to ruins.
