Renaissance Historiography Research Articles

"Determined to prove a villain": Criticism, Pedagogy, and Richard III

Surprisingly little scholarly work has been done on how to teach William Shakespeare's Richard III at the college level, even though it presents specific textual and thematic problems for undergraduates. Aside from the play's reliance on a broad historical familiarity with the Wars of the Roses, students are often confused by its peculiar combination of archaic-sounding language and a modern-seeming protagonist and have to adjust to reading an early modern text about a late-medieval moment. This essay proposes a new approach to teaching Richard III, one that is informed by recent critical readings of the play as well as by theoretical models of subjectivity. I offer suggestions for teaching that aim to have students explore the simultaneous and contradictory presence in the play of different notions of selfhood, including the metaphysical and secular-humanist views, but also more modern constructions that take us into the realms of psychology and metatheatricality.In addition to this historical and theoretical focus, this essay looks to bridge the gap between performance-based pedagogy and text-based classroom practice by arguing for a treatment of the play that joins the two approaches in a meaningful way. In spite of the continued dominance of new historicism in criticism, the subfield of teaching Shakespeare has been, since the early 1980s, overwhelmingly oriented towards performance, whether this means having students act out scenes and discuss performance techniques or using film, video, and various electronic media in the classroom.1 In the final pages of the essay, I explore the openings and closings of three of the bestknown film versions of Richard III and consider how they can enrich a discussion of Shakespeare s complex treatment of subjectivity. Paradoxically, perhaps, modern film can enhance a historically aware conversation about Shakespeare, asking students ultimately to reflect on themselves and their situatedness in history and to consider where their own ideas about identity come from. As Bruce Smith has put it in a succinct discussion of teaching Shakespeare, project our own concerns, but they come back to us-or, at least, they should come back to us-transformed by the solidities of Shakespeare as a historical phenomenon. They come back to us in the form of (1997, 454). Enabling students to engage in this dialogue with Richard III is my central concern in teaching the play.The critical debate on Richard III (1592-93), initiated by E. M.W. Tillyard, has centered on the overall presentation of history in the play, and specifically on its status as a providential narrative in support of the Tudor Myth or as a secular, humanist, or even Machiavellian text that looks to human action in this world as a primary cause for historical change. In Stages of History Phyllis Rackin explains the uneven development in Renaissance historiography, which shows the same ambivalence. She notes that history writing of the period reveals the gradual separation of history from theology: explanations of events in terms of their first cause in divine providence were giving way to Machiavellian analyses of second causes-the effects of political situations and the impact of human will and capabilities (1990, 6). Although Rackin herself sees Richard III as dominated by the providential perspective, something she claims has meant a long-standing preference of conservative critics (55) for this play, the question of Shakespeare's treatment of history has by no means been resolved, as recent studies make clear. The play's plot structure, poetic formality, and final push for moralistic closure do not unequivocally overcome its Machiavellian protagonist, whose appeal undermines an appreciation of the final outcome. Both in Renaissance historiography and in Richard III, then, we encounter two ways of viewing historical events and the world at large-as governed by a divine being or by human agency. …

From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism

I. Walter Ralegh's Historicist Inheritance: God's Providential World and Marvelous El Dorado II. High and Rare Delight: Spiritual Geographic and the Dislocation of the East 1. Conflicted World Visions 2. Columbus, the East, and Millennial Jerusalem III. Richard Hakluyt and the Confusion of Sources IV. World Revised: Francis Bacon and Abraham Ortelius V. Skepticism and Faith: Samuel Purchas, John Donne, and the Composition of Purchas his pilgrimage VI. Toward a Humanist Global History: Purchas and World Historical Discourse VII. Empirical and Prophetic Visions: Milton and the Strands of Renaissance Historiography VIII. Prophetic Universal of Paradise Lost: Paradoxical Triumphs and Designs IX. An Overview: on The End of History and the Patterned Forms of World Historicism: Hegel, Marx, Globalization, and Beyond.

Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography

We are very nearly at the sesquicentennial of the publication of the book that virtually invented the Renaissance in its modern formulation, Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Not surprisingly, the world of the condottieri and the humanists, and of the artists and the worldly prelates, looks rather different than it did in the day of the brilliant but idiosyncratic Swiss historian. A stock-taking of Renaissance historiography was taken by Wallace Ferguson in 1948 in a well-known book; other efforts have appeared since, including the suggestive (and here strangely under-used) Idea of the Renaissance, by William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden (1989). The present volume of essays is intended for ‘graduate and upper level students’ as an introduction to current debates, and specifically to the state of the field in a variety of areas related to Renaissance Studies. The contributors are in the main leading scholars in the field, so their judgments can generally be relied on by the trusting reader, or the lecturer boning up on an unfamiliar area (but see below for one caveat). The book is organised, following a brief editorial introduction, into three untitled parts, and it is not altogether clear what the rationale for the first two divisions is (though part 3, about half the volume, is devoted to topics such as ‘art’, ‘religion’, ‘gender’ and ‘science’). There are some very good essays, notably Woolfson's own interpretation of Burckhardt's vision, and Peter Burke's broad scan of Renaissance Europe in its global context. Catherine M. Soussloff achieves the nearly impossible task of summarising the current historiography of ‘art’ in a chapter of 15 pages. While the volume as a whole is peninsular to a considerable degree (though issuing helpful correctives such as David Abulafia's Neapolitan-oriented warning against taking the northern cities, much less Florence only, as the full measure of the Renaissance), there are ventures beyond. Most interesting among the departures, though it appears to fit rather oddly here, is Warren Boutcher's more tightly-argued chapter on ‘literature’, which focuses on England and specifically on the Campion-Daniel dispute over poesy and tradition at the end of Elizabeth I's reign. There is some duplication (for instance several reminders that the Renaissance of the late Paul Oskar Kristeller was not the Renaissance of Burckhardt), and necessarily some variation of views—the reader looking for a single clear definition of key terms such as ‘humanism’ will not leave happy, but that is both unavoidable and proper in an edited collection. If there is a major problem with the book it is owed less to its contents or organisation than the very conceptualisation of the series in which it lives. ‘Advances’ is surely a dubious framework for describing changing tides in humanistic fields. The essays herein do not depict ‘advances’ in the sense that Ernst Cassirer's and then Kristeller's generations ‘improved’ on Burckhardt's, and the current generation on Kristeller's and Hans Baron's. Fashions, in historiography as much as clothing, are cyclical and recurrent, especially where critical questions such as the originality of the Renaissance or the humanist debt to an outwardly reviled scholasticism are at issue. While we may know more (in the sense of having a much wider access to documents than previous scholars), or have a broader sense of background (no one would—or at least should—now teach the Renaissance as exclusively an artistic or literary movement without reference to social and religious contexts), imposing a progressivist scheme on the subject does not ‘advance’ our understanding. The editor and contributors are not to be blamed for what is an obvious marketing stratagem. The prudent instructor can usefully prescribe this book to students, but would be well advised to gloss the contents and especially the title in the manner of a cinquecento humanist rhetorician ensuring that his pupils do not pick up bad habits from reading Livy.

Palgrave advances in Renaissance historiography

Palgrave advances in Renaissance historiography

Vernon Lee: New Woman?

This article tracks the evolution of the sexual and aesthetic politics of the late-Victorian critic, aesthetician and Renaissance historiographer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) in response to the controversies generated by "the Aesthetic Movement" at the fin de siècle. Despite her own practice of same-sex love, Lee's first work of Renaissance historiography, Euphorion (1884), strikingly indicts the celebration of aesthetic hedonism, male homosociality, and aesthetic individualism which formed the conceptual underpinning to Walter Pater's seminal text of impressionist historiography, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). In this, Lee can be seen to anticipate the sanitising tenor of the New Woman's response to the Aesthetic Movement a decade later. The sequel to Euphorion, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), was published in the shadow of the Wilde trials and unexpectedly defers from participating in that backlash to radical literary culture marking both newspaper editorials and New Woman publications. Instead, a dextrous co-opting of New Woman discourse can be adduced from Lee's assertion that the radical philosophies of the Decadents would be harnessed for the purposes of social good. As this article reveals, Lee's brave insistence on a "queer comradeship" with the literary avant-garde at this pivotal moment in finde-siècle culture signals a distinct emboldening of her sexual politics.

