Myths of Renaissance Individualism (review)

How did Renaissance people understand their identities, and relationships between interiority and the world of politics, society, religion, and culture? John Jeffries Martin adjures scholars addressing this question to reject mythographers of the self, especially Burckhardt, with his autonomous individuals detached from corporate entities, and postmodernists, with their view of the self as an artifact or as defined by external performances scripted on internal blank sheets. For Martin, Renaissance identities were neither monolithic nor fixed, not based preclusively on either internal or external norms, but pluriform, responding to shifting circumstances and relationships. He proffers five contemporary models: the social or conforming self, the prudential self, the performative self, the porous self, and the sincere self, devoting chapters 3–6 to the latter four models. His final chapter resumes his findings and critique of Burckhardt and postmodernism. His first two chapters state his thesis and offer his rationale for his methodology's most innovative feature: in addition to treatises, etiquette books, dialogues, letters, memoirs, confessions, and visual arts, he bases most of his analysis, except for the sincere self, on Venetian inquisitorial records. Since Martin's "Renaissance" is primarily fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice, this strategy, plausible for a historian whose previous work on Venice's early modern heretics gives him a mastery of inquisitorial materials, is much more effective than what historians aware of the non-transparency of inquisitorial records might suppose.

Martin is sensitive to that non-transparency. But his inquisitors were men of their own times, sharing common assumptions about personal identity. They elicited information about social location, profession, education, neighborhood, friends, and acquaintances, knowing that miscreants, like upstanding folk, could be identified through these connections. Inquisitors also knew that beliefs were sometimes held independent of these connections. Enough data exist from their inquiries into who people were to undergird four of Martin's five selfhood typologies.

He illustrates the social or conforming self with Venice's shipwrights and fishermen. Bound not only by craft but by neighborhood, endogamy, clothing, dialect, confraternities, and specific roles in public rituals, their beliefs and social locations reinforced each other, enhancing both their self-identification and their religious and civic identities. The prudential self was the most widespread of Martin's typologies. Protestants, living partly clandestine lives while conforming externally to Catholicism, were simply an acute indicator of a broadly felt need to dissimulate, in order to operate vis-à-vis superiors in private and public. Here, Martin's analysis fits one of his examples imperfectly. No Nicodemite, Bernardino Ochino was aboveboard regarding his numerous religious conversions, apparently retaining, throughout, an abiding sense of personal identity. Martin's chief example of the performative self is a private ceremony enacted by three journeymen; this selfhood model thus involved the lowborn as well as their superiors, posturing in public spaces for self-protection, reputation, or favor. Unlike postmodern performers, Renaissance people recognized that certain situations required certain behaviors deemed appropriate to them; their performances were regarded as suitable displays of, not substitutes for, the inner self.

While Martin's first three modes of selfhood were not mutually exclusive, capable of engaging the same person in diverse contexts, his last two modes are different. The porous self is the self open to the influence of God, cosmic or astral influences, spirits, angels, or demons. Martin illustrates this category with diabolical possession alone, noting that Italian inquisitors were "soft" on it owing to the availability of Catholic anti-demoniac rites, especially exorcism. The sincere self departs from Martin's other typologies in two ways. It had stronger classical and medieval roots, as well as Protestant, Catholic, and Neostoic support, while also critiquing hypocrisy in late sixteenth-century public life. To be sincere, an authentic person whose prayers were acceptable to God, who could truly connect with other people, one's inner thoughts and feelings, words, and actions had to concur. And, Martin's chief example, Montaigne, is non-Italian. Insofar...