Historiography, take three
Complete 25 pages. I'm so tired. I might come back to this later and format it nicely.
The Formation of Ethnic Identity in the Italian Renaissance
The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt is one of the oldest comprehensive studies of the Italian Renaissance and is still commonly quoted and referenced although it has also been challenged in the wake of the social history movement of the 1970s. It is stunning in its breadth as it seeks to cover nearly every event of note in the 14th and 15th centuries. Burckhardt was clearly influenced by the views of his time and his tome reflects this, with its emphasis on reading the Renaissance as the struggle between the superstition and backwards thinking of the Middle Ages and the progressive views of modernity that, of course, his own time embodied. He argues that the man of the Italian Renaissance “was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe” and that it was in the Renaissance when man, due to the birth of a few great thinkers who revolutionized their society, managed to throw off the curtain of superstition and myth and take his first steps towards this bright new age of human history. It was then that man was “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 now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” History, then, is a linear process towards advancement, which the Middle Ages had retarded due to the suppression of science and the interference of the dogmatic Church.
Burckhardt’s work was so all-encompassing that it led to a stagnation in Renaissance studies, where all new work would simply refer back to his text as the end-all source. Renaissance studies underwent a period of neglect; it became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period but there was not much else to say about its break with the past and Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged for many decades. The thesis of progress became stale because there was nothing new to say about it; if history was a march of advancement and the Renaissance sparked this advancement, then everything that could be studied in the Renaissance was merely a prototype of some form of modern society. The conclusions were already known. 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. Burckhardt had successfully argued that this idealized man in the Renaissance had learned to reason objectively, saw himself as a spiritual individual, and was no longer bound by ideas of race.
It was only the great social change that took place in the 1970s that history began to be written in drastically new ways and the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy was reshaped. Much of the criticism that appeared stemmed from the fact that Burckhardt was writing in the 19th century, prior to new popularity of looking at history from the bottom up and was deeply entrenched in the Whiggish notion of history as a march towards progress and enlightenment. Karl Oskar Kristeller, in revitalizing Renaissance studies, 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 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.” Kristeller was writing in an era of change in historiography, when history was moving from being the story of the wealthy Caucasian men who were largely in power to the story of other social, gender, and ethnic groups as well. Political history was no longer the only viable form history could take, with great repercussions in all spheres of historical interest. The Kristeller thesis has become competition for the Burkhardt thesis and in modern Renaissance studies usually is the more influential of the two.
Historical studies of the Renaissance now more often focus on disenfranchised groups of peoples, whose daily lives experienced little change in the century or so before and after the period labeled the Renaissance. This has emphasized the continuities between the times before and after and sought to show how the Renaissance, while significant, was not a time of such drastic change as earlier historians tried to argue. These arguments for a sharp break with the past in the years of the Italian Renaissance reflected the beliefs of their authors that their own period was one of a struggle between enlightened progress and dangerous and regressive behavior or belief. “To posit the existence of a hiatus between the infancy of mankind, which ended with the Renaissance, and its maturity, culminating with the advent of modern technology, served [in texts prior to the 1970s] to bolster the sociopolitical pains of our partisans of progress, who thought they were, or who actually were, surrounded by hostile forces.” By stating that the Renaissance broke away from old traditions and illogical ways of thinking about the world, it was possible to see one’s own time as also following this same pattern. The groups and parties these authors belonged to could be cast as the champions of progress, continuing this grand and noble tradition of advancing into a more perfect age and those who opposed them became by default the forces of irrationality, trying to reverse all those positive changes that had come about.
This argument is mirrored in L. R. Poos’ work in historical demography where he states that while there were periods of short-term instability in pre-modern Europe, the general trend was one of long-term stability and slow but steady growth. While isolated areas could have disastrous years, on the whole the history of the population of Europe was remarkably stable. The presence of non-scientific and non-Christian beliefs in popular culture during the Renaissance is also often brought up to challenge the idea of progress. Donald Nugent calls the Renaissance the “golden age of the occult” and argued that “the more exotic turn of humanism credulously rehabilitated the occult traditions of antiquity,” his logic flying in the face of the old notion that Renaissance humanism was the start of real modern thinking and belief. Studies on the Renaissance prior to the advent of social history rarely took this stance and when occult beliefs were noted they were asserted to be relics of the past and not truly indicative of the mindset of the time; they certainly were never tied to humanism.
