Stephen Greenblatt was born on November 7, 1943, in Newton, Massachusetts, into a Jewish family with Litvak roots. His grandparents had emigrated from Lithuania in the 1890s to escape Czarist conscription. He grew up secular, but that heritage of displacement and cultural negotiation runs quietly beneath his lifelong preoccupation with how people construct identity under pressure from larger forces. Newton was comfortable, middle-class, assimilationist. Harvard Yard was visible on the horizon. He arrived at Yale for his undergraduate degree in 1960.
At Yale he trained inside New Criticism, the dominant mode of the postwar American academy. New Criticism treated literary texts as sealed aesthetic objects, complete in themselves, requiring no context beyond the words on the page. It rewarded close readers who could parse tension, irony, and ambiguity. Greenblatt was good at it. His undergraduate thesis on modern satirists, Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley, was published as his first book in 1965, before he had completed his graduate work. Then came a Fulbright year at Cambridge that changed the terms of his thinking. Raymond Williams was there, pressing the case that culture was not a set of great texts floating above history but a material field shaped by class, labor, and social struggle. Greenblatt absorbed the argument. When he returned to Yale for his doctorate, finished in 1969, his dissertation on Sir Walter Raleigh already showed the new interest: not the text as object, but the self as performance, identity as something constructed in negotiation with power.
He arrived at Berkeley the same year. He would stay nearly three decades. The intellectual atmosphere at Berkeley in the 1970s and early 1980s was unlike anything in American literary studies. Michel Foucault’s analyses of power, knowledge, and discourse were filtering in from France. Clifford Geertz was arguing in anthropology that culture was a text to be read, dense with locally specific meaning, accessible only through what he called thick description. Williams offered cultural materialism. Greenblatt’s achievement was translation. He took those European and anthropological frameworks and rendered them usable inside American graduate training. He turned abstraction into a method. The method had a name after 1980, when he published Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.
That book is the founding document of New Historicism. Greenblatt argued that early modern individuals did not simply have identities. They fashioned them, in tense negotiation with the authorities, the church, the state, the family, that surrounded them. Literary texts were not separate from that process. They were sites where orthodox and subversive energies met and struggled. The book’s scope ran from Thomas More to Edmund Spenser to Christopher Marlowe to Shakespeare. Its method was the anecdote, the vivid archival fragment that grounds interpretation in something concrete and strange, what Greenblatt would later call “the touch of the real.” Reading it now, one notices both its intellectual energy and its strategic intelligence. The method was designed to be irresistible to a graduate student. It rewarded archival work, theoretical fluency, and narrative skill simultaneously. You could be rigorous and you could tell a story.
In 1982 he coined the term New Historicism almost in passing, in an introduction to a special issue of a journal. The same year he co-founded Representations with colleagues at Berkeley. That journal was the key institutional move. To publish in Representations was to be inside the new paradigm. To remain outside it was to look dated. Greenblatt preferred the label “cultural poetics” to “New Historicism,” which he found too rigid. That preference was strategically intelligent. A doctrine that refuses to fully stabilize is hard to attack. New Criticism had hardened into a set of principles that rivals could target and dismantle. New Historicism stayed fluid. It could absorb feminist criticism, Marxist readings, postcolonial analysis, and present all of it as consistent with its core practice of reading texts within the “circulation of social energy.” That phrase is worth pausing over. It says enough to sound like a theory. It leaves enough undefined to accommodate almost anything.
By the late 1980s, New Historicism dominated hiring in English departments. Greenblatt trained graduate students who took positions at major research universities and trained their own graduate students in the same approach. The pipeline reinforced. His move to Harvard in 1997, and his appointment as John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000, ratified what was already true. He had won. He was not simply a distinguished scholar at the most prestigious address in American higher education. He was the center of gravity for a whole way of doing literary work.
The Norton appointments made the infrastructure visible. Greenblatt became general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and a shaping presence in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Anthologies define what undergraduates read. What undergraduates read shapes what graduate students think matters. What graduate students think matters determines what junior scholars write about, where they publish, and who hires them. Control the syllabus and you influence the field without winning every argument. It is downstream power of a very durable kind.
His books after the Berkeley years widened his audience while staying true to the New Historicist impulse. Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) traced the ghost in Shakespeare against the Reformation’s suppression of Catholic belief about the afterlife. Will in the World (2004) became a bestseller, a speculative biography that placed Shakespeare inside the anxieties and opportunities of Elizabethan England. Greenblatt used the phrase “might have” deliberately and often. He constructed a life from cultural fragments, anecdotes, and educated inference. Critics noted the speculation. He had the prestige to sustain the method. A junior scholar attempting the same moves would have been dismissed. He changed the rules of the genre because he could.
The Swerve (2011) was the pivot into mass prestige. It followed Poggio Bracciolini’s 1417 rediscovery of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and argued that this materialist, Epicurean poem helped spark the Renaissance and, ultimately, modernity. The argument drew scholarly criticism, some of it sharp, for oversimplifying the history of ideas. It also won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. That combination of mass recognition and academic position insulates against disciplinary shifts. Even if theory falls out of fashion inside English departments, the broader educated public knows his name.
The standard critique of New Historicism is that it flattens aesthetic judgment into power analysis. Everything becomes circulation, negotiation, subversion, containment. The cost is evaluative clarity. You cannot easily say, inside the New Historicist framework, that one text is better than another. Greenblatt has never shown much interest in that problem. From the perspective of alliance building, the indifference is functional. Strong claims about literary greatness generate conflict. Soft claims about cultural negotiation allow coexistence. The method traded sharpness for scalability, and it scaled.
What New Historicism also built, and this is the harder point to see, is a containment loop for the critic. The method allows you to find subversion in any text. It then allows you to argue that power anticipated that subversion. The critic appears radical. He remains safe inside the institution. The loop offers the thrill of rebellion without the risk. No evidence breaks it, because the method can always argue that even apparent counterexamples are effects of power. This is not a flaw that Greenblatt invented. It is a structural feature of much academic theory after Foucault. But he refined it into a livable professional practice.
By the 2000s, New Historicism stopped feeling like a movement and started feeling like background method. Its core moves had been absorbed into standard practice. That is what success looks like at the end stage. The paradigm wins so thoroughly that it disappears. Greenblatt survived that absorption by shifting genres rather than defending the old paradigm. He moved from the scholarly monograph to the speculative biography to the trade book, each move expanding his audience and his prestige base while leaving the internal academic consensus to settle without him.
He is now 82 and still teaching and writing. Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival appeared in 2025, a biography of Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe is an interesting final choice. He was the rival who did not manage his social energy well enough to survive. He died young, in a tavern, under circumstances that remain disputed. Shakespeare worked the system and lived. Greenblatt has spent his career studying exactly that difference.
Speaking with the Dead: Stephen Greenblatt and the Sacred Value of Wonder
Harry J. Greenblatt died at 86, a Boston lawyer who had spent decades inside one story. The story had a villain, a cousin named Joseph H. Greenblatt who set up shop in the same building and started calling himself J. Harry Greenblatt, close enough to skim clients off a man’s name. For years the father told it and retold it. He measured the rivalry the way his world measured most things, by the dollar figures printed each year in a small charity booklet that everyone in the neighborhood read. Then a newspaper got the embezzlement charge wrong and printed the culprit as Harry J., and the phone rang with neighbors offering their sympathy to the wrong wife. The father, near the end, used the mistake for fresh material. New stories, his son later wrote, become precious when you reach your eighties.
When Harry J. Greenblatt made his will, he set aside money for an organization to say Kaddish for him. Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, belongs by custom to the sons. A childless man could be called, in Yiddish, a man who dies without a kaddish. Harry J. had two sons. He paid strangers anyway. He did not trust the boys to do it.
The younger son said the prayer, out of love and spite, and then built a career on the gesture.
Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) became the most influential literary critic in America by inventing a method that does in the seminar room what his father tried to buy from a religious agency. He called the method New Historicism. He announced its founding wish in one sentence at the opening of Shakespearean Negotiations: he began with the desire to speak with the dead. Critics quote the line as a charming flourish. It is a confession. The man who set out to talk with Shakespeare came from a house where the dead were a live problem, where one parent feared dying and the other feared being forgotten, and where the family business was the manufacture of stories strong enough to hold a self together against loss.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the apparatus for reading a life like this. Man knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge, so he builds what Becker called a hero system, a scheme of meaning that lets him feel he counts in a universe that will outlast him. The hero system hands out roles and rewards. It tells a man how to earn significance and how to deny, through that significance, that he is an animal who rots. Religion offers literal immortality, a soul that survives the body. The secular orders offer symbolic immortality, a name on a building, a theory in the textbooks, a child, a prize. Every culture is, in Becker’s terms, a death-denial running under the surface of its values. The values feel sacred because the alternative to believing in them is terror.
