Maryanne Cline Horowitz. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Editor: Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Volume 5, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.
The term Renaissance (English, French, German; rinascità in Italian) refers to (1) “a rebirth of arts and letters” noticed by authors and artists living between the 1300s and the 1600s; (2) Italian cultural history from about 1300 to 1520 (“La Rinascimento”), as in the period concept of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860); or (3) a period of European history starting in Italy as early as the fourteenth century and extending into the seventeenth century in England. In the twentieth century, those studying other European nations sought to document outside Italy the presence of both a renaissance of arts and letters and the Burckhardtian characteristics of Renaissance civilization. The Renaissance, especially in American humanities courses on “Western” civilization and to members of the Renaissance Society of America (founded 1954), became a full period concept for European civilization from Petrarch to Milton, including trade routes and colonization.
Medievalists, led by Charles Homer Haskins, researched a succession of medieval renaissances (Carolingian, Ottonian, twelfth century), suggesting that the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Renaissance may be viewed as an extension of late medieval culture. Nevertheless, Erwin Panofsky in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1972) argued that the Italian Renaissance differed from the earlier ones in that the revived classical heritage became a permanent possession and ancient forms were reunified with ancient content; to experience Panofsky’s point, visit in the renovated Galleria Borghese in Rome the succession of rooms of pagan gods such as Venus or Hermaphrodite.
Comparison of Culture to Horticulture
Petrarch, who was a practical gardener, viewed the rebirth of culture as plants regrowing in the sunlight of spring. Petrarch’s French disciple Nicolas de Clamanges refers to flowers together with the Latin term renasci, meaning “to grow again” or “to be reborn.” Boccaccio praised Dante for inviting back the Muses and Giotto for restoring the art of painting. Borrowing from the ancient vegetative imagery, such as the older Cato’s image of a broken clover regrowing and Pliny’s examples of vegetative matter regrowing as sprouts, humanists praised the work of fourteenth-century Italian artists and writers. Northern humanists continued a strategy of nourishing, cultivating, and transplanting from classical texts and images the seeds of virtue and knowledge. In the circle of King Francis I of France, in flowery rhetoric humanists praised him for the rebirth (renaître) of letters, and in the architecture, decorative arts, and manuscript and book collections in the court at Fontainebleau, there was a “renaissance of arts and letters.” Visual evidence for concepts of the rebirth of culture include Simone Martini’s illumination that Petrarch commissioned for his copy of Virgil’s Georgics and Eclogues, Da Vinci’s image of a trunk resprouting (a botanical lesson from Virgil’s Georgics), and Botticelli’s Primavera.
The Influence of the Burckhardtian Renaissance
Burckhardt claimed “the Italian Renaissance must be called the mother of our modern age” and described its six major characteristics: the vision of the state as a work of art in both princedoms breeding egocentric leaders and republics breeding new independent individuals; the development of the individual—newly subjective, conscious of fame, and multi-faceted; the revival of antiquity, especially ancient Latin culture; the discovery of the world and of humanity as evidenced by mapmaking, landscapes, natural science, poetry, biography, and social commentary; the equalization of society through festivals that expressed a common culture; and the advent of an immoral and irreligious age with revival of ancient pagan superstitions and an oscillation between religiosity and secularity. Medievalists sought to show that especially the first four Burckhardtian characteristics were already present in the medieval world, that in fact a rich Roman culture persisted more in the north than in the divided Italian peninsula. They documented individualism in Thomas Aquinas and Eleanor of Aquitaine and medieval advances in science and in naturalistic art. Scholars of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in England, France, Spain, the Low Countries, the German lands, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere have likewise claimed Burckhardtian Renaissances, usually like the medievalists emphasizing the first four traits, although in French scholarship a secular, doubting French Renaissance had a vogue to which Lucien Febvre responded in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1982). In the expansion by later Burckhardtians, the Italian city-states were a model in miniature for the development of the nation-states (see Garett Mattingly on diplomacy, Hans Baron on civic humanism in Florence as a precedent for the United States), and individualism emerged not only from political turmoil but from the development of capitalist, middle-class occupations (Alfred von Martin, E. P. Cheyney).
