AHR Forum
Introduction: The Persistence of the Renaissance
PAULA FINDLEN and KENNETH GOUWENS
IN HIS LANDMARK PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS to the American Historical Association
twenty years ago, William J. Bouwsma spoke of the "collapse of the traditional
dramatic organization of Western history" and, with it, the privileged place of the
Renaissance in that narrative. The 1950s had witnessed the development of an
"amiable but slightly complacent consensus" among historians that the Renaissance
occupied a pivotal position in a linear process of development culminating in the
modern age.! By the late 1970s, however, three related developments in historiography were undermining that consensus. First, social historians, who had come to
dominate the profession around the time that Bouwsma was writing, preferred to
focus on popular rather than elite culture. Since the accomplishments of the latter
had traditionally supported claims for the importance of the Renaissance, there was
little room in this new narrative of society for the intellectual, cultural, and political
activities around which the concept had coalesced. 2
At the same time, the Renaissance became an important testing ground for the
newly emerging field of women's history. In her classic essay, "Did Women Have a
Renaissance?" appearing two years before Bouwsma gave his address, Joan Kelly
transformed the image of the Renaissance from a Burckhardtian epiphany for the
individual into a period of declining freedoms and social and political retrenchment
for women. 3 The new emphasis on the restrictions faced even by elite women
further undermined the salutary image of the Renaissance that traditional accounts
had presented. If the Renaissance had mostly a negative effect on half the
population, as Kelly suggested, then it was hardly a movement to embrace.
The final blow to the Renaissance was philosophical rather than empirical.
Doubts about the intelligibility of the modern age combined with a postmodern
incredulity toward metanarratives to undercut any claim of filiation between the
1 William J. Bouwsma, "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History," AHR 84 (February
1979): 1. The address was delivered at the Annual Meeting of the AHA in San Francisco, December
28,1978. For the broader context of postwar consensus among historians in the United States, see Peter
Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), pt. 3 ("Objectivity Reconstructed").
2 On the triumph of social history in the late 1970s, see Lawrence Stone, "Social History," in Stone,
The Past and the Present (Boston, 1981); and Lynn Hunt, "Introduction," in Hunt, ed., The New Cultural
History: Essays (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
3 Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History,
Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds. (Boston, 1977). See also the response of David Herlihy,
"Did Women Have a Renaissance? A Reconsideration," Medievalia et Humanistica 13 (1985): 1-22.
51
Paula Findlen and Kenneth Gouwens
52
Renaissance and the present. In such changing times, the Renaissance no longer
looked like a bold statement about the birth pangs of the modern world but
appeared to be an antiquarian's category. Surveying the shambles into which his
chosen field had fallen, Bouwsma lamented that "the venerable Renaissance label
has become little more than an administrative convenience, a kind of blanket under
which we huddle together less out of mutual attraction than because, for certain
purposes, we have nowhere else to gO."4
In the two decades since Bouwsma's essay appeared, the Renaissance has proved
far more resilient than had seemed imaginable in the 1970s, even while defying
coherent resynthesis. Most of the leading research universities in the United States
today include a Renaissance specialist, and the subject remains prominent in
department catalogues, syllabi, and course descriptions. 5 If institutional inertia
partly explains this persistence, consumer demand also plays a role. While students
may not flock to courses on the Renaissance in the numbers that they did when it
enjoyed pride of place in Western Civilization surveys, there is still a healthy
clientele for the subject. Drawn in part by past exposure to artistic images from
fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy, students come with expectations about what
the Renaissance is that derive largely from the popular culture of the Renaissance
that has given it a stable niche in the world of documentaries, museum exhibits, and
even consumer goods such as Caryco's "Dress-Me-Up" Michelangelo's David
refrigerator magnets. 6 Even students who have never before studied the Renaissance usually arrive with a cluster of assumptions about the period's uniquely
optimistic view of human potentiality and of individual creativity. They tend to
approach the Renaissance with a confidence in the importance of its more
prominent artifacts and with some sense that knowledge of it should be a vital part
of their cultural edification.
In contrast to their students, however, history faculty have remained uncomfortable with the term "Renaissance"-so much so, in fact, that many have substituted
the lackluster and no less value-laden term "Early Modern" (a curious choice,
particularly on the part of scholars ostensibly fleeing teleological narratives).
Studying early modern Europe admittedly can encompass the Renaissance, but it
no longer makes it a focal point of the transition to the world that we inhabit. The
Annaliste historiography against which Bouwsma reacted twenty years ago, which
emphasized gradual structural changes, has given way to micro historical studies
that are less embedded in any overarching narrative-studies that exhibit a
fascination with the unique and, at times, sensational aspects of human experience.
