The Revival of Antiquity: A Fan's Notes on Recent Work

Abstract

THE RENAISSANCE IS BACK-IF IT EVER WENT AWAY. Kenneth Gouwens and Paula Findlen give powerful evidence, in their lucid and lively essays, that the intellectual history of Europe continues to attract powerful scholarly minds and to stimulate major projects in historical research. From the study of classical texts to the holding of classicizing picnics, both writers show, historians are applying new methods, excavating new sources, and using both to create new pictures of society-pictures as varied, colorful, and full of life as the term Renaissance would lead one to expect. Not all the pigments and methods these scholars have applied are as new as the uses to which they have put them, and that is all to the good. In the hisstory of the as elsewhere, Findlen and Gouwens agree, scholarly traditions now of considerable age, as well as the revisionist intellectual histories written in the 1980s and after, continue to offer vital information and stimulus. The classic studies of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the greatest of all students of the field, still provide the most powerful general definition we have of humanism. Gouwens's effort to supply a new one begins from a spirited tussle with Kristeller, me, and others who have gone before-and draws on, as well as challenges, the older work. Findlen, similarly, deploys materials from a rich tradition of scholarship on collections and antiquarianism, one that long antedates the rise of her own approach to cultural history. In their willingness to treat earlier scholarship as a living tradition, as in their novel ideas, Gouwens and Findlen make clear why revisionism in the Renaissance-unlike some other fields-does not simply rise up into the air and dissipate. These revisionists are good philologists. Archive rats as dedicated to the pleasure of the hunt for documents as to the devising of new theses, they are also discriminating and well-informed readers of the older secondary literature. It is a pleasure to engage in discussion with them. For all the differences between them, moreover, Gouwens and Findlen converge in a fascinating and attractive way. For both seek, above all, to move from the study of texts and terms to that of individuals living in three-dimensional, human contexts. Gouwens insists, with absolute justice, that intellectuals did not only meet the classical world when having their noses ground into the Catilinarians at school. Humanists in High Rome, he points out, pursued jobs and love affairs amid classical ruins, which they explored as eagerly as the bodies of their lovers. They posted poems in classical meters on the speaking