Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Present and Future of Italian Renaissance Intellectual History

Since the 1970s, intellectual historians in general and Renaissance historians in particular have perceived a state of crisis, fragmentation and isolation in the larger enterprise of intellectual history.¹ For Renaissance historians, the sense of crisis appears to have been compounded by the degree to which the conceptual coherence and basic periodization of the field itself depended on elite culture—and, although present in the plastic and visual arts, for historians it was located in the highly erudite world of humanism. Intellectual historians of, say, Reformation theology or the Enlightenment philosophes of the Ancien Régime might find their once dominant concerns contested by demands for attention from social, economic and cultural perspectives, but no shift in epistemological perspective, however seismic, was likely to undermine the conviction that the Reformation and the Enlightenment are discrete, autonomous and significant periods of European history.

Many intellectual historians of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy feared an imminent repartitioning of the periodization of European history that would mark the end of the Renaissance as an autonomous and acknowledged period of history.² If the humanist attempt to recover the culture of classical antiquity was no longer viewed as in any way central to Italian history between 1350 and 1550, then one potential solution to the interpretative problem of the 'Renaissance' would be to redistribute it between more expansive notions of 'late medieval', 'early modern' and 'absolutist', each periodization implying fundamental continuity with broad pan-continental developments and none rooted in the recovery of classical culture or distinctly Italian history.

Yet, judging from the quality and quantity of recent work in Renaissance intellectual history over the past few years, it seems fair to say that the crisis, however real or apparent, has passed.³ Since 2000, there has been a rich harvest of monographs and essay collections on Renaissance humanism, education and political thought, English translations of Italian scholarship, and paperback editions of specialized studies. And two series of critical editions and translations are under way: the University of Chicago's 'The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe' series, translations of writing by and about women in this period (forty-five volumes in print and at least seventy-five titles currently projected), and 'The I Tatti Renaissance Library' series, an ambitious project to publish the English translation and Latin text of all the major and minor humanist manuscripts from the Renaissance (twenty-eight volumes in print of a projected one hundred and sixty volumes).We have detailed contextual studies of major Renaissance intellectuals, synthetic interpretations of the era itself (from senior and younger scholars alike), and, given how many specialized studies have gone into second and paperback editions, we also have evidence of a wide readership for these studies, at least in the eyes of academic press editors.⁴ And, considering that nothing approaching the scale of the I Tatti Renaissance Library's dissemination of humanist writings has yet existed for Renaissance history, we might conclude that the prospects for the study of the Renaissance, particularly its elite intellectual moorings and concerns, have never been better.

The purpose of the present essay is to assess this recent historiography, articulate its strengths and more controversial characteristics, and consider the general direction in which Renaissance intellectual historians are moving. All the scholars under review share the conviction that the term 'Renaissance' remains a valuable and more than notional term to describe crucial developments in the history of the Italian peninsula between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, though they defend that conviction in different ways, and they equally share the conviction that humanism was the most important characteristic of the Renaissance. Within this general point of consensus, however, the most significant and interesting debates, some explicit and some implicit, emerge around the following issues: large interpretative debates over the nature and impact of humanism, humanism in the republican tradition, the contextualization of intellectual history, and the recovery of Renaissance Latin texts.

I

Hedgehogs and Foxes on Renaissance Humanism

Renaissance historiography — or at least the most significant, controversial and scholarly works — increasingly falls into the two intellectual categories invoked...