I

The Renaissance as the Concluding Phase o f the

Middle Ages

Jakob Burckhardt’s Kultur der 'Renaissance in Italien of 1860 was the

culmination of a five hundred year historiographical tradition estab­
lishing the Renaissance as the beginning o f modernity. Into
Burckhardt’s book flowed ideas and even words that were first voiced
by Renaissance humanists, Protestant reformers, Enlightenment
philosophes, rationalist historians, Romantic authors and historians,
and not least of all G. W. E Hegel. Even Georg Voigt’s Die
Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums (The Revival o f Classical Antiquity),
a book of a very different stamp from Burckhardt’s, published in
Berlin just a year earlier, anticipated Burckhardt’s theme of
Renaissance individualism vs. medieval corporateness1. But it took
Burckhardt’s narrative genius to pull all these strands together in the
first true masterpiece of Kulturgeschichte.
Burckhardt’s central insight, as he put it at the start of Part 2 on
«The Development of the Individual, was that the Italians of the
Renaissance were «the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe»2.

1 See W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Cambridge, MA, 1948,

pp. 159-162. Whereas in the first edition, Voigt saw as the goal o f this classical revival
the recapitulation o f antiquity and the “Christian-Romantic life,” in the much expand­
ed final edition (2 vols., ed. M. Lehnerdt, Berlin 1893), he sharpened the pagan-
Christian contrast (vol. 1, p. 4): «Als den Kern dieser Entwickelung betrachtete man
friih schon die Aufnahme des Rein-Menschlichen in Geist und Gemiith, wie es die
Hellenen und Romer der alten Zeit gepflegt, der Humanitat, im Gegensatze zu den
Anschauungen des Christenthums und der Kirche.» («Quite early on was the assump­
tion of the purely human in spirit and sentiment — o f humanity, as the Greeks and
Romans o f old cultivated it — treated as the cbre o f this movement in opposition to
the oudook o f Christianity and the Church.»)
2 The Civilisation o f the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore, first
published in 1878; I used the New York 1954 edition; see p. 100. Middlemore trans-
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Burckhardt thus defined the modern conception of the Renaissance as

the beginning of modernity. The Renaissance was, in essence, the Anti-
Medieval3. Modern scholarship has since shown Burckhardt to have
been wrong on every essential point of his argument4. Nonetheless, not
only vulgar notions of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, but also
scholarly assumptions on the Renaissance and Middle Ages still reflect
Burckhardt’s influence. More recently, the misapplied term “Early
Modern” has only made the situation worse. My purpose here is to pro­
pose a different chronological scheme as a way out of what I see as an
impossible thicket of historical and intellectual confusion.
A master of the narrative sources, Burckhardt was usually right in
his details. But the details hardly mattered since his was an anecdotal
presentation that proved little. Since 1860 his supporters and critics
have contended about his generalizations, not his facts. Wallace K.
Ferguson has capably analyzed both groups up to almost the mid-

fered the adjective ‘modern* from the previous sentence since Burckhardt spoke here
of «present-day* Europe» («jetzigen Europas»); see Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien.
Ein Versuch, 2nd edition of 1869, ed. M. Wegner, Wiirttenberg 1950, p. 111.
3 Not that Burckhardt scorned the Middle Ages. On the contrary, from 1844 to
1891, i. e., for almost his whole career, he demonstrably lectured on aspects of the
Middle Ages; see H. Heilbling, Das Mittelalter im Geschichtsbild Jacob Burckbardts,
«Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo», 100 (1995-1996), pp. 193­
212. That Burckhardt immersed himself in the study o f art and that this study was
closely linked to his understanding o f the Middle Ages and Renaissance is well known;
but now see also Relire Burckhardt: cycle de conferences organises au musee du Louvre
par le Service culturel du 25 novembre au 16 decembre 1996 sous la direction de
Matthias Waschek, Paris 1997.
4 The despots, whom Burckhardt saw as the originating cause o f Renaissance
individualism (see Part 1. The State as Work o f Art; and Part 2. The Development o f the
Individual), were quite medieval in their behavior and beliefs; not does his thesis explain
the utterly central role of republics in Renaissance culture. On a more general level see
now John Jeffries Martin, Myths o f Renaissance Individualism, Hampshire —New York
2004, pp. 208-224. Burckhardt*s portrayal of the humanists in Part 3, The Revival o f
Antiquity, as immoral neo-pagans is fantasy and completely misses their rootedness in
medieval cultural and social traditions. Burckhardt had no understanding o f medieval
scholasticism and science nor,, for that matter, o f Renaissance philosophy and science.
Consequently, his Part 4, The Discovery o f the World and o f Man, became essentially art
exercise in literary history. His Part 5, Society and Festivals, is brilliant in conception, but
a failure in execution, amounting to a farrago o f aperfus and anecdotes. In the last part
of his book (6. Morality and Religion) Burckhardt determinedly illustrated his pre­
conceived notions o f immorality, paganism, and superstition, and thereby failed to
gain an accurate understanding o f the religiosity and religious traditions o f Italy.
5 See note 1 above. Ferguson’s own historical approach was to view the period c.
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twentieth century5.Full-throated Burckardtians are scarce on the

ground today, but Burckhardt’s insistence on the modernity of the
Renaissance is alive and well, evidenced by its iteration in two recent
prize-winning books6. Medievalist critics have countered with three
basic strategies. One has been to appropriate Burckhardt’s Renaissance
for the Middle Ages, finding the origins of the Renaissance in
medieval religion7, medieval science8, medieval legal traditions9, or

1300 - c. 1600 as a period of transition. See his Europe in Transition, 1300-1520, Boston
1962, p. viii: «While still o f the opinion that a complete discussion o f the transition
from medieval to modern civilization would have to be carried through to the end of
the sixteenth century or beyond, I was thus forced to the conclusion that the years
around 1520 might well serve as the terminus ad quern for the present work.» See also
his The Interpretation o f the Renaissance: Suggestionsfo r a Synthesis, «Journal of the History
o f Ideas», 12 (1951), pp. 483-495.
6 See William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea o f the Renaissance, Baltimore,
1989; and Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, Baltimore 2004. The for­
mer assert, p. xi: «It is our contention in this book that the inherited idea o f the
Renaissance, though it has (at least in literary circles) fallen without uproar into near
obsolescence, does propel us into a story that matters today: Burchardt’s story, the his­
tory of early modern individualism»; and on p. 4: «We agree with Gombrich that what
Burckhardt initiated in historiography is ‘a succession of attempts to salvage the
Hegelian assumption without accepting Hegelian metaphysics/ but we disagree with
his dismayed conclusion that this kind of thing has to stop.» Celenza explains, p. xii:
«Burckhart advanced this interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in 1860 and it grad­
ually became the dominant one. However, despite the strength o f Burckhardt’s inter­
pretation o f the Renaissance, neither he nor subsequent scholars had access to the
complete range o f sources to study the period . . . What remained of Burckhardt’s
interpretation was the idea that the Renaissance marked the beginning o f modernity.
What was lacking was a comprehensive collection o f sources.»
7 The oddest was Konrad Burdach’s argument concerning Cola di Rienzo and
Franciscan mysticism. For an instance of its popularity see my Toward the Genesis o f the
Kristeller Thesis o f Renaissance Humanism: Tour Bibliographical Notes, «Renaissance
Quarterly)), 53 (2000), pp. 1156—1173: pp. 1161-1163. I can only second Ferguson’s
words in Renaissance in Historical Thought cit., p. 306: «A foreigner not attuned to his
[Burdach’s] mental processes may find it difficult to understand either the meaning of
his work or its undoubted vogue among younger German historians ...» An interest­
ing discussion o f the historiographical background to Burdach is Cesare Vasoli, Due
momenti della discussione sul RJnascimento del Burckhardt: Emile Gebhart e Konrad Burdach, in
Rinasdmento: mito e concetto, edd. R. Ragghianti - A. Savorelli, Pisa 2003, pp. 213-254.
8 Even if mistaken in its contention about the origins o f the Scientific Revolution
in fourteenth-century Scholasticism, P. Duhem’s Le systeme du monde: Histoire des doctrines
cosmologiques de Platon a Copemic, 5 vols., Paris 1913-1917, still merits our respect for its
exploration and insightful discussion of many ignored texts.
9 E. g., see W. Ullmann, Medieval Foundations o f Renaissance Humanism, Ithaca, NY,
1977. Ullmann’s presuppositions required him to seize upon Hans Baron’s hyperbolic
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something else medieval, and thereby transforming the medievals into

