The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (review)

This is the publication of the first Bernard Berenson Lectures delivered at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, apparently in March, 2006. Edward Muir, a distinguished historian of Renaissance Venice, argues that Venice had its own version of today's culture wars between 1591 and the 1660s, a period that Muir calls "late Renaissance," although baroque might be more appropriate. The author makes explicit comparisons with today's culture wars.

There were three major battles. In 1591 Cesare Cremonini, a professor at the University of Padua, led some (not all) professors and probably a minority of students in a successful battle to persuade the Venetian Senate to forbid the Jesuits to teach non-Jesuit students in their school in Padua on the grounds that it was a rival university to that of Padua. But there was more to it than that. Muir argues that this was a battle of freedom of thought and skepticism, even atheism, and scientific experimentation, personified by Cremonini and Galileo Galilei on one side, against clerical culture and repression in the form of the Jesuits and the Inquisition on the other. The influence of William Bouwsma is strong in this chapter.

Chapter 2 is an account of the libertine thought of various Venetians and others who were members of the Accademia degli Incogniti, led by Giovanni Francesco Loredano. They published anticlerical, skeptical, racy, and sometimes atheistic works. This chapter updates Giorgio Spini's classic Ricerca degli libertini (1950). The third chapter describes the flourishing Venetian opera from about 1637 to the 1660s. Muir uses much excellent recent scholarship to describe the emergence of popular, commercially successful opera in Venice. Opera libretti, often written by some of the Incogniti, expressed countercultural themes. And the operas were places where Venetian males met shady ladies in closed boxes; not all the action occurred on stage. Muir links this to the ruthless limitation of marriage in the Venetian nobility; only one son was permitted to marry, and the majority of noble women were forced into convents. But the freedom of expression of Venetian opera ended in the 1660s, when the Jesuits, having been banned from the Venetian state from 1606 to 1657, recovered influence. This reviewer, an opera fan and chorister, found this the most successful chapter. Overall, Muir sees the Venetian cultural warriors as proto-Enlightenment men and women.

Some interpretations seem forced. The connecting link between the three episodes was Cremonini, who taught natural philosophy at the University of Padua from 1591 to 1629. He argued that Aristotelian reason could not prove that the human soul was immortal (which is not the same as personally doubting immortality, a distinction not made clear). Muir sees members of the Incogniti as much influenced by him. They certainly may have been his students, because he taught a very large number, albeit in a single course in natural philosophy, and he was popular with the nobility. Still, one would like to see more evidence for this link. And Muir probably exaggerates the villainy and influence of the Jesuits. Their school was not a threat to the University of Padua, because the vast majority of university students came to study law and medicine, which the Jesuits did not teach. And more evidence may be needed to credit the Jesuits with enough influence to censor Venetian opera in the 1660s, as they returned to Venice only in 1657 and needed time to reestablish their residences and schools. The book is based on substantial reading in primary and secondary sources. The documentation is truncated; a knowledgeable reader can pick out statements lacking references that come from other scholars. There are a handful of misprints. Despite the caveats, the book is intelligent and full of arresting ideas, as lectures should be.