While many aspects of Renaissance studies have changed in the wake of the social history movement, studies specifically on ethnicity in this period have remained largely unchanged from Burckhardt’s time, although the specific terminology has been updated and made more politically correct. Burckhardt wrote that Renaissance man had moved past the ties of racism while breaking the people of the peninsula up by province and city and assigning them specific historical characteristics and other authors still follow this pattern, such as Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s collection of essays, The Renaissance in National Context, which is organized by city-state. While Peter Burke’s essay, “The Uses of Italy” within this edited work argues that the Renaissance was a time of weaker national identity and should be seen not as Italian per se but as international, the very fact that his work is part of a collection still organized along national and regional lines is counter to his point and shows the larger trend still at work. It is similar to writing a text that talks about how all people in New York City think one way while all people in Chicago think another, ignoring other demographics beyond location that could serve to influence opinion and belief such as religion or socio-economic background. The “ethnicity” of New York City is in this way just as questionable as the “ethnicity” of Florence or Rome.
While it certainly makes sense to look at the Renaissance as having distinctive characteristics in different places (For example, Paul Grendler’s Renaissance Education Between Religion and Politics very concisely lays out the differences in educational systems in different parts of Europe, and I understand the strength of the city-state and the rivalries between different ruling families), the tendency then is to assume that the people from these different places are themselves markedly different or in some ways incompatible with one another and that these differences are inherent and immutable. Older texts make this point more clearly than do newer ones, but both tend to either imply or outright assert it yet rarely provide satisfactory explanation as to how this difference developed or how it affected people at the time. While there are authors who deal with the problems of ethnic or cultural identity, such as the ones touched on briefly above, I have not found a comprehensive text that truly delves into the issue.
Edward Muir’s 2001 lecture probably does the best out of any text I have seen at dealing with this issue. He says, “The idea of the city as a sacred community, a mystical corpus, was crucial to the political ideology of many late medieval towns,” agreeing with the longstanding belief in the importance of the city-state and specific locale in determining community and identity. At the same time, however, he elaborates by arguing, “There was nothing ‘universal’ about Italian communities. The ‘public’ was a private club” and that “Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of skin pigmentation or ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others.” This expands his analysis of the situation tremendously, giving it greater weight in as much as no discussion about 2000s United States’ society would be complete without acknowledging both the power of the individual states and other smaller divisors in forming identity and that certain groups are excluded from “membership in the majority community” for various reasons. Muir’s lecture, however, focused on a single and isolated case study (village of Brui in Friuli in 1516) for the formation of community and identity. While he said that the conclusions he drew off of it could be applied to the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance in general, he made no attempt to show if this was indeed true or not. Similarly, Burke claims that the formation of national identity relied more heavily on exclusion than inclusion (on rejecting certain persons rather than actively seeking to incorporate others) but fails to give any substantial evidence. Sarah Bradford, in her biography of Cesare Borgia, also asserts that the formation of a cultural or community identity in the Renaissance was based on exclusion but does not follow up her claim with any real analysis or documentation. This process of constructing communities through inclusion and exclusion has only been looked at by a few historians and although they have give widely differing examples there has been little if any attempt to look at continuities or patterns that stretched across Renaissance Europe or even Renaissance Italy. Research that strove to gather and synthesize the disparate strands of thought on this subject, even if on a general level, would be useful to bettering our understanding of the development of ethnicity and how different demographics interacted in this period.
This lack of extensive research on the subject is my criticism of more recent historiography of the Italian Renaissance. Works in the Burckhardtian style do explore in great detail the development of a certain “character” held by one population or another and give case studies and examples as evidence. I do not agree with the reasoning used in these older texts, however, as much of it is along the lines of statements such as 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 now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” While this posits a community identity (in this case, Italian as a whole irregardless of specific location and the lack of a unified peninsula) and gives reasons for its formation (the freedom from various previous named bonds, the interest in the classical age), it is too generalizing and too stable. It is a product of the thoughts on racial hierarchy and identity formation at the time and, like many such theories, has a tendency to read back onto the past the present it is embroiled in.
As the works on orientalism, exemplified by Edward Said’s classic text by the term he coined, have pointed out about studies about Asia, it is a form of racial control to simplify another people’s history. It serves to claim that the people who are seen to be connected to it are only valuable inasmuch as their past can be seen as interesting or useful by the group studying them. Similarly, the men who wrote about the Italian Renaissance in the Burckhardtian style refuse to acknowledge the merits of the era on its own terms. The Renaissance was important only if it could be seen as the dawn of their own modern period. Because of this structuring of the history of the Renaissance, studies on the formation of community and identity also had to match up to how these enfranchised men understood them to exist in their own time. This is why Burckhardt was able to write that there were no racial or ethnic tensions in the Italian Renaissance. What he meant was that there were none of note-of course there were still conflicts between the Arabs and the Italians that were based on matters of religion (which tends to assume ethnicity) and he was well aware of the plethora of complaints written by many in Italy who came into contact with people from other parts of Europe. Burckhardt was using the men of the Italian Renaissance as a prop for his ideas about his own culture’s position in the world. Italy was important because he was able to use it to prove that Europe had advanced into a superior state of being. He did not understand his own period to be racist and, ergo, the Renaissance that birthed his own time could not be racist, either. It would be equally problematic if a text with a worldview more like that which we ascribe to today assigned this point of view to people in the Renaissance and tried to prove it by reading backwards onto history.
