The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain — in one word
If you had to summarise your book in one word, what would it be? The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain has its official publication date on 2nd May 2019. I have, then, been giving some thought to what my response to the question would be and I think the answer is: cosmopolitanism.
I appreciate that some might me to justify my use of that word. I employ the term in its general sense of involving people from different countries but, the remit of my book, with its cast-list which ranges from St Andrews to Rome and from Majorca to Milan, is rather narrower than the word’s little sense. My use of the concept cannot have the worldwide reach that cosmopolitanism has in present-day philosophy. I could defend my profligate deployment of the term by noting that Diogenes the Cynic, the first person on record to claim he was a cosmopolite, envisaged a world that did not include the Americas or Australasia. I could also point out that The Renaissance Reform draws attention to how humanists saw the British Isles as at the very edge of the world — but I could not claim that those humanists’ vision was so myopic that it stopped at the Mediterranean or that it was oblivious to cultures beyond Western Christendom. Indeed, the interaction of ‘the West’ (as defined by obedience to the pope) with Eastern Christendom impinges on the book’s discussion. Moreover, a sense of the edges of a civilization is intentionally at the borders of its coverage. All that said, The Renaissance Reform cannot pretend to be a contribution to the global Middle Ages. Perhaps, if I had my time again, I might replace ‘cosmopolitan’ with ‘Europolitan’ — a citizen of Europe (with the inclarity of its definition being productive) — except that I see that term has already been appropriated by a Swedish mobile phone company, and I would not want to infringe their copyright.
The emphasis on cosmopolitan in the book is a challenge. The theme of the work is the re-design of the manuscript book, in script and layout, promoted by Florentine humanists at the very start of the fifteenth century and its success among the British. That statement in itself is a provocation, since it is usually assumed that humanism reached England, at its earliest, in the reign of Henry VII and only found glorious summer under the sun of York and Lancaster combined, Henry VIII. In contrast, I insist that there was a sustained tradition of interest from the 1430s which should qualify to be called ‘the English Quattrocento’. This is not to say that the tradition was the sole preserve of roast-beef-eating English-born, or that it grew solely in English soil. On the one hand, there were many immigrants who were central to the promotion of the humanist agenda in England — with the most significant being not Italians but Dutch scribes. On the other, there were Englishmen and Scots who were active in the humanist reforms in their heartland of Italy. These Britons were part of a wider pattern of engagement which, I claim, was integral to the success of the humanist aesthetic for the book. I would go further and say that some were significant not merely in its propagation but in its construction. That is to say, this Renaissance reform originated with a coterie of Florentines but it gained its popularity through international collaborators. The leitmotif was cosmopolitanism at not just the edges of Europe but what was to Italian eyes its epicentre.

Oxford: Balliol College, MS. 310 fol. 32v — Letters of Leonardi Bruni, written in England by the Dutch scribe, Theoderic Werken (1449).
This assertion, for which I give evidence in the monograph and other recent publications, raises a question: why would non-Florentines or non-Italians adopt a script designed to be a local reaction against ‘gothic’ (that is northern European) influence? We tend to see in the humanist bookhand as immersed in a particular set of cultural co-ordinates: the legacy of ancient Rome with its physical presence in Italy (though not much in Florence itself), the humanists’ attempts to revive eloquence both textually and visually. Yet this — I hypothesise — was not primarily what other Europeans saw on the page when viewing a book in the new ‘Roman’ hand. Here, I take cosmopolitan to mean ‘the world’ not in a simple synchronic sense of how it is now but also encompassing its shared inheritance. The humanists, in developing their reform they turned to prototypes of the eleventh and twelfth century — to late caroline minuscule or ‘protogothic’ bookhand. Such prototypes were not, of course, Italian patrimony alone: caroline minuscule, emanating from north-east France and beyond, had been successful across Europe, and ‘protogothic’ had thrived near the shores of the English Channel. That is to say, what non-Italians saw when they looked upon the ‘new’ script, created in its very particular local circumstances, was an acknowledgement of a tradition in which they could see themselves as full partners.
The humanist reform, however, was not a single moment. The bookhand itself developed — in part, thanks to the intervention of ultramontanes. Equally, there was also a ‘second wave’ when, in the north-east of Italy in the mid-quattrocento, what we know of ‘italic’ was invented. That very name, foisted on the script by French and English, suggests its Italian origins, and it worked on viewers in a very different way from the ‘Roman’ hand, since there was not for this any historic precedent to which it returned. While the humanist bookhand was archaising, italic was archaising by metaphor. The result was that this later script’s international success worked differently and was, in its first decades, more dominated by Italians. In The Renaissance Reform, this is presented as a shift in cosmopolitanism but it could be configured otherwise: as a move from Europolitan to Italophile.