Clean Hands and Rough Justice: An Investigating Magistrate in Renaissance Italy

It is rarely possible to write biographies of lay people who lived in the Middles Ages. While accounts of clerical, royal, and military life are many, the wider populace has remained in relative obscurity. In Clean Hands and Rough Justice: An Investigating Magistrate in Renaissance Italy, David S. Chambers and Trevor Dean present an extraordinary and previously unknown character from Renaissance Italy, Beltramino Cusadri (ca. 1425-1500). This judge was known as the terrible commissioner, and he spent most of his professional life acting as criminal investigator and legal adviser to two princely dynasties--the Gonzaga of Mantua and the Este of Ferrara. The authors investigate and compare the judicial institutions and social conditions in which Beltramino Cusadri worked, the criminal cases that he investigated, and his successes and failures. Their combined presentation of the figure and mentality of Cusadri amounts to something unprecedented in Italian Renaissance historiography: the portrait of a professional man, employed to combat rising crime, but accused of corruption and tyranny by the entrenched interests that he faced. The book follows the major phases of Beltramino's career and offers a broader exploration of the legal history of Renaissance Italy. In his long life Beltramino Cusadri wrote hundreds of letters to his employers and it is upon these letters that this book is based. These letters with their wry, colorfully worded expressions are liberally quoted and provide unique insight into the career, activity, and attitudes of a major Renaissance bureaucrat. The letters of his employers in return are also drawn upon to examine a variety of themes, from the progress oflaw-making and the pattern of criminality, to the problems of policing and the changing forms of punishment. These provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of face-to-face realities that make an important contribution to the history of crime, law, policing, and punishment. David S. Chambers is Reader in Renaissance Studies at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Trevor Dean is Principal Lecturer, Department of History, Roehampton Institute, London. Both have published extensively on the history of Medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Medievality and the Chinese sense of History

The concept of a medieval period is problematic for China. Europeans formulated it after the medieval period was over, to identify a past they felt they had transcended, whereas the Chinese did not regularly periodise the past in this way. A few writers made use of 'middle periods' to organise the past, but congruence between their and the European model is never more than coincidence. The approach taken in this article is, instead, to ask whether the Chinese, prior to the twentieth century, developed a sense of history capable of qualitatively discriminating between present and past in the way, or to the degree, that allowed Europeans to 'discover' their medieval period? Using criteria inspired by Peter Burke's study of Renaissance historio graphy, this article notes that Chinese historians by the seventeenth century, and in some respects long before, met and even surpassed the standards that Burke sets for a self-conscious sense of the past, but without generating a medieval period. Critical skills in history improved over time, but they were not linked to the sort of transformation suggested for Renaissance Europe. That Chinese historians did not 'find' a medieval period indicates that the medieval may be little more than an ideological category in the service of the European teleology of the modern. It also signals the difficulty of establishing a specific category of medievality to which all parts of the world can be related. Rather than generalising the concept of medievality, comparative historians of the medieval period might be better advised to look outward from Europe and become conscious of synchronic trends and events elsewhere if they wish to build a more global understanding of what happened in medieval Europe and the world.

Medieval and renaissance historiography: Break or continuity?

(1997). Medieval and renaissance historiography: Break or continuity? The European Legacy: Vol. 2, The Individual in European Culture, pp. 1336-1371.

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

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

Francesco Guicciardini and the "Pisan Crisis": Logic and Discourses

Previous articleNext article No AccessFrancesco Guicciardini and the "Pisan Crisis": Logic and DiscoursesOsvaldo CavallarOsvaldo Cavallar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 65, Number 2Jun., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244638 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt (review)