Greenblatt grew up inside a Jewish hero system already cracking. His grandparents kept the commandments and fled the Czar’s army. His parents kept the fear and lost the faith that once answered it. The mother carried what a reviewer of The Swerve described as an obsessive dread of imminent death. She rehearsed her end for years. She lived to 95. The son found his exit from her clock as a teenager, reading Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC), whose poem De rerum natura argues that the soul is atoms, that death is nothing to us, that there is no afterlife to fear because there is no one left to do the fearing. Greenblatt has said the poem freed him. Decades later he wrote a whole book about its rediscovery, won the Pulitzer Prize for it, and took heat from medievalists who charged that he had slandered a thousand years of Christian thought to make his liberation story land. Hold that fight for later. Notice first what the boy did with his freedom. He did not stop talking to the dead. He changed the terms.
This is the heart of his hero system, and the place where Becker earns his keep. The Protestants who abolished Purgatory called it a fraud and, worse, a poem, a fiction that priests sold to frightened families so the living could imagine they still reached the dead and the dead still needed them. Greenblatt wrote Hamlet in Purgatory about that abolition and about the hole it left. When the institution that manages your grief dies, he saw, you suffer two deaths, the one you mourn and the one that took away your means of mourning. Hamlet’s father comes back from a Purgatory the new church says cannot exist, and he asks one thing of his son. Remember me. The whole play runs on the failure of every ritual built to answer that request.
Greenblatt lost his Purgatory the way the Elizabethans lost theirs. He could not believe the soul survives. He needed, anyway, to remember and be remembered, to reach his father and Shakespeare and the rest. So he built a private chantry out of the materials he had. Scholarship became his prayer for the dead. The archive became his Memorbuch. The footnote, that record of where a voice was last heard, became his Kaddish, recited by a man who does not hold the doctrine and performs the rite regardless. New Historicism is the poem he tells himself, the believed-in fiction that lets the living traffic with the dead. He knows it is a poem. He does it the way he said the prayer for his father, out of love and spite, because the silence is worse.
And the sacred token at the center of the chantry, the word that does for Greenblatt what grace does for a believer, is wonder.
Marvelous Possessions carries the subtitle The Wonder of the New World and treats wonder as the decisive experience Europeans had before the radical strangeness of the Americas, the thing that stopped them and seized them before they understood what they saw. His essay “Resonance and Wonder,” written for a debate about museums, names wonder as the power of an object to halt a viewer in arrested attention, to strike him still. Resonance is the object reaching outward to summon a vanished world. Wonder is the object holding you in place. For Greenblatt the two together are what literature can do and what he wants from it. The poem reaches back to summon the dead, and then, for one held breath, makes them present. The clock his mother watched stops. The father he could not save stands at the rail. That arrest, that stopped breath in front of the marvelous, is the closest a man without an afterlife can come to touching one. Wonder is Greenblatt’s communion. It confers, for its duration, the thing Becker says all hero systems exist to confer, the sense that you are not merely an animal sliding toward the dirt but a creature in contact with something that outlasts you.
Say the word to a man in a different system and it splinters.
Walk the cemetery at Uman on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, where tens of thousands of Breslover Hasidim crowd the grave of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810). A young man from Lakewood, black hat soaked through, presses toward the tziyun in a crush of bodies and shouting and song. He has come because the Rebbe promised to pull from Gehinnom anyone who comes to his grave, gives a coin to charity, and says the ten psalms. Ask him about wonder and he will not reach for a museum. He calls it yirah, awe, and for him it runs one direction only, up. The marvel of the world is a finger pointing past the world to the One who made it. To stop at the marvel, to stand arrested in front of the beautiful object and call that the end, is for him a snare, the error of a man who mistakes the letter for the One who wrote it. Wonder that does not collapse into obedience is wonder gone wrong. “Everything you see,” he tells you over the noise, “is Him talking. You think the point is the talking?” His wonder denies death the old way, the literal way. The soul lives. The Rebbe pulls you out. Greenblatt’s wonder, the kind that ends in the marvel and asks nothing further, would look to this man like idolatry with good footnotes.
Drop down a mile under the French and Swiss border, three in the morning, a postdoc on shift at the detector. A bump rises in the data where the Standard Model says a bump should rise, and for a second the room goes quiet and somebody says, low, “There it is.” She feels what Greenblatt would call wonder and she does not trust it. Her training tells her that the feeling is the first thing to interrogate, that awe in front of a result is how good physicists fool themselves. The wonder is real and it is also the enemy, the emotion she must kill by quantifying it, run through the look-elsewhere correction and the systematic errors until the marvel becomes a number with error bars. Her hero system grants symbolic immortality through authorship of a law that holds after she is gone, her initials buried in a collaboration of three thousand names, and the law gets in only after she has strangled the very awe that drew her to it. For her, wonder is the raw ore. Knowledge is what you get by burning the wonder off.
Now the floor of a casino off the Strip, where a pit boss in a gray suit watches a table the way a hawk watches a field. For him wonder is a substance, and it belongs to the marks. The whole house runs on farming it. The lights, the near-miss, the comp, the woman screaming at the craps table while the dealer’s face stays dead, all of it engineered to keep the customer in a state of arrested attention long enough to separate him from his money. The pit boss feels none of it. He cannot afford to. His craft is to induce maximum wonder in the player and hold exactly zero himself, to read the man counting cards by the small light that comes on behind the eyes, the light of a man who thinks he has glimpsed an order in the chaos, and to have him walked out before the light costs the house. “They all think they found the thing,” he says, tapping ash. “That’s the product. We sell them the feeling they found the thing.” Wonder, to him, is not sacred. It is inventory. It is the customer’s exploitable softness, the lever the building exists to pull.
A close-up magician works a private party in the same town, palming a coin he has palmed ten thousand times. He knows what Greenblatt half admits and does not like to dwell on, that the historian and the conjuror are cousins. Both raise the dead. Both sell contact with the impossible. The magician produces wonder on demand, on a schedule, for a fee, and he knows to the second how long the arrested breath lasts and how to end the trick before the spell turns into suspicion. His whole art rests on a fact the Breslover would call blasphemy and the physicist would call a control, that wonder is manufactured, that the marvel is a thing a skilled man does to a credulous one. “Wonder’s just attention plus a gap they can’t close,” he says, shuffling. “Give them the gap. Don’t ever let them close it.” Hold his definition next to Greenblatt’s séance. The critic stands at the rail summoning Shakespeare, and the magician asks the question the critic spends his career not asking out loud. Who is doing this, the dead man or the man at the rail?
And in a tent over a pit in a country that had a war, a forensic anthropologist kneels in the clay beside a long trench, brushing soil off a femur, and for her the dead are the opposite of a poem. The dead must not speak in metaphor. The dead must yield a name through dental records and a mitochondrial match, a name that will hold up in a courtroom, returned to one family and no other. Her ethic forbids the séance. Where Greenblatt wants the dead to talk, she needs them to stop talking and start testifying, because the families do not want communion, they want the right bones in the right box. Wonder, in her tent, is close to obscene. A junior tech once gasped at the strangeness of a skull and she took him outside. “These are people,” she told him. “We don’t marvel at them. We identify them.” Two people serve the dead with their whole lives, the critic and the scientist, and they serve opposite gods. One built a method to make the dead present. The other built a method to make them quiet, and accurate, and finally let go.
Same word. Six systems. In each one wonder is load-bearing, and in each one it carries a different weight, points a different direction, denies death by a different route or refuses the denial outright. The Hasid’s wonder rises to a Creator and earns a literal soul. The physicist’s wonder must die to become a deathless law. The pit boss farms it off the weak. The magician makes it to order and despises the closing of the gap. The scientist treats it as a failure of professional distance. And Greenblatt’s wonder, the arrested breath before the marvelous text, is the secular man’s last open channel to the people he has lost. Becker’s point holds across all six. The value feels sacred from the inside because the man who lives by it cannot survive the thought that it is arbitrary. Step outside his system and the sacredness does not travel. The word stays. The cosmos behind it changes hands.