Discussions about the development of the political systems in the Renaissance are largely in the Burckhardtian style: progressive and concerned with drawing as direct a line as possible from the older and presumably worse forms of government to the enlightened models we are familiar with today. This is in part because political history was the focus in the earlier years of Renaissance studies when Burckhardt dominated the field and has simply carried over from then. David Sobek argues that the development of republics in the Italian peninsula led to the lessening in intensity and frequency of wars between city-states in part because “these ‘republics’ had more controls over citizenship and participation but fiercely protected civil liberties,” leading to greater concern for the loss of citizen life and the increased likelihood of seeing members of other republics as having the same shared rights, as theoretically our modern states today do. Brian Nelson follows the same logic in tracing back through history to try and figure out when the first notion of a modern state arose and when the first modern state was truly born. He describes the deterioration of the old, uncivilized feudal system and the rise of the city-state populated by urban bourgeoisie but also claims that “state consciousness,” what we might recognize as the awareness of and loyalty to a political system distinct from those of the past did not appear until much after it was seemingly described by Niccoló Machiavelli, the famous Italian Renaissance diplomat and political theorist.
While many historians claimed that it was during the Renaissance that a sense of nationalism was first developed, this nationalism should not be confused for ethnicity. The two terms could work together and often coincided but should be understood as distinct. Different ethnic groups could exist in the same nation and the same ethnic group could be found in different nations. Some authors wrote about Italy as a whole as if all the peoples in the peninsula could be grouped together others break it apart by region or city-state, stressing the differences between the populations. Similarly, both Gilbert and Nelson talked about the formation of political systems in Machiavelli’s time but drew very different conclusions. Nelson said that there was no contemporary notion of state consciousness, although it appeared that Machiavelli talked about it, and that while monarchs might claim to rule over a large area they did not have the power to affect their claims in reality. Gilbert on the other hand said that while there was no national Italian state until later, there was recognizable state consciousness in other parts of Europe such as Spain and France. This is an important contradiction to look at because of the assumption that regional and local identities or ethnicities form the building block for larger, national ones. This was not a train of thought that was very developed in the Renaissance, however, but was a reflection of later attempts to read back onto history a predetermined formation of identity even before the nation state had formed. It has led to, in more modern times, the formation of several ethnically determined countries in the reshuffling of European territories after World War I. It is problematic to look at ethnicity through the lens of national allegiance when dealing with time periods before formed (or before powerful) nation-states because it was simply not predetermined that these nations would come into being. Perhaps part of the reason that Italian ethnicity was so often broken up by city-state instead of by modern nation is because it was not a nation until relatively recently and the older works in particular reflect this fact.
Many writings on the development of a national consciousness in the Renaissance mirrored Burckhardt’s own text where he wrote that because of their suddenly superior (i.e. more like his own) mindsets and beliefs, men in the Italian Renaissance were able to craft what he saw as the foundations and beginnings of modern political states. “The Middle Ages paradoxically bequeathed to the modern world a concept of the structure of the modern state before it had any real idea of the state as such,” wrote Nelson, agreeing with the same basic thesis that although people in this period might have inadvertently created or done something that we can see to be “modern,” it was not really so because they were incapable for one reason or another of understanding what it was that they themselves had created. This emergence, for one reason or another, of national thinking was most commonly considered to entail recognizing different political organizations apart from one’s own and of including them in one’s world view-the recognition that peasants across the mountains were French while peasants in one’s own village were Italian, for example. As stated above, this related to the change in ethnic and racial thinking although it should not be confused for being the same.
Perhaps in part because so much of the dialogue about the development of the communities that were so important in the Renaissance has not changed, the discourse about the development of ethnic or cultural identity in the Renaissance remains largely static as well. While in both cases small adjustments have been made or new theories posited, they have been without any great depth to put them on par with the old ones and as such the conversation that is being had tends to refer more to older arguments than newer ones. It could also be that simply not enough time has elapsed in the dialogue for this change to come about. The idea of inclusion versus exclusion is one that I would like to see developed further, just as it has been in other realms of historical studies, and I feel that the current literature on the Renaissance, whether it is looking at small differences (such as between various Italian city-states) or larger ones (such as between Jews and Western European Christians), remains too vague and incomplete. Garrett Mattingly found it sufficient to state “in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics, and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest internal quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith” without any further explanation why this was-how did religion, in this case, override differences of region or other factors?-or what it meant for the individuals and societies involved.
