'The Renaissance' is one of the most frequently used terms in cultural history, but the idea itself has been subject to much examination and discussion. Here is a summary of some of the key points in the debate.
The Idea of Renaissance
Claims that the fourteenth century
witnessed some kind of cultural rebirth in Europe
go back to the period itself. The Italian poet Petrarch (1307-74) saw the rinascimento as the revival of the
values of the classical world, after the barbarian invasion of Rome Rome with this miserable
present, Petrarch divided history into two periods, historiae antiquae, which ended with the ending of the Roman Republic Rome Africa (composed 1338) he says:
For you, if you
should long outlive me, as my soul hopes and wishes, there is perhaps a better
age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the
darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure
radiance of the past. (Africa , IX,
453-7)
The achievement of the Florentines
in restoring the light was saluted by the (Florentine) humanist Marsilio Ficino
(1433-99):
If we are to
call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden
talents in different places. That such is true of this our age [one] will
hardly doubt. For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the
liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting,
sculpture, architecture, music ...
In his Lives of the Artists (1550), the artist and writer Vasari presented
the history of northern Italian art as an upward journey, leading away from the
stylized forms of the Middle Ages to the magnificent realistic art of
Michelangelo. This journey was led by a series of heroic artists of genius.
Through them, as Vasari tells the story, the glories of the ancient world had
been reborn. Such comments are not
attempts at objective history. They appear in writings such as letters or
manifestos, where poets promote their activities and seek patrons. Vasari’s Lives is also a work of propaganda: it
was dedicated to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and thus naturally extols the
greatness of that region.
Effusions of enthusiasm such as
these are not the same as claims that the age as a whole can be characterised
as a rebirth, or re-naissance of ancient thought. The use of the word
‘Renaissance’ as a serious historical term really starts in the nineteenth
century. The French historian Michelet famously called the Renaissance a time
of ‘the discovery of the world and the discovery of man’. In this period,
Michelet points out, man looked outwards at the world around him: he explored
in ships, investigated with science, and celebrated natural objects in art. At
the same time, people looked inwards at themselves: in the plays of Shakespeare,
or the essays of Montaigne, we see an unprecedented representation and examination
of individual human consciousness. This thesis was further developed by the
Swiss historian Burckhardt in his massively influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). For
Burckhardt, the Renaissance was the birth of the modern age: medieval
certainties about man, the world and God faded away, and the modern individual
emerged – equipped to enquire and reason, to trade and to express himself
through his behaviour and creative work.
How
convincing are these various claims? They have certainly been influential. Petrarch’s
picture of a noble classical age, lost in the ‘Middle Ages’ and revived in the rinascimento has ingrained itself in the
Western sense of history. Yet there is much to be said against it. Above all,
it discounts the cultural achievements of the so-called ‘Middle Ages’. Latin
culture could hardly be reborn in Petrarch’s time, since it had never died:
Europe is built on the ruins of Rome
The
theses of Michelet and Burckhardt have also been disputed by later writers. Was
the Renaissance really the birth of modernity? Medieval practices and beliefs
did not disappear but continued throughout the Renaissance period. As for the
examination and celebration of the natural world, we can see these clearly in
the work of a medieval scholar like Roger Bacon and the poetry of St Francis.
Seen in this light, the Renaissance could be seen as a development of the
medieval world rather than a departure from it. Perhaps the single greatest
invention of the Renaissance - printing - came from the medieval guild system. Equally,
Renaissance characteristics can be found in cultural achievements of the
eighteenth century and even into the present. At both ends, the chronology is
highly problematic.
In
short, while Michelet and Burckhardt draw our attention to important phenomena
of the period, they also select out a great deal. Moreover, their books are
based on a theory of history that is also controversial: this is the idea - inspired
by the German philosopher Hegel - that an age has a Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Age) - an underlying essence or character which
unifies its various parts. Moreover, in the Hegelian view, history is
teleological: that is to say, it is moving in a certain meaningful direction.
This assumption underlies the nineteenth-century historians’ emphasis on the
Renaissance as a progression from past to present. This notion, too, which
links with the outlook of Vasari and others, is contentious.
For these reasons, some historians
and critics have avoided the term ‘Renaissance’, and preferred to employ the
label ‘Early Modern’ for broadly the same period. A book like this one could
also be called ‘English Reformation Literature’, since the ideas of Reformation
theology had at least as much impact on the English in these centuries as the
models of classical culture - and possibly more. Nevertheless, the Renaissance
is a convenient term for denoting a certain period, and we can use it without
committing ourselves to the thesis elaborated by Burckhardt and other
historians. A period term may be used for practical convenience; indeed without
them, study becomes next to impossible.
The
foregoing discussion is not intended to imply that the writers discussed may be
in any way dismissed. Vasari’s Lives
is one of the great books of the West. Burckhardt’s book, the result of five
tears’ exhaustive travel, reading and note-taking, is still indispensable for
the serious student of the Renaissance, precisely because of the discussion it
has provoked. And while it has been seriously revised in the light of later
scholarship, it has not been comprehensively demolished. Some contemporary
writers on the Renaissance still, with various important qualifications, see
the period as representing a profoundly significant shift in Western man’s modes
of thinking and living. The debate on what we mean by ‘The Renaissance’ is
still ongoing.
Further Reading
A classic defence of the label
‘Renaissance’ as applied to Italian art is: Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art
(London: Paladin, 1970), ch. 1 ‘Renaissance – Self-Definition or
Self-Deception?’, 1-35.
See also the first two essays in A G Dickens and others, Background to the English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures (London:
Gray-Mills, 1974): E H Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance – Period or Movement?’, 9-30;
J R Hale, ‘The Renaissance Label’, 31-42.
A modern summary of the debate is
given by Margaret L King, The Renaissance
in Europe (London
'The Renaissance' on In Our Time: excellent discussion by Francis Ames-Lewis, Peter Burke and Evelyn Welch.
