The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools and Studies: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Grendler ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler, Nicholas Terpstra (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 323 The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools and Studies: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Grendler, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto : Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto 2008) 378 pp., ill. The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools and Studies presents a topical overview exploring Paul Grendler’s main areas of scholastic inquiry. Grendler’s scholarship has focused on such wide ranging issues as Italian authors, the Venetian press, the Roman Inquisition, education in Renaissance Italy, and meanings of the Renaissance in modern American culture. The authors of this compilation range from Grendler’s colleagues in the field of Renaissance studies, to one time students at the University of Toronto. Grendler’s career as a Renaissance scholar spans more than forty years. During that time, he authored eight books, 118 articles, contributed to collected works, and wrote more than 200 book reviews. He contributed to Renaissance scholarship by forming associations with prominent authorities such as Hans Baron, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and Charles Schmitt. Grendler engaged in collaborative endeavors, filling the role of articles editor for Renaissance Quarterly (2000–2003), and associate editor and later editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (1999). In addition , Grendler served as president of the Renaissance Society of America, American Catholic Historical Association and the Society of Italian Historical Studies. He has received many accolades for his esteemed work, including twenty fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophy Society, and The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Three of his books have been awarded with the Marraro Prize, and The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance received the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association and the Ronald H. Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference. Grendler believed the study of history should be approached without resorting to filtering material through the myopic mores of the society inhabited by the historian. The historian should be an objective observer. Grendler did not subscribe to the mantra of seeing all history as relative. He believed the historian is able to reconstruct the past and create a narrative history. He saw the Renaissance not as a period in which white males imposed culture on a hapless society , but as a time when people from all walks of life achieved extraordinary things, gaining knowledge which is very much alive in modern times. He believed in bringing Renaissance scholarship to the masses, and as editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, he was able to do just that. The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools and Studies is divided into five major parts: I: The Varieties of Teaching; II: Humanism and Politics; III: Shaping Reform; IV: Art and Life; and V: The Renaissance in the Modern World. Terpstra introduces the various essays with “Roads to the Renaissance: An Introductory Note.” A bibliography of the works of Paul F. Grendler (1962–2007) follows. Part I features two articles, one analyzing the emergence of the mother as teacher, authored by Margaret L. King, and the other, an analysis of two Jesuit humanists in Naples, by Mark A. Lewis. King makes interesting connections between the role of the mother in rearing young children and the subsequent paternal guidance that was necessary to complete the essential Renaissance education. Lewis explores the importance of the teaching of humanities REVIEWS 324 in Jesuit institutions, not only for the enlightenment of the pupils, but as a way to render the Jesuits relevant in an increasingly reformist minded church and society. By the seventeenth century, the teaching of humanities was established as a ministry in itself. Part II features an essay by Ronald G. Witt on the early communal historians , and another by Mary Hewlett exploring the influence of humanism on Francesco Burlamacchi. The last essay in this series, written by Nicholas Terpstra , explores “Catechizing in Prison and on the Gallows in Renaissance Italy: The Politics of Comforting the Condemned.” Witt’s subject lends itself well to the exploration of how laymen trained as notaries and ultimately wrote histories of their communities. Clergy, nobility, and patricians read notary histories. The flow of information and the creation of history...