Which returns us to Greenblatt himself, and to the harder truth his own first book confessed before he had a method to hide behind.
He set out, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, to celebrate the self-made man, the Tudor courtier who fashions an identity by an act of will. He ended the book admitting that he could not find that man. The self he chased turned out to be fashioned by forces it did not choose and could not see, by power and language and the dead hand of culture, and the will he had hoped to honor looked more like a part the culture was already writing. He records the moment he felt the dream go. He decided to hold the dream anyway. He would keep behaving as though he authored himself, because the alternative, a self with no author and no exit, was a thing he could not live inside.
That is the same gesture as the Kaddish. The same gesture as the séance. A man performs the rite he has stopped believing because the meaning it carries is the only thing standing between him and the void his mother watched for ninety-five years. Becker had a name for this. He called it the vital lie, the necessary fiction a person tells to keep functioning, and he did not say it with contempt. He thought we all need one. The honest man is the one who knows his hero system is a lie and serves it with open eyes, the way you keep saying a prayer for a father who did not trust you to say it.
The fight over The Swerve fits here, and it is worth getting right rather than soft. The medievalists had a case. Greenblatt did flatten a millennium to make Lucretius the hero who lets the modern world begin, and a man who built his career on reading the past in its own terms should have known better than to cast the Middle Ages as the dark from which his favorite poem rescued us. The book is, in part, his liberation myth dressed as history, the story of the boy who escaped his mother’s clock told as the story of civilization. That is the cost of a hero system. It bends the evidence toward the shape that saves you. A truth-seeker has to watch for the bend hardest at the places where the story flatters his own escape.
But notice what the same engine produced when it ran clean. It produced Hamlet in Purgatory, a book that takes the cultural work of grief more seriously than almost anything written in his field, because the man who wrote it needed that work for himself. It produced a method that put the dead back in the room of a discipline that had locked them out. It produced a reader who could stand in front of a four-hundred-year-old play and feel the father at the rail, and make a hundred thousand students feel him too. The vital lie, when a man knows it for what it is and pays for it in honest scholarship, can be the most productive thing about him.
Harry J. Greenblatt did not trust his sons. He paid strangers to remember him. One of those sons grew up and built the largest remembering machine an English department has ever seen, an apparatus for hearing the voices of the dead, and ran it for sixty years, and never quite believed the dead were there, and never stopped listening.
Remember me, the ghost says.
The son said Kaddish. Then he made a life of it.
Alliance Theory and the Career of Stephen Greenblatt
Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton argue that political belief systems derive not from abstract values but from alliance structures: the network of supportive and antagonistic relationships among groups competing for position and resources. Moral vocabularies, on this account, are coalition technologies. They justify allies, condemn rivals, and mobilize third parties. The framework applies well beyond electoral politics. Academic fields have alliance structures too, and the career of Stephen Greenblatt illustrates how those structures form, stabilize, and produce the characteristic belief systems of a discipline.
Pinsof et al. identify three criteria by which individuals choose allies: similarity, transitivity, and interdependence. Greenblatt’s Berkeley years show all three at work. He gathered colleagues who shared his dissatisfaction with New Criticism and his appetite for Foucault, Geertz, and Williams. Similarity created a natural coordination point. Transitivity extended the coalition outward: graduate students who trained under Greenblatt shared his allies and rivals, which made them reliable partners in hiring committees, conference programs, and journal review processes. Interdependence followed from the structure of academic production. Publication in Representations, the journal Greenblatt co-founded in 1982, depended on peer review by scholars who had already committed to the New Historicist approach. Those scholars depended on the journal for legitimacy. The loop was self-reinforcing. Alliance Theory predicts exactly this: similarity, transitivity, and interdependence are self-reinforcing and partly stochastic, meaning small variations in initial conditions can snowball into seemingly arbitrary but durable alliance structures. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s were precisely such a case.
The paper’s account of propagandistic biases is equally illuminating. Pinsof et al. distinguish perpetrator biases, which rationalize allies’ transgressions, from victim biases, which embellish allies’ grievances. New Historicism deployed both. On the victim side, the movement framed humanist scholars trained in New Criticism as agents of an oppressive canonical ideology, custodians of a tradition that suppressed marginalized voices and enforced bourgeois values. This victim framing mobilized junior scholars who felt excluded from a prestige system they had not built. On the perpetrator side, New Historicism rationalized its own institutional dominance by presenting that dominance as liberation: the field had simply been freed from a false and narrow formalism. The power the movement accumulated through journals, hiring committees, and anthology editorships was narrated as the natural consequence of intellectual progress rather than coalition victory. This is precisely what Pinsof et al. describe as propagandistic bias applied to allies: the movement’s transgressions against older scholars and rival paradigms were minimized, while its own grievances against the New Critical establishment were embellished.
The attributional biases Pinsof et al. describe are also on display. Alliance Theory predicts that partisans attribute their allies’ advantages to internal causes—talent, hard work, superior method—and their disadvantages to external causes, such as an unfair system or entrenched opposition. New Historicism attributed its dominance to the inherent superiority of contextual reading over formalist close reading. It attributed whatever resistance it encountered to the conservatism of an establishment protecting unearned privilege. The movement never seriously entertained the possibility that its rise owed as much to coalition coordination as to intellectual merit, because acknowledging that would have undermined the moral vocabulary that held the alliance together. This is what Pinsof et al. call the strategic function of moral claims: they mobilize support, not by accurately describing the world, but by positioning allies as virtuous and rivals as deficient.
Pinsof et al. stress that alliance structures produce double standards: the same moral principle applied to an ally yields one judgment, applied to a rival yields another. New Historicism generated its own version of this. The movement insisted that all texts are embedded in power relations and that no interpretation is politically neutral. This critique applied with force to New Criticism’s claims of aesthetic autonomy and universal value. But the same critique, applied to New Historicism’s own institutional position, was largely avoided. The movement did not dwell on how its own rise was shaped by the power relations of Berkeley in the 1970s, by Greenblatt’s Harvard appointment, by the editorial policies of Representations, or by the downstream influence of Norton anthology decisions. These power relations were real, but they were not the kind the movement trained its scholars to examine. Rivals’ authority was power; the movement’s authority was method. The asymmetry fits the Alliance Theory account of propagandistic bias with some precision.
The paper also draws attention to the stochastic origins of alliance structures. Pinsof et al. argue that there is often no deeper pattern to a political coalition than the historical accidents that brought it into being. The combination of libertarianism and Christian fundamentalism in the American Republican Party did not emerge from philosophical analysis; it emerged from a series of contingent realignments in the 1970s. New Historicism has an analogous story. The specific combination of Foucauldian power analysis, Geertzian thick description, and Williamsian cultural materialism that Greenblatt synthesized was not the only possible synthesis available to a dissatisfied literary scholar in the 1970s. It was the synthesis Greenblatt happened to construct, at Berkeley, with the colleagues and interlocutors he happened to encounter. Its dominance reflects the coalition that formed around it as much as the inherent superiority of the ideas. Other syntheses, with different founding figures and different institutional homes, might have been equally plausible. Once one coalition gains enough momentum, however, the stochastic element disappears from view. The contingent looks inevitable. The historical accident looks like intellectual progress.
Finally, Pinsof et al. argue that the primary difference between liberal and conservative partisans is not what values they hold but whom they view as their allies. This reframing has direct implications for understanding intellectual movements. New Historicism and its rivals did not differ primarily in their underlying commitments to rigor, evidence, or the value of literature. They differed in their alliances: different faculty networks, different journals, different graduate training pipelines, different conceptions of which questions were worth asking. The moral vocabulary of each position—liberation versus tradition, context versus form, power versus beauty—was not the cause of the conflict. It was the flag under which competing coalitions marched. Greenblatt built the most durable coalition in late twentieth-century literary studies. He did it through intellectual talent, institutional intelligence, and the same propagandistic biases that Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton identify in voters arguing about immigration and welfare. The content of the arguments differs. The underlying logic does not.
Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge cuts directly to the heart of New Historicism.
Turner’s central argument, developed in The Social Theory of Practices and elaborated elsewhere, is that tacit knowledge cannot be shared or transmitted collectively in the way that theorists from Polanyi onward assumed. If knowledge is genuinely tacit, it resists codification. It lives in the body, in habit, in trained perception. It cannot be passed from one person to another through instruction alone. Turner’s conclusion is unsettling: appeals to shared tacit knowledge, shared background, shared practice, function ideologically. They create the appearance of a community with a common foundation while concealing the fact that what is actually being transmitted is something far more explicit, more social, and more political than the language of tacit knowledge suggests.
