Abstract
Reviewed by : Sean Roberts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar
Providing a comprehensive and concise history of approximately three centuries is no small task. Guido Ruggiero’s The Renaissance in Italy rises to the challenge, presenting readers with an intellectually ambitious, erudite and engaging narrative of Italy’s social and cultural contours between 1250 and 1575. In the process, Ruggiero touches on the ways that we as scholars and students have excavated, told and re-told our stories of a period both contested and persistently figured as pivotal to the development of European modernity.
The major components expected of such history writ large are all present. The peninsula’s political commitments and ideologies, military struggles and economic fortunes, demographic shifts and landmark events like the Black Death cohabit with and inform discussion of vibrant new traditions within literature, philosophy, religious thought and the visual arts. Not every component of such a variegated culture, of course, can be covered in any survey. Music, architecture and popular devotional practices, for example, are largely absent from Ruggiero’s account.
In organizing this array of material across some six hundred pages, the author has divided his book into 11 chapters developed around broad concepts including ‘Violence’ ‘Self’ and ‘Imagination’ while nonetheless proceeding chronologically. These chapters thus adventurously investigate themes including the inadequacy and inaccuracy of humanism as an organizing principle for literature and antiquarian scholarship, the production of what Ruggiero calls ‘consensus realities’ through notions of legitimacy and civic responsibility, the continued seductiveness of Jacob Burckhardt’s conception of the discovery of the self, and the period’s disavowal of novelty in favour of notions of return as the very organizing principle of rinascimento. This thematic approach is often rewarding and frequently makes for compelling reading, allowing for the intrusion of fascinating vignettes that help to balance broad history with case study. Ruggiero’s consideration of the etiology of the plague and his exploration of the impact of wet nurses upon infant mortality, social mobility and legitimacy are two such genuinely engaging examples.
Occasionally these organizing themes are pushed a bit beyond their usefulness. ‘Discovery’, which focuses on Renaissance hostility to novelty, for example, fixates on the ways in which reactions to the printing press sought to ‘deny the new in all this and demonstrate this it was in fact safely old’ (388). But such an account sidesteps the prevalence of laudatory responses to invention, of which Stradano’s Nova reperta is only the best known. While the marriage of thematic and chronological approaches is generally agreeable, it does present occasional difficulties. The rinascimento has nearly universally been defined through cultural expression rather than socio-political shift. Yet, art, literature and education make only cameo appearances in Ruggiero’s story until a pivotal chapter on ‘Imagination’ that begins after some two hundred initial pages on political legitimacy, plague and warfare. So too, this hybrid arrangement makes for some strange bedfellows since chronologically significant events in military and political history are sandwiched between material chosen for its thematic relevance. Thus the peninsular invasions of the sixteenth century find themselves in the ‘Discovery’ section, introduced by way of a slightly tortured discussion of whether they – like the printing press – were seen as dangerously ‘new’ or safely placed within long-established categories of experience.
Despite its thematic novelty and revisionist ambition, Ruggiero’s history conforms in other ways to commonplace narrative structures that have long shaped accounts of the period. Most significantly, though he endeavours to provide a vision that embraces the geographical and cultural variety of the peninsula, the author returns frequently to the comfortable environs of Florence. Dante, Machiavelli and the Medici, understandably loom large. Similarly, without resorting to unwieldy historiographic contortions, it is also probably unavoidable that the artists we encounter here are the protagonists of Vasari’s Vite. But the decision to devote nearly half of the chapter on ‘Courts’ to consideration of Cosimo il Vecchio’s milieu seems rather to reify the primacy of the city on the Arno than to interrogate assumptions about courtly and republican dichotomies. Were this simply the result of authorial choice, this Tuscan predilection would perhaps be no cause for concern. Instead, Ruggiero’s history suffers from the long-standing over-evaluation of the city that Vincent Illardi dubbed ‘Florentinitis’ nearly forty years ago. Crucial negotiations of centre and periphery, of signorial and civic authority, and of the continuing impact of such choices on canons and disciplinary boundaries – questions which animate, for example, the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (2015) – find themselves somewhat muted in The Renaissance in Italy on account of this rather traditional regional focus.
Any synthetic account of over three hundred years of regional history, especially one that often seamlessly merges the social and cultural dynamics of one of the discipline’s most frequently and polemically contested moments, necessarily opens itself to criticism. It is a testament to Ruggiero’s intellectual risk-taking and its results that many of the questions raised are themselves so rewarding, compelling and unresolvable. This clear and engagingly written book will find itself in the hands not only of university students and scholars but of many curious readers who want to approach the Renaissance in its broadest possible contours for decades to come.