Reason and Experience in Renaissance Italy by Christine Shaw

Abstract

Drawing on her unequaled expertise concerning the governments and political systems of Renaissance Italy—the fruit of decades of research in both the archival and published sources of every major Italian state (and several minor ones) between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century—Shaw has produced a comprehensive and salient analysis of what she identifies as the fundamental “political principles” of Italy’s republics. This excellent and deeply learned book—the latest of her many monographs—challenges the dismissive view of Renaissance republicanism as moribund, especially after European monarchies took control of most of the peninsula in the early sixteenth century.Shaw’s approach is grounded in careful explication of the language of the “principles” that she unearths, not from the works of political thinkers but from the records of council proceedings, proposals by government committees, debates and advisory sessions, preambles to legislation, chancery letters, diplomatic instructions and reports, and much more. These practical, collaborative, and mostly anonymous documents reflect the historical experience of five republics—Venice, Genoa, Florence, Lucca, and Siena. Their historical value, Shaw affirms, lies in their authors’ expectation that the “reasons and principles” expressed in them “would appeal to, and be agreed by, many of those to whom they were addressed” (14). For example, most citizens of republics were in agreement (at least in principle) that unity was a supreme virtue; that “nothing poses greater danger” than “dissension” and faction (16); that in republics “no ranks are recognized” (36); that “it befits justice and equity to provide that all may share in offices and magistracies” (65); that the “true and supreme prince” of a republic, even in Venice and Genoa where doges held the highest office, was “always a corporate entity, a council, or the popolo or comune” (101); that “it is just that all citizens should bear the [fiscal] burdens of their city” (104); that “he who has more should pay more” (112); and that “the administration of justice is the universal foundation of all the cities and states of the world” (163). Governments embraced such ideas to enhance their legitimacy and forge consensus.Yet Shaw also elucidates the conflicting interpretations of these principles and the sharp divisions between factions, classes, and interest groups about fact to achieve unity, curtail factions, and define ranks; about who constituted the “all” who should share in offices; about which council or which definition of the people was the “supreme prince”; and about how taxes were to be assessed and what was to be taxed. The principles no doubt rested on what Shaw calls the “core values”—justice, equality, and equity—of republican governance (4), but this fact did not prevent divergent interpretations by different social constituencies. Shaw’s subtle and discerning treatment thus merges close scrutiny of the shared idiom of republicanism with the effects on it of competing, even antagonistic, sociopolitical interests.Shaw also casts new light on Italy’s principalities. Because, she says, the “legitimacy of princely rule” was “equivocal” and not self-generated, it almost always depended either on approval by subjects (however expressed or manufactured) or on investiture by popes or emperors. Inheritance as a buttress of legitimacy was “complicated by limited acceptance of primogeniture”—noble families often seeing themselves as “equals, rivals, even superiors” to a prince’s family—and by subject cities with their own “histories of self-government” that required princes “to come to terms” with local communities (176–177). Princely regimes lacked a “concept of the crown” as distinct “from the person of the prince,” whereas in republics the “palace” metonymically distinguished the state from the party in power (216). Principalities borrowed republican principles of legitimacy, especially approval by subjects, to bolster their ambiguous status.Shaw further demonstrates the persistence into the sixteenth century of republican values in resistance to princely rule and, after Charles Habsburg became emperor, to imperial pretensions to supreme power over all states within the old boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Republics frequently rejected imperial attempts to station garrisons, build fortresses, and demand complete obedience and onerous subventions (276–290). Even after the loss of independence, therefore, deeply rooted republican principles protected long-standing liberties. This original and penetrating study illuminates promising new paths for the history of political ideas.