Today the Burckhardtian Renaissance is evident in textbooks, in films on Renaissance individuals, and in art exhibitions. The term “renaissance” meaning a flowering of culture is positive and optimistic, and thus it has been extrapolated to other contexts, such as the “Jewish Renaissance” of Hebrew with the rebirth of Zionism in nineteenth-century Europe, the “Harlem Renaissance” of African-American culture in the 1920s, and numerous discussions of urban renewal as a “renaissance.”
Burckhardtian scholarship continues to emphasize Burckhardt’s first four characteristics of the Renaissance, finding isolated precedents in the medieval period. As social and economic historians and women’s historians have made evident the hierarchies of rank and gender that marked the age, scholars have recognized that the fifth characteristic, “equalization,” was limited to the mingling and rising of burgher to noble status and that a few daughters tutored along with sons and women’s presence at courts did not add up to Burckhardt’s “footing of perfect equality with men.”
In claiming Burckhardtian Renaissances for other nations, generally scholars isolated the “immoral and irreligious age” to the Italians, although in some postcolonial interpretations (such as that of Walter D. Mignolo), point four—the discovery of the world and of humanity—provides the strongest evidence of point six—the immorality of the European colonialist, slave trader, and missionary.
Scholars of the Protestant Reformation have always emphasized the Christian characteristics of northern humanists. Criticizing Luther for authoritarianism and asceticism, Ernst Troeltsch (1906) contrasted medieval traits of the reformation with modern traits of the Renaissance; admiring Luther for redirecting Christian freedom to vocations in this world, Wilhelm Dilthey (1923) interpreted the Renaissance and Reformation together as the foundation of the modern world. Especially in the United States, where scholars specializing in the Renaissance and the Reformation often interpret the Reformation as a culmination of the Renaissance and focus on the humanist’s inquiries into Christian antiquity, the term “Christian humanism” is applied to humanists of both the Italian and the northern Renaissance. Nevertheless, we must note that curious and daring humanists employed Jews and Greek Orthodox to explore texts in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, and openly read and commented upon works written by ancient pagans; Jewish humanists in Italy brought about a renaissance of ancient Hebrew genres (see Cecil Roth and Arthur Lesley in Renaissance Rereadings).
Historical Challenges from Annales School and from Early Modernists
Coincident with national movements of independence from colonization by European nations, historians in Paris developed a movement disparaging the historical studies focused on “What’s new?” The Annales school focused on structures of long duration, emphasizing land patterns, family structures, religious and political rituals, and popular customs that have changed slowly and not in accordance with the traditional dates of historical periodization. Funded as social science and utilizing increasingly computerized databases on demography and prices of material goods (whether wine, salt, or catechisms), scholars are accumulating more precise information on living conditions in the premodern world.
The work of scholars seeking out lives of lesser-known people (women and the marginalized) and seeking documents of public performances (confraternity events, religious and political rituals) has provided a fuller awareness of premodern cultures. To be inclusive of popular as well as elite cultures and to start afresh without the ideological implications of nineteenth-century interpretations of “Renaissance,” some scholars prefer the period term “early modern.” Such scholars tend not to be working on the Italian Renaissance of the 1300s and early 1400s but to start after 1450, when the invention of the printing press accelerated the spread of the renaissance of arts and letters throughout Europe. For those scholars, who view either the invention of the printing press or Martin Luther the protester as the turning point from the Middle Ages to the early modern period and who drop Renaissance as a period concept, the Renaissance in Europe becomes closer to its original definition as a movement in arts and letters—in the early modernist’s viewpoint, the first movement in a succession of overlapping movements of the early modern period.
A strain of scholarship has emerged to historicize the development of the concept of a Renaissance period. Scholars are fascinated by various versions of ideas of the Renaissance, such as those of Jules Michelet, Burckhardt, the Victorians, J. P. Morgan, and Virginia Woolf. Pascal Brioist emphasizes that Michelet published his Introduction à la Renaissance in 1855, the year Burckhardt began writing his more famous work. Even though Michelet originated the phrase “the discovery of the world and the discovery of man,” the term “Burckhardtian” remains the common adjective for “Renaissance” with a capital R.