A royal letter of 1506, signed by Henry VII, written in italic by Pietro Carmeliano (private hands).
As will be clear from what all that I have said, the field of action for this cosmopolitanism is the page. In that sense, detecting it is akin to the sensitivity art historians show to the multiple cultural contacts that shape a Renaissance painting or miniature. In palaeographical terms, cosmopolitanism can stand as a conceit for digraphism or polygraphism. The Renaissance Reform discusses the movement between scripts, and the adoption of humanist elements in gothic scripts; it also muses on how far we can sense a conscious rejection of the reforms when a bookhand shows no humanist influence. I also invoke at one point the concepts of code-switching and code-mixing, but an implication of what I have just said is that, while these may be separate ‘codes’, they could announce, to some eyes, their shared origin, speaking of one graphic tradition that has ramified into many forms.
It could be legitimately said that the ‘some’ just mentioned are only ‘a few’. The Renaissance Reform is very clear that it is talking about a minority among a minority. Most of its characters stood out from the many who were born in the same village or town because these people were highly mobile across Europe. They also were the privileged because they were highly literate, in societies that were majority-illiterate. Cosmopolitanism — citizenship of this ‘world’ — was only for the select. At the same time, a theme that underlies this book is a sense that they themselves sensed their special status and that some were humbled by it. Some, I suggest, took it less as a badge of pride than as a spur to think on the poverty of their own literacy and, indeed, on the limits of their own cosmopolitanism.
Postcard from Harvard V: Bruni against the Goths gothicised
I realise that the tradition of the postcard privileges messages of few words. I note also that I have, in my recent posts, underachieved in that respect. This post is an attempt to rectify that. It comes without a description, for the manuscript discussed here has been well described in print by Laura Light. What I want to draw attention to is how this codex is witness to a humanist text escaping from the confines of humanist presentation and taking on another identity.
It is not unusual to have the work by a humanist copied in a gothic script. Indeed, the previous post discussed one such manuscript produced in England. The Houghton’s MS. Lat. 170 is a particularly pungent example of this habit for two reasons. First, while the copy of Bruni’s Ethics translation discussed last time is in a cursive script, this thin volume provides a case of the less common practice: a text written in a classicising style to be rendered into a textualis, that is a gothic bookhand needing to be produced with care and so at a slower pace. MS. Lat. 170 has suffered over time, mainly because of water damage, but it is clear that the scribe wrote with deliberation and a concern for detail, shown in particular with the frequent hairline strokes adorning the letters (look, for instance, at the h). The block of text is compact, with little space between the lines, in an aesthetic quite different from that promoted by the early humanists — the only similarity with their style of mise-en-page is the substantial blank borders around the text, which is, in fact, also to be found in the ‘pre-humanist’ circle of Coluccio Salutati. The illumination in this manuscript also shows no concession to the fashionable preference for bianchi girari initials. It is as if the scribe was unaware of the humanist agenda but that certainly cannot be true.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. lat. 170, fol. 18v
This brings us to the second point: the text that is being presented here. It is a work of Leonardo Bruni, the acknowledged doyen of the first generation of Quattrocento humanists; what is more, it is his history, De bello adversus Gothos — the Italians’ war against the Goths. Here we have an Italian scribe providing a humanist text that discusses the Goths but doing it in a style that the humanists would have described as ‘gothic’. Did the scribe enjoy the irony?
I see that the text above could not fit on a postcard, unless perhaps I used a tiny gothic script.
Postcard from Harvard IV: a little witness to English humanist interest
The manuscripts I have discussed so far have all been easy on the eye (as they say). The subject of today is not. Indeed, seated on the shelves alongside gorgeously illuminated presentation manuscripts, this codex might feel embarrassed by its appearance. That it is pocket-sized is not that unusual, but that it is written cursively on quires that are encarté (paper except for the outermost and central bifolia which are parchment) suggests that this was a volume on which little expense was spared. Nor can it claim to be a textual rarity — it provides a copy of a fifteenth-century bestseller, Leonardo Bruni’s new translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. For me, though, this small workaday volume is gold dust in the library.

Cambridge MA: University of Harvard, Houghton Library, MS. Lat. 286, fol. 1 – the opening of Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics.
