Historiography
I'm going to be putting up things that I write for my thesis that are relevant to Cesare. Since my thesis is on the Italian Renaissance, I anticipate this happening more than once.
Here's the first five pages of historiographical ramble. Is this interesting at all? PROBABLY NOT. And I'm too lazy to stick the footnotes in. But, hey, if you can't get to sleep and are wondering what I think about some of the different names in Renaissance studies, this will help.
Jacob Burckhardt’s famous tome, The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance, argues for the importance of the Italian Renaissance (here defined as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) based on its apparent differences from the previous centuries. Burckhardt views history as the march of progress and his Whiggish views on the subject come through clearly (not unexpected, however, since it was written in the mid-late ninteenth century). He states that the Renaissance was part of that drive towards progress that the Medieval Ages had retarded and hindered, as the man of the Italian Renaissance “was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe”. History, then, is a linear process headed towards enlightenment and modernity and the Italian Renaissance is significant in that it is then that the curtain of superstition and myth is first lifted so that man, stepping onto the scene with all of his new humanism and learning, can truly advance. Burckhardt’s views were largely unchallenged for many decades, where even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. Ephraim Emerton’s text published in 1925 said that the history of the Renaissance was the history of the struggle between the “forward-striving enlightenment and the backwards pull of an obscurantist ‘fundamentalism’” (290)-in the early twentieth century, then, persists this idea of the struggle between good (progress) and evil (here defined as fundamentalism), influenced by the belief still held at this time of the capacity of man for infinite achievement and boundless expansion.
It was not until Paul Oskar Kristeller started writing in the mid-twentieth century that this view was seriously challenged. Renaissance studies had undergone a period of neglect, they became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period and there was not much else to say about its break with the past. Kristeller argued that there was more continuity with the Medieval Ages than had previously been acknowledged but that at the same time the Renaissance should still be looked at as significant because continuity is not the same as stability. Change was still happening and the centuries of the Renaissance looked distinct from those that came before them, but they should be understood as having their roots in the past (recent as well as distant). “The old and the new are inextricably intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the one or the other side, as has often been done.”
This has become the dominant tone for the second half of the twentieth century on, although Burckhardtian views are still often espoused. When they are, it is frequently in more politico-military works, while Kristeller’s views are more often linked with social history or the development of thought, aided in large part because he himself focused on the development of humanism and different philosophical trends. Donald Nuget, however, shows a Burckhardtian flair in his paper “The Renaissance and/or Witchcraft” published in 1971. He argues that the Renaissance is very close in character to post-modern society and lists a number of superficial reasons why (popularity of poetry and the love story, tension between the younger and older generations), as if these things could not have existed in any other time. Although his topic is superficially more like the focus of Kristeller than of Burckhardt, he uses the same logic of history as progress over backwardness that Burckhardt used to say that both the Renaissance and his own day are periods of transition from failing systems to a more perfect way of being.
Burckhardtian and Kristellerian theories of the Renaissance can also be seen in the interpretations of different historical persons. I admit that one of the ways I judge books on the Renaissance is on what they have to say about the Borgias. The line between the apologists and the traditionalists is drawn very neatly parallel to the line for followers of the Kristeller thesis and followers of the Burckhardt thesis. I prefer Paul Oskar Kristeller’s work and likewise I prefer texts that deal with the Borgias not as demonized monsters (Burckhardt himself writes that “the great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself and, above all, in his son Caesar Borgia”-more dangerous than the French invasion, raiding from the Middle East, or any of the series of plagues and illnesses which swept periodically through Rome) but as more multifaceted human beings acted upon by various outside forces and internal desires. Sarah Bradford’s biography of Cesare Borgia published in 1976 looks at the forces that influenced his behavior, drawing upon both the unique political situation of the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century that allowed his family to come to power and the restrictions and schema that carried over from the Medieval Ages that also shaped his world (reminding us that the peninsula was both a cosmopolitan and a xenophobic community, for example, so that a Spanish family like the Borgias [originally de Borja] could both have the opportunity to come to power and be simultaneously barred from being truly accepted). At the other end of the spectrum is Paul Strathern’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccoló Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia, that consistently calls Borgia a demon and a monster while arguing that the work of all three men was practically unthinkable only a generation or so prior.