Likewise, Robert Black wrote in 1992 that “ancient lineage was always praised in Florence, all the more so when newly enriched families were constantly trying to break into the exclusive circles of upper-class society” with no explanation other than saying that it had always been that way even though the economic and political implications of his statement pose potential threats to his very argument. How was “ancient lineage” so highly regarded if at the same time families who had recently acquired money or funds were able to threaten the upper crust? On the one hand the Medicis were considered to be relative newcomers (and, by this argument, of a lesser status) onto the scene, even while il Magnifico ran Florence at the end of the fifteenth century. At the same time they were undoubtedly one of the most powerful and well-connected families in the peninsula. There is an inherent contradiction to the argument that “ancient lineage” was so important if at the same time it was clearly obvious that one’s position at birth could be augmented and altered through the acquisition of money and power. While it is possible that birth and name were more important in theory than in practice, or that they were important factors in determining one’s social position but not the sole ones, it is also clear that this process needs to be better examined and explored. The creation of class is similar to the creation of ethnicities, since both are social constructs and means of grouping people, giving those in the preferred selections power and depriving those in the others of it.
Nicholas Davidson wrote about identity in abstract rather than real terms. His essay on Rome talks about the distinction between “civilis patria” and “naturalis patria”-between the influence and importance of Rome and the influence and importance of one’s native city-state. In this sense he posits a quasi-national ethnic identity for people in the peninsula. Other authors go farther and claim that this idea of connection to Rome in its form both as the Holy See and as the old capital of the Roman Empire created a pan-European identity, forming a “sense of a common bond, political as well as religious” . The formation of this theorized community, however, is based on intangible overarching systems of thought and is therefore fundamentally different from the one that Muir described that, while based more on a mythical ideology of a place than the reality of the physical location, was created and supported by public acts as well as these private or internal beliefs. Muir defined the idea of community as “less an abstract moral entity than the public representation of private arrangements,” distancing himself from authors who wrote about community and identity as formed by location and politics, as this type of identity often comes with moral underpinnings or value judgments. Mattingly agreed that community should be understood as abstract and not as literal as it was talked about under the Burckhardtian thesis but also that it was more clearly tied to location than Muir believed. They both felt, however, that the representation of location was important in popular perception, as it was a means of conveying belief about what was understood to be important. Florence, for example, could be associated with humanism and higher education, and the people who identified themselves with the city-state were also identifying themselves with these abstract concepts. Muir and Mattingly differed over how strongly this association could be felt, with Mattingly claiming that even places that one was not directly tied to could influence identity in a very real way. This debate over the necessity of a physical location in which to base community and ethnic identity is intriguing but not one that has been looked into much in the context of the Italian Renaissance.
It might be more useful to examine what people in the time period thought of their own formations of identity and ethnicity. “‘I love my native city more than my own soul,’ said Machiavelli near the end of his life.” Clearly for him at least the city-state was a viable nexus of identity and many historians have picked up on this sentiment and written about the importance of the city-state, dividing up their tomes into chapters on Florence, Milan, Rome, et cetera. (There is nothing wrong with this division as long as it is understood to be more nuanced than black and white: all Florentines do not think one way and all Romans do not think another. The problem is that most texts that deal with community in this manner fail to properly recognize this, causing a stereotype for each locale to stand in for the different social dynamics that can be found in each.) These are posited, fairly accurately by all accounts and data, as being at war with one another or at least on uneasy ground. “These he [Machiavelli] referred especially to division: hostile states, jealous factions, universal selfishness. Once for a moment he becomes a dreamer, in the last chapter of The Prince imagining a united Italy.” It seems clear that many living in the midst of the Italian Renaissance understood identity at least to be formed in part by the social conditions in one’s environment. People saw themselves to be members of these communities and understood them as distinct, to the point that their goals were often incompatible and at odds with one another. A pan-Italian identity was unrealistic until one could be created that overshadowed regional ties and identifications.