The manuscript does not exclude any explicit statement of where or when it was produced but its evidence — palaeographical, philological and codicological — is revealing. James Hankins in his listing of Bruni manuscripts in North America correctly states that it was made in England. This is apparent from the pen-flourished initials, the script of the main text (which shows substantial continental influence) and of the textual corrections, which are by another hand using some anglicana forms. Those corrections show that the copy was being checked against its prototype — a suggestion that, for all its appearance of low-grade production for personal use, this was created in a communal context, with some care to ensure a level of textual accuracy. Collating passages of the text suggest where that might have been: it has affinities with two manuscripts which have Oxford associations. Those two volumes, however, are probably later than this one. This is where the paper becomes important.
The scribe wrote on paper of one stock, with a watermark of a hand, the fingertips of which touch a half-moon. The information gathered in Piccard on-line shows that there was a fashion for this in at a few German papermills in the 1430s. Those who know about paper suggest that use often follows at most a few years after production, but they are thinking of mainland Europe. England, which relied (apart from the 1490s) entirely on imported paper, may count as a special case: with the travel and distribution times involved, we would expect the possible lead-in before use to be longer. Perhaps Orietta da Rold’s exciting project mapping paper in medieval England will shed further light on the average time-delay. Even, though, if we assume a couple of decades between production in the German-speaking lands and use in this manuscript in Oxford, that would place it soon after the mid-point of the century, and that may be a little late, judging from the script. We know that the Ethics translation was known in England from the early 1430s, at the latest — that is, within fifteen years of its composition — and it may be that we have before us an early witness for its English circulation.
In short, this unprepossessing codex is notable evidence for the interest in the humanist re-translation of Aristotle’s textbook of ethics in England. It joins six other manuscripts identified at present as being of English provenance. Beside them, there is the well-known incunable, printed in Oxford in 1479. We might want to think of that printed version as a new beginning, but we could also see it as a culmination of an Oxford interest in the text stretching back decades.
Here is my description of MS. Lat. 286. As always, comments welcome.
Postcard from Harvard II: a presentation manuscript from Pier Candido Decembrio

The opening leaf of Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Richardson 23, with the arms of Borso d’Este.
My second report from my new location involves a manuscript that is hardly unknown but which I could not resist making one of the first I studied. It is a copy of four texts by the Milanese humanist Pier Candido Decembrio, made under his guidance for presentation to the duke of Ferrara, Borso d’Este, in the early 1460s. Decembrio, cheer-leader for his city in its opposition to all things Florentine, has been an acquaintance of mine since my graduate days, for, in the late 1430s and early 1440s, he attempted to construct for himself an international reputation by presenting works and sending books to Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, as I discussed in my doctoral thesis. So, when I opened up this manuscript and saw before me Decembrio’s script writing the contents list, it had the sensation of a meeting with a familiar friend.
The humanist himself is not, however, the main scribe of this manuscript. As with some of those he made for Humfrey, he called on others to produce the volume but left enough evidence in the volume to show that oversaw its creation. As I explain in my description, his interventions here are multiple, correcting the whole text and adding annotations in some, using different inks for each level of accretion, suggesting he went over the manuscript two or three times. It provides us, then, with interesting detail about the mechanics of presentation — the desire to achieve an elegance which spoke of the cost involved being balanced by a need to personalise, not just in terms of the identity of the recipient but of the author as well.
Textually, this manuscript of importance for being the earliest known copy of his panegyric of his home city, De laudibus urbis Mediolanensis (a work first composed in the later 1430s but, apart from this codex, extant only in two later fifteenth-century manuscripts, in Milan and Brussels). That is a work which demonstrated his patriotism for Milan and his repudiation of Florence’s claims to pre-eminence, for in this panegyric he engages with the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis of Leonardo Bruni, a work which had already gained an international circulation, turning on its head its claims by a process of quotation and revision which, at times, comes close to creative plagiarism.
His expression of independence from Florence was expressed not only in words but in presentation on the page. He knew and acknowledged the reforms of the page promoted by Bruni’s friend, Poggio Bracciolini, but he by no means adopted it fully. In particular, he preferred a much smaller script than was fashionable in Florentine littera antiqua, and an example of this is on display not only in his own interventions but in the main script, which provides a notably compact block of text on the page. At the same time, Decembrio’s scribe here (identified as Gabriel Brepia) is more willing to accept some of the reforms than his commissioner. A key orthographical shift in Florence was the re-introduction of the digraph, demonstrating the presence of the diphthong (usually ‘ae’, sometimes ‘oe’). Here we see a contrast between Decembrio who continues to ignore it and his scribe who adopts a couple of strategies for marking the diphthong (a subscript mark, and a small loop before e). One wonders how far Decembrio condoned the transformation of his text in this detail, and whether he felt his work was succumbing to Florentine influence, even when it expressed its opposition to that city.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Richardson 23, fol. 12v – with Decembrio’s rubrication annotation at bottom left. Contrast his lack of digraph with the scribe’s writing of ‘quae’ at ll. 8 and 13.