“the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe.” A second strate­
gy, which I fully endorse, is best exemplified by Charles Homer
Haskins’ The Renaissance o f the 12^ Century, which demonstrated the
medieval cultural efflorescence without denying the Italian Renais­
sance10. Erwin Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art,
even if a bit patronizing of the medievals, is in this tradition11. A third
stratagem has been, directly or indirectly, to deprecate the Renaissance,
George Sarton and Lynn Thorndike in the history of the science being
the best known coryphei of the “revolt of the medievalists”12. Etienne
Gilson encapsulated this attitude from the perspective of a Christian
medievalist in the memorable sentence: «La Renaissance ... n’est pas le
moyen age plus l’homme, mais le moyen age moins Dieu»13. Lately,
this third stratagem has taken the form of the ‘long Middle Ages,’ as
most famously enunciated by Jacques Le Goff, who views the
Renaissance, as an «evenement brillant mais superficiel» in the face of
phenomena of duree longue, such as the continuation of plague from
1347 to 1720 and the belief in the thaumaturgic powers of the French

thesis concerning civic humanism.

10 Cambridge, MA, 1927. I used the Cleveland-New York 1963 edition, p. vi:
«The Italian Renaissance was preceded by a similar, if less wide-reaching movements;
indeed it came out o f the Middle Ages so gradually that historians are not agreed
when it began, and some would go so far as to abolish the name, and perhaps even
the fact, o f a renaissance in the Quattrocento.)) Note that Haskins did not himself
endorse the latter view, but called the medieval renaissances «less wide-reaching.»
11 Stockholm 1960. Panofsky’s theme o f «the union of classical form and clas­
sical content» achieved,in the Renaissance was in his own way brilliantly and contem­
poraneously developed by E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, New Haven 1958
(2nd ed.: New York 1968). A no less brilliant third scholar associated with the Warburg
Institute, Ernst Gombrich, In Search o f Cultural History, in his Ideals <&Idols: Essays on
Values in History and in Art, London 1979, pp. 24-59, rightly sniffed out a trace o f
Hegelianism in Panofsky’s approach to cultural history (p. 44).
12 See Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought cit., pp. 383-85. Thorndike was
confused even when he tried weak praise. In his Renaissance or Prenaissance?, «Journal of
the History o f Ideas», 4 (1943), pp. 65-74, he commented that o f the six parts o f
Burckhardt’s book, only the third «on the Revival o f Antiquity seems to me scholarly
and just.» Unfortunately, as it is clear from Kristeller and Witt (see below) that part
was neither scholarly nor just.
13 Humanisme medieval et Renaissance, which was a talk delivered in 1929.1 used the
printing in Gilson’s Humanisme et Renaissance, Paris 1983, pp. 7-32 (quotation on p. 28).
14 Pour un long moyen age, first published in Le Moyen Age maintenant, «Europe», 654
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king as late as 182514. If anything, contrary to his intention, Le G off’s

argument reenforces the prejudice that associates the adjective ‘me­
dieval’ with superstition and backwardness and the term Renaissance
with innovation and cultural brilliance15. Nor is Le G off’s slant on the
long Middle Ages novel. A century ago Ernst Troeltsch notoriously
argued that the Reformation was a continuation of medieval religion,
and he did so not in order to praise medieval religion16. Moreover,
despite the growing popularity of his formulation17, Le Goff did not
confront the increasingly fashionable term of “Early Modern.”

(oct. 1983), pp. 19-24, and now available in his Uimaginaire medieval’ Paris 1985, pp.
7-13. Jumping on the bandwagon, Edward Peters and Walter P. Simons have recent­
ly told us that Johan Huizinga demolished Burckhardt and «implicitly subscribed)) to
a «long Middle Ages». See their The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages, «Speculum»,
74 (1999), pp. 587-620: p. 604. How they deal with statements of Huizinga’s such as
«Now this scrupulous realism ... is the characteristic feature of the spirit o f the expir­
ing Middle Ages» (J. Huizinga, The Waning o f the Middle Ages, tr. F. Hopman, New York
1954, p. 274) is not made clear. Nor am I persuaded by their assertion that the word
“Waning” is not an accurate rendering o f what Huizinga intended when Huizinga
himself revised the text for the English translation, supervised the translation, and
wrote a preface for it. Also, I do not see how “Waning” subverts the intent o f the
word “Autumn” in Huizinga’s original Dutch title.
15 For the Renaissance = Good side of the contrast see P. F. Grendler, The Italian
Renaissance in the Past Seventy Years: Humanism, Social History, and Early Modem in Anglo-
American and Italian Scholarship, in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century. Acts of
an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9-11,1999, edd. A. Grieco -
M. Rocke - F. Gioffredi Superbi, Florence 2002, pp. 3-23: 19-20.
16 Die Beudeutung des Protestantismus fu r die Entstehung der modemen Welt, Munchen
1906; and Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neu^eit: Kultur der Gegenwart, 1.4,
Berlin, 1906. See Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought cit., pp. 287-289. Note that
in later editions Troeltsch mitigated but did not repudiate his basic position. See his
Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7: Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neu^eit
(1906/1909/1922), edd. V. Drehsen - Chr. Albrecht, Berlin 2004, p. 87: «Er [Prote­
stantismus] ist zunachst in seinen wesentlichen Grundziigen und Auspragungen, eine
Umformung der mittelalterlichen Idee, und das Unmittelalterliche, Moderne, das in
ihm unleugbar bedeutsam enthalten ist, kommt als Modernes erst voll in Betracht...»;
and p. I l l: «So ist es nicht zu verwundern, wenn die nachste Wirkung des Reforma-
tionszeitalters trotz der langst eingetretenen Auflosung des Mittelalters eine zweihun-
dertsjahrige gewaltige Nachbliite des Mittelalters is t...». See K. Pauzel, Ernst Troeltsch
on Luther, in Interpreters o f Luther. Essays in Honor o f Wilhelm Pauck, ed. J. Pelikan,
Philadelphia 1968, pp. 275-303.
17 E. g, on the Internet I encountered: E. L. Skip Knox, The Renaissance Interpreted
as a Continuation o f the Middle Ages (http://boisestate.edu/hy309/historiography
/14.html), which concludes by citing authorities for two options: «The Renaissance was
a continuation o f the Middle Ages, or even a decline ... [or] it doesn’t constitute any
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In itself, ‘Early W Lo& zivl (Friihe Neu^eit) is unobjectable. As a neu­

