L’inquietudine del Quattrocento (review)

This is Remo Guidi’s second book on moral thought in the Quattrocento. The first, Il dibattito sull’uomo nel ‘400, which appeared in 1999, was mammoth in size and, in my estimation (see my review in this journal, 56, no. 3 [2003]: 762–64), an indispensable vademecum for students of Quattrocento intellectual life and religion. Its quotation of an amazing quantity of texts still in manuscript or early printed editions from an extraordinary array of minor and major figures made Il dibattito a resource that henceforth one ignored at one’s peril. Everything I said then in praise of Il dibattito I can repeat here in recommending L’inquietudine. Once again Guidi has produced an enormous book of breathtaking documentary richness (I counted 6,312 footnotes; the listing of manuscripts and incunabula used runs nineteen pages). The earlier volume focused on the competition between the humanists and the mendicants as spiritual and intellectual guides. The present volume continues this theme, but within the larger one of the diffused moral and psychological anxiety that Guidi has espied running through the history of humanism from Petrarch in the fourteenth century to Pietro Aretino in the sixteenth. Guidi sees his study as a corrective to the still overly rosy picture of Renaissance thought that we inherited from the nineteenth century. As he puts it: “Anxiety, spiritual discomfort, depression, and fear seem terms antithetical and incompatible with the vulgar idea one has of the Age of Humanism” (113–14).

With such a thesis, Guidi follows in the traces of Charles Trinkaus’s 1940 book Adversity’s Noblemen. But whereas Trinkaus concentrated on a select number of texts and seemed to repudiate his thesis thirty years later in his In Our Image and Likeness, Guidi supplies us with an overwhelming mass of texts and authors great and small that permanently renders impossible any monochromatic rosy depiction of Renaissance thought. Guidi challenges what he calls the axiom that humanistic training enhances virtue and is even able to quote no less a humanist authority than Poggio Bracciolini in support of his argument. Guidi also fleshes out what he labels Klosterhumanismus as opposed to the Bürgerhumanismus of Hans Baron fame. En passant, we are also treated to a wonderful array of unexpected bits of information and discussions from Pope Leo X’s near dissolution of the Conventual Franciscans in 1517, humanist maledictions of the dead, and debates on female spirituality to Saint Antoninus’s condemnation of sailors as homines pessimi, blasphematores, discussions of the morality of fleeing or remaining during plagues, and comments on Angelo Poliziano’s interest in the Psalter, just to give a tiny sampling from an encyclopedic collection of data and analyses. Also, given Guidi’s deep and extensive reading of the sources, one must take into account even what amount to obiter dicta, such as his comments on Machiavelli’s supposed religiosity or on the intellectual effects of the geographic distribution of mendicant houses.

This encyclopedic quality cannot, however, mask the one signficant failing of the book, namely, its impressionistic approach to the sources. Guidi quotes text after text from author after author to make a point, but his argument is neither methodical nor comprehensive as far as the authors, the texts, and the issues are concerned. We are continually given instances, almost always refreshing in their newness and number, and the cumulative effect cannot but give one pause. What is lacking, however, is demonstration that deals in the round and through a convincing series of inferences with the figures and themes raised. Furthermore, the book suffers from some odd omissions. Given its overarching thesis, which includes extensive discussions of an existentialist anxiety before death, it is surprising to miss any reference not only to Trinkaus’s old Adversity’s Noblemen, but also to the more recent Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento of Alberto Tenenti, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism of John McMananmon, and Sorrow and Consolation in...