Prince of Scholars: Michael C. Schoenfeldt
Remembered by Jonathan Post and Richard Strier
Jonathan F. S. Post—a Tribute to Michael C. Schoenfeldt
For me—and I suspect for others—Mike will always be remembered as the living epitome of courtesy, a Sir Calidore Incarnate. He was a brilliant scholar and deft critic, an exuberant writer of critical prose, generous in his commendation of others, always finding a way of differentiating his own arguments from those of others without ever sounding at all disagreeable or pompous. These are defining attributes of his first book, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago, 1991), one of the very best books on an author for whom there is no shortage of excellent criticism. But these virtues are apparent as well in all his writings: his important monograph Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1999), the many articles and the diverse collections of essays he edited and the introductions he wrote. No one with a smaller reach, intellectually or personally, could have accomplished so much. He wrote on many of the poets that matter most in the English Renaissance–lyric and long poems alike by Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, and Marvell, and some who were newly surfacing like Aemelia Lanyer. There was rarely a collection of essays published anywhere in the field that didn’t bear a contribution from him–and all were better for doing so.
In his concern with ceremony, with manners as a mode of being and practice, Mike was a lineal descendent of Donald Friedman, his dissertation supervisor at Berkeley, whom he commemorated on several notable occasions. Both shared the belief that criticism, along with pursuing an argument, should make pleasurable reading, and Mike’s writing, rich with adjectives, is as pleasurable to read as it is argumentatively sound and wide ranging in reference. As befitting someone who did his graduate studies at Berkeley in the heyday of New Historicism, Mike was drawn, indeed compelled, to situate his readings in the wider discourse of Renaissance cultural studies: not just the courtesy or medical literatures of the era but the visual arts as well. Albrecht Durer held a special appeal to him. I once wondered if hailing from Oklahoma gave Mike a special angle on courtship. A bit like Robert Frost, born in San Francisco, but hearing so well New England accents and phrases, he was a keen student of the machinations and discourse of social difference.
Someone as thoughtfully attuned to others as Mike was also a treasured teacher and campus leader. His entire career was spent at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he quickly rose through the ranks, enabled by offers from other institutions. He chaired the department and eventually assumed the role of Associate Dean of Humanities. He guided the department superbly, winning the confidence of his colleagues across the generations, and he helped to open the door into emerging disciplines like the medical humanities. His students likewise testify to his many kindnesses, for the encouragement he gave them in their inquiries, and, of course, to his knowledge of the field.
I sometimes thought of Mike as a younger brother, smarter of course, as younger siblings so often are, wiser to the ways of the world. We were both transplanted Californians of a sort. Both of us taught at large, public universities, enjoyed the classroom, and assumed a variety of administrative tasks. But neither of us was ever able to forsake the “Muses dear.” Mike’s Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2007) is perhaps the single best compilation of criticism on that subject—and it is a large subject. My copy of his enviably concise Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010) bears a note scribbled on the title page, “To Jonathan, with admiration and affection. Mike.” I’m sure I’m not alone in receiving and cherishing such phrasing from him. Admiration and affection are what he brought to the study of poetry and to the people around him. If there is one work of his that I now return to in light of Mike’s own later-in-life medical circumstance, it is his Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. The body was often the focal center of Mike’s scholarship and it had come to be of his life. Remembered in the Preface for her patience and grace, his mother died of the same kidney affliction that would eventually claim him.
Early grey-haired, hobbled like Hephaistos (from a football injury), but silver-tongued, Mike—and he was always Mike, not Michael—breathed good humor and self-incriminating wit. With a duck of the head, he could mimic and parody his own obsession with courtesy. He once referred, in passing, to his notorious reading of Herbert’s “Love” (3) as having ruined a great poem for a generation of readers. This is the same reading, it should be said, that also, elegantly, quotes James Merrill on the same poem as “a work in which two characters are being ravishingly polite to one another.” Mike could reach forward in time as well as backwards, up the social ladder and down. He also had a special affection for the University of Cambridge, Herbert’s alma mater, and Spenser’s and, less happily, Milton’s. He spent a year at Clare College, researching Bodies and Selves, and, subsequently, a term as a visiting fellow at Trinity College. On that occasion, he and his partner and eventual wife, Leslie, were housed on the second floor of a Tudor-frame pizza parlor near the college, where they could also attend Evensong—a yoking together of heterodoxical worlds much in keeping with Mike’s habits of thought about high and low places. Health prevented him from attending in person the “Herbert and Eloquence” Conference at Cambridge in 2022, but, to the delight of all, he was Zoomed in on a large screen high on the wall in a lecture hall. In the spirit of the times—Mike was a self-confessed addict of trends—he then read a fine, ecologically informed paper on weather in Herbert that will be included in the resulting collection of essays he was co-editing at the time of his death.
Mike gave of himself to many people and communities. To ours, like the poets he admired, he radiated joy and light on the subjects he loved sharing with others—joy and light that continue even beyond his passing.
Richard Strier—A Eulogy for Michael C. Schoenfeldt
My most immediate reaction to the death of Michael Carl Schoenfeldt is disbelief. How can Michael be dead? We were in the middle of a conversation. We had both written essays for a collection on George Herbert and eloquence that Michael was co-editing with Kenneth Graham and Christopher Hodgkins. Michael’s essay concerns the extent of Herbert’s use of natural phenomena in the poetry, arguing for Herbert’s positive, almost ecological sense of nature; mine, on Herbert and Emily Dickinson, takes the view that attention to natural phenomena was more important to Dickinson than to Herbert, and that Herbert’s attitude toward nature was mainly monitory. We had just begun discussing this. Mike had asked for a copy of an old essay of mine that he was having trouble getting from his library, and which asserts the “monitory” view at length. I sent him an electronic copy, and was eagerly awaiting his response. I can’t believe that now I am never going to get one, that the conversation has come, as I have to put it, to a dead stop. How can that be? Michael and I had been happily and productively discussing and disagreeing about Herbert’s poetry for, literally, decades. It was truly disagreement without disagreeableness, and, of course, there were significant moments of agreement (about “The Church-porch,” for instance). Some of our disagreements were of such long standing that we made a joke of them. Neither of us could recall how many hours we had spent on the word “perhaps” in line 15 of Herbert’s “Submission.” And always productively and in high spirits. We did this in a discussion “from the floor” at a conference in Paris on George and Edward Herbert, and the room was galvanized with interpretive energy, and with laughter. How can all that be over (not to mention our ongoing conversations about the status of bodily pleasure in the period)?
Since I seem to have fallen into a semi-autobiographical mode, I will continue briefly in that mode. I first encountered Michael and his work on George Herbert in 1985, when he was on the job market. Naturally I wanted to hire him, but my department couldn’t see having two George Herbert fanatics. The University of Michigan was the lucky department that got Michael, and I need not rehearse the triumphs of his career there. But I want to give some sense of how Michael and his work entered into my critical and intellectual world in 1985 and immediately thereafter.
My book on George Herbert’s poetry had come out in 1983. It brought together close reading and intellectual history; New Criticism and Old Historicism, so to speak. It tried to show that Herbert’s commitment to the central Reformation doctrine of justification by faith was not simply the “context” for Herbert’s poetry but entered into the tiniest details of the writing. The substantive point was that Herbert was deeply against aggressive selfhood. Meanwhile, Frank Whigham’s book, Ambition and Privilege, had come out at almost the same time. His book was about the world of aggressive selfhood. Whigham and I were close friends, and recognized our books as perfect opposites of one another, portraying, in Herbert’s words, “this world and that of grace.” Frank was that fashionable thing, a New Historicist; he read courtly behavior as closely as I read lyrics.
Imagine our surprise when, as readers for University of Chicago Press, we encountered a book that brought our critical endeavors together. Michael Schoenfeldt’s Prayer and Power (published in 1991) embraced and employed the theological framework and literary analysis of my book with the sociological framework and social analysis of Frank’s. New Historicism had barely entered into the field of lyric poetry (though there were some fine pages on Wyatt in the book that founded the movement in 1980, Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning). Some devotees of the study of poetry thought this version of historicism to be unappreciative of literary value. However, Michael’s book had it all: close reading — of lyric poetry and of courtly materials — together with deep theological awareness. His knowledge of the whole spectrum of early modern English Protestantism was paralleled by his knowledge of absolutely all the courtesy and conduct manuals of the period as well as the relevant scholarship on and theorization of the latter (Norbert Elias and Lawrence Stone; Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman). New Historicism had entered decisively into the world of lyric poetry studies and into the world of early modern religious studies—with sensitivity and nuance.
There are many moments in Prayer and Power that provide the kind of transformative flashes of surprising and deepening insight that show New Historicism at its best. I would point to two moments in the chapter wonderfully entitled “Socializing God”: the material about the legal penalties and social opprobrium of changing service to a master as it applies to the imagined gesture of changing service to God at the end of the first “Affliction” poem (P & P, 76); and the material on the extraordinary boldness involved in a tenant wishing to renegotiate a lease as it applies to “Redemption” (P & P, 79). But the book should not be admired only for such moments. Its sustained effort must be recognized: to harmonize humility as a strategy for self-promotion with humility as sincere self-critique and self-abnegation. Michael had to simultaneously cultivate and renounce cynicism. Only someone immensely talented could even embark on such a project. Michael came close to accomplishing the impossible trick. This can be seen in his chapter-long treatment of the culminating lyric in The Temple, “Love” (3). The chapter is a tour-de-force, involving not only (!) courtesy manuals and sermons but Don Quixote, James Merrill, and Sandro Botticelli. That Michael had to acknowledge at the end of the chapter that the topic of the poem, love, tended to get lost in the discussions of power is a tribute to his intellectual honesty, and to how much he understood the perils as well as the strengths of his project.
In a way it is odd that aggressive selfhood was Michael’s subject. It certainly was not his style. His own courtliness was not a stratagem for self-advancement. His life fully showed what his book could not: that there is such a thing as non-manipulative courtesy, that a sweet and virtuous soul could exist in our world. To say he will be missed is an understatement.
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