Renaissance

Renaissance (meaning "new birth") describes a revival in intellectual or artistic effort. In History, this term is used for a period in European History between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. More generally the term applies to other outbursts of creativity, such as the Harlem Renaissance in black New York City in the 1920s, the Irish Literary Renaissance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Carolingian Renaissance in eighth and ninth century Europe. This article is about the European Renaissance, "the great revival of art and letters, under the influence of classical models, which began in Italy in the 14th century and continued during the 15th and 16th" centuries.

Civic Humanism

See also Republicanism and Machiavelli

Pocock (1981)traces the Machiavellian belief in and emphasis upon Greco-Roman ideals of unspecialized civic virtue and liberty from 15th-century Florence through 17th-century England and Scotland to 18th-century America. Thinkers who shared these ideals tended to believe that the function of property was to maintain an individual's independence as a precondition of his virtue. Consequently, in the last two times and places mentioned above, they were disposed to attack the new commercial and financial regime that was beginning to develop.

The influential concept of civic humanism of German Renaissance scholar Hans Baron (1900-88) emphasized the male citizen's participation in the republic of Florence. He saw medieval religion as antithetical to this republicanism and denied religion any constitutive role in Renaissance culture. In medieval Thomism there is a broader concept of participation than that of Baron. Despite the supposed ignoring of religion by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97), he asserted that Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-92) reclaimed medieval spirituality in his late writings. Lorenzo's writings point toward a broader definition of participation to include human associations that focused on charity, thereby including men and women in participatory roles in society.

Najemi (1996) examines Hans Baron's ambivalent portrayal of Machiavelli. He argues that Baron tended to see Machiavelli simultaneously as the cynical debunker and the faithful heir of civic humanism. By the mid-1950s, Baron had come to consider civic humanism and Florentine republicanism as early chapters of a much longer history of European political liberty, a story in which Machiavelli and his generation played a crucial role. This conclusion led Baron to modify his earlier negative view of Machiavelli. He tried to bring the Florentine theorist under the umbrella of civic humanism by underscoring the radical differences between The Prince and the Discourses and thus revealing the fundamentally republican character of the Discourses. However, Baron's inability to come to terms with Machiavelli's harsh criticism of early 15th-century commentators such as Leonardo Bruni ultimately prevented him from fully reconciling Machiavelli with civic humanism.

Historiography

During the Renaissance there was an explicit self-awareness on the part of humanists, involving a disdain for medieval traditions and art forms, a rejection of scholastic philosophy, and a quest for a purer form of Latin, as discovered in the classics. Italy was the center of this new realization by 1300; by 1600 an expanded version was widely disseminated across western Europe. North of the Alps humanists like the Dutch Erasmus sought the reform of Christian society through classical education. They envisioned the rebirth ("re-naissance") of the Golden Age through the rebirth of good writing. As the tutors the European aristocracy, humanists saw their ideas accepted by the top ranks of the ruling classes.

French intellectual historian Pierre Bayle wrote a highly influential Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695-1697), read by scholars across Europe, which promoted the incorrect notion that the rebirth of letters began in 1453 when the fall of Constantinople sent Greek scholars into exile in the West. (Greeks had come 200 years earlier.) During the Enlightenment, French historian Voltaire portrayed the Renaissance as a crucial stage in the liberation of the human mind from medieval superstition and error, as promulgated by the Catholic Church. Voltaire exaggerated the decline of traditional religion in the Renaissance, for most of the Italian humanists were devout Catholics. The Romantic movement of the 19th century, typified by the poet Robert Browning, explored with fascinated disapproval the pagan and immoral qualities of Renaissance man. Romantics, interested in the vital, heroic, and unconventional personalities of Renaissance artists, added the theme of the Renaissance as the invention of individualism.

In the 19th century, the great romantic historians Jules Michelet (1798-1874) focused on the French Renaissance and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) interpreted at Italy. In both cases they assumed there had been an abrupt and fundamental change in society: the Middle Ages end and the modern world suddenly begins. Michelet abhorred the Middle Ages; Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) did not, but each explored the ways in which a dynamic Renaissance could develop from static medieval culture. Each historian brought his own personal history and ideals to his study of culture, cultural change, and the idea of modernism.

Burckhardt articulated the single most fruitful idea about the Renaissance: "the discovery of the individual," which dominated historical writing for a century. His approach came under challenge from postmodern scholars in the 1970s. The contributions of the New Historicists, particularly literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, have made it impossible to approach the history of individualism in traditional humanistic terms. Accordingly, postmodern scholars now view the "individual" as a cultural construct rather than as an underlying human "essence" or "protagonist" in narratives of modernization or progress. Martin (1997) challenges the postmoderns and offers a new reading of the history of individualism in the Renaissance. He argues many New Historicist practices are inadequate because they tend to ignore long-term historical shifts in the Western European vocabulary of selfhood and to envision constructions of the self as shaped by a narrowly defined cultural context. The history of individualism in the Renaissance should be approached as a discursive field in which there was a new understanding of "prudence" as a strategy for concealing one's views and sentiments and a newly invented notion of "sincerity" that called for the expression of personal convictions and feelings. As a result of the tension between these two ideals, the Renaissance self came to be defined in increasingly expressive and individualistic terms. Because these ideals had a European-wide currency and developed over several generations, the origins of individualism cannot be traced in any exclusive manner to specific national contexts or particular moments in time. Rather than a return to traditional assumptions about the self, Martin's approach encourages discussions of individualism and identity to take into account two critical issues: the need to remain open to complex intellectual and cultural forces that transcend particular times and places, and the need to recognize that the Renaissance sense of interiority was often immune to precisely the sort of ideological manipulation that New Historicists have seen as decisive in the construction of identities.

Bouwsma (1979) laments the virtual collapse in recent historiography of the venerable conception of the Renaissance as a decisive turning point in the drama of Western history and to the postmodern substitution for it of the vague notion of the Renaissance as an "age of transition" to the modern world. This shift is attributed to a general tendency in recent historiography to minimize process in favor of structure. However valuable in some respects, structuralist history is not well adapted to explain change, argues Bouwsma. As a result, it has undermined the dramatic organization of Western history and - since historiography cannot finally dispense with dramatic patterns of some kind - opened the way for a "myth of apocalyptic modernization" that rejects the relevance of all but the most recent past to the present. The traditional idea of the Renaissance, since it saw the modern world as the goal of linear history, was itself vitiated by apocalypticism. Detached from this metahistorical assumption, however, it is still useful to explain much (if not all) in contemporary culture, in the meaning of that term now common among anthropologists.

Studying history

Medieval history was consisted primarily of descriptive chronicles. Humanism in created a new kind of historical writing, with attention to motives and causes, animated by a belief that the study of the past had direct applications to governance and military science, and a sense that historical change is best understood in the context of deep values. Leonardo Bruni, one of the earliest humanist historians, presents the history of Florence as a battle between tyranny and civil liberty. Sabellicus presents Venice as the successor of the ancient Greek ideal of the independent city-state. Political history was a seen as to statecraft argued by Machiavelli and Polydore Vergil.

Organization

The Renaissance Society of America formed in 1954 with about 700 members. It now has several thousand, and held its 54th annual meeting at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago, 3-5 April 2008.

Further Reading

for a much longer guide, see the Bibliography subpage

• Abbagnano, Nicola. "Renaissance Humanism" in Philip P. Wiener, ed. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, (1974) online edition
• Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (2006) excerpt and text search
• Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), a famous classic; excerpt and text search 2007 edition; also complete text online
• Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 1. The Renaissance (1903), older atticles by scholars complete text online
• Campbell, Gordon. The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance. (2003). 862 pp. online at OUP
• Grendler, Paul F., ed. The Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students. (2003). 970 pp.
• Fletcher, Stella. The Longman Companion to Renaissance Europe, 1390-1530. (2000). 347 pp.
• Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. (1994). 648 pp.; a magistral survey, heavily illustrated excerpt and text search
• Hall, Bert S. Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (2001) excerpt and text search
• Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. (2000). 747 pp.
• Johnson, Paul. The Renaissance: A Short History. (2000). 197 pp. excerpt and text search
• King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance (1991) excerpt and text search
• Kristeller, Paul Oskar, and Michael Mooney. Renaissance Thought and its Sources (1979) excerpt and text search
• Nauert, Charles G. Historical Dictionary of the Renaissance. (2004). 541 pp.
• Patrick, James A., ed. Renaissance and Reformation (5 vol 2007), 1584 pages; comprehensive encyclopedia
• Plumb, J. H. The Italian Renaissance (2001) excerpt and text search
• Ross, James Bruce, and Mary M. McLaughlin, eds. The Portable Renaissance Reader (1977) excerpt and text search
• Rowse, A. L. The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society (2000) excerpt and text search
• Ruggiero, Guido, ed. A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance. (2002). 561 pp.
• Sider, Sandra. Handbook to Life in Renaissance Europe (2007) excerpt and text search
• Rundle, David, ed. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. (1999). 434 pp.; numerous brief articles online edition
• Speake, Jennifer and Thomas G. Bergin, eds. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation. (2004). 550 pp.
• Turner, Richard N. Renaissance Florence (2005) excerpt and text search