The Houghton has helpfully digitised the whole manuscript and the iiif images can be viewed in Mirador. All I can add is a description of this important codex (with all the usual caveats about its draft status).
Italian Renaissance – a few primary sources
This post might equally be called ‘what I did in the Christmas vacation’. This term, for the first time, there is a new module at the University of Essex entitled ‘Terror, Murder and Bloodshed: the civilization of Renaissance Italy, c. 1400 – 1527’, which I designed and am running. As I prepared for the teaching, it became clear it would be useful for the students to have some short, focussed extracts from primary sources around which we could centre our seminar discussions. There are, of course, many resources available already on-line. The full text of Vasari’s Lives is uploaded, in Italian (both the 1550 and 1568 editions) and in the ‘standard’ translation of de Vere. There are some very useful collections of documents and images in English, like that provided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. These can be supplemented by the webpages of exhibition which remain available – those for Rome Reborn continue to be an excellent resource of images and discussion. Individual academics have also built up helpful websites – to give just one example, there is the work-in-progress of Mikael Hörnqvist of Uppsala University.
What I am adding to the available corpus is intentionally very limited. As already explained, there is a particular audience in mind of second-year undergraduates. What I wanted to provide was a set of short pieces which would introduce some of the key concepts but not overwhelm with a mass of text or of new information. I set myself a limit, then, of four typed pages for each extract (admittedly, in one cases, I overstepped the mark but, in my self-defence, the five pages also include relevant images). That meant that I could not simply link to existing resources, even where a translation existed. What is more, as we know with the de Vere translation of Vasari, the existing translation can at times mislead rather than inform. So, increasingly, I realised that my Christmas would be spent less with mince pies than with the Latin and Italian texts.
Only a few have not had previous English renditions – those exceptions include the passages I provide from Leonardo Bruni’s Funeral Oration on Nanni Strozzi, Matteo Palmieri’s Della vita civile and parts of Platina’s De principe (here there is some overlap with Nicholas Webb’s sections published in those very useful volumes of the Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, edited by Jill Kraye – available only in hard-copy). In some cases, as with the extracts from Bruni’s Praise of the Florentine city, I worked independently of the existing translation, in this case the deservedly well-thumbed version in Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt’s Earthly Republic – not because I believe there to be significant problems with it, but that I judged that another rendition (albeit very limited) could help by providing a different perspective on Bruni’s style. In others, as with Vasari (where I have used his lives of Giotto and Simone Martini, Paolo Uccello, Antonello da Messina and Pietro Torrigiano), I started from the de Vere version but revised it freely to bring it closer to Vasari’s original and to assist students by adding some light annotation. Similarly, the short section from Flavio Biondo’s Italia illustrata is much endebted to the edition by Jeffrey White in that excellent new resource, the I Tatti Renaissance Library, and can only claim any advantage in that it provides a little more footnoting than is the norm for that series.
I have put all these now on-line as a page on this website: you can find them under the heading ‘Resources on the Italian Renaissance‘, a few lines down on the right-hand side of this site’s homepage. I would naturally be grateful for any comments that you have – and even more interested to learn if you have found them helpful. I put them up in the hope that they can help others in their teaching: all I ask is that you acknowledge their source and let me know when you use them.
The Palaeographer and the Philologist’s Stemma
I would like your advice (you, who are often so silent but who — I determinedly believe — are sitting there, shrewdly considering the prose). I have the not-unpleasant duty of breaking up term with a visit to Rome, to speak at a conference taking place in Place Navone — not, for sure, Piazza Navona, as this is at the École française. It is part of a series on ‘L’écriture latine en résaux’, with this event, organised by some impressive and strikingly young scholars, including Clémence Revest, concentrating on humanist works.
In my talk, I want to present in diagrammatic form some of the information about the relationship between manuscripts and so have turned to the established format of the stemma. Of course, it lacks some elements that philologist would consider a sine qua non; in particular, it does not trace the text back to its Ur-status or to its platonic form — there is no ‘x’ perching atop the tree here. What it gains, instead, though is some precision in dating: down the left-hand side is a set of years, with the manuscripts (most extant, some lost) aligned to that grid.
