The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity (review)

Theodore Rabb notes that in the historiographic wake of Jacob Burckhardt historians have concentrated on the origins of the Renaissance but have rarely asked about its end. By shifting the focus to "what came to an end, and when," Rabb seeks "to illuminate some essential features of the Renaissance period and thus cast light on the qualities that set it apart" (xix). He also sets for himself the broader task of identifying "a succession of fundamental shifts in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present, with special attention to the time when the Renaissance dissolved into the Age of Revolution" (xxii). Rabb accomplishes this through an exposition of the coherences or unities of each period, seeing this as neither a search for a Foucauldian episteme (xix) nor a Hegelian zeitgeist (xxi).

In the Middle Ages — late tenth through the early fourteenth centuries — the unifying institutions of the Church and the practice of war constituted the major coherences. Moreover, a system of servitude for agricultural workers prevailed throughout Europe, as did the physical setting and organization of towns, which were "regularities that bound this society together" (9). The hierarchical arrangement of society, regulated by local custom and, especially, oath and contract, further unified medieval life. Reinforcing all of this was "a set of basic assumptions that dominated intellectual and artistic life": namely, "the determination to bring religious beliefs to bear on every aspect of existence" (18).

Concerning the Renaissance, Rabb seeks not "to settle on a definition, but rather to identify . . . the distinctive unities" that bound Europe together from the early fifteenth until the last decades of the seventeenth century. These unities are the appearance and growth of gunpowder warfare, the increasing centralization of power, the expansion of bureaucracies, the domestication of the aristocracy, overseas conquests and immigration, and the rise of capitalism, all coinciding with the cultural and intellectual admiration for antiquity.

By the last third of the seventeenth century, the three major rivals of the state for political power — the aristocracies, the cities, and the Church — had finally been subjugated. At about the same time came the "definitive assertion . . . that the moderns might know more or be better than the ancients" (139) and the first attempts "to rehabilitate the Middle Ages" (157). Of the many transformations that mark the end of the Renaissance, the two most significant are the "revolution in attitudes toward war and the supernatural" (161).

Accordingly, by approximately 1700, society "had shaken off the reverence for antiquity; it had raised doubts about the glory of war; it had limited the authority of the supernatural; and it had resolved difficult struggles over centralized political authority and the role of the Church" (208). In the next two centuries (ca. 1700–ca. 1900), Europe would be engulfed in a "wave of Revolution": namely, of political, industrial, communicative, social, cultural, and global relations.

Rabb intends this book to serve, first, "not as a summary for [his] contemporaries, but as a template of European history for a new generation" (xvi). Second, he aims to attract "a general readership that does not often these days encounter large-scale narratives of the past" (xvi). It is gratifying and instructive to read a historiographic narrative that engages both professionals and a general readership. I find Rabb's evidence and timeframe for the close of the Renaissance convincing, but his case for a definitive break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance less so. It must be acknowledged that my inability to detect a clear break may follow from my own concentration on the origins of the Renaissance. Rabb chose, after all, to focus on the end of the Renaissance precisely to sharpen the image of "what came to an end" and "what set it apart" (xix). For me, the shift of cultural leadership to south of the Alps does not eclipse the continuities (or coherences) found in...