298 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL 1992 John Henry and Sarah Hutton, eds. New Perspectiveson Renaissance Thought: Essaysin the Histo0 of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt. London: Duckworth & Co. Ltd. and the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 199o. Pp. xi + 3~4. Cloth, s It is a chastening irony that only Charles himself would be adequately equipped to write a proper review of this excellent collection. As the editors say, "the chapters in this book seem to range widely over an alarmingly diverse set of topics," yet the unifying factor is Charles Schmitt and his extraordinarily broad grasp of Renaissance philosophy and science. All but five of the contributions (those of Blackwell, Brockliss, Giard, Jardine, and Webster) were presented at a memorial symposium for Charles held in February a987 at the Warburg Institute, London, and both speakers and additional contributors "were asked to offer a paper which either extended some aspect of Charles's work or which reflected the influence of his approach to intellectual history" (vii). Accordingly, the volume as a whole reflects many of Schmitt's varied interests in the Renaissance, and presents abundant evidence of his presence in virtually every aspect of the contemporary history and historiography of Renaissance and early modern science and philosophy. The editors are to be congratulated in making that evidence publicly available in convenient form. It is sometimes better to be dully informative than invidiously selective, so here are the contributions in order of appearance: Dick Popkin on the role of Jewish antiChristian arguments in the rise of scepticism, that is, in Enlightenment critiques of religious belief; Charles Webster on Conrad Gessner's shaping of humanist attitudes to Paracelsus; Tom Settle on Egnazio Danti, cosmographer to the Tuscan court 0563-75), and his impact on sixteenth-century Florentine mathematical education; M. J. B. Allen on Ficino ("the father of Renaissance Hermetism," though in a Pickwickian sense) and the Corpus Hermeticum; Letizia Panizza on Italian humanists' use of Boethius to show the positive links between poetry and philosophy, not the opposition assumed by earlier readers of Consolation; Lisa Jardine on Gabriel Harvey's annotations in his copy of Livy's Decades and the Irish dimensions of Spenser's Faerie Qucene, and the relations of both to the English colonial experience in wild and unruly Ireland; Don Kelley on the idea of custom (altera natura), its relation to law and nature, and its links with the history of social science; Dilwyn Knox on gesture and universal languages (155o-a65o), including unexpected connections between the former and Ramist method; Eckhard Kessler throwing fresh light on Renaissance transformations of Aristotelianism; Richard Sorabji on infinite power in the Aristotelian tradition up to Averroes and Aquinas; John Murdoch comparing the medieval with the Renaissance Aristotle; Stephen Pumfrey on Neo-Aristotelianism and postGilbert magnetic philosophy, showing the explanatory inventiveness of the reformed Aristotelianism of the seventeenth century; a detailed study by Laurence Brockliss on the introduction of the Copernican theory into French colleges and the universities of Paris and Louvain (coU~gesde plein exercice, not exercise:passim, including the index); Nancy Siraisi on Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Vives, and Agrippa and their BOOK REVIEWS ~99 respective critiques of contemporary medicine, physiology and anatomy; Vivian Nutton on the curious and complicated story of Brasavala's prefaces Is/el to his printed commentary (1541) on Hippocrates' Aphorisms;J. W. Binns on Elizabeth I's visits to Cambridge and Oxford; Ian Maclean on the philosophical book trade in the European market 057o-163o), with special reference to the case of Ramus and his principal publisher Andr6 Wechel. Finally, Luce Giard writes an inspiring intellectual biography of Charles Schmitt as historian--"reconstructor of a history"--of Renaissance learning, and rounding off the volume is an invaluable bibliography of Charles's publications (books, articles, and reviews), compiled by Constance Blackwell. Other than the Preface, the collection is shy of a contribution from each of the editors. Admittedly, editing is a debilitating full-timejob, especially if it is to succeed, as is assuredly the case here. Yet it's a pity the volume does not include the couple of contributions informed prospective purchasers might expect to...

Machiavelli's Ironic View of History: The Istorie Florentine

A few years ago, Felix Gilbert, after a brief survey of various studies on Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentitte (1520-24), noticed the need to focus on the work's historical significance, and proposed a reading that goes beyond the mere narrative account of the rise and development of the city of Florence. Having shown that the work's structure follows the cyclical theory of history prevalent in Renaissance historiography, Gilbert goes on to suggest that Machiavelli anticipates Florence's rise from its present decline: “It would seem possible to suggest therefore that Machiavelli intended to represent the situation in which Italy found itself in the early sixteenth century as carrying with it the possibilities of a new ascent. “ The book, he argues, contains the same political message conveyed in his earlier works, such as the Prince (1513), which appropriately ends on the optimistic note that a redentore will come to lead the peninsula out of its ruinous downfall and back to glory and prosperity.

