Book Reviews

The Renaissance Society of America is pleased to announce that Christopher

S. Celenza’s The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and
Latin’s Legacy was awarded the Phyllis Goodheart Gordan Book Prize for
2004–2005. Michael J. B. Allen’s review follows.
Christopher S. Celenza. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists,
Historians, and Latin’s Legacy.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xxii + 210 pp. index.
$45. ISBN: 0–8018–7815–2.
This is a difficult book to review despite its clarity, learning, and range. For
it is preoccupied both with the lost riches of Renaissance Latin culture and with
a modern failure that bears on the academic passions and intellectual commitments
of many readers of this journal: the failure, despite the enormous labors and
achievements of scores of brilliant and devoted scholars, to establish the study of
the Italian humanists in the fifteenth century — for Celenza significantly the
“long” fifteenth century — as a secure field in American universities, indeed to
ensure its remaining in the curriculum at all. One of the problems may well be the
very Latinity the humanists championed as the appropriate vehicle for their con-
cerns and enthusiasms. Celenza’s plea that more of us shoulder the unrespectable
burden of translating the body of important but largely inaccessible Renaissance
Latin texts is commendable: certainly translations may seduce more students into
the field and help those already in it to explore its highways and byways with
greater ease and expedition. But it is difficult to see how more translations, even
of the profoundest and most difficult texts, can solve a problem that is not just a
philological but more generally an educational, political, and philosophical one.
When the President of the United States is incapable at times of constructing a
grammatical sentence conveying the simplest of notions let alone of articulating
complex ideas (if such exist), how can we set about teaching the essentially aulic
values of a group of far less public, politically impotent men for the most part, who
lived their mature lives guided, often competitively, by rhetorical and epideictic
concerns centered on a patrician language that we now think of as dead even
though it was very much alive for them? Even a shaping role for these humanists
in the history of Italy is yet to be established, as is the seminal relationship between
their humanism and our own humanisms, those that speak to our various demo-
cratic, ethical, and humanitarian values.
The Golem that haunts this study is the problem of the Latin sources in
general. Celenza’s first chapter shows convincingly why they escaped the great
gathering and classifying efforts of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries
that achieved so much in putting the study of antiquity and the Middle Ages on
secure foundations. His second chapter is especially provocative given the current
reevaluation of Paul Kristeller’s and Eugenio Garin’s complementary but rather

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 B O O K R EVIEWS 577

different legacies. This successfully sets out Garin’s indebtedness as a “diachronic”

thinker to Gentile and Croce, but to my mind underplays his remarkable sensi-
tivity to the roles played by astrology, by harmonics, and by the World Soul and its
complex musical and magical dimensions, in the cosmologies of such philosophers
as Ficino and Bruno; for Garin wrote about such topics moved not only by
immanentist philosophical convictions but by a subtle sense of poetry and mystery.
Celenza is much more insightful in mapping out Kristeller’s complex philosophical
debts and the breadth of his scholarly interests, and in establishing the architec-
tonic role of his elite German education and its stars. The third chapter looks at
a number of theorists, and especially at the importance of Richard Rorty’s insights
into the notion of interpretive communities, before turning to a microhistory of
twentieth-century sociology and social history. This takes us from Lucien Febvre
and Marc Bloch through Braudel, Ginsburg, Collins, and Bachelard to Bourdieu’s
cooptation of habitus to mean a “universalizing mediation” governing the subcon-
scious structuring of any given field at any one time. All this is informative but has
only an indirect bearing on the ways chapter 4 actually explores Valla and Ficino
in the context of the notion of intellectual orthodoxy. Chapter 5 weaves together
a consideration of the theoretical foundations underlying the work of Caroline
Bynum and of Lauro Martines with a consideration of Lapo da Castiglionchio, a
humanist at the papal court; and it has perceptive things to say about the ani-
mosities and emulative dynamics of small communities, as humanists sought for
honor and reputation. The last chapter establishes the grounds underlying both the
book’s title and scholarship’s changing attitudes towards the editing of (Latin)
texts, and makes an urgent plea for a reconsideration of the “lost” culture of the
Renaissance. An appendix looks at the not entirely lost state of this culture in
contemporary America.
This is an original, engaging, well-written book. More than a historiography
of the Renaissance, it raises two related and momentous questions: What about the
fifteenth-century humanists was studied or neglected in the past and why? What
about them must we study in the future if we are to create a caring and informed
society?
MICHAEL J. B. ALLEN
University of California, Los Angeles