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How did Stephen Greenblatt use cultural anthropology in Renaissance Self-Fashioning?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

In Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Stephen Greenblatt utilized cultural anthropology to transform how scholars analyze literary production. By drawing on the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Greenblatt moved away from the formalist constraints of New Criticism, which had previously isolated literary works from their historical context.12

Instead, Greenblatt treated literature as a vital component of a broader cultural exchange. He analyzed how a society fashions its identity through political ceremonials and social interactions, viewing the creation of individual identity as a process that occurs in opposition to—and in negotiation with—external cultural and historical factors. This approach, which became a cornerstone of New Historicism, allowed Greenblatt to interpret Renaissance texts not as autonomous objects, but as active participants in the complex, circulating "social energy" of their time.12