Campbell - The Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance

T he Renaissance is a model of cultural descent in which the culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe is represented as a repudiation of a medieval world in decline in favour of the revival of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The parallel religious model is the Reformation, in which the church is represented as turning its back on corruption and decline in favour of a renewal of the purity of the early church. In both models, there had to be an intervening middle period between the glorious past and its revival. The idea of the Middle Ages (medium aevum) was introduced to European historiography by the Roman historian Flavio Biondo in 1437, and quickly became a commonplace. Thereafter European history was conventionally divided into three periods: classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern period. The biblical metaphor of rebirth was first applied to art by Giorgio Vasari, who used the term to denote the period from Cimabue and Giotto to his own time. It was certainly an inordinately slow birth.

The broadening of the term renaissance to encompass a period and a cultural model is a product of the nineteenth century, albeit with roots in the French Enlightenment. That is why we use the French form (renaissance) rather than the Italian (rinascit) to denote this rebirth. In 1855 the French historian Jules Michelet used the term Renaissance as the title of a volume on sixteenth-century France. Five years later Jacob Burckhardt published Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), in which he identified the idea of a Renaissance with a set of cultural concepts, such as individualism and the idea of the universal man. Vasaris designation of a movement in art had become the term for an epoch in history associated with a particular set of cultural values. These issues are explored in detail in Franois Quivigers chapter on The Civilization of the Renaissance, which explores the afterlife of Burckhardts concept of individuality in more recent notions of self-fashioning and gender fluidity, and in the complex notion of the self.

The model of the Renaissance has evolved over time. An older generation of historians had a predilection for precision: the Middle Ages were deemed to have begun in 476 with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and concluded with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Greek scholars fled to Italy with classical manuscripts under their arms. This book subverts those easy assumptions at every turn, but the contributors nonetheless assume that the model of a cultural Renaissance remains a useful prism through which the period can be examined. That model has been challenged by those who prefer to think of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries purely in terms of a temporal period called the Early Modern period. This idea is, of course, as fraught with ideological baggage as is the term Renaissance, and embodies narrow assumptions about cultural origins that may be deemed inappropriate in a multicultural Europe and a globalized world.

This is a book about the cultural model of a Renaissance rather than a period. That said, it must be acknowledged that while this model remains serviceable, it also has limitations. The idea of a Renaissance is of considerable use when referring to the scholarly, courtly, and even military cultures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, because members of those elites were consciously emulating classical antiquity, but it is of little value as a model for popular culture and the everyday life of most Europeans. The idea of historical periods, which is emphasized by the use of centuries or rulers as boundaries, is particularly problematical in the case of the Renaissance, because a model that assumes the repudiation of the immediate past is insufficiently attentive to cultural continuities.

Such continuities are sometimes not readily apparent, because they are occluded by Renaissance conventions. Shakespeare is a case in point. He was in many ways the inheritor of the traditions of medieval English drama, and he accordingly divided his plays into scenes. Printed conventions, however, had been influenced by the classical conventions in Renaissance printing culture. Horace had said that plays should consist of neither more nor less than five acts (Neue minor neu sit quinto productior actu fabula,