I should immediately admit that I am lucky: through a combination of philological and palaeographical knowledge, as well as circumstantial evidence, it is possible to be more definite about the date of a high proportion of these manuscripts than would be possible in most cases. Part of my paper will, in fact, be about how we can gain that precision and what it means for our understanding of the circulation of humanist texts. That said, there does remain some uncertainty about some dates – for instance, the copies of the ‘Virtue and Vice’ compilation listed at bottom right can only be dated tentatively and to a period of a few years rather than a specific date. One issue I have is how to demonstrate such tentativeness clearly in this tabular format. Should a different typeface be used? Should the lines of connexion be altered and if so, how?
One other change I would like to make is to signify more clearly the place of origin of the manuscripts. This is the purpose of the circle at top centre-right, marking those manuscripts owned by Humfrey, duke of Gloucester and given by him to Oxford University (in these cases, all in 1444). As those who know my work might realise, the intention is to delimit, to enclose the influence of Humfrey, and so provide a corrective to the assumption that he is the fons et origo of humanism in England. A good example involves Oxford: Balliol College, MS. 310 which sits on this chart floating at centre left (under the year 1449), intentionally without links to other manuscripts here. It is a copy, made by Theoderic Werken, of Leonardo Bruni’s Epistolae in the final nine-book edition; it has sometimes been assumed that it derived from a lost manuscript owned by Humfrey and given to Oxford but as the duke’s last gift to the university took place in the first days of 1444 and as the edition of Bruni’s letters was only completed after the author’s death in March of that year, that is highly unlikely, to say the least. What is more, it seems that the manuscript was produced in London, rather than in Oxford. The issue, then, is how to signify such differences of place: should the information be organised into columns (here it would be Oxford, London and Canterbury)?
I would be interested in your comments on these issues. More generally, I would like to hear if you think this type of presentation of information, ordering the manuscripts not just by their textual associations but also by their date, has any merit. I look forward to hearing from you.
Finally, a short set of fairly commonsensical abbreviations:
s: = scribe
p: = possessor
BL = London: British Library
BnF = Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France
NLW = Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales
A previously unidentified copy of Coluccio Salutati
I have been preparing some sample entries for my work on English Humanist Scripts up to c. 1509, intended for the Handwriting of the Italian Humanists series. In doing that, I have returned to the manuscripts of Petrus Lomer, a scribe who we know solely from four manuscripts. One of those is now in the Library of the Universiteit van Amsterdam [MS. I F 74], having arrived there just under a century ago. Previously, it had circulated among private collectors and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic. During its travels, it lost a quire or more of its content. The result is that it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that it contained one work — Benvenuto da Imola’s Liber Augustalis — but, in truth, that short text occupies only the first folios and ends imperfectly. The second text, when it has been noticed, has, because it lacks its opening pages, been identified solely as a ‘theological treatise’. The small discovery for today is that the manuscript actually contains De seculo et religione by the godfather of Florentine humanism, Coluccio Salutati.
This is a treatise that received a fine edition by Berthold Ullman in 1957 (in that edition, what we have in the Amsterdam manuscript is the text from p. 28, l. 22 until the end). Unsurprisingly, this manuscript does not appear in the list of thirty-one witnesses to the work. Ullman’s listing does suggest something of the interest of this particular copy: the majority of codices were created because monastic communities considered Salutati’s work was relevant to them. This manuscript, uniquely, marries De seculo with Benvenuto, a more secular, historical text. We also learn something by realising that Lomer copied this work, for it was not the only occasion that he showed an interest in the writings of the Florentine chancellor who was the mentor to the likes of Leonardo Bruni: there is a copy of Salutati’s De fato et fortuna now in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Padua signed by Lomer. That manuscript was one of two he definitely produced in England; is the same true for De seculo? There is no way for knowing for certain, though what early annotations there are suggest, instead, that this copy was in Italy from its first years. Was Lomer providing texts of Salutati for different readers on order? Or is it a sign of his own intellectual interests — was he a particular devotee of Coluccio Salutati? It is in the nature of our knowledge of this elusive scribe that we cannot answer for certain. Yet.
Will the real Renaissance please stand up?
