ABSTRACT
The impact of humanism on political thought, on educational ideals and the invigoration of classical learning and on perceptions of individuality are all generally considered to have infiltrated English thought and practices towards the later fifteenth century at the level of royalty, nobility, and university. Canonical English writers as early as Chaucer and his successor, Hoccleve, have also been identified with the humanistic interests of Italian writers both through their own modes of expression and in their translations of these European and classical greats. There is no denying that Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning is an important book and the excitement, positive and negative, generated amongst reviewers during the 1980s is testimony to this. Greenblatt's subjects are all very well–known figures whose lives generated large quantities of text. The material selected for use in each chapter is therefore a 'small group of texts' from the surviving mass.