New Historicism presented itself as a practice rather than a doctrine. Greenblatt insisted on this repeatedly. He called it cultural poetics rather than a theory precisely to suggest that it was a cultivated sensibility, a way of reading, something you developed through immersion rather than a set of propositions you could memorize and apply. This framing was enormously effective institutionally. It meant that the method could not be easily codified by rivals, attacked as a rigid system, or replaced by a competing algorithm. It also meant that genuine membership in the movement required apprenticeship, proximity to the right teachers, training in the right seminars. The tacit framing created a guild structure. You could not simply read Greenblatt and do what he did. You had to be formed by someone who had been formed by someone in the lineage.
Turner would say this is precisely where the ideological work happens. The claim that New Historicism is a practice, a sensibility, a feel for the archive, naturalizes what is actually a set of explicit moves, preferences, and rhetorical habits that can be learned, imitated, and taught. The anecdote, the opening with a strange historical fragment, the pivot from the particular to the general, the gesture toward circulation and power, these are not ineffable. They are a style. But presenting them as tacit, as something you either have or develop through long immersion, serves the coalition’s interests. It creates barriers to entry. It makes the initiated feel they possess something genuine that outsiders lack. It gives senior scholars authority over junior ones not because they control explicit criteria but because they are the arbiters of an uncodifiable sensibility.
This connects to Turner’s broader point about expertise and authority. When a field grounds its judgments in tacit knowledge claims, it becomes very difficult for outsiders to challenge those judgments. You cannot argue against a sensibility. You cannot falsify a feel for the material. New Criticism was actually more vulnerable on this front because it produced explicit criteria, tension, irony, ambiguity, paradox, that rivals could contest, apply inconsistently, or show to be question-begging. New Historicism’s retreat into practice language made it harder to pin down. Turner would identify this as a feature, not a weakness. The strategic ambiguity that protected New Historicism from attack was sustained by exactly this tacit-knowledge framing.
There is a further implication for how we understand Greenblatt’s influence specifically. His books work as demonstrations rather than arguments. Renaissance Self-Fashioning does not really make a case for New Historicism. It performs it. The method is embodied in the texture of the prose, the choice of anecdotes, the way the archive is handled, the rhythm of the interpretive moves. This is tacit transmission in the pedagogically effective sense: watching a master perform. Graduate students who read Greenblatt closely were not learning a doctrine. They were internalizing a style. Turner would say that this is still explicit enough to be transmitted, but the framing as demonstration rather than argument conceals how rule-governed the performance actually is. The concealment is part of what makes it prestigious. If the moves were too obvious, anyone could do them. If they look like the expression of a formed sensibility, they require a master.
Turner’s critique of essentialism also matters here. He argues against the idea that communities share a common essence, a set of background beliefs or practices that constitute their identity. Applied to New Historicism, this means the movement did not have a coherent shared foundation even when it appeared most unified. What it had was a shared vocabulary, a shared set of rhetorical moves, a shared set of allies and rivals, and a shared institutional infrastructure. These are sufficient to produce the appearance of a unified practice without any deeper common ground. When New Historicism began to fragment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it was absorbed into background method and lost its identity as a movement, Turner’s analysis suggests this was not a betrayal of a genuine original unity. There was no such unity to betray. The coalition dispersed because the incentives for maintaining it changed, not because the shared essence dissolved.
What Turner adds, then, is a precise account of how a method can be simultaneously powerful and hollow, institutionally dominant and intellectually unstable, capable of training generations of scholars and yet resistant to any definitive statement of what it actually is. Greenblatt built a career and a movement on exactly that combination. The tacit-knowledge framing was not incidental to his success. It was structural to it.
David Pinsof argues that the misunderstanding myth is what intellectuals do because it serves their interests. The social scientist who designs interventions to reduce bias, the humanist who exposes power relations in canonical texts, the critic who frames his method as liberation, these are not people who have made a mistake about human nature. They are people whose careers depend on the story that human nature is a mistake requiring their correction.
Applied to Greenblatt, this means the moral vocabulary of New Historicism, the claim that formalist criticism was complicit in oppression, that contextual reading was emancipatory, that the field needed to be rescued from its own assumptions, was not primarily intellectual conviction. It was the form that coalition maintenance takes when the coalition is made up of people whose status depends on diagnosing other people’s blindness. Greenblatt and his allies were not wrong to believe in their method. Believing in it was adaptive. It justified their authority, positioned rivals as deficient, and gave graduate students a moral reason to affiliate with the new paradigm rather than the old one.
Pinsof argues that stated motives and actual motives diverge systematically, and that this divergence is itself functional. Greenblatt genuinely presented New Historicism as a way of listening to the past more honestly, recovering suppressed voices, refusing the false autonomy of the aesthetic object. That presentation was sincere in the sense that Trivers means when he argues that self-deception is more effective than conscious deception: you are more persuasive when you believe your own pitch. The essay suggests that the gap between Greenblatt’s stated goals and the institutional machinery he built is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is the normal condition of an intelligent social animal operating inside a prestige hierarchy.
Turner shows how the tacit framing functions ideologically, how it naturalizes explicit moves and creates guild barriers. But Turner leaves open the possibility that scholars who understood this could do better. Pinsof closes that door. The drive to frame one’s method as ineffable practice, as something possessed rather than learned, reflects incentives that no amount of methodological self-awareness dissolves. You cannot think your way out of the hole.
The humanities in the late twentieth century needed a story about why literary scholars mattered. New Historicism supplied one. Texts are nodes of power. Reading them correctly is a political act. The scholar who exposes the circulation of social energy is diagnosing a misunderstanding that the rest of the culture has not yet corrected. Pinsof’s essay lets you say that this story served the interests of the people who told it. The misunderstanding myth is what intellectuals believe because believing it is good for intellectuals.
New Historicism was a status game inside the humanities. Its players competed for positions, publications, grants, and prestige. That competition was real and intense. But if it had been conducted openly, as a competition, the moral vocabulary that held the coalition together would have collapsed. You cannot simultaneously argue that all cultural production serves power and that your own institutional rise is pure intellectual progress. The sacred value, the liberation of the text from formalist ideology, the recovery of suppressed voices, the exposure of power’s circulation, was not incidental decoration on the status game. It was what kept the game from collapsing under mutual awareness. The sacred value stabilizes the status game by making it unrecognizable as a status game, to participants and audience alike.
The virtue signaler does not see herself as virtue signaling. The brave norm-violator does not believe he is seeking praise. Greenblatt did not experience himself as building a coalition to capture institutional real estate. He experienced himself as doing something important for the study of literature and history. That sincere experience was not a failure of self-knowledge in some random direction. It was exactly the form that successful status-seeking takes in an environment where overt status-seeking destroys status.
Sacred values work best when they are maximally distant from the status game they conceal, and when they track real values closely enough to remain plausible. New Historicism’s sacred values, political liberation, the recovery of marginalized voices, the refusal of false aesthetic autonomy, were well-chosen on both counts. They were far from anything that sounded like career competition. And they tracked real goods closely enough, there were genuine suppressions of historical complexity in formalist criticism, genuine hierarchies embedded in canonical choices, that believers could point to actual evidence for their sacred commitments. The deception was symbiotic[: it benefited the movement’s members and gave intellectual value to those who engaged with the work.
When the status game becomes common knowledge, the hierarchy inverts: winners look conniving, losers look humble and modest. Readers who identify with the movement’s sacred values will read my account as a low-status attack on the prevailing order. That response is a rational reaction to the threat of common knowledge dissolving a status game some people are winning. This does not make my analysis wrong. It does mean that I am up against a structural resistance that is deeper than mere disagreement about facts.
Jeffrey Alexander’s core argument is that trauma is not something events do to collectivities automatically. It is something carrier groups construct through symbolic work, claiming the nature of the pain, defining the victim, establishing the relation of victim to audience, and attributing responsibility. Trauma becomes real when this meaning work succeeds, not before. The event is raw material. The narrative is the thing.
Greenblatt spent his career studying how the past gets narrated, how power circulates through representation, how cultural classification shapes what counts as real and significant. Alexander is essentially giving him a sociological account of exactly the process Greenblatt analyzed literarily. The difference is that Greenblatt treated that process as something happening in Renaissance England, while Alexander describes it as the structure of all collective meaning-making. Greenblatt’s containment loop, where subversion is anticipated and absorbed by power, is a special case of Alexander’s claim that trauma narratives are always contested, always the product of carrier groups with interests, always disputed at every node: what happened, to whom, why, and who bears responsibility. Greenblatt intuited this but remained inside the literary text. Alexander gives it an explicit sociological architecture.
The more pointed connection is institutional. Alexander’s carrier groups are precisely what Greenblatt built. New Historicism succeeded as a trauma narrative about the academy itself. The story it told was that literary studies had been traumatized by formalism, by the willful blindness of New Criticism to power, history, and the voices of the marginalized. Greenblatt and his allies were the carrier group making that claim, broadcasting it through Representations, through graduate training, through Norton anthologies. They defined the nature of the pain, the formalist suppression of historical context and political reality, the identity of the victim, scholars and texts and traditions excluded by the canonical hierarchy, the relation of that victim to the broader audience, and the attribution of responsibility, New Criticism and its institutional custodians. The movement succeeded because this trauma narrative succeeded. It became the new master narrative of what the field was and what it needed to become.
Alexander also illuminates why the narrative was so durable. He argues that trauma construction requires the victim to be represented in terms of valued qualities shared by the larger collective identity, otherwise the audience cannot identify with the suffering. New Historicism managed this by making its victim both specific, the suppressed voices of Renaissance England, and general, anyone whose complexity had been flattened by aesthetic formalism. That double framing meant the coalition could expand. Feminists, postcolonialists, minority scholars, Marxists, could all find their concerns reflected in the master narrative without needing to share a single theoretical commitment. Alexander’s framework explains why the strategic ambiguity that Turner identifies as Greenblatt’s institutional protection was not just clever. It was structurally necessary for the trauma narrative to work.
Stephen Greenblatt’s convenient beliefs are organized around a foundational claim so successful that it has become invisible as a claim: that literary texts are best understood as sites where social energies circulate, where power and subversion negotiate, and where the critic’s task is to recover the specific historical pressures that shaped the text’s production. That claim generated New Historicism, transformed the American English department, made Greenblatt the most influential literary scholar of his generation, and is now so thoroughly absorbed into standard practice that it no longer registers as a theoretical commitment. It registers as the way things are done. That invisibility is the terminal state of a convenient belief that has won completely.
Start with his coalition. Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, the most prestigious academic appointment in the American humanities. He trained at Yale under New Criticism, absorbed Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault at Cambridge and Berkeley, co-founded Representations in 1982, and built a pipeline of graduate students who carried New Historicism into hiring committees across the discipline. He is general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare. Those editorial positions are not honorary. They determine what texts get taught in undergraduate classrooms across the English-speaking world. A scholar who controls the Norton Anthology controls the canon’s institutional reproduction.
His material base is Harvard salary, royalties from trade books that have reached mass audiences (The Swerve won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award), the Norton editorial income stream, and the prestige economy that makes him the person whose endorsement matters most in Renaissance and early modern literary studies. His coalition is the post-New Historicist mainstream of American English departments: the scholars who absorbed his method, passed it to their students, and now practice it as default professional competence rather than as a contested theoretical choice.
His convenient beliefs map onto that coalition with a completeness that rivals Caleb Smith’s, but with a specific difference that makes Greenblatt’s case more interesting. Smith inherited a completed framework and internalized it. Greenblatt built the framework himself. His convenient beliefs are not absorbed formations. They are the formations he designed. That makes the convenience harder to see because the builder always experiences his creation as a response to the problem rather than as a product of his position.
The first convenient belief is that the circulation of social energy is a genuine theoretical framework rather than a metaphor that accommodates anything. Greenblatt’s signature concept, introduced in Shakespearean Negotiations, is that literary texts participate in the circulation of social energy: they absorb, reshape, and redistribute the cultural forces that surround them. Power is negotiated in the text. Subversion is produced and contained. The text is a node in a network of exchange rather than a sealed aesthetic object.
Turner would note that the phrase “circulation of social energy” says enough to sound like a theory and leaves enough undefined to accommodate almost any reading. That flexibility is the framework’s greatest strength institutionally and its greatest vulnerability epistemologically. A graduate student can use it to read any text in any period. That makes the framework scalable. It also means the framework cannot be falsified, because any reading can be described as an instance of social energy circulating. Turner would say the framework is not a theory in the predictive or falsifiable sense. It is a vocabulary. And the vocabulary is convenient because it allows the practitioner to appear rigorous without specifying mechanisms.
The inconvenient belief would be that “circulation of social energy” is a metaphor that describes the critic’s activity rather than the text’s properties. The critic selects an archival fragment, juxtaposes it with a literary text, and narrates a connection. The energy that circulates is the energy of the critic’s narration, not an independently verifiable property of the historical field. Turner’s tacit knowledge critique applies: what Greenblatt calls social energy may be what his trained perception finds when it applies a specific set of heuristics to archival material. The finding feels like discovery. It may be construction. The convenient belief is that it is the first. Turner predicts Greenblatt will hold it because holding the second would dissolve the method’s authority.
The second convenient belief is that New Historicism’s dominance represents intellectual progress rather than coalition victory. Greenblatt built Representations, trained the graduate students, placed them in departments, and watched the method become default practice. That trajectory is presented, in the field’s self-understanding, as the triumph of a better way of reading over an older, narrower way. New Criticism was limited. Deconstruction was abstract. New Historicism combined textual attention with historical specificity and cultural sensitivity. It won because it was better.
Turner would reframe. New Historicism won because Greenblatt was an extraordinarily skilled coalition builder. He co-founded a journal that became the institutional home of the movement. He trained students who replicated the method across the discipline. He designed a framework flexible enough to absorb feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial approaches without requiring allegiance to any single political commitment. He made the method irresistible to graduate students because it rewarded archival work, theoretical fluency, and narrative skill simultaneously. You could be rigorous and you could tell a story. That combination was a recruitment tool of extraordinary effectiveness.
The convenient belief is that the method won on intellectual merit. The inconvenient belief is that the method won because it was better adapted to the institutional ecology of the American graduate program than any competing approach. It scaled. It trained. It placed. It reproduced. Turner would say those are properties of a successful coalition, not necessarily properties of a superior epistemology.
The third convenient belief is that the anecdotal method, the vivid archival fragment that grounds interpretation in “the touch of the real,” produces knowledge rather than narrative pleasure. Greenblatt’s signature move is to begin with a strange, specific, concrete historical detail and use it to illuminate a literary text. A colonial encounter. A trial record. A medical case. An inventory of goods. The fragment is selected for its strangeness, its capacity to defamiliarize the literary text and reveal the social forces operating within it.
Turner would observe that the selection of the fragment is the moment where tacit knowledge does its heaviest work. The archive contains millions of fragments. Greenblatt selects the ones that produce the best readings. The selection criteria are not explicit. They are the product of decades of immersion in a specific tradition of reading. What makes a fragment productive is not a property of the fragment. It is a property of the trained perception that recognizes it as productive. The anecdote does not ground the reading in historical reality. It grounds the reading in the critic’s narrative skill.
The convenient belief is that the archive speaks. The inconvenient belief is that the critic speaks through the archive, selecting fragments that confirm the reading he has already begun to construct. Turner would note that this is the same critique he applies to Collins: the similarity of patterns across cases may reflect the universality of the underlying mechanism or the universality of the lens the analyst brings. Greenblatt’s readings are dazzling. Whether they tell us more about the Renaissance or about what a specific formation trained a specific critic to find in the archive is a question the method cannot answer from inside itself.
The fourth convenient belief is that the subversion-containment loop represents a discovery about power rather than a professional containment loop for the critic. New Historicism’s characteristic finding is that literary texts produce subversive energies and that those energies are ultimately contained by the power structures that enabled them. The critic finds rebellion in the text and then shows that the rebellion was anticipated, managed, and absorbed. The structure is reliable. It appears in every New Historicist reading with minor variations.
Turner would say the loop is also a professional survival mechanism. The critic who finds subversion gets to feel radical. The critic who shows that subversion was contained gets to remain safely inside the institution. No evidence can break the loop because the method can always argue that even apparent counterexamples are effects of power. The loop offers the experience of critical engagement without the risk of destabilizing anything. It is rebellion performed in conditions of total institutional security.