Nicholas Davidson asserts that, whatever the condition between current populations, people of the Renaissance were better able to understand the similarities between themselves and those of the distant past than they had been able to just shortly before. “The Middle Ages, it seems, had lost the awareness that classical civilization was different, and buildings like the Pantheon inspired only dread because of their association with paganism.” While on the one hand his description of how this change came to be rectified rests a little too heavily on the concept of the Great Man, of individuals who single-handedly alter the views and opinions of the masses, he also posits the idea of a pan-peninsular (if not pan-European) identity based on this same process of exclusion: we are not the same as the people who lived a century before us. This is a unifying factor that can make the case for a singular identity across the whole of Italy. Because of the popularity of classical culture and the common knowledge that people a few generations before had not felt the same way, it was possible to create a popular identity based on this difference and that would have been the same throughout all of the city-states. It did not conflict with regional loyalties but at the same time it tied people together across Italy, similar (but arguably more inclusively since the only ones explicitly rejected from membership would be those members of previous generations who were no longer alive) to other organizations. It is the interplay between these various segments of time, location, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth that I wish to see elaborated on further, specifically that of ethnicity.
It has been claimed that Italian groups resisted the inclusion of foreigners into their ranks and that, to paraphrase Bradstreet, even if someone was born in Italy but their family came from a different area this realm of power was a world in which they could never belong, or at least never belong without conflict. Yet at the same time there are any number of texts that assert that what we might call ethnic or national identity did not form until the centuries after the Renaissance and that at the time it was much more important what language you spoke and where you were born, not where your parents hailed from. According to this latter thesis, it should not matter if you or your parents had immigrated form another city-state or nation. If you spoke the language and dialect and obeyed the customs of your locale, you were a member of the community. According to the prior, it was very difficult if not impossible to be accepted as part of the majority community because your background, something it was impossible to change, marked you out as foreign. These two theories are in sharp and obvious conflict and yet there is little work that focuses on analyzing the two points of view. This seems very strange to me, given that Renaissance Italy held many cosmopolitan towns, where people mingled from all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I feel that more work needs to be done on weighing the influences exerted by the immediate surroundings (Paul Grendler asserts, for example, “universities and their professors may have had greater influence on society in any era before or since” ) and by the unchangeable past. Clearly there was dialogue between nature and nurture, between those aspects of self such as language and customs that were created by society and those aspects such as appearance and parental background that were dictated by the chances of birth and could not be altered. How did these things come together to influence one’s ethnic identity and how did they influence the identity that was assigned by observers? Was there a difference between internal and assigned ethnic identity?
Just as Muir put forth the most comprehensive account of community building in this time period, Robert Bartlett wrote perhaps the most detailed discussion of ethnic formation in the Medieval period (and which, he argues, can be understood to be in effect throughout much if not all of the Renaissance). Bartlett asserts that “such a cluster of terms as ‘customs, language and law’ was an absolutely standard part of the thinking of medieval authors when it came to describing ethnic identity” but also writes that ethnicity could be biological and inherited. This statement is in less conflict that it might initially seem, as religion and language were usually inherited as well from one’s parents and family, although they could potentially be changed in later life while one’s descent group could not be. The tensions over this somewhat contradictory idea of ethnicity and self were reflected in the European unease with converted Jews. Ideas about the validity of conversion to Christianity from Judaism changed throughout the centuries, generally heading towards the belief that Judaism was a racial trait, not a cultural one, therefore feeding into the fear of “crypto-Jews” in the community who masqueraded as Christians but were not true believers. This fear was intensified with the belief that members of this ethnic group share certain unsavory characteristics, furthering the notion that ethnicity was inherited instead of created. Fear of “crypto-Jews” reflected the uncertainty of what counted as an inheritable trait. Some stories about the Jewish community contained voluntary conversions, showing that the negative traits associated with practitioners of Judaism were in fact tied to religion and were not an inherent part of the people. Later stories tended to focus on “crypto-Jews” who, even after conversion, retained the undesirable characteristics associated with Judaism. Although the reasoning was that they had not truly converted to Christianity at all, it pointed to the idea that it was impossible for members of the minority community to become members of the majority community: once a Jew, always a Jew.
Similarly, if this medley of “customs, language, and law” is applicable to the idea of ethnicity as it was understood in the Italian Renaissance, then it is certainly possible that the older method of assigning populations of city-states character traits holds some water. Even if the method was at odds with how we understand ethnicity today it would have to be given some credit for, in this case, aligning with how it was understood at the time. Still, it should not be forgotten that many the writers of Italian Renaissance history from the Enlightenment until fairly recent times felt that character traits were both racial and unchangeable, something that Bartlett’s thesis goes against. Although a citizen of Verona, for instance, might have different laws than a citizen of Pisa and, therefore, a different ethnic identity, this is something that could (and was often) changed. It was very possible for a person to move from place to place, learning new languages and customs and following new laws along the way. This sense of a mutable identity was reflected in the practice (as Bartlett says in a different text) of Italian merchants who created their own enclaves, where they spoke their native tongue and were compelled to follow their original laws, in trade cities outside of Italy. By their creation of these fortresses of familiarity, it appears that Bartlett is correct and that the merchants were very aware of ethnicity as changeable and something to be both protected and nourished. Some aspects of ethnic identity were easier to change than others both because they were more deeply ingrained (such as religion instead of regulatory laws) and because changing them was more strongly discouraged. It was much harder for a Jew to convert to Christianity than for a merchant to agree to participate by different laws even though in both cases the person might have been moving from a minority into a majority group. This is not to say that it either was impossible, simply that one was easier and as such more likely, making it more typical and acceptable and feeding back into the cycle.
The movement of individuals into the majority culture needs to be looked at in more detail. Joan-Pau Rubiés writes that merchants traveling abroad often took on “the local rules of dress and language in order to avoid conflicts with political authorities, but only in extreme cases of intolerance, or when they decided to settle abroad, did they change religion and private customs as well” but does not delve into the topic of ethnicity itself. Using Bartlett’s explanation of ethnicity in the time period, Rubiés can be understood to be saying that merchants adjusted to fit the cultures they were traveling through but did not make a complete shift into them and so did not change their ethnicities for such work. It required a more complete shift to count as taking on a new ethnicity, just as it requires more than simply learning the language to transition from being culturally American to culturally Japanese. Culture and ethnicity were thoroughly entwined. The debate over who was part of the ethnically dominant group was essentially the same as the debate over who was allowed into the cultural majority, with cultural outsiders being labeled ethnic outsiders as well. Although it was possible for someone to wholly adopt a new culture and as such a new ethnic identity, it was also equally possible for members of that culture to reject his attempts, barring him from acceptance.
“Travel was a narrative structure for a geographic, economic and ethnological description,” and it is clear by looking at the contemporary texts that travel writing was indeed used to compare one’s own ethnic culture with others and, in this way, further define and refine it. It is understood that one of the things facilitated by these travel writings was the recognition of other, non-Christian, cultures. While these cultures were not always praised or lauded they were at the very least acknowledged and accepted as reality, forcing Christendom to understand itself as part of a larger world and as coexisting alongside places where various minority groups within Europe were in the majority outside of it. China and the Dar-al-Islam, at the very least, were unable to be ignored by learned individuals or by anyone involved in international trade. Through the process of identity formation through exclusion, the existence of these other societies allowed for the strengthening of a sense of broader self. Italy as a whole could be seen as a community when put into contrast with these Asian cultures. Ethnicity then was “community as a social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion,” as belonging to a particular ethnic group entailed belonging to a particular culture. It was not until regional connections gave way to more national and then international connections that ethnicity became tied to nationality as it is understood today. In this sense it is right to connect identity and ethnicity to city-state; it is wrong to assume that inhabitance in the city-state automatically confers acceptance into the majority community.
What should be done about the minorities living within Italy? Not all groups were as lucky (or, as in the case of the various Jewish ghettos that existed in Italy as in other parts of Europe, as pressured) to create ethnic havens and there were many who simply intermingled with the mainstream population. Would they be classified as ethnically Italian (or Veronian, Pisan, et cetera) or would their familial background win out? In biographies on the Borgias, emphasis is continuously laid on their Spanish roots (although to call them Spanish is in and of itself difficult because the Reconquista did not end until the year Alexander VI was elected pontiff and the dilemma of establishing a Spanish national or ethnic identity is one that also needs to be delved into), but individual analysis of the family members tends to become confused. Was Lucretia written about in a more moderated manner after her marriage to Alfonso d’Este and her removal from the rest of her family in the Vatican because of some actual change in her character or because she was no longer associated as strongly with a Spanish ethnicity? Was it a change in her behavior or in the willingness of the community that enabled her to finally enter and be labeled for the large part Italian? The Borgias had certainly resisted conforming to the norms of Italian society. They spoke Catalan between themselves in public, decorated their apartments with Spanish-style frescos, and introduced the very Spanish sport of bull fighting to various celebrations. At the same time, Cesare attended Università di Pisa and adopted the very Roman Julius Caesar as his inspiration. For most of his adult life, Cesare was on far better personal and working terms with the king of France than the king of Spain and Machiavelli fantasized about the Italian peninsula being united under his strength. He could not properly be called Spanish and neither could his siblings. At the same time he could not be called Italian or Roman and the family was summarily rejected from belonging even as they held positions of great power. It mirrored the position of the Medicis, rejected for not being an old name while at the same time practically ruling Florence. Clearly it was possible to do quite well without “membership in the majority community” and power and acceptance did not always go together.
It is agreed that there was tension felt in Italy towards non-Italians in much the same way that there was tension felt in Venice towards non-Venetians. At the same time, however, it has been asserted that the concept of Christendom was a “triumph of the idea of unity over the facts of diversity.” While this statement most generally applies to the period shortly before the oft-perceived turbulence of the Renaissance it still raises questions. How can there be ethnic division while still having a sense of unity? It is clear that division among different cultural or ethnic groups did not spring into being in the fourteenth century but was present in some form before. Was it simply a matter of proportion-of another Christian from a different province being “more accepted” than a non-Christian because they were understood to be more culturally (and by extension, ethnically) similar? What, then, of Christians who were not in Europe? There were Christian populations by the Renaissance established along the Silk Road, made up of both European settlers and merchants and peoples from China and the Middle East. Was a Uighur Catholic living in northwestern China more or less accepted by the Florentine mainstream than a practitioner of Judaism whose family had been living in Florence for centuries? It seems that there is no one catch-all answer to these questions but that, rather, different minority groups were met with more or less acceptance at different times depending on the circumstances. Groups that were seen as threatening to the norm were less likely to be accepted. At times this meant religious outsiders and at times this meant geographic outsiders. Muir quotes Shepherd and Withington as saying that this process of conflict and exclusion created a sense of self in relation to the other and that “precepts and practices of community were invariably crystallized through attempts to resolve and contain it.” Ethnicity was formed in order to define the safe mainstream when society was broadened enough that other groups of people were encountered and the whole was no longer homogenous.
By reading the problems of ethnicity onto Randolf Starn’s work, published in the mid-80s, it seems that ethnicity in the Renaissance was indeed changeable, although it required a certain amount of effort to do so. “With the erosion of communal institutions and the conversions of the party boss, ambitious noble, or upstart oligarch into princes, cults of personality and dynasty and the cultivation of the rhetoric and iconography of heroism were often inseparable.” If it is possible to place this formulation of individual heroism onto (as is implied) less than heroic persons and if there is a public awareness that “heroes are not born but made-or, rather, re-made” , then it seems possible that ethnicity could function in the same way. Indeed, using the Borgia family as an example again, while their being initially from Spain was an issue for their contemporaries it in and of itself was not brought up as often as was the way in which they continued to highlight and perpetuate this ethnic identity. Their ethnicity was not based solely on birth nor on the culture they lived in (and to a large degree took part in) but was rather an aspect of their lives that they actively participated in shaping. The design for their apartments in the Vatican, for instance, included over 200 bull motifs (both featured on the family crest and in the iconography of Spain) and had a distinctly Mozarabic or Spanish flair. This propagating of the language and culture of Spain was seen to override any religious similarities, thrusting the family out of the mainstream Italian community even as Alexander VI resided as pontiff. This example shows the clear conflict between statements such as Mattingly’s that there was “a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith” that was at the core of the formation of ethnic identity and Bartlett’s that it was a conglomeration of different mutable factors that made up ethnicity, to say nothing of the older Burckhardtian method of looking at ethnicity as defined by birth and (presumably stationary) residence alone.
Within the society of the Renaissance there were tensions between people of different cultural backgrounds. Ethnicity was one of the grouping factors which defined who a person was and how he or she related to the surrounding culture and society. It was possible to be a member of Christendom without being part of a majority culture. It was possible to be Christian and a citizen of Rome without being a part of majority Roman culture. It was even possible to obey Bartlett’s formula for ethnicity and speak the Roman dialect, obey its laws, and follow its customs and still not be accepted as a member of its ethnic majority if your family came from a different area. This was harder to do and for the most part seems not to have been worth the potential social or economic cost of exclusion. It did happen in certain cases, however, where the person at risk for being excluded was seen to be a threat in some way. Just as the individual could choose their ethnic identity and in this way exert control, so too could the community chose to reject an individual from entry. Ethnic identity was a mode through which power was articulated and expressed. This is why it was connected to national identity in later years but not so strongly during the Renaissance. It was not important until later to have a distinct sense of national ethnicity because there was no strong nation state until later. During the Italian Renaissance, the centers of power were the city-states and they developed their own senses of self as such. These communities shaped identity and ethnicity because it was important for people to feel attached to them in order to perpetuate them. As the community grew and incorporated more people into itself, it also continued to exclude others as not being the same for various reasons that boiled down to a sense of ethnicity that was both flexible and rigid. On the one hand it could be changed by modifying certain non-essential aspects such as language and law and in this way allowed for the community to grow. On the other hand it provided a means for persons to be rejected from the majority and to be refused entry. Both the individual and the surrounding community shaped perceptions of ethnicity in the Italian Renaissance.