tral term, it has certain advantages, e. g., for anyone trying to combine
the Renaissance and Reformation18. But a rose by any other name
remains a rose, and the flight to ‘Early Modern’ is at least in part an
ideological attempt to escape the positive connotations of ‘Renaissan­
ce’ while retaining the all-essential connection modern/non-medieval
for the period 1500 - c. 165019. Obviously somewhere along the chro­
nological continuum ‘Early Modern’ will be the appropriate name. The
question is: where in the continuum?
As a practical matter, history cannot do without periodization. But
periodization does more than define the past. It also defines the pres­
ent. Modernity is a moving target, and what is modern today cannot
but seem passe years from now. I wonder what future generations will
think of the present fashionable oxymoron, post-modern? In any case,
all seeing is essentially perspective, as Nietzsche says20, and it is always
from the perspective of the present that we view the past. ‘The Middle
Ages’ is a case in point. As a name, The Middle Ages’ is absurd. Every
age is a middle age, between what preceded and what will follow21.

sort of Indentifiable age all, and so properly belongs to the Middle Ages.» The notion
of the “long Middles Ages” is mentioned in Handbook o f European History 1400-1600:
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, edd. Th. A. Brady Jr. - H. A. Oberman - J.
D. Tracy, 2 vols., Leiden 1994, vol. 1, p. xviii, in connection with James Bryce’s preco­
cious 1860 book on the Holy Roman Empire.» Bryce was precocious, but the date of
his book is the more salient fact here. Note also that the editors tried to square the cir­
cle by using three o f the four possible terms for their period in the title, and the fourth
term, “Early Modern,” they made the cornerstone of their preface (p. xxi): «These soft­
er contours o f European events between 1400-1600 are the reason why Burckhardt’s
individualist princes and Modey’s Luther seem to us typical not of the “modern” age,
a phrase with which we identify our own era, but o f the “early modern” one. Our
acceptance of this term expresses a sense of distance from the era between 1400 and
1600 which our nineteenth-century predecessors did not have.»
18 See the previous note.
19 E. g., for feminists it is a solution to the famous question posed by Joan Kelly-
Gadol, Did Women Have a Renaissance?, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History,
edd. R. Bridenthal -C. Koonz, Boston 1977, pp. 137-164. Symptomatically, to escape
these undesirable connotations, in 1996 Duke University’s «The Journal o f Medieval
and Renaissance Studies» changed its name to «The Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies».
20 E Nietzsche, The Genealogy o f Morals in The Birth o f Tragedy and The Genealogy o f
Morals, tr. Francis Golffing, New York 1956, p. 255.
21 Long after I wrote this sentence, I learned that I had done no more than echo
Etienne Gilson, “Le moyen age comme ‘saeculum modernum”, in Concetto, storia mid
e immagini del Medio Evo, ed.V. Branca, Firenze 1973, pp. 1-10, at p. 9: «Dans l’ordre de
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Indeed, from early on in the Middle Ages, and ever more insistendy
from the twelfth century on, people often and righdy referred to
themselves and their activities as modern22. So the via moderna in phi­
losophy and the devotio moderna in religion were quite accurate appella­
tions in their own time. Renaissance humanists, therefore, were reac­
tionary rebels against modernity23. But however we wish to parse the
self-conception of the Renaissance humanists24, from the perspective
of our own present, it is unambiguously clear that what we call
Antiquity was a different age from what we call the Middle Ages and
that we live in an age quite different from the Middle Ages25. These
names make sense primarily, though not exclusively, within the
Western historical tradition since to be modern today means to a less­
er or greater degree to be Westernized. Not to be Westernized to some
significant extent renders a people today prime material for a certain
type of anthropological study precisely because it makes them non­
modern. The question therefore before us is to date the start of pres-

rhistoire ecrite, tout age est un moyen age: un age moyen entre celui qui l’a precede et
celui qui suit.» See also Gilson’s Notes sur un frontiere contested, «Archives d’ histoire doc-
trinale et litteraire du moyen age», 25 (1958), pp. 59-88, reprinted in Gilson’s
Humanisme et Renaissance.
22 D. Trapp, Moderns’ and Modernists’ in MS Fribourg Cordeliers 26, «Augustianum»,
5 (1965), pp. 241-270; W. Freund, Modemus und andere Zeitbegriffe des Mittelalters, Koln
1957; E. Gossman, Antiqui und Moderni im Mittelalter: Fine geschichtlicher
Standortbestimmung, Munchen, 1974; and Gilson, Le moyen age comme \saeculum modernum’
(p. 3 : «Selon mon information, helas trop insuffisante, c’est au XIIe siecle que
l’Occident a commence a prendere conscience de soi comme d’un age distinct de
l’Antiquite. Les temoins de ce nouvel etat d’esprit n’ont pourtant pas dit: Nous
hommes du moyen age, mais bien: Nous, modernes.»). For the sake of his argument,
Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences cit., pp. 34-35, was forced to explain away Vasari’s
use o f modemo in the normal (medieval) sense.
23 See for instance Erasmus’ criticism of scholastic culture in terms of its novel­
ty in contrast to the antiquity o f bonae litterae in J. Domanski, Nova und Vetera bei
Erasmus von Rotterdam, in Antiqui und Moderni: Traditionsbewusstsein und Fortschrittsbe-
wusstsein im spdten Mittelalter, edd. A. Zimmermann - G. Vuillemin-Diem, Berlin 1974,
pp. 515-528.
24 See now L. D’Ascia, Coscien^a della Rinascita e coscien^a antibarbara. Appunti sulla
visione storica del RJnascimento nei secoli XV e XVI, in Ragghianti - Savorelli, Rinascimento
cit., pp. 1-37.
23 Nor should we take at face value contemporary comments about resurgence
and/or decline; see the instructive C. S. Jaeger, Pessimism in the Twelfth-Century
Renaissance’, «Speculum», 78 (2003), pp. 1151-1183.
26 But not to the fifteenth century. Giovanni Andrea Bussi’s famous reference to
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ent-day Western modernity. My argument in brief is that though the

scheme of ancient, medieval, and modern goes back to the
Renaissance26, since the nineteenth century we have erred in consider­
ing the Renaissance the start of modernity. What the Renaissance was
in fact was the final and, in some respects, culminating phase of the
Middle Ages. The terms we assign to historical epochs are purely con­
ventional. However banal or vacuous their literal meaning may be, they
are useful bits of linguistic shorthand. But if the Renaissance was the
concluding phase of the Middle Ages, then, whatever other name you
may wish to use to denote it as a period, the one name that cannot
work for the Renaissance is Early Modern precisely because by defini­
tion that is the one thing the Renaissance cannot be: Early Modern —
and not simply because of the witch hunt craze, the belief of the edu­
cated elite in astrology and magic, and the continuing popularity of the
esoteric texts of the Cabala and Hermeticism27.
Others have noted — most recently Fran^oise Waquet28 — that
despite the impression given in literature courses, Latin retained its lin­
guistic hegemony in literature and learning throughout the Re­
naissance, at least until the later seventeenth century. The Renaissance
humanists were the last successful proponents of Latin as the proper
medium of educated discourse. But in teaching and using a neo-clas­
sical Latin, the Renaissance humanists were building upon a tradition
that can be said to date from the Carolingian Renaissance and that

the media tempestas in his 1469 preface to his edition o f Apuleius (Ferguson, Renaissance
in Historical Thought cit., p. 74) should be understood as a reference to the recent as
opposed to the distant past; see Ludovico Gatto, Viaggio intorno al concetto di medioevo:
Proftlo di storia della storiografia medievale, Roma 19812, pp. 45-46.
271 note that Peter Burke denies the adjective “modern” to the Renaissance; see
his The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, Princeton 19862, p. 9: «The conclu­
sion which sugests itself at this point is that the Italian Renaissance should be studied
from a somewhat different perspective. It should be reffamed, detached from the idea
of moderntiy so dear to Burckhardt and studied in a ‘decentred’ fashion’»; and in his
The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries, Oxford, 1998, p. 2: «In the first place,
an attempt will be made to dissociate the Renaissance from modernity»
28 Latin or The Empire o f a Sign, tr. John Howe, London - New York 2001; first
French edition, Le latin ou I'empire d ’un signe, Paris 1998. See also Jozef Ijsewijn with
Dirk Sacre, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, 2 vols., Leuven 1990-1998 (see especially the
Historical Survey, I, pp. 41-49); and, to take England as an example, W. Binns, Intellectual
Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings o f the Age, Leeds 1990.
29 The massive impact of humanist discoveries, translations, and commentaries
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received a powerful boost from the cathedral school culture of the

eleventh and twelfth centuries. To be sure, the Renaissance humanists
claimed to have restored good letters. But in essence what they did was
complete a process that had begun with the Carolingian Renaissance.
The medieval universities were built around the recovery of classical
texts, specifically, the Aristotelian corpus, the Justinian law code, and
select medical texts, combined with modern (i. e., medieval) texts.
The Italian humanist redressed the balance by focusing on antique lit­
erary writings, but in the process they also revitalized the medieval sci­
entific and religious tradition by fresh discoveries and translations29.
By around 1650, the Renaissance had recovered and in the case of
Greek translated into Latin almost the whole classical corpus we pos­
sess today30. The Renaissance completed the medieval recovery of the
textual heritage of antiquity.
Yet, Renaissance humanism did not end the reign of medieval *
scholasticism. Indeed, the greatest age of Italian scholasticism, when
it rose to European-wide prominence, was precisely the Renaissance.
Statistically, in terms of the number of teachers, students, and societal
support, Italian scholasticism rivaled Italian humanism31. In terms of
intellectual vitality, figures such as Paul of Venice, Giovanni Marliani,
Pietro Pomponazzi, Agostino Nifo, and Iacopo Zabarella, more than
held their own. Even Cesare Cremonini, the prototypical scholastic
reactionary, who today is invariably compared unfavorably with his
colleague in seventeenth-century Padua, Galileo Galilei, was very pop-

in religion, science, and philosophy as well as in literature is being documented by

Catalogue Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and
Commentaries. Annotated Lists and Guides, edd. P. O. Kristeller (f) - F. E. Cranz (f) -V.
Brown, I, Washington, D. C. 1960.
^ See L. D. Reynolds - N. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission
o f Greek and Latin Literature, Oxford 1991, pp. 192-202: «Discoveries of Texts since
the Renaissance,)) describing how the main means in modern times o f supplementing
the massive Renaissance infusion of classical texts have been palimpsests, papyri, and
the occasional manuscript find.
31 In general see P. F. Grendler, The Universities o f the Italian Renaissance, Baltimore
2002. For the substantial importance of the university in a great center o f humanism,
see J. Davies, Florence <&its University during the Early Renaissance, Leiden 1998. For the
adaptability and vitality o f the universities in a subject area o f great humanist interest,
see D. A. Lines, Aristote’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300-1650): The Universities
& the Problem o f Moral Education, Leiden 2002.
32 See Grendler, Universities cit., p. 311; M. A. del Torre, Studi su Cesare Cremonini:
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ular with students and much respected by the Venetian patriciate up to

his death in 163132. And in the person of Pedro da Fonseca, Luis de
Molina, Domingo de Soto, Francisco Suarez, and the Jesuits of the
Collegium Conimbricense, the Iberian pennisula as well as in Italy gave
medieval scholasticism a second spring that extended well into the sev­
enteenth century33.1 should also note in passing that contrary to what
one would have expected because of the condemnation of Luther and
other early Protestant leaders, Aristotelianism came to dominate the
Protestant academies and universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries34. The Aristotelian commentaries of the Jesuit Collegium
Conimbricense found ready readers in Protestant circles35.
But if Italian humanism began in the thirteenth century, as it
demonstrably did36, how can it not be considered anything but a me-

Cosmologia e logica nel tardo aristotelismo padovano, Padova 1968, pp. 16-20; and C. B.
Schmitt, “Cremonini, Cesare,” in Dizjonario biograftco degli italiani, 30, Roma 1984, pp.
618-622: 618-619. Traditional Aristotelian instruction in Padua was not seriously chal­
lenged until the eighteenth century, a pattern that one can find duplicated to an extent
in Germany; see H. C. Kuhn, Venetischer Aristotelismus im Ende der aristotelischen Welt:
Aspeckte der Welt und des Denkens des Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631), Frankfurt a. M. 1996,
pp. 487 ss.
33 For a tour de horizon, see C. B. Schmitt, Problemi deWaristotelismo rinascimentale,
Napoli 1985 (slighdy expanded and corrected version o f his Aristotle and the
Renaissance, Cambridge 1983). One finds good information passim in The Cambridge
History o f Renaissance Philosophy, edd. C. B. Schmitt - Q. Skinner - J. Kraye, Cambridge
1988. ‘
34 See P. Petersen, Geschichte der Aristotelischen Philosophie im Protestantischen Deutsch­
land, Leipzig 1921; J. S. Freedman, Aristotle and the Content o f Philosophy Instruction at
Central European Schools and Universities during the Reformation Era (1500-1650), «Pro-
ceedings o f the American Philosophical Society», 137.2 (1993), pp. 213-253, reprint­
ed in his Philosophy and the Arts in Central Europe, 1500-1700: Teaching and Texts at
European Schools and Universities during the High and Tate Renaissance, Aldershot, UK, 1999,
as article V; and Freedman, European Academic Philosophy in the Tate Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries: The Life, Significance, and Philosophy o f Clemens Timpler, 1563-1624, 2
vols., Zurich 1988,1, pp. 162-186.
35 E. g., Petersen Geschichte der Aristotelischen Philosophie cit., pp. 277, 292, 446;
Freedman, European Academic Philosophy, I, p. 172 (Fonseca); Schmitt, Problemi cit., p.
145 (= Aristotle and the Renaissance, p. 99); and Freedman, Aristotle and Philosophy
Instruction cit., p. 251. For the large number of printings, including in Germany and
France, see C. Lohr, Renaissance Latin Aristode Commentaries: Authors C,
«Renaissance Quarterly)), 28 (1975), pp. 689-741, pp. 717-719.
36 See now R. Witt, In the Footsteps o f the Ancients *: The Origins o f Humanism from
Tovato to Bruni, Leiden 2000.
37 See J. Ahern, Epistles, in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. R. Lansing,. New York 2000,
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THE RENAISSANCE 175

dieval phenomenon? Dante, with his classical interests, fits nicely into
the culture of incipient Italian humanism. He was not himself a lawyer
or notary or teacher of the ars dictaminis as were the other early Italian
humanists, but his associates, his fellow poets, his circle of correspon­
dents were, and he very much shared a common culture with them. At
one point in his exile he even wrote letters as a secretary for a patron
just as a medieval dictator would37. We all know that Petrarch had trained
as a lawyer and that Boccaccio actually was a lawyer. Renaissance
humanism, as Kristeller showed, developed out of the professional
interests of medieval intellectuals associated with the ars dictaminis*.
I find irrefutable the medievalists’ claims for the Renaissance of
the twelfth century. The twelfth-century poets, grammarians, com­
mentators, translators, and other scholars were responsible for an
enormously successful recovery of antique language, learning, and lit­
erature39. That recovery took place mainly in northern Europe and
continued into the thirteenth century. Nonetheless by the fourteenth
century Italians had clearly taken the lead and would eventually pro­
duce far more brilliant results than did the earlier medieval humanists.
But what is critical to understand is that at this very same time in
the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries Italians were also
absorbing northern scholasticism and developing their own very dis­
tinctive university structure. As Kristeller has pointed out, even if one
denies that there was a Renaissance, one cannot deny that there was a
Renaissance of Italy40. From a relatively backward cultural position

pp. 352-355, at p. 353 for his three letters for the Lady Gerardesca, Countess of
Battifolle. As Ahern notes, the letters were doubted until proven authentic by E.
Moore, The Battifolle letters Sometimes Attributed to Dante, «Modern Language Review», 9
(1914), pp. 173-189.
38 See his classic essay Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,
«Byzantion», 17 (1944-45), pp. 346-74, reprinted many times since, including in his
Renaissance Thought: The Classic; Scholastic, and Humanist Strains, New York 1961.
39 See now B. Munk Olsen, I classici nel canone scolastico altomedievale, Spoleto 1991;
and for a handy bibliography on the literature of the “Renaissance of the Twelfth
Century,” see Jaeger, Pessimism cit., p. 1151, nota 1.
40 Renaissance Thought cit., p. 4: «On the other hand, if the Renaissance o f the fif­
teenth century, seen against the background of the French Middle Ages, does not
appear to some historians like a rebirth of Europe, it certainly appeared to its contem­
poraries, against the background o f the Italian Middle Ages, like a rebirth of Italy.» Cf.
the comments of M. Lentzen, Warn beginnt die italienischen Uteratur?, «Archiv fur das
Stadium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen», 208 (1971-1972), pp. 1-22: pp. 12-13:
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before the fourteenth century, Italy surged to leadership by the late fif­
teenth century as cultural forms that it had been developing since at
least the thirteenth century began to exert decisive influence on the
rest of Europe. Indeed, I would go further and contend that the
Renaissance was a period of Italian cultural leadership in Europe dis­
placing traditional French cultural leadership41, and that the end of the
Renaissance was the reassertion of French cultural leadership in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a world that increasingly
rejected medieval traditions. In his recent book on Tommaso
CamjDanella, John Headley captured a poignant moment in this transi­
tion . When Campanella, the celebrated anti-Aristotelian author of
City o f the Sun, escaped from Italy to France in 1634, his enthusiastic
French supporters, especially Marin Marsenne and Pierre Gassendi,
now came to see him as yesterday’s man. This great representative of
what was once daring and new now seemed sadly passe. French intel­
lectuals were moving in another direction. The Enlightenment was
superseding the Renaissance. When the French reasserted their tradi­
tional cultural leadership in the Enlightenment, they consciously
rejected not only the Middle Ages, but also the Italian Renaissance43.

«Enstanden schon vor dem 13. Jahrhundert keine grossen literarischen Werk im
Volgare, so wird dieser Mangel auf der anderen Seite aber keineswegs durch eine Bliite
mittellateinischer Literatur in Italien kompensiert. . . . so drangt sich der Schluss auf,
das die literarische Produktion in lateinischer Sprache in Italien sparlich und unbedeu-
tend gewesen ist, mit Ausnahme vielleicht des 13. Jahrhunderts, in dem die Scholastik
durch Thomas von Aquin und Bonaventura ihren Hohepunkt erreichte. . . . Uber-
haupt man die Entwicklung der lateinischen Literatur in Italien bis hin zum 12/13
Jahrhundert, so zeigt sich mit aller Evidenz, dass von einer Renaissance des 12.
Jahrhunderts, wie sie Frankreich hervorbrachte, kaum die Rede sein kann.»
41 See, for instance, F. Braudel, Out o f Italy: 1450-1650, tr. Sian Reynolds, Paris
1991 (first published in Italian in 1974 as vol. 2 o f Storia d ’ltalia and then in French in
1989 as Le modele italien).
42 Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation o f the World, Princeton 1997, pp. 117­
138.
43 See F. Waquet, Le modele franfais et lltalie savant (1660-1750): Conscience de soi et
perception de I’autre dans la republique des lettres (1660-1750), Rome 1989. This rejection was
building in the course o f the Renaissance; see J. Balsamo, Les rencontres des Muses:
Italianisme et anti-italianisme dans les Lettresfranfaises de la fin du XVJe siecle, Geneve-Paris
1992; and, for xenophobic, political, and economic aspects o f this anti-Italianism see
H. Heller, Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France, Toronto 2003; see also Burke,
European Renaissance cit., pp. 173-175.
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Not only did Rene Descartes and his followers turn their backs
upon medieval philosophical and scientific tradition traditions, but so
also did other classes of intellectuals. The Enlightenment produced
the first serious attempts to reduce Latin in the schools and its use by
the educated public44. Like the end of the Aristotelian hegemony in
Protestant as well as Catholic lands, the end of the reign of Latin spelt
the end of the Middle Ages. The Enlightenment did not complete the
job, but it decidedly began it. Not the Renaissance, but the Enlighten­
ment is properly “early modern,” properly the period that leads to the
modernity of the nineteenth century that we all recognize45. The proof
is that the Enlightenment historicized the Renaissance. When Voltaire
in the 1750s treated the Renaissance (though he did not use the name
in the modern sense), as the third age of enlightenment, when the
“Italians alone possessed everything,” preceding the fourth age, the
age of Louis XIV, he recognized that it had ended. His hatred of reli­
gion distorted his historical vision of the Catholic Middle Ages and
made him see a sharp division between the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance46. But the critical point is that he saw the Renaissance as
much as the Middle Ages as over and done with. In a way we can see
the same thing happening with Latin. In 1737 Johann August Ernesti
published his Clavis Ciceroniana1. After nearly 400 years of Renaissance
Ciceronianism, the Clavis Ciceroniana was the first dictionary that
attempted to supply not a way for writing like Cicero but rather a way