Last month I received notice of a conference which I am sure proved stimulating but which I could not attend as I was then in Rome. What caught my attention, however, were the first words of the promotional e-mail:
While Renaissance and Early Modern Studies are focused on the two and a half centuries between 1500 and 1750,…
I must admit that it took me some time to move beyond that comma. Has the Renaissance that I study been abolished? Have we returned to calling Piero della Francesca or Andrea Mantegna ‘Primitives’ and now see art beginning only with Michelangelo and his followers? Since I have been away, has it been decided that humanism now starts only with Filippo Beroaldo the Younger and leaves out the generations of Leonardo Bruni and Pomponius Laetus? More to the point: what Renaissance after 1500? From where I am standing, it is mostly over, bar the shouting (between back-biting editors) – and that soon turned into the burnings of the Reformation. What brave new world is this?
When I explain my work, I sometimes describe my area of study as that part of the Middle Ages that we call the Renaissance. I do not say it because I believe in the essence of the ‘medieval’ any more than I have faith in the existence of ‘modernity’ but rather because most of the achievements we would recognise as ‘Renaissance’ – think of Brunelleschi’s dome capping Florence’s cathedral, Alberti’s design for the Palazzo Rucellai, Donatello’s statues of David, the art of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Lippi father and son, the new classicising Latin of Bruni or Poggio, the reform of manuscripts begun in the same circle, the establishment of libraries from San Marco in Florence to the Malatestiana in Cesena and the papal library in Rome, the philological work of Lorenzo Valla or Politian, the teaching of Guarino or Vittorino da Feltre the first sales from the Aldine press – fall within the fifteenth century. And that century, as we know, sits in most faculty corridors or on bookshop shelves within that millennium of civilisation that follows the Fall of Rome. Such distinctions necessarily simplify – we might not now believe Italian creativity dies with the invasions from 1494, or even with the re-born Sack of Rome in 1527 – but we might wonder how long into the sixteenth century lasts that cycle of fashions and their fruitful combination that marked the quattrocento.
I will be accused of being obtuse: the term ‘Renaissance’ is surely being used with the meaning of ‘cultural flowering’ which sprouts in many parts of Christendom. But is such ‘flowering’ solely the province of the sixteenth century? Could not late medieval England boast of its tre corone – Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate – and celebrate the architecture of the likes of Richard Winchcombe, or the artistry of Nottingham alabasters? Would not Castile look earlier to the vernacular achievements of its three cultures in the time of Alfonso X? And, in the fifteenth century, the would-be nation of Burgundy has been described as having in its heyday its own Renaissance, and one which with its skill in oil paintings and tapestry found buyers in Italy. In Italy itself, why talk of creativity only in quattrocento or cinquecento terms: are Giotto, the Cosmati family, Pietro Cavallini, Dante and Mussato all to be forgotten? It does not seem obvious to me that these was unprecedented creativity that marks out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – new markets, following the economic reorganisation created by the Black Death, and new technologies, most notably in print, certainly, but not necessarily new genius after a winter (or an autumn) of cultural decay.
Of course, it may be then said, the ‘Renaissance’ was a particular type of cultural flowering which began in Italy and slowly oozed out of the peninsula, eventually to stain all of Europe (meaning, most often, western Europe and paying less heed to culture in, say, Krakow or Buda). This is a claim with a long tradition – the Italian humanists themselves, like Polydore Vergil, liked to talk of the translatio studii which had transferred learning from their homeland to whichever country they were then visiting (following in the footsteps, it must be said, of earlier humanists). There was certainly an export of a type of education then becoming popular in Italy and eventually giving its name to humanism; that export was made possible, in large part, by the creation of a trade in printed books. Yet, was there really a similar combination of artistic fashions with interplay between them in Shakespeare’s London, say, as there had been in early Medici Florence or in the papal city of Nicholas V and Sixtus IV? Even if the answer to that was ‘yes’, the question would then be how much that particular cultural flowering – the Shakespearean moment, one episode in many – directly owed to the earlier activities in those Italian cities? Do we use the term ‘Renaissance’ more by analogy than by association?
Ah, says the early modernist, that is the point: our Renaissance need not be the young relative in the shadow of your quattrocento events; it is its own man. So be it: use the term as you choose. But, if it is to have a specific relevance to a particular part of one vernacular tradition, it cannot simultaneously be employed in some general sweeping definition, that can encompass all of the cultural activity of the sixteenth century or (even more incongruously) later. Hispanists perhaps are more fortunate: they can talk of their literary ‘Golden Age’ without straining to define it in unavoidably Italianate terms. Perhaps other nations need a similar separation. For late sixteenth-century England, then, who would like to invent a term?
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