Consequently, the base of our knowledge has expanded, but no coherent paradigm
has emerged, only an increasingly complex mosaic of details from a wider social
spectrum and geographical range. 7 Few of us would endorse a return to the old
Bouswma, "Renaissance and the Drama of Western History," 3.
Edward Muir, "The Italian Renaissance in America," AHR 100 (October 1995): 1095-1118, esp.
1107.
6 Other consumer products playing on Renaissance images include Don Martin's "Mona Laffa" and
"Mona Crya" coffee mugs, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling umbrella, and National Lampoon's "Undiscovered Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci."
7 Current consensus represents something of a balance between Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic
statement that nothing had changed over five hundred years and the alternate view that history was a
series of discrete, dramatic events. See Le Roy Ladurie, "History That Stands Still," in The Mind and
4
5
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
FEBRUARY
1998
53
Introduction
pieties about the place of the Renaissance in "The Rise of the West," yet the
current incoherence of the Renaissance, as a historian's category, deserves further
reflection when the subject remains so lively as an aspect of public history. If
scholars persist in situating their work in the Renaissance, as many social historians
seem to do judging by the titles of their books, which suggest that there is a world
of "Renaissance" lovers, urban criminals, homicidal townspeople, agricultural
laborers, and rioting wool carders to be explored, then we need to continue to
redefine the concept in a meaningful way.8 The often vague and laconic use of the
term "Renaissance" in such work begs the question rather than addresses it.
The arrival of the "new" social history and the post-1960s disillusionment with
the narrative of Western Civilization did not, however, put an end to the study of
the "elite" culture of the Renaissance. Indeed, scholarship in the past decade has
reinvigorated Renaissance studies in ways that Bouwsma could not have predicted.
Foremost among these have been developments in cultural and intellectual history
and a renewed emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities. With
the advent of the "new cultural history," Renaissance cultural materials have
proved to be fertile ground for doing the sorts of close iconographic and textual
readings that are the hallmark of this burgeoning field. Similarly, the continuing
popularity of the "new historicism" in the realm of literature, a subject created by
a core of prominent Renaissance scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, has
emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary methodologies in approaching a
past that is largely discernible through the interconnections between literary and
visual documentation. 9 Such scholarship has not created a new coherent portrait of
the Renaissance, by any means, but it has at least presented it as an object lesson
in how to interpret culture.
Renaissance intellectual history, meanwhile, has proved remarkably resilient, and
the hermeneutics of reading and methods of textual criticism have proved especially
fruitful areas of inquiry. 10 This work has fundamentally transformed how we look at
humanists' practices. In so doing, however, it has also called into doubt the vaunted
"modernity" of Renaissance humanists' methods as well as the transformative
Method of the Historian, SHin Reynolds and Ben Reynolds, trans. (Chicago, 1981). For an overview of
this tradition, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89
(Stanford, Calif., 1990). Microhistory, as practiced by such historians as Carlo Ginzburg, has also
moved the field further away from the traditional story of the Renaissance. For a trenchant assessment
of the shortcomings of microhistory as practiced by American scholars of the Renaissance, see Anthony
Molho, "American Historians and the Italian Renaissance: An Overview," Schifanoia 8 (1989): 9-17,
esp. 16. While we cannot agree with all of Professor Molho's criticisms, his cautions about the
fragmentation of the field surely merit our attention.
8 The following prominent titles suggest the range of subjects for which social historians have
appropriated the "Renaissance" imprimatur: Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian
Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1986); Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr., The Laboring Classes in
Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980); Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in
Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md., 1993); Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996); and Guido Ruggiero, Binding
Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993).
9 See, for example, Randolph Starn, "Seeing Culture," in Hunt, New Cultural History; and Stephen
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980).
10 See William J. Bouwsma, "From History of Ideas to History of Meaning," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 279-91.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
FEBRUARY
1998
54
Paula Findlen and Kenneth Gouwens
power of their encounters with ancient texts. 11 By implication, when not explicitly,
these studies pose the question, was the classical revival itself really of such great
historical consequence? Rather than emphasizing the traditional view of humanism
as the cultivation of skills that shaped the modern spirit, this new form of
scholarship presents the Renaissance as an epoch in which we can watch closely the
formation of a literary canon and the subsequent birth of many modern disciplines
of knowledge.
In the space of this Forum, we do not presume to articulate a universally
acceptable reinterpretation of the Renaissance. Nonetheless, we do believe that
certain elements within recent scholarship suggest that we can, in fact, define the
term meaningfully in a way that seemed impossible before the emergence of the
new intersection between cultural and intellectual history. Claims to a special
filiation with the present were never really a sound basis on which to build a field,
so perhaps it is best that we follow the practices of Renaissance humanists
themselves, and claim the past for the future. As the millennium approaches, the
time for conceptual renovatio may be at hand.
11 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal
Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
FEBRUARY
1998