44 See Waquet, Empire cit., pp. 10-11; and especially, the country by country sur­
vey in I o f Ijsewijn-Sacre, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies. For the last golden age o f real
world argument about Latin style and education see M. Fumaroli, Lage de 1‘eloquence:
Rhetorique et ures literaria,>de la Renaissance au seuilde Tepoque classique, Geneve, 1980. The
emergence of the vernacular in the schools is certainly documentable in certain kinds
of schools well before the seventeenth century; see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in
Renaissance Italy, Baltimore 1989, pp. 275-329.
45 The French, obviously, were not the only important protagonists in the
Enlightenment; see, for instance, G. Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British,
French, and American Enlightenment, New York 2004; Th. P. Saine, The Problem o f Being
Modern Or the German Pursuit o f Enlightenmentfrom Leibni% to the French Revolution, Detroit
1997; and N. Jonard, La France et I'ltalie au siecle des lumieres: essai sur les echanges intellectuels,
Paris 1994.
46 See Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought cit., pp. 87-95, who collates
Voltaire’s famous opening scheme in his Siecle de Louis XIV (1751) with his comments
in the Essai sur les moeurs (1756) and the Remarques de PEssai (1763).
471 used the edition o f London c. 1780.
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for understanding Cicero in his historical context. Ernesti had histori-

cized the study of Cicero and therefore had also historicized Re­
naissance Ciceronianism. Without any intention of being so, his work
signaled that the medieval continuation of Latin as the central tool of
educated discourse was coming to an end.
To move to another front, universities were one of the great cre­
ations of the Middle Ages. What needs to be stressed is that they pros­
pered more than ever in the Renaissance. Yet, starting in the later sev­
enteenth century and unequivocally in the eighteenth century, the uni­
versities, from England and Germany to Spain and Italy, were in dras­
tic decline, with plummeting enrollments, collapsing morale, and a
growing sense of intellectual bankruptcy48. As medieval institutions,
despite their brilliant success in the Renaissance, the universities had
run to ground in the Enlightenment. They, like much else that was
medieval, had to be be reinvented in the modern era if they were to
survive.
What was true in secular culture was also true in the religious
sphere. It is now generally recognized that what was once called the
Counter-Reformation was in fact a Catholic Reformation, a bit too
late, to say the least, to fend off the Protestant Reformation, but
nonetheless a reform — “Renaissance Catholicism” could work nice­
ly here as a more comprehensive name — emerging from pre-existing
movements49. The Council of Trent codified, purified, and regularized

48 See L. Stone, The Si%e and Composition o f the Oxford Student Body 1580-1909; R. L.
Kagan, Universities in Castile 1500-1810; and R. Steven Turner, University Reformers and
Professorial Scholarship in Germany 1760-1806, in The University in Society, ed L.Stone,
Princeton 1974, pp. 3-110, 355-405 and 495-531 respectively;as well as H. Dickerhof,
Die katholischen Universitaten im Heiligen Romischen Reich deutscher Nation des 18.
Jahrhunderts', N. Hammerstein, Aufkldrung und Universitaten in Europa: Divergen^en und
Probleme; J.Voss, Die fran^osischen universitaten und die Aufkldrung, P. Schiera, Die italienis-
che Universitdt im Zeitalter der Auflklarung: fehlende Institution in einem reformerische Zeitalter,
and M.Maurer, Die Universitaten Englands, Irlands und Schottlands im 18. Jahrhundert.
Intellektuelle, sosfale und politische Zusammenhange, in Universitaten und Aufkldrung ed N.
Hammerstein,.Gottingen, 1995, pp. 21-47, 191-205, 207-220, 221-242, 243-272,
respectively. Interestingly, this crisis is by and large masked in the thematically orient­
ed (one might say management oriented) articles in Universities in Early Modem Europe
(1500-1800) (A History o f the University in Europe), II, ed. W Riiegg,, Cambridge 1996.
49 See J. W. O’Malley, Trent and A ll That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern
Era, Cambridge, MA, 2000, who, pp. 140 sq., opts for the name “Early Modern
Catholicism” after having shown the problems with the traditional nomenclature; for
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medieval Catholic theology and traditions. Intellectually and artistical­

ly as well*as morally, administratively, and statistically the Catholic
Church experienced an amazing renaissance in the sixteenth and sev­
enteenth centuries. It was in the eighteenth century, as elites fell under
the spell of the Enlightenment, that the great life-threatening crisis
began for the Church50.
Protestantism followed a similar pattern. Far from being the anti­
Renaissance, the Reformation was rather a Renaissance movement.
The Protestant Reformation could only have occurred within the cul­
tural environment of the Renaissance51. Indeed, one should view the
Protestant Reformation as half of a dual sixteenth-century reforma-
• 52 •
tion . Moreover, the sixteenth-century reformation needs to be seen
as the third of the medieval reformations, the first being the monastic
reformation of the eleventh century and the second the mendicant

different choices, see R. Po-chia Hsia, The World o f Catholic Renewal 1540-1770,
Cambridge 1998; R. Bireley, The Refashioning o f Catholicism, 1450-1700, Washington, D.
C , 1999; and D. Zardin, Controriforma, Riforma cattolica, cattolicesimo modemo: conflitti di
interpretanyone, in Identita italiana e cattolicesimo: Una prospettiva storica, ed. C. Mozzarelli,
Roma 2003, pp. 289-307. In an extraordinarily wide-ranging survey of the recent lit­
erature, S. Ditchfield, In Search o f Local Knowledge *: Rewriting Early Modern Italian Religious
History, «Cristianesimo nella storia», 19 (1998), pp. 255-296, demolishes the notion of
the modernity o f the Italian Church and papacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­
turies and demonstrates the enormous variety and complexity of religious culture and
experience in the penisula.
50 The suppression of Jesuits in 1773, the most successful of the new
Renaissance orders, is symptomatic of the decline — not that the Jesuits themselves
were culturally in decline; for an instance of their adaptability in the Enlightenment
see G. Zanlonghi, The Jesuit Stage and Theatre in Milan during the Eighteenth Century, in The
Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, edd. J. W. O’Malley et al., Toronto 2005, pp. 530­
549. For the general crisis in the Catholic Church, from secularization, national
churches, and decline of the papacy to stagnant missions, Jansensism, and intellectu­
al sterility, see The History o f the Church, edd. H. Jedin - J. Dolan, VI: The Church in the
Age o f Absolutism and Enlightenment, tr. G. J. Holst, New York, 1981 (= Die Kirche im
Zeitalter des Absolutismus und der AufkldrungSf, Freiburg i. B. 1970).
511 can only endorse the assertion o f P. Matheson, Humanism and Reform, in The
Impact o f Humanism on Western Europe, edd. A. Goodman - A. MacKay, London-New
York 1990, pp. 23-42: p. 26: «Yet when all that can be said by way of qualification has
been said, it remains true that neither the Catholic, nor the Luteran nor the Reformed
renewals of Church piety, praxis and doctrine are conceivable without the imput and
impact o f humanist tools, skills and perspectives.))
52 See, for instance, the conclusion of E. Cameron, The European Reformation,
Oxford 1991, p. 422: «The difference between catholic and protestant reformations
was that between evolutionary and revolutionary change.))
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reformation of the thirteenth century. One of the more amusing