While “medievalisms” are also studied, the brunt of historicizing of the period concept of Renaissance suggests that the Burckhardtian Renaissance is a nineteenth-century historical fiction or a utopian vision. J. B. Bullen traces the development of the “myth” of the Renaissance between Voltaire (1756) and Walter Pater (1873). Burckhardtians have responded to the undermining of the period concept by printing editions of his work with art illustrations, as art more than any other medium demarcates a distinctive period. The 1793 creation of the Louvre Museum, with its succession of rooms of great civilizations (Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the centrally placed Renaissance) set a pattern spread by Napoléon to Madrid, Naples, Milan, and Amsterdam, and imitated in New York, Boston, and Chicago (see Carol Duncan’s 1995 study, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums). Daniel Ménager in 1992 emphasized the aesthetic, in fact the religion, of beauty that distinguishes the creativity of the Renaissance. Paula Findlen, in a 1998 American Historical Review forum on “The Persistence of the Renaissance,” demarcated the period by its passion for collecting objects of antiquity and taking creative inspiration from that collecting. The general public, as well as the tourist industry, recognizes the innovation, distinctiveness, and sheer visual beauty of art from, say, the cardinal and Christian virtues and vices of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua to the nude forms of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgment.
Humanists and Early Scientists
Meanwhile, neither humanist nor reformer ushered in the world of the post-Sputnik generation; government funding of the sciences, including the history of science, has taught historians that the major intellectual shift of modernity occurred in the development of the sciences, especially from Galileo to Newton. Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter (1999) illuminates the contrasting mentalities of this shift as represented by the scientist’s relationship (through correspondence) with his daughter Maria Celeste, a nun. The interpretation of Copernicus and Galileo as early scientists rather than as “Renaissance men,” as well as the seeking of the origins of science in the practices of apprenticeship, the work of artisan workshops, and in the inventions accompanying military battles and world navigation, rivals the outpouring of current scholarship documenting the humanist movement in countries throughout Europe.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the decrease in humanists educated in Greek and Latin letters, the rise in the status of scientists and those educated in “science” or “social science” curricula, and the funding of the history of science encouraged a search for the origins of modernity in the seventeenth-century innovations in science and technology. To create global and multicultural liberal arts curricula, colleges and universities have condensed posts across the disciplines for pre-modern Europe, making it sensible for those doing scholarship on topics from antiquity to the French Revolution to advocate their common interests in the creation of academic centers, funding of journals, and defending posts in premodern studies. For those in the historical profession, “early modern” is the category used globally by the American Historical Association.
Renaissance of the Renaissance Society of America
Together with practical on-line resources for accessing published books, such as Early English Books, 1475-1700, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Historical Change refocused attention on 1450 as a turning point. E-mail groups such as FICINO and conferences have discussed the rivalry of the term “Renaissance” and the term “early modern,” but “Renaissance” persists as a period label for books and articles in disciplinary histories such as art history, music history, and history of science, in national and comparative literatures, and in history. While the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies appeared in 1997 with the new title Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, expanding its reach to “European and Western Asian cultural forms from late antiquity to the seventeenth century,” its home base at Duke University remained the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Women’s studies scholars, delving into women’s writings and disregarding the stereotype “Renaissance woman,” created the Society for Study of Early Modern Women with a home base at the University of Maryland Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies.
Encouraging regional and topical organizations, the Renaissance Society of America holds council meetings with affiliates. As of 2003, there was no early modern umbrella organization. From the 1985 national meeting of the Renaissance Society of America at Occidental College, the Huntington Library, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, which ushered in open calls for papers on distinctive topics of the European Renaissance (collected in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, a selective anthology commemorating the conference) to the RSA’s international meetings in 2000 in Florence, Italy, and in 2005 in Cambridge, England, there has been an international renaissance of Renaissance studies.