"Vestigia philosophorum," Il medioevo e la storiografia filosofica (review)

~66 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY moral theory, especially in the three doctrines of natural law, conscience, and synderesis . The Stoic ideal was to live in harmony with nature, which impels the individual to act in conformity with the norms of virtue and to rise above the impulses of passion. By nature the Stoics meant divine reason immanent in the individual, inclining him to act rightly. Thus the natural law is unwritten, inborn law, belonging to the natural structure of each individual (46). Verbeke shows that natural law was variously interpreted in the Middle Ages, as it is in modern times. His statement that Ockham's teaching on natural law reveals the same orientation as that of Duns Scotus is questionable (65). For Scotus, the natural law is inscribed in the human nature God has freely chosen to create, and in which individuals participate. Ockham denied the existence of such a nature and made the natural law dependent on the divine will. This book fills a lacuna in the literature on medieval philosophy. Much has been written about the influence of Platonism and Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages. Less well known is the part Stoicism played in shaping medieval thought. Verbeke has given us a wealth of information on this subject. His book will be welcomed by everyone interested in the history of philosophical ideas. ARMAND MAURER Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies G. Piaia. "Vestigia philosophorum, ll medioevo e la storiografia filosofica. Studi di filosofia e di storia della filosofia, vol. 6. Rimini, Italy: Maggioli Editore, 1983, pp. 246. Paper, L. x5,ooo. The present work is devoted to philosophical historiography in the Middle Ages and about the Middle Ages. Indeed, its first part ("La storia dei filosofi nelruniverso culturale del Medioevo," 13-159) studies how mediaeval thinkers represented and interpreted the philosophers' histories, while the second part ("I1 costituirsi del pensiero medievale come oggetto storiografico," 163-232) deals with the Middle Ages as an object of historiographic investigation. The author's purpose in the first part is to show that mediaeval historiography is richer and more complex than usually believed, a view which contrasts with a general trend among historians of philosophic historiography, who often pay little attention to it, or neglect its specific features. They consider the mediaeval approach to ancient philosophers merely as an appendix to the survivals of ancient thought, or considered it in the light of the subsequent humanistic and renaissance historiography. Based upon a choice of particularly significant texts, the author first traces the path followed in the Middle Ages by the historic and philosophic themes of antiquity which became the very kernel of the mediaeval approaches to the histories of philosophy; indeed, he indicates by whom they were usedwand variously manipulated--and how they were interpreted, by relating them to the appropriate historical, doctrinal, or biographical context. Next, he strikes a first balance and advances an interpretation; finally, he compares some aspects of mediaeval and modern historiography. BOOK REWvWS 267 Augustine and Isidore are the first authors examined, for both transmitted topics in the history of philosophy which mediaeval thinkers considered for a long time as exemplary. Whereas the first-mentioned writer has, by and large, a tolerant attitude towards heathen culture, the second one, whose writings carry strong traces of the antiheretical polemics, generally opposes it. Both make use of the current doxographies (Isidore relies in part on Augustine as well). Augustine's could be defined as a 'speculative doxography'; his main concern is the evaluation of the ancient philosophies in light of his notion of Christian philosophy. Thus Platonism, the nearest philosophical system to Christianity, becomes the gauge of all remaining philosophies . They are regarded as introductory to Platonism, and evaluated according to their respective closeness to it. On the other hand, Isidore does not worry about such questions; he limits himself to outlining a philosopher's history based on the distinction in sects and 'placita', referring in a scantily and often unreliable fashion to the classification moduli of late antiquity. Topics in philosophers' histories appear in historical works, for instance in the Chronicon of Otto of Freising (twelfth century) and in the Speculum historialeof Vincent of Beauvais (thirteenth century...

Anti-Historians: Women's Roles in Shakespeare's Histories

No woman is the protagonist in a Shakespearean history play. Renaissance gender role definitions prescribed silence as a feminine virtue, and Renaissance sexual mythology associated the feminine with body and matter as opposed to masculine intellect and spirit. Renaissance historiography constituted a masculine tradition, written by men, devoted to the deeds of men, glorifying the masculine virtues of courage, honor, and patriotism, and dedicated to preserving the names of past heroes and recording their patriarchal genealogies. Within that historical record, women had no voice.