books of late is James Stayer’s Martin Luther, German Saviour; in which
Stayer narrates the attempts of the likes of Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf
von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, Karl Holl, and other Lutheran intel­
lectuals to make a modern man out of Martin Luther, especially in
response to Ernst Troeltsch’s description of Protestantism in its first
centuries as a continuation of medieval religion53. Troeltsch has since
gotten the better of the argument not only because Luther’s medieval
intellectual outlook and prejudices are just too obvious to ignore54, but
also because of the eventual codification of Lutheran and Calvinist
orthodoxy into forms of scholasticism. Lutherans even resorted to a
metaphysics characterized by Aristotelian categories similar to the
Catholics, as recent scholarship has demonstrated55. So much so was
Protestant scholasticism part of the medieval tradtion that Antonie
Voss has recently asked: «Is a realistic approach to the history of
Western philosophy possible without seeing and taking into account
the continuity of scholasticism from the beginning of eleventh centu­
ry until the end of the eighteenth century?»56. What first brought

53 For the difficulty modern Protestant historians have had effectively demon­
strating the modernity of the Reformation, see H. J. Hillerbrand, Was There a
Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, «Church History», 72 (2003) pp. 525-552: 540 sq.
54 See, for instance, H. A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil.’ tr.
Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart, New Haven 1989. Oberman comments on Luther as a
professor today (p. 313): «he would be too conservative and far too pious as well as
being too Catholic in approach and too strongly committed to the Middle Age ...»
Oberman could never bring himself to make Luther a medieval man tout court.
Consequendy, he floundered attempting to come up with a new periodic formulation;
see his The Dawn o f the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought,
Edinburgh 1986, p. 19 (“II. The Shape of Late Medieval Thought: The Birthpangs of
the Modern Era”): «Admittedly we no longer assume a tripartite view of history with
its periodisation of antiquity, Middle Ages, and modern times. Furthermore, we dis­
tinguish today at least pre-modern, modern, and contemporary history...» For various
criticisms of Oberman’s view o f Luther see J. M. Kittelson, Luther the Theologian, in
Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research II, ed. W. S. Maltby, St. Louis 1992, pp. 21-46:
pp. 28-29.
55 W. Sparn, Wiederkehr derMetaphysik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie
des friihen 17. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1976; R. A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology
and Predestination in Reformed Theologyfrom Calvin to Perkins, Durham, NC 1986; Verspatete
Orthodoxie: Uber D. Johann Melchior Goere (1717—1786), edd. H. Reinitzer - W. Sparn,
Wiesbaden 1989.
56 Scholasticism and Reformation, in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical
Enterprise, ed. W. J. van Asselt - E. Dekker, Grand Rapids 2001, pp. 99-119: p. 101.
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Protestants into the modern age was not the Reformation but the
Enlightenment.
A few years ago, Jessie Ann Owens, the then president of the
American Musicological Society, wrote an article tided Was there a Re-
naissance in Music? She saw little reason to use the name Renaissance to
denote a period beginning in 1430 or 1450. The evidence rather sug­
gested, she said, «a single period extending from about 1250 or 1300
to 1550 or 1600.»57. Experts in each of the disciplines will have to pro­
nounce on periodization in their disciplines, but it seems to me that a
case can be made in Italian literature and art history for stressing the
continuities from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the sixteenth
and seventeenth and perhaps even eighteenth centuries. For instance,
even the Italians of the Renaissance traced a line that ran from
Cimabue and Giotto to Raphael and Michaelangelo; and Italians of
the Renaissance drew inspiration and authority from Dante. Indeed, in
the Renaissance, if one adhered closely to the dictates of perhaps the
age’s greatest literary critic, Pietro Bembo, then in poetry at least one’s
Italian would have differed little from Dante’s. Once one is liberated
from the need to find a radical break between medieval and Renais­
sance, the continuities simply multiple. While separating the Middle
Ages from the Renaissance, C. S. Lewis nonetheless found his elucida­
tion of the “medieval model” of the universe fully applicable to
«Spenser, Donne or Milton.»58. Nearly seventy-five years ago, in a
small but wise book, The Renaissance and English Humanism59, Douglas
Bush repudiated the depreciation of the Middle Ages» that is so com­
mon among literary scholars of the Renaissance and located John
Milton and his seventeenth-century readers in a thought world more

57 In jLanguage and Images o f Renaissance Italy, ed. A. Brown, Oxford 1995, pp.
111-125: p. 121.
58 The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature,
Cambridge 1964, p. 13: «Again, the reader will find that I freely illustrate features of
die Model which I call ‘Medieval’ from authors who wrote after the close of the
Middle Ages; from Spenser, Donne or Milton. I do so because, at many points, the old
Model still underlies their work. It was not totally abandoned till the end o f the sev­
enteenth century.»
59 Toronto 1939. After having once been a supporter o f Bush’s approach, E. M.
W. Tillyard in The English Renaissance: Fact or Fiction? Baltimore, 1952, p. 112, wavered
because he took the Renaissance to be the anti-medieval: «was there an English
Renaissance? ... my answer is: there was and there wasn’t.»
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properly medieval than modern60. To give one more example, one of

the great novelties connected with the Renaissance is the recovery of
Plato. Yet, in his golden The Decline and Fall o f the Neoplatonic Interpre­
tation o f Plato61, E. N. Tigerstedt deftly demonstrated the fundamental
unity of the medieval and Renaissance interpretation of Plato until its
overthrow, starting especially in the eighteenth century.
In point of fact, once one leaves culture for politics, economy, and
social structure, the radical break dissolves. The great break in eco­
nomic history is the Industrial Revolution, not the Renaissance nor the
discoveries at the end of the fifteenth century. That the Renaissance
was not the decisive moment in social and economic history is implied
in the recent conflicting tendencies either to treat the period from at
least the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century as a coherent
whole (see, for instances, the volumes of Carlo Cipolla62, Fernand
Braudel63, and George Huppert64) or to identify the seventeenth cen­
tury as the decisive moment of premodern transformation65. Pace
Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of a new world system in the Renais­
sance66, the expansion of the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century took place in an essentially medieval legal and intellectual