The inconvenient belief would be that the subversion-containment loop tells us more about the position of the American literature professor than about the dynamics of Elizabethan power. The professor who needs to feel politically engaged while holding a tenured position at Harvard has every incentive to discover a form of critical practice that combines the appearance of radical insight with the reality of institutional safety. The loop provides exactly that. Turner predicts Greenblatt will not see it as a professional convenience because the loop has been absorbed so deeply into the method’s practice that it feels like a discovery about how power works rather than a discovery about how the method works.
The fifth convenient belief is that the move from academic monograph to trade book represents an expansion of the method’s reach rather than an exit from the method’s accountability. Starting with Will in the World and continuing through The Swerve, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, and Dark Renaissance, Greenblatt shifted from scholarly monographs reviewed by specialists to trade books reviewed by journalists. The move expanded his audience, his income, and his cultural prestige. It also moved him out of the peer review system that enforces disciplinary standards.
Turner would note that The Swerve was criticized by classicists and medievalists for historical inaccuracies, for its triumphalist narrative of the ancient atomist Lucretius saving the West from medieval darkness. The specialists found the book simplistic. The trade audience found it wonderful. The Pulitzer committee found it prizeworthy. The gap between specialist reception and public reception is revealing. The convenient belief is that the trade books bring serious humanistic scholarship to a wider audience. The inconvenient belief is that the trade books relax the evidentiary standards that the academic work was held to, and that the wider audience rewards narrative skill more than it rewards analytical precision. Greenblatt moved to the market where his greatest strength, the ability to tell a compelling story, is most rewarded and his characteristic weakness, the tendency to construct readings that are beautiful but underdetermined by evidence, is least punished.
The beliefs that would be inconvenient for Greenblatt to hold complete the picture.
That “circulation of social energy” is a metaphor that describes the critic’s narration rather than the text’s properties. That New Historicism’s dominance reflects coalition dynamics as much as intellectual merit. That the anecdotal method selects for narrative pleasure more than for historical truth. That the subversion-containment loop is a professional survival mechanism for the safely tenured radical. That the move to trade books was an exit from accountability as much as an expansion of audience. That his Norton editorial positions represent institutional power over the canon’s reproduction rather than neutral scholarly stewardship.
Each is defensible. Each would compromise the self-understanding that sustains his authority. Turner predicts he will not hold them.
The comparison with the other figures places Greenblatt as the series’ most complete case of a convenient belief system that achieved total institutional victory and then disappeared into the atmosphere.
Smith inherited a completed framework and experiences it as the floor. Greenblatt built the framework that became the floor. The difference is that Greenblatt experienced the transition from contested innovation to invisible background. He was there when New Historicism was a movement. He watched it become standard practice. He watched it become so ubiquitous that no one needed to name it anymore. Turner would say that trajectory, from controversial claim to invisible assumption, is the life cycle of every successful convenient belief. The belief starts as a proposition that can be argued about. It ends as a presupposition that structures what counts as argument. Greenblatt has lived through the entire cycle.
Alexander built a coalition with a center, a journal, and a name. Greenblatt built a coalition with a journal, a method, and a pipeline but refused to let the name stabilize. He preferred “cultural poetics” to “New Historicism” and let the doctrine stay fluid. Turner would recognize the strategic intelligence: a doctrine that refuses to fully stabilize is harder to attack. New Criticism hardened into principles that rivals could target. New Historicism stayed liquid. It could absorb feminist criticism, Marxist readings, postcolonial analysis, and present all of it as consistent with the core practice. The flexibility was not epistemological generosity. It was coalition design. A broad tent recruits more members than a narrow one.
Collins built a framework that explains intellectual greatness as a network product but exempts himself from the explanation. Greenblatt built a framework that explains literary texts as products of social negotiation but does not fully apply the analysis to his own text-production. His books participate in the circulation of social energy. They negotiate with the power structures of the academy, the trade market, and the prestige economy. They produce and contain certain kinds of critical subversion. But the framework that would reveal all of this is the framework Greenblatt designed. He built the tools that would expose his own practice and then did not use them on himself.
That is the deepest parallel with Alexander. Both men built analytical machinery capable of reflexive application. Both declined the reflexive application. Both hold as their most foundational convenient belief the conviction that their framework reveals the truth about other people’s cultural production while their own cultural production is simply what good scholarship looks like. Turner would say that exemption is the structural endpoint of every convenient belief system that achieves complete success. The framework explains everything except the conditions of its own production. The builder of the lens can see everything except the lens.
Bromwich narrates the death of his tradition and finds no audience. Greenblatt narrates the birth of his method and finds the widest possible audience. Felski narrates the exhaustion of a method she says succeeded too well and proposes replacement. Three different positions in the life cycle of a dominant framework. Turner would say each figure holds the convenient beliefs appropriate to his or her position in the cycle: the founder believes the method is a discovery, the inheritor believes the method is reality, and the reformer believes the method took a wrong turn that she can correct. Each is sincere. Each is convenient. Each describes the same structural process from a different temporal vantage point. And none of them can see the cycle as a cycle because seeing it would require standing outside the formation that each has spent a career building, inheriting, or reforming from within.
Trans
If Greenblatt came out as trans, almost nothing would change. And the reason almost nothing would change is the most revealing structural observation the thought experiment can produce, because it shows that the constraints governing Greenblatt’s career are entirely different in kind from the constraints governing Etshalom’s and Shapiro’s.
Start with the institutional response. Harvard would not revoke the John Cogan University Professorship. The chair is governed by tenure protections, university anti-discrimination policy, and the norms of the contemporary American academy, which treat gender transition as a protected category. Harvard has institutional incentives running in the opposite direction from the Orthodox system. A trans scholar holding the most prestigious humanities chair in the country would be received by the university’s public-facing apparatus as evidence of institutional inclusivity. The communications office would not issue a statement of concern. It might issue a statement of support.
The Norton editorship would continue. The Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare are commercial products governed by contracts with a publishing house whose institutional culture is secular, progressive, and market-driven. A trans general editor would not threaten sales. It might generate positive media coverage. The anthology’s content would not change. The editorial judgment that selected the texts would not change. The commercial viability would not change. Norton would have no incentive to alter the arrangement.
The Representations legacy and the New Historicist pipeline would be unaffected. The graduate students Greenblatt trained, the scholars who carry the method forward, the hiring committees that absorbed New Historicism into standard practice, none of them enforce gender norms. The method’s institutional reproduction does not depend on the founder’s gender presentation. It depends on the method’s utility as a professional practice. That utility is unchanged.
The trade publishing platform would likely benefit. A trans Renaissance scholar at Harvard who writes bestselling books about Shakespeare, Lucretius, and the history of ideas would become a more interesting public figure rather than a less interesting one. The media attention would increase. The speaking invitations would increase. The book sales might increase. The trade audience that reads Greenblatt for the narrative pleasure of his prose does not apply Orthodox coalition filters. It applies prestige-liberal cultural filters, and those filters reward gender nonconformity in senior intellectual figures rather than punishing it.
The academic reception of the scholarship would be unchanged in substance and improved in framing. Greenblatt’s work on self-fashioning, on the construction of identity through negotiation with power, on the circulation of social energy between bodies and texts, would acquire an additional biographical resonance. Critics would read Renaissance Self-Fashioning through the lens of the author’s own self-fashioning. The subversion-containment loop would be reinterpreted as autobiography. The existing scholarship would gain a new dimension without losing any of its existing reception. Dissertations would be written about the connection between the life and the work. The bibliography would grow.
The colleagues in the Harvard English department would not object. The department’s political and theoretical commitments are organized around exactly the set of values that treats gender transition as an expression of authenticity rather than as a violation of norms. A trans colleague would be received as confirmation of the department’s self-image: inclusive, progressive, attentive to the constructed nature of identity categories. The department that studies how selves are fashioned would find in a transitioning colleague the most vivid possible illustration of its own theoretical commitments.
Now examine why nothing changes, and what the absence of consequence reveals.
The Orthodox system that governs Etshalom and Shapiro enforces a gender taxonomy that is experienced as divinely mandated, halachically grounded, and existentially load-bearing. Male and female are not social constructions in that system. They are categories written into the structure of creation. A figure who transitions violates not a social norm but a cosmic boundary. The violation cannot be absorbed because the system’s self-understanding depends on the boundary’s integrity. The boundary is prior to every other boundary the system enforces. It is prior to the genre boundary that governs intellectual speech. It is prior to the coalition boundary that governs institutional access. It is the floor beneath the floor.
The academic system that governs Greenblatt enforces no comparable gender taxonomy. It enforces a different taxonomy: the taxonomy of theoretical sophistication, political alignment, and professional competence. In that taxonomy, gender transition is not a violation. It is a data point that the system’s theoretical commitments predict and celebrate. The same system that produced Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, that treats gender as performative, that has spent four decades arguing that identity categories are constructed rather than natural, cannot coherently punish a member for performing a gender transition. The theoretical commitments foreclose the institutional response. The system’s own vocabulary makes the exclusion impossible.
This is the deepest structural revelation the three thought experiments produce when compared.
Etshalom’s career is governed by a system whose deepest boundary is the gender taxonomy. The system tolerates intellectual destabilization because the person performing it fits inside the taxonomy. Remove the fit and the tolerance vanishes completely. The intellectual contribution is real but conditional on a non-intellectual classification.
Shapiro’s career is split between a system that enforces the gender taxonomy and a system that does not. The transition would destroy the Orthodox platform and preserve the academic platform. The insulation the essays identified as the foundational fact of his career would perform exactly the function the essays predicted: it would provide a floor beneath the collapse.
Greenblatt’s career is governed entirely by a system that does not enforce the gender taxonomy. The transition would change almost nothing about his institutional position, his scholarly reception, or his commercial viability. It might enhance all three.
The comparison reveals that the constraints the essays have been mapping across the series are not universal features of intellectual life. They are specific features of high-commitment religious systems. The genre boundary, the coalition arithmetic, the managed disclosure, the one-way ratchet, the quiet removal through non-renewal, all of these mechanisms operate inside Modern Orthodoxy with a force and a specificity that have no equivalent in the secular academy. The secular academy has its own constraints. They are different constraints. They enforce different boundaries. They protect different categories. And they produce different consequences when those categories are violated.
Pinsof’s framework illuminates the difference with precision. In both systems, coalition membership determines what can be said and who can say it. But the membership criteria differ. In the Orthodox system, membership requires conformity to a gender taxonomy, a halachic practice, and a communal identity that are experienced as given rather than as constructed. In the academic system, membership requires conformity to a theoretical vocabulary, a political alignment, and a professional identity that are experienced as earned rather than as given. The first system punishes gender transition because the transition violates a given category. The second system rewards gender transition because the transition confirms a theoretical commitment. Same action. Opposite response. The difference is entirely in the coalition’s membership criteria.
Turner’s framework adds the tacit dimension. The Orthodox system’s gender norms are tacit in the deepest sense: they are not experienced as norms at all. They are experienced as reality. A man is a man. A woman is a woman. The categories are not up for negotiation because they are not experienced as categories. They are experienced as the way things are. A figure who transitions is not violating a rule. He is violating reality. That is why the response is so total and so fast. The system is not enforcing a policy. It is defending its ontology.
The academic system’s gender norms have been made explicit through four decades of theoretical work. Gender is performative. Identity is constructed. Categories are contingent. The norms are visible as norms. A figure who transitions is not violating reality. She is performing the theoretical insight that the system has been teaching. The transition confirms the system’s ontology rather than threatening it.
Turner would say this is the difference between a system whose foundational categories remain tacit and a system that has made its foundational categories explicit. The tacit system cannot absorb a violation of its categories because the categories are invisible as categories. They are just the world. The explicit system can absorb the violation because the violation is what the system’s own theory predicts. The first system treats the transition as a catastrophe. The second treats it as a case study.
Collins’s interaction ritual chains framework predicts the emotional energy consequences in each system.
In the Orthodox system, the transition would disrupt the interaction rituals that generate the community’s emotional energy. The rituals depend on the gender taxonomy: men’s and women’s roles in prayer, in study, in communal life, in the marriage market. A figure who crosses the taxonomy disrupts the ritual’s conditions. The emotional energy the ritual generates is threatened. The community responds by removing the disruptive figure to protect the energy.
In the academic system, the transition would generate new emotional energy. The department seminar that discusses a colleague’s transition in relation to their scholarship on self-fashioning would be a high-energy interaction ritual. The shared focus, a dramatic biographical event that confirms the department’s theoretical commitments, would produce enthusiasm, solidarity, and the specific pleasure of a community whose intellectual framework has been validated by life. The transition would be energizing rather than depleting.
Same event. Opposite energy consequence. The difference is entirely in what each system’s rituals are organized around. Orthodox rituals are organized around the stability of given categories. Academic rituals are organized around the interrogation of given categories. The first system needs the categories to hold. The second system needs the categories to yield. The transition threatens what the first system needs and provides what the second system needs.
Alexander’s cultural trauma framework completes the comparison. In the Orthodox system, the transition would be experienced as a profanation of a sacred boundary. Alexander says trauma occurs when something sacred is violated. The gender taxonomy in Orthodoxy is sacred in the fullest Durkheimian sense: it participates in the system’s understanding of divine order. Violating it triggers the trauma response. The carrier group that narrates the violation as a wound to collective identity would form immediately and would have the full resources of the rabbinic establishment behind it.
In the academic system, the transition would not be experienced as a profanation. It would be experienced as an affirmation. The sacred values of the academy, at least in the humanities, include the constructed nature of identity, the performativity of gender, and the courage to embody one’s theoretical commitments. A transition affirms those values. It does not violate them. There is no wound to narrate because there is no sacred boundary that has been crossed. The system’s sacred objects are intact. If anything, they are strengthened.
The three thought experiments together produce a single structural observation that runs beneath the entire series.
The intellectual freedom any figure exercises is conditional on fitting inside the deepest taxonomy the system enforces. In Orthodox life, that taxonomy is gender and halachic status. In the secular academy, that taxonomy is theoretical and political alignment. Both systems enforce their taxonomies with the same mechanism: quiet removal of figures who violate the boundary, retrospective reinterpretation of the violator’s career, and protection of the system’s self-understanding against the disruption the violation represents.
The difference is in what the taxonomy contains. The Orthodox taxonomy contains categories experienced as ontologically given: male, female, Jewish, non-Jewish, observant, non-observant. The academic taxonomy contains categories experienced as epistemologically earned: theoretically sophisticated, politically aligned, professionally competent. Both taxonomies are enforced through the same coalition mechanisms the series has mapped. Both produce the same structural consequence: the person inside the taxonomy has intellectual freedom; the person outside it does not.
The Greenblatt thought experiment is the control case. It shows what happens when a figure’s deepest taxonomy is not threatened by the transition. The answer is: nothing. The career continues. The work continues. The reception continues. The power continues. The person changes and the system does not notice because the system was never organized around the feature that changed.
That is the most revealing thing the three thought experiments produce when read together. The Orthodox system is organized around features that the transition changes. The academic system is not. The consequences follow mechanically from the organization. No one decides to punish Etshalom or reward Greenblatt. The systems respond according to their own structural logic. The logic was set long before the transition occurred. The transition simply reveals which features are load-bearing and which are decorative. In the Orthodox system, gender is load-bearing and intellectual freedom is conditional. In the academic system, gender is decorative and theoretical alignment is load-bearing.
A thought experiment that tested the academic system’s load-bearing feature would produce the same total dissolution that the Orthodox system produces for gender transition. Imagine Greenblatt announcing not a gender transition but a conversion to the view that Western civilization’s literary achievements reflect genuine and non-contingent human greatness, that the canon is not a product of social negotiation but a record of real excellence, that the New Historicist method he pioneered was a sophisticated way of avoiding the evaluative question that criticism exists to answer, and that he now believes Harold Bloom was right all along. That announcement would produce, in the academic system, consequences structurally identical to what a gender transition produces in the Orthodox system. The invitations would stop. The editorial positions would become untenable. The graduate students would distance themselves. The retrospective reinterpretation would begin. The career would not survive.
Each system protects its sacred objects. Each system enforces its deepest taxonomy. The thought experiments reveal which objects are sacred and which taxonomies are deep. Gender is sacred in Orthodoxy and decorative in the academy. Theoretical alignment is sacred in the academy and irrelevant in Orthodoxy. The consequences of violating the sacred object are identical in both systems. Only the object differs.
