ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter provides context for the subsequent chapters. The first section looks at medieval attitudes to self-love and to the Narcissus myth. The second traces from medieval to early modern times approaches to self-negation, including the mystical and the penitential, and the themes of contemptus mundi and vanitas, the latter demonstrating an intersection of the two themes of self-negation and self-love. The third section then explains how approaches to the Narcissus myth changed during the sixteenth century, and I suggest that a new, more psychological approach began to emerge in the second half of the sixteenth century. The final section uses the example of George Gascoigne to show how medieval ideas on self-negation and self-love persisted in the 1570s but were being reinterpreted and sometimes interrogated. Gascoigne the debt-ridden Elizabethan courtier shared in common with the impoverished scholar Stephen Gosson not only their financial insecurity but also the fact that both published translations of Pope Innocent III’s On the Misery of the Human Condition in 1576. These two thereby give a taste of some of the issues that arise in the book and show how the two themes of the book crossed social divides.
