The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies: Essays in Honour of Paul F. Grendler (review)

The homage that the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies has offered to Paul F. Grendler is an important volume for those who wish to understand how and why that center was born and what it has contributed to the great flourishing of studies on the Italian Renaissance in Canada. At the center of this history is the figure and work of Grendler as a scholar and teacher.

A former Grendler student, Nicholas Terpstra, provides a lengthy introduction. The future historian of the Renaissance was formed in the school of two historians—George Mosse and Giorgio Spini—who were engaged, at that time, in the study of the cultural conflicts between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus it was that Grendler left behind research on Pierre Charron and dedicated himself to the study of sixteenth-century Italian culture as a history of the conflict between intellectual liberty and ecclesiastical power, between the development of the press and the censorship of the Inquisition, between “Learning” and the “Rejection of Learning.” His work as a scholar is documented in a bibliography of his published works that occupies nine pages. But the memories of his students also reconstruct his work conducted as a professor and organizer of studies and research, as well as a promoter and animator of a seminar modeled on the grand German tradition learned in the school of Mosse.

The themes that Grendler has mainly studied are those dealing with the conflict between the values of intellectual liberty and of the diffusion of knowledge promoted by the Italian Renaissance and the obstacles that arrested their development. Hence, he gave his attention to the conflicts between culture and censorship, between the Venetian press and the Roman Inquisition. The contributions to this volume take up and deepen some of the themes dear to him. The first of the volume’s four parts (“The Varieties of Learning”) takes this dichotomous model. The first study by Margaret L. King (“The School of Infancy: The Emergence of Mother as Teacher in Early Modern Times”) is dedicated to the origins of the “school of infancy” through the work of Italian humanists (such as Michele Savonarola and Francesco Barbaro), Erasmus, and, above all, men of Protestant culture such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Amos Comenius, an exile persecuted for his religious ideas who was in line to become the first president of Harvard College. A completely different intellectual tradition is examined in the next essay by Mark A. Lewis, S.J., “The Jesuit Institutionalization of the Studia Humanitatis: Two Jesuit Humanists at Naples.” Lewis studies the work of two Jesuits active in Naples in the second half of the sixteenth century, Francesco Guerrieri (“guerrier l’ingegno” or “warrior of genius,” according to Torquato Tasso) and Niccolò Orlandini. He shows how the Society of Jesus recognized the importance of the studia humanitatis as instruments of propaganda for the missionaries.

In the second part (“Humanism and Politics”), Ronald G.Witt’s study, “The Early Communal Historians, Forerunners of the Italian Humanists,” uses new sources to examine the development of Latin poetry in thirteenth-century Italy. Mary Hewlett’s very detailed and interesting “Fortune’s Fool: The Influence of Humanism on Francesco Burlamacchi, ‘Hero’ of Lucca” analyzes Burlamacchi’s humanistic culture, knowledge of Machiavelli and Plutarch, and use of Savonarola as an inspiration for religious reform. Burlamacchi orchestrated a celebrated plot against the Tuscan duchy of Cosimo I and was sent to the gallows. In the prisons where men like Burlamacchi awaited their fate the catechetical work of the “comforters” was carried out. This theme is the focus of “Catechizing in Prison and on the Gallows in Renaissance Italy: The Politics of...