New Historicism takes as its central claim that early modern identity was constructed in negotiation with authority structures. The construction proceeded through specific practices that left traces in literary texts. The texts therefore provide access to how selfhood was fashioned under specific historical pressures. The framework is specifically historical. It treats selfhood as variable across historical periods and specifically attentive to the conditions that produced different kinds of selves.
Taylor’s claim that the buffered self is a historical achievement of specifically modern conditions parallels Greenblatt’s claim that early modern selves were constructed under specifically different conditions than subsequent or previous selves. Both frameworks resist the buffered liberal assumption that selfhood is constant across history. Both insist that specific historical conditions produce specific kinds of selves. The parallel is substantial.
Greenblatt’s method proceeds through the anecdote. He begins with a vivid archival fragment that grounds interpretation in something concrete. The fragment functions as entry point into the historical conditions that produced the text under analysis. The conditions then illuminate what the text is doing and what it reveals about the period. The method has specific virtues. It produces readable prose. It grounds theoretical claims in specific evidence. It rewards archival research while permitting theoretical fluency. The combination is specifically well-suited to the institutional requirements of American graduate training in the 1980s.
The anecdote operates selectively. Greenblatt chooses specific anecdotes that illustrate specific theoretical claims. The selection produces specific readings. Different anecdotes would produce different readings. The method does not provide criteria for determining which anecdotes best represent the period’s conditions. It therefore permits specific interpretive latitude that more systematic historical methods would constrain.
Greenblatt reads the texts as evidence of specific constructions of selfhood. The reading proceeds from thoroughly buffered scholarly position. It treats the porous phenomena it documents as objects of analysis rather than as live possibilities for the analyst. The treatment produces specific scholarly results while maintaining the phenomenological distance that buffered scholarship typically maintains from its subjects.
Greenblatt treats the porous material as object of sophisticated buffered analysis. The analysis captures some dimensions of what the material involves. It systematically misses other dimensions. What it misses is specifically what made the material live for its original producers and audiences. The miss is not Greenblatt’s particular failure. It is the structural condition of contemporary scholarly engagement with porous historical materials.
Greenblatt grew up in a secular Jewish family with Litvak roots. His grandparents had emigrated from Lithuania in the 1890s. The family was secular. Greenblatt’s own Jewish identity operates at substantial remove from the porous Orthodox tradition his ancestors inhabited. The formational background matters for understanding his subsequent work on early modern constructions of selfhood.
Greenblatt knows that identity negotiations happen. He does not share the specifically religious phenomenology that made those negotiations what they were for early modern figures. His readings of religious material in early modern texts typically operate through the categories his secular academic training provides. The categories produce specific readings. They do not fully reach what the religious material meant to those who produced and received it from within porous religious commitment.
Greenblatt’s central theoretical concept is the circulation of social energy. Literary texts are sites where social energies circulate. The circulation proceeds through specific transactions between texts and their cultural contexts. The concept has proved specifically useful for analysis across many literary periods. It has also proved specifically vague enough to accommodate substantial variation in application.
Taylor’s framework provides secular vocabulary for phenomena that premodern commentators would have described in religious or metaphysical terms. Social energy circulates where grace once circulated. Texts participate in transactions where rituals once participated. The secularization of the vocabulary enables specific kinds of contemporary scholarly discussion. The secularization also specifically empties the phenomena of the content that made them substantial in their original context.
Greenblatt co-founded Representations in 1982. The journal became the key institutional venue for New Historicism. Publishing in Representations placed a scholar inside the new paradigm. The journal functioned as coalition-maintaining institution that sustained the movement across its first decades. The founding was specifically strategic. It created the institutional infrastructure that would propagate the method across American English departments.
New Historicism became dominant in American English departments through the hiring pipelines that Representations and its associated graduate programs produced. The dominance lasted through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The duration reflects what the institutional work accomplished. Sustained intellectual movements require institutional infrastructure to propagate beyond their founders. Greenblatt and his colleagues built the infrastructure that propagated their movement effectively.
Greenblatt serves as general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare. The editorships are specifically consequential for what gets taught in English-language undergraduate courses worldwide. The Norton Anthology determines which texts appear in standard undergraduate survey courses. The Norton Shakespeare determines which editions and apparatus students encounter when they study Shakespeare. Control of these editions is specifically substantial institutional power.
Rita Felski has emerged as a specific critic of New Historicism and related approaches. Her The Limits of Critique (2015) argues that contemporary literary criticism has developed excessive commitment to suspicious reading that treats texts as specifically concealing power relations to be exposed through critical analysis. The commitment produces specific kinds of reading that systematically miss what texts can provide to readers beyond power analysis.
Felski’s critique applies specifically to what New Historicism has become in its fully institutionalized form. The method that once felt liberating now operates as professional default that constrains rather than enables reading. Felski argues for approaches that take seriously what texts provide phenomenologically to readers rather than treating all textual effects as effects of power.
Taylor’s framework helps see what Felski is specifically identifying. New Historicism operates through thoroughly buffered analytical distance from texts it analyzes. The distance produces specific findings about how texts participated in power relations. It systematically misses what texts provide to readers who engage them with something other than critical suspicion. The missing is the specifically phenomenological dimension that Taylor’s framework identifies as characteristic of what buffered analysis cannot fully reach.
Greenblatt’s response to such criticism has generally been to acknowledge partial validity while not substantially modifying his method. The method continues to operate as he established it. Subsequent scholars work with variations of the method. The field continues within the paradigm New Historicism established.
Greenblatt represents the specifically successful consolidation of buffered humanistic scholarship in the late twentieth century American academy. The consolidation depended on methodological innovations that transformed how literary texts were read. The transformation was substantial. It also specifically embedded buffered assumptions about what reading is for in ways that subsequent scholarship has had difficulty dislodging.
The embedding proceeded through the specific institutional mechanisms Greenblatt and his colleagues built: Representations, the Norton editorships, the graduate training pipelines that reproduced New Historicism across decades. The mechanisms functioned as specifically effective infrastructure for propagating particular analytical commitments. The commitments became professional defaults rather than arguable choices. The default status made them specifically difficult to examine from within the profession they organized.
The humanities face pressures that may eventually require fundamental paradigmatic reconsideration.
Greenblatt himself will likely not participate in such reconsideration. He is 82 and continues to work within the paradigm he established. His most recent book on Marlowe operates through the same method as Renaissance Self-Fashioning. The consistency is characteristic of scholars who have shaped dominant paradigms. They typically sustain their methods throughout their careers rather than modifying them in response to emerging critique. They will eventually be modified or replaced by subsequent scholarship operating from different phenomenological positions.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his view of human nature undermines the core premise of New Historicism.
Greenblatt gained prominence by arguing in Renaissance Self-Fashioning that human identity is a fluid product of cultural manipulation. In his framework, individuals possess a agency to navigate, subvert, and reshape the cultural scripts and power structures of their era. Greenblatt focuses on the micro-maneuvers of the individual within these systems, treating identity as something a man can actively fashion for himself through language, behavior, and strategy.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology invalidates this focus on individual self-fashioning in three ways.
First, Mearsheimer reveals that the capacity for self-fashioning is largely an illusion. Greenblatt assumes that a man stands apart from his culture enough to manipulate its scripts. Mearsheimer argues that early tribal socialization generally seals a person’s identity long before he develops the critical faculties required to question or reshape it. By the time a man is old enough to think about fashioning himself, his family and his society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. The individual rarely manipulate the cultural script; the cultural script has already manufactured the individual.
Second, the two thinkers disagree on the nature of social constraint. Greenblatt views power structures as historical and institutional arrangements that savvy individuals can navigate or subvert through subtle resistance. Mearsheimer views these constraints as products of evolutionary survival and structural anarchy. Men rarely engage in clever micro-maneuvers against power for personal expression; they cling to their group because the alternative is destruction. The tribal bond is a survival device, not a theatrical costume that an individual can alter to suit his personal style.
Third, Greenblatt’s method overstates the importance of the individual actor in history. By focusing on how specific writers, courtiers, and historical figures fashioned their public personas, New Historicism treats history as a series of fluid, individual negotiations. Mearsheimer’s realism presents a static view of human behavior where collective units, namely nations and tribes, drive outcomes. A man might alter his style or his rhetoric, but his fundamental loyalties and moral code remain bound to the collective unit that protects him.
If Mearsheimer is right, Greenblatt’s self-fashioning is a luxury of language that misses the hard reality of human development. Men do not fashion themselves from the raw material of culture; culture fashions men from infancy to serve the survival of the group.