The Formation of Ethnic Identity in the Italian Renaissance
The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt is one of the oldest comprehensive studies of the Italian Renaissance and is still commonly quoted and referenced although it has also been challenged in the wake of the social history movement of the 1970s. It is stunning in its breadth as it seeks to cover nearly every event of note in the 14th and 15th centuries. Burckhardt was clearly influenced by the views of his time and his tome reflects this, with its emphasis on reading the Renaissance as the struggle between the superstition and backwards thinking of the Middle Ages and the progressive views of modernity that, of course, his own time embodied. He argues that the man of the Italian Renaissance “was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe” and that it was in the Renaissance when man, due to the birth of a few great thinkers who revolutionized their society, managed to throw off the curtain of superstition and myth and take his first steps towards this bright new age of human history. It was then that man was “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 now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” History, then, is a linear process towards advancement, which the Middle Ages had retarded due to the suppression of science and the interference of the dogmatic Church.
Burckhardt’s work was so all-encompassing that it led to a stagnation in Renaissance studies, where all new work would simply refer back to his text as the end-all source. Renaissance studies underwent a period of neglect; it became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period but there was not much else to say about its break with the past and Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged for many decades. The thesis of progress became stale because there was nothing new to say about it; if history was a march of advancement and the Renaissance sparked this advancement, then everything that could be studied in the Renaissance was merely a prototype of some form of modern society. The conclusions were already known. 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. Burckhardt had successfully argued that this idealized man in the Renaissance had learned to reason objectively, saw himself as a spiritual individual, and was no longer bound by ideas of race.
It was only the great social change that took place in the 1970s that history began to be written in drastically new ways and the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy was reshaped. Much of the criticism that appeared stemmed from the fact that Burckhardt was writing in the 19th century, prior to new popularity of looking at history from the bottom up and was deeply entrenched in the Whiggish notion of history as a march towards progress and enlightenment. Karl Oskar Kristeller, in revitalizing Renaissance studies, 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 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.” Kristeller was writing in an era of change in historiography, when history was moving from being the story of the wealthy Caucasian men who were largely in power to the story of other social, gender, and ethnic groups as well. Political history was no longer the only viable form history could take, with great repercussions in all spheres of historical interest. The Kristeller thesis has become competition for the Burkhardt thesis and in modern Renaissance studies usually is the more influential of the two.
Historical studies of the Renaissance now more often focus on disenfranchised groups of peoples, whose daily lives experienced little change in the century or so before and after the period labeled the Renaissance. This has emphasized the continuities between the times before and after and sought to show how the Renaissance, while significant, was not a time of such drastic change as earlier historians tried to argue. These arguments for a sharp break with the past in the years of the Italian Renaissance reflected the beliefs of their authors that their own period was one of a struggle between enlightened progress and dangerous and regressive behavior or belief. “To posit the existence of a hiatus between the infancy of mankind, which ended with the Renaissance, and its maturity, culminating with the advent of modern technology, served [in texts prior to the 1970s] to bolster the sociopolitical pains of our partisans of progress, who thought they were, or who actually were, surrounded by hostile forces.” By stating that the Renaissance broke away from old traditions and illogical ways of thinking about the world, it was possible to see one’s own time as also following this same pattern. The groups and parties these authors belonged to could be cast as the champions of progress, continuing this grand and noble tradition of advancing into a more perfect age and those who opposed them became by default the forces of irrationality, trying to reverse all those positive changes that had come about.
This argument is mirrored in L. R. Poos’ work in historical demography where he states that while there were periods of short-term instability in pre-modern Europe, the general trend was one of long-term stability and slow but steady growth. While isolated areas could have disastrous years, on the whole the history of the population of Europe was remarkably stable. The presence of non-scientific and non-Christian beliefs in popular culture during the Renaissance is also often brought up to challenge the idea of progress. Donald Nugent calls the Renaissance the “golden age of the occult” and argued that “the more exotic turn of humanism credulously rehabilitated the occult traditions of antiquity,” his logic flying in the face of the old notion that Renaissance humanism was the start of real modern thinking and belief. Studies on the Renaissance prior to the advent of social history rarely took this stance and when occult beliefs were noted they were asserted to be relics of the past and not truly indicative of the mindset of the time; they certainly were never tied to humanism.
While many aspects of Renaissance studies have changed in the wake of the social history movement, studies specifically on ethnicity in this period have remained largely unchanged from Burckhardt’s time, although the specific terminology has been updated and made more politically correct. Burckhardt wrote that Renaissance man had moved past the ties of racism while breaking the people of the peninsula up by province and city and assigning them specific historical characