Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (review)

Reviews 177 Parergon 20.2 (2003) not have surrendered because the deed does not survive, and that the nuns may not have received pensions, show that he has not consulted the receivers’ accounts for the circuit where much of this material was recorded. His attempt to suggest, on the basis of archaeological work and Marilyn Oliva’s study, that nunneries elsewhere, at least in the diocese of Norwich, may have had similar relations with their bishop and identical problems seems open to question. Many of these nunneries, while they had their full complement of 12 nuns, had a quite different economy from the wealthier Benedictine houses. They had little land, so that when they were dissolved the property the crown could seize was not sufficient to cover the meagre pensions the nuns were allocated. The problems of such houses were quite different from those of Romsey, so that the light that Fox’s translation sheds on English female monastic life in its dying years is narrow indeed. It is a pity that Collett has not offered some comment on the absences which most mark institutional religious life in England at this time. Where are the third orders that grew up on the continent such as the Beguines? Why did English well-to-do widows not take up the life-styles that developed from religious piety elsewhere in Europe? If a new assessment of English religious life prior to the Reformation is to be undertaken, surely these are critical questions? Sybil M. Jack Department of History University of Sydney Connell, William J., ed., Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 2002; cloth; pp. xii, 453; 1 b/w frontispiece; RRP US$65.00; ISBN 0520232542. Dedicated to Gene Brucker, one of the leading post World War II Englishspeaking historians of Renaissance Florence, Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence is a collection of essays (including the editor’s introduction) written by seventeen of Brucker’s many friends, colleagues and students. Contributors take up and extend many historical concerns central to Brucker’s work, namely politics and society, social structures and relationships (particularly the lower classes) and religion. In the spirit of the sort of history Brucker always has encouraged and supported, several essays also discuss issues of gender as well as the place of the marginalised outsider. And in its own way, 178 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) each essay takes up the central theme of this book: ‘[the] ways in which Renaissance Florentines expressed or shaped their identity in interaction with their society’ (p. 7). William Connell’s introduction to the volume begins with a succinct summary of the historiography regarding ‘Renaissance Man’ – the autonomous, secular individual who supposedly was a harbinger of the modern world in contrast to the traditional, corporate family centred men of a backward medieval age – a paradigm that was famously conjured by Jakob Burckhardt in his The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Then Connell contrasts this work with Brucker’s own, and that of many others who have followed him over the decades (including some of the contributors to this volume) of Florentine men and women as pious, corporatised, family-oriented individuals enmeshed in networks of social relationships such as neighbourhood and confraternity that, at first glance, looks decidedly more ‘medieval’ than ‘modern’. But as this book’s title suggests, and its several contributors argue, Florentines fashioned identities for themselves that were both individual as well as collective, both medieval as well as modern. I cannot hope to discuss adequately each of the sixteen essays in a review of this length, and so not all can receive the treatment they deserve. The book opens with a masterful discussion of class relations in Renaissance Florence by F. W. Kent, who engages in a lively and nuanced analysis of both the archival sources and the historiography (including Brucker’s own important contributions) on this still hotly debated issue. John Najemy, in a path-breaking article, discusses a well-known work on the family by the quintessential ‘Renaissance Man’, Leon Battista Alberti. In this analysis, Najemy persuasively suggests that the identity of the paterfamilias is destabilised in the text and...