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  • The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera
  • James S. Grubb
Edward Muir . The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera. The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv + 176 pp. index. illus. bibl. $24.95. ISBN: 978–0–674–02481–6.

Readers of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History might have been surprised to open the winter issue of 2006 and discover an article by Edward Muir about the development of opera. This is a field far removed from civic ritual and Friulan vendetta, the subjects of his first two monographs, and the time period under consideration was later than was the case in his earlier work. But Muir has always traveled comfortably across topics and time zones, in large part because he takes on broadly thematic issues rather than discrete, time- and site-specific subjects. The venture was successful enough to warrant an expanded inquiry into the "cultural politics" (xii) of late Renaissance Venice, for the inaugural Bernard Berenson Lectures at I Tatti. Revised and footnoted versions of those lectures constitute the present volume.

After an introduction that moves effortlessly among traditional disciplines, together with the new discipline of cultural studies, with considerations of late Renaissance psychology and periodization at the forefront, Muir's exposition unfolds in three related segments. The first looks at battles at Padua (and beyond) [End Page 261] between some of the regular university faculty and those of the Jesuit college. The conflicts were about everything imaginable: turf, students, authorization, pedagogy, theology, philosophy, cosmology, and morality. Nor was the dustup confined to academe: Galileo and his principal colleague in the culture wars, the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini, were repeatedly denounced before the Inquisition. Muir's focus is on Cremonini, a charismatic figure, a skeptic, a libertine, and (most likely) a heretic: he resists any impulse to turn Cremonini into a failed scientist (Galileo's empiricism carried the day, eventually), or to turn the Jesuits into straw-figure heavies.

Cremonini's pupils and intellectual heirs are the subject of the second chapter. At the center is the Academy of the Incogniti ("Unknowns"), Venetian-centered but cosmopolitan, whose members had a taste for satire and parody, virtuosic displays of language, skepticism bordering on heterodoxy, discussion of nothingness, and complex intellectual games. One of Muir's themes here and throughout the book is the relative toleration of the Venetian government, which allowed publications and performances that would not have been allowed elsewhere. But even the republic had its limits, and the slashing satirist, misogynist, and all-around bad boy Ferrante Pallavicino found it best to flee. (The Inquisition caught up with him, and he was executed.) He shares the stage with the nun Arcangela Tarabotti, no libertine but a fiercely independent thinker in her own right.

The final chapter brings overarching themes of free inquiry, skepticism, and libertinism to the world of opera. Here the atmosphere is heavy with sexuality: marriage limitations of Venetian patricians were bound to produce both transgression and anxiety, and both the operas and the opera houses projected this preoccupation. Muir also explores a more practical issue, the development of modern commercialized culture, in which Venice was equally at the forefront. But the glittering, daring era that he has traced came to a crashing halt in 1657, scarcely two-thirds of a century after the Paduan students rose up, when the government allowed the Jesuits to return and more sober cultural inquiry ensued.

Muir's narrative is as glittering as his lectures must have been, and his text is filled with bold leaps and far-reaching connections. But it is to be remembered that these were once lectures: short bursts rather than sustained examinations. It is to be hoped that Muir and others will return to explore at length some of the issues that he raises with wit and efficiency. The notion that the projects of the Incogniti and others represent a kind of proto-Enlightenment (80) deserves a further look. The notion that Venetian opera marks the end of the Renaissance (144–45) should stimulate a rethinking of periodization. Alas, the notion that culture wars are bound to...

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