Review of Robert Appelbaum’s The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare

Robert Appelbaum’s The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Anthem Press, 2022), takes on the problem of depictions of violence: “a human condition and a human predicament” (212). This encyclopedic study explores how and why violence is depicted across a number of European Renaissance genres, moving from early novella collections to Menippean satire, to epic romance, to tragic drama. On the whole, Appelbaum is more concerned with violent expressions within each singular genre than he is with drawing conclusions across the collection, but he does tentatively suggest a movement towards increasingly complex and open-ended depictions calling for audience struggles with morality. He is more concerned, however, with the general tracing of a “history of systems of ideas” (211) surrounding violence and its fictionalized expressions. In this, he is extremely successful. This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars, and Appelbaum’s clear and incisive presentation of texts and ideas makes it so that a specialist in any one of his texts, genres, or locales will be able to read the whole and derive great worth from it.

Chapter 1, “Overture: The Show of Violence”, sets up the book elegantly with a deep theoretical framework of violence. Appelbaum delineates many different types and categories of violence, one of the most vital of which is the distinction between violence in which the means should justify the end (as in situations of violent social reform) and situations where the means and the…