The "Baron Thesis" after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni

Abstract

was entirely appropriate the death of Hans Baron in November of 1988 should have become the occasion for a number of tributes to his work and influence as a Renaissance historian; and since Princeton University Press, only a few months earlier, had issued a collection of his papers and articles, a retrospective look at his contributions to Renaissance studies was made all the more obligatory.' Among the more perceptive accounts of Baron's work was a review-essay by John Najemy, which made some very large claims for the importance of Baron's work.2 It is by now commonplace, wrote Najemy, that what Burckhardt was to nineteenth-century Renaissance historiography, Baron is to its twentieth-century counterpart: each provided his century's most influential, compelling, and debated interpretation of the significance of the cultural developments of Italy between the end of the Middle Ages and the modem era. And again: In recovering Bruni and the civic humanism of the early fifteenth century, Baron did nothing less than recast the entire Renaissance from Petrarch to Machiavelli. Large claims indeed, yet it is difficult to quarrel with them, especially coming from a scholar of Najemy's authority. Baron was surely one of the three or four most influential interpreters of the Renaissance in the second