While I agree that studies of individuals are more limited in scope and therefore generally less useful than are studies of movements or historical patterns, I also feel that it is useful to intertwine the two. An individual can present examples of the larger patterns in society in much the same way that a novel can tell later readers much about the time it was written in. I therefore prefer it when historical texts attempt to explain the rationale behind the actions of those people they inevitably mention instead of writing it off to the inexorable drive of modernity or the backwards-looking forces of suppression and fundamentalism. They can be used as examples, for instance, in the change in belief from one set of ideas to another. Especially in works on the Italian Renaissance, where so much intellectual life really was devoted to the “discovery of man and of the world”, as Michelet put it, the use of historical figures as educational devices seems only natural. Certainly that was what intellectuals in the time period did. Machiavelli’s Il Principe runs through the gauntlet of Great Men in order to illustrate his ideas on government and politics, and the development of humanism (in the original sense, as Kristeller points out, the study of the humanities) and the emerging definitions of fortuna and virtù both show the importance of the individual in the Renaissance. Ernst Cassirer writes that one of the key changes that took place during these years was the change in depiction of fortune as a wheel to as a sailboat. While the wheel spun man helplessly in any direction, the sailboat could be steered by someone with enough talent and diligence and pointed at one’s goals. “Fortezza (virtù) means the strength of virility itself, the strength of the human will which becomes the tamer of destiny, the domitrice della fortuna.” Man was seen to have more control over his destiny than before, although Cassirer does not say that this marks a clean break with the past, as Burckhardt argued. The concept of fortune is present both in the Renaissance and in the Medieval Period.
While other historians have rejected the notion that the Renaissance was so markedly different from the years leading up to it, Burckhardt and those who fall into his camp say that it was only during the Renaissance that “freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind mow turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” This is a rejection of the modes of irrational thought found in the Renaissance years and, in a way, a rejection of the irrationalities still present today. It idealizes Italy and the people who lived there during these centuries. By understanding the passage of years not as progress towards a goal of enlightenment but as a series of innovations and continuous changes then we can see the Renaissance in Italy as both connected securely to the years on either side (one of the flaws of Burckhardt’s theory is how it detaches the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the centuries prior to them, as if a man born in 1299 had nothing in common with a man born in 1300) and as significant for the developments that did occur and the events that did take place during this time.
Here's the first five pages of historiographical ramble. Is this interesting at all? PROBABLY NOT. And I'm too lazy to stick the footnotes in. But, hey, if you can't get to sleep and are wondering what I think about some of the different names in Renaissance studies, this will help.
Jacob Burckhardt’s famous tome, The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance, argues for the importance of the Italian Renaissance (here defined as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) based on its apparent differences from the previous centuries. Burckhardt views history as the march of progress and his Whiggish views on the subject come through clearly (not unexpected, however, since it was written in the mid-late ninteenth century). He states that the Renaissance was part of that drive towards progress that the Medieval Ages had retarded and hindered, as the man of the Italian Renaissance “was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe”. History, then, is a linear process headed towards enlightenment and modernity and the Italian Renaissance is significant in that it is then that the curtain of superstition and myth is first lifted so that man, stepping onto the scene with all of his new humanism and learning, can truly advance. Burckhardt’s views were largely unchallenged for many decades, where even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. Ephraim Emerton’s text published in 1925 said that the history of the Renaissance was the history of the struggle between the “forward-striving enlightenment and the backwards pull of an obscurantist ‘fundamentalism’” (290)-in the early twentieth century, then, persists this idea of the struggle between good (progress) and evil (here defined as fundamentalism), influenced by the belief still held at this time of the capacity of man for infinite achievement and boundless expansion.
It was not until Paul Oskar Kristeller started writing in the mid-twentieth century that this view was seriously challenged. Renaissance studies had undergone a period of neglect, they became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period and there was not much else to say about its break with the past. Kristeller argued that there was more continuity with the Medieval Ages than had previously been acknowledged but that at the same time the Renaissance should still be looked at as significant because continuity is not the same as stability. Change was still happening and the centuries of the Renaissance looked distinct from those that came before them, but they should be understood as having their roots in the past (recent as well as distant). “The old and the new are inextricably intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the one or the other side, as has often been done.”
This has become the dominant tone for the second half of the twentieth century on, although Burckhardtian views are still often espoused. When they are, it is frequently in more politico-military works, while Kristeller’s views are more often linked with social history or the development of thought, aided in large part because he himself focused on the development of humanism and different philosophical trends. Donald Nuget, however, shows a Burckhardtian flair in his paper “The Renaissance and/or Witchcraft” published in 1971. He argues that the Renaissance is very close in character to post-modern society and lists a number of superficial reasons why (popularity of poetry and the love story, tension between the younger and older generations), as if these things could not have existed in any other time. Although his topic is superficially more like the focus of Kristeller than of Burckhardt, he uses the same logic of history as progress over backwardness that Burckhardt used to say that both the Renaissance and his own day are periods of transition from failing systems to a more perfect way of being.
Burckhardtian and Kristellerian theories of the Renaissance can also be seen in the interpretations of different historical persons. I admit that one of the ways I judge books on the Renaissance is on what they have to say about the Borgias. The line between the apologists and the traditionalists is drawn very neatly parallel to the line for followers of the Kristeller thesis and followers of the Burckhardt thesis. I prefer Paul Oskar Kristeller’s work and likewise I prefer texts that deal with the Borgias not as demonized monsters (Burckhardt himself writes that “the great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy lay in Alexander himself and, above all, in his son Caesar Borgia”-more dangerous than the French invasion, raiding from the Middle East, or any of the series of plagues and illnesses which swept periodically through Rome) but as more multifaceted human beings acted upon by various outside forces and internal desires. Sarah Bradford’s biography of Cesare Borgia published in 1976 looks at the forces that influenced his behavior, drawing upon both the unique political situation of the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century that allowed his family to come to power and the restrictions and schema that carried over from the Medieval Ages that also shaped his world (reminding us that the peninsula was both a cosmopolitan and a xenophobic community, for example, so that a Spanish family like the Borgias [originally de Borja] could both have the opportunity to come to power and be simultaneously barred from being truly accepted). At the other end of the spectrum is Paul Strathern’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccoló Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia, that consistently calls Borgia a demon and a monster while arguing that the work of all three men was practically unthinkable only a generation or so prior.
While I agree that studies of individuals are more limited in scope and therefore generally less useful than are studies of movements or historical patterns, I also feel that it is useful to intertwine the two. An individual can present examples of the larger patterns in society in much the same way that a novel can tell later readers much about the time it was written in. I therefore prefer it when historical texts attempt to explain the rationale behind the actions of those people they inevitably mention instead of writing it off to the inexorable drive of modernity or the backwards-looking forces of suppression and fundamentalism. They can be used as examples, for instance, in the change in belief from one set of ideas to another. Especially in works on the Italian Renaissance, where so much intellectual life really was devoted to the “discovery of man and of the world”, as Michelet put it, the use of historical figures as educational devices seems only natural. Certainly that was what intellectuals in the time period did. Machiavelli’s Il Principe runs through the gauntlet of Great Men in order to illustrate his ideas on government and politics, and the development of humanism (in the original sense, as Kristeller points out, the study of the humanities) and the emerging definitions of fortuna and virtù both show the importance of the individual in the Renaissance. Ernst Cassirer writes that one of the key changes that took place during these years was the change in depiction of fortune as a wheel to as a sailboat. While the wheel spun man helplessly in any direction, the sailboat could be steered by someone with enough talent and diligence and pointed at one’s goals. “Fortezza (virtù) means the strength of virility itself, the strength of the human will which becomes the tamer of destiny, the domitrice della fortuna.” Man was seen to have more control over his destiny than before, although Cassirer does not say that this marks a clean break with the past, as Burckhardt argued. The concept of fortune is present both in the Renaissance and in the Medieval Period.
While other historians have rejected the notion that the Renaissance was so markedly different from the years leading up to it, Burckhardt and those who fall into his camp say that it was only during the Renaissance that “freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind mow turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” This is a rejection of the modes of irrational thought found in the Renaissance years and, in a way, a rejection of the irrationalities still present today. It idealizes Italy and the people who lived there during these centuries. By understanding the passage of years not as progress towards a goal of enlightenment but as a series of innovations and continuous changes then we can see the Renaissance in Italy as both connected securely to the years on either side (one of the flaws of Burckhardt’s theory is how it detaches the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the centuries prior to them, as if a man born in 1299 had nothing in common with a man born in 1300) and as significant for the developments that did occur and the events that did take place during this time.