Summary Of The Unfortunate Traveller By Christopher Nashe

5) Discuss one of the following ideas in Renaissance writing, with particular reference to one or two texts: excess; idleness; plain-speaking; spirituality.

Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) explores a Renaissance world that has spun on its axis and turned upside-down by the weight of corporeal excess, particularly the amassed fragments of the anatomised body. The text originates from an England gripped by the extremes of socio-political, religious and literal epidemic. The seismic change of the sixteenth-century witnessed Reformation schisms in the unified church, the decay of feudalistic social hierarchy, and the ideological contagion of radical Protestant malcontent. This produced an environment of latent hysteria over the disintegration of the authority that the whole Elizabethan belief system was built

The carnivalesque (Bakhtin 196-278) proliferates throughout the Elizabethan Renaissance as traditional proprieties fragment. Bakhtin’s trope, the ‘grotesque body’ (Bakhtin 303-368), relates political conflicts to human anatomy through degrading all that is abstract to physicalized fragmentary entities. The reductive state of fragmentation, reducing a whole into parts, when fused with excess as defined as: ‘beyond the usual or specified amount’ (‘Excess’) – poses a paradox. However, Patrick Grant considers that ‘Nashe uses his talent for dismembering [the body] as a means of creating it’ (Grant 8), and, to further this idea, Nashe actually fashions his text around the basic experience of human dissection. Jonathan Sawday outlines the Elizabethan Renaissance as ‘the culture of dissection’ (Sawday 2), pervasive in all forms of life. This assertion has its limitations in attributing an immensely diverse period to a sole medical subfield. Nevertheless, the text is abundant with the synecdochic language