60 To change language areas, see M. Jeanneret, La Renaissance et sa litterature: le pro-

bleme des marges, in Letude de la Renaissance: nunc et eras. Actes du colloque de la Fede­
ration internationale des Societes et Instituts d’Etude de la Renaissance (FISIER),
Geneve, septembre 2001, Geneve 2003, pp. 11-28, who on the issue o f “Moyen
Age/Renaissance. Continuite ou rupture?” conies down on the side of the latter but
not before succinctly surveying a significant range o f areas where the strands o f con­
tinuity are too large to deny.
61 Published in 1974 as vol. 52 in the series Commentationes Humanarum Utterarum
of the Societas Sdentiarum Fennica, Helsinki.
62 Before the Industrial Revolution'. European Society and Economy 1000-1700, New York
1975 (2n<* ed., New York 1980).
63 Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, tr. M. Kochan, New York 1973 (original
ed., Civilisation materielle et capitalisme, Paris 1967).
64After the Black Death: A Social History o f Early Modern Europe, Bloomington 1986.
65 To cite some titles: H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Crisis o f the Seventeenth-Century:
Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, New York, 1968; edd. G. Parker - L. M. Smith,
The General Crisis o f the Seventeenth Century, London, 1978; Geoffrey Parker, Europe in
Crisis, Brighton, 1980; Ronald G. Ash, Nobilities in Transition 1550-1700, London, 2003.
Even in Early Modem Europe, ed. E. Cameron, Oxford, 1999, the seventeenth century
emerges, apparently not by design, as the decisive century between 1500 and 1800.
See D.O. Flynn, Early Capitalism Despite New World Bullion: an Anti-Wallerstein
Interpretation o f Imperial Spain, essay XI in his World Silver and Monetary History in the 16^
and 17^ Centuries, Aldeshot 1996.
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framework67. Indeed, the Renaissance geographic expansion is best

viewed as a continuation of the great medieval expansion following
upon important advances in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries68.
In Italian political and social history, for all the great changes experi­
enced by the peninsula from the eleventh century on, a sharp division
between medieval and Renaissance is hardly more than an arbitrary
fantasy. And for the rest of Europe, there is a reason why historians
speak in terms of the Ancien Regime up to the end of the eighteenth
century. Many medieval social and political structures may have
changed in the Renaissance, but it was the French Revolutionary and
the Industrial Revolution that ended them and ushered in a new social
and political era.
In making the tyrants of the Italian city states rather than the
humanists the progenitors of the Renaissance outlook, Jacob
Burckhardt strove to free the Renaissance from a belletristic interpre­
tation. Ironically, since he was fundamentally wrong in this thesis, what
one is often left with is a belletristic interpretation, in other words,
with Le G off’s “evenement brillant mais superficiel.” But in fact it is
the belletristic interpretation that is terribly flawed. There can be no
doubt that the Renaissance was filled with enormous fundamental
changes, in arts and literature, in learning and education, in philosophy
and science, in religion, in technology, in government, and in the geo­
graphic horizons of Europe. What we call the ensemble is, as I have
said, a matter of convention. But Renaissance is as good a name as
any. It could stand as the shorthand name for a period of Italian cul­
tural leadership and Spanish political hegemony.
The Middle Ages was a time of massive and nearly constant trans­
formation. The mistake is to view the fourteenth and fifteenth cen­
turies as the supposed Late Middle Ages and the thirteenth as the sup­
posed High Middle Ages. What Huizinga took as the Waning or
Autumn of the Middle Ages was in fact the culmination of one phase
of the Middle Ages in one part of Latin Christendom. Though he did

67 See the various articles of James Muldoon in his Canon Law, the Expansion o f
Europe, and World Order; Aldershot 1998.
68 I can see no sharp break between what B. Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the
Renaissance, 1420-1620, Cambridge, MA 1953, reports in his first three back­
ground/ medieval chapters and the chapters on “The Portuguese in the Orient” and
the “Columbian Voyages.”
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express doubts about the validity of the Medieval/Renaissance dis­

tinction69, what he failed fully to grasp was that the Italian cultural
forms that supplanted the French and Flemish cultural forms he stud­
ied were not modern, but a set of more successful medieval fashions.
We should view the Middle Ages as a series of surges, e. g., in the
realm of culture, the Carolingian Renaissance, the Renaissance of the
Twelfth Century, the Renaissance of the Thirteenth Century, the
Italian Renaissance, and the European Renaissance, each extraordinary
and distinct in its own right, with effects continuing not only into the
next surge, but even into our own day. I have already alluded to the
Renaissance continuation of the massive geographical expansion that
began in the eleventh century. The same is true of the Renaissance
population boom after the devastating retrenchment of the fourteenth
century. The Renaissance demographic story is simply a continuation
of the medieval narrative until “The Great Transformation” of the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries70.
Attempts, especially prevalent in philosophical and literary tradi­
tions, to encapsulate the Renaissance in a philosophical or psycholog­
ical or stylistic or ideological mode fail because they are so blatantaly
selective in what they identify as characteristic of the whole epoch71.
What is in fact needed are linear studies, such as Tigerstedt’s, that run
from the end of antiquity to the end of the Renaissance. Contrary to
the impression one might get from his bon mot about the Renaissance,
Etienne Gilson was a serious student of the Renaissance. He began his
career by exploring Descartes’ medieval sources and in his maturity
wrote several important articles on the Renaissance scholastic Pietro
Pompanazzi72. Paul Oskar Kristeller’s work spans the eleventh to the

69 See his Problem o f the Renaissance, in his Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, tr. J. S. Holmes - H- van Marie, New York 1959, pp. 243-287.
70 See M. Livi Bacci, The Population o f Europe, tr. Cynthia and Carl Ipsen, Oxford
1999 (original edition: Lapopola^ione nella storia dEuropa, Roma 1998).
71 Since such schemes are so arbitrary, they spawn in turn arguments for sup­
posed “anti-Renaissances,” not only apropos religious movements, but also in philos­
ophy and literature (see H. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, New York 1950) and in art
(see E. Battisti, L'antirinascimento. Con un ’appendice di testi inediti, Milano 1962; 2nd ed., 2
vols., Milano 1989).
72 Index scholastico-cartesien, Paris 1913; and Etudes sur le role de lapensee medievale dans
la formation du systeme cartesien, Paris 1930 (an expansion of Part 2 o f his Strasbourg
1921 Etudes de philosophie medievale). Gilson’s articles on Italian scholasticism are con-
 I

THE RENAISSANCE 185

eighteenth centuries. Marc Bloch carried his study of les rois thau­
maturges far beyond the traditional terminus of the Middle Ages73.
Great scholars do not let arbitrary historiographical categories block
them from pursuing the logic of their scholarly subjects. The almost
desperate urge to find ‘the modern us’ in the Renaissance in contradis­
tinction to the backward ‘other’ of the Middle Ages is as unfruitful
and silly as the reciprocal tendency to view the Renaissance as hardly
more than a glossy veneer masking the continuation of medieval
superstitions and deplorable health conditions. Viewing the Renais­
sance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages does not deprive
the Renaissance of its own rich complexity as a period. Rather, a
Middle Ages that culminates in the Renaissance gives a fresh impulse
to reconceptualizing the Middle Ages and allows us to escape the
dead-end of an ‘early modern period’ that was not modern at all, or,
at least, no more modern than the Middle Ages.

veniently gathered in his Humanisme et Renaissance, the most notable of which are
Autour de Pomponasgi. Problematique de Pimmortalite de Vame en Italie au debut du XV7e sie­
cle, «Archives d’ histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age,» 28 (1961), pp. 163-279;
and L ’affaire de Pimmortalite de I’dme a Venise au debut du XVle siecle, in Umanesimo europeo
e umanesimo vene^iano, ed. V. Branca, Firenze 1964, pp. 31-61.
73 Les rois thaumaturges: etude sur le caractere sumaturel attribue a la puissance royale par-
ticulierement en France et en Angleterre, Strasbourg 1924.