History of Education: A Southern Exposure

ITHE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS is one of the freer forms of professional communication currently in use in the American academic community. One can get a glimpse of freedom of the form by briefly perusing the presidential messages published in various historical journals over the past five or so years. A president may, like William Bouwsma, touch on a current in his own specialty because it is ofconsiderable importance for historians and for the larger culture of which we are a part. And, using his own expertise in Renaissance history, he proceeded to identify changes in Renaissance historiography, with the larger theme ofthe collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history. (1) Other options which have been exercised by historian presidents include the challenge to improve teaching offered by Gilbert C. Fite to his colleages in the Southern Historical Association or the consideration of the effects of the federal government on all aspects of the historical profession offered by Richard W. Leopold to the Organization of American Historians. (2) The addresses of my predecessor presidents of the History of Education Society over the last five years are a further testament to the diversity of the form. One may, like Michael Katz or Clarence Karier, choose to defend vigorously one's own work against what is considered unfair or unknowledgeable criticism. Or one may, like John Calam or Jurgen Herbst, choose to recommend a topic or topics worthy of attention by one's colleagues in an effort to move the field in what they consider to be a more fruitful direction. Or one may, like Geraldine Clifford, offer examples from one's own ongoing research as an indicator of the value of the particular approach employed. (3) The common element, if there is such, in all of these examples is that

Renaissance Culture in Recent Soviet Historical Studies

Rarely has a scholar exercised such influence over the interpretation of an historical period as Jakob Burckhardt on the Italian Renaissance. First published over a century ago, his essay (Versuch) advanced a set of theses that have stood behind serious scholarship ever since. Burckhardt developed clearly the characteristic themes of Renaissance historiography — the state as a work of art, the development of the individual, the revival of antiquity, and so forth — and he molded them into an engaging, impressionistic portrait of Renaissance Italy as the first manifestation of modern civilization.

Review: The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence by Gene Brucker; Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control by J. R. Hale; Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography by Ronald M. Steinberg

Review: The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence by Gene Brucker; Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control by J. R. Hale; Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography by Ronald M. Steinberg

Humanism, Religion, Society: Concepts and Motivations of Some Recent Studies

The following essay will address itself both to the content and the motivation of Renaissance historiography in the last decade and will be confined primarily to the work that has been done in the English language. History, as other scholarly disciplines, tends always to look inward at its own work and the publications within its particular national and language boundaries. But at the same time more inventive minds within the discipline constantly feel a dissatisfaction with provincialisms of various sorts and seek to open their thinking and their work to wider influences. Yet this may happen very slowly. For example the famous essay of Lucien Febvre, ‘Une question mal posée,’ first appeared in 1929 (Revue historique, 161), found an Italian counterpart in Delio Cantimori's Prospettive di storia ereticale italiana of 1960, and was cited for its parallels with Pre-Reformation German piety in Berndt Moellers’ ‘Frommigkeit in Deutschland um 1500’ of 1965.

The Emergence of an Urban Ideology at Florence c. 1250–1450

Every city must in a sense have a city culture. Florence, however, was the only place in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers. Much of the modern historical interest in Florence has centred around these ideas which emerged in the first half of the fifteenth century, the more so because even the innovations in the visual arts introduced at the same time by Donatello and his contemporaries are in part a by-product of them. The theme which I would like to develop in this paper therefore is the relationship between the city society and its ideology. This is of course a very old and well-worn theme. One of the common presuppositions of Renaissance historiography has been the understandable assumption that the ideology fitted the city, and a good deal of historical analysis has been applied to identifying the congruences between them and illustrating the growth of the humanist school out of the circumstances of Florentine life. The ideology, however, was created in the early fifteenth century, at the end of the period which I am going to discuss, when Florence had already been a great centre of industry and commerce and an independent republic for a very long time. Fruitful as it has been, this approach therefore leaves one with the disquieting feeling that a place which has been for so long and so conspicuously a centre of throbbing urban life ought to have had its ideological revolution much earlier, particularly since economic historians have emphasized the elements of commercial contraction rather than expansion in the early Renaissance period. Some historians have found themselves driven into the paradoxical position of regarding the early Renaissance as a symptom of economic decline. I would therefore like to look at the old theme obliquely by deflecting attention from the great innovations themselves and concentrating it on the factors which favoured or hindered ideological innovation in the century and a half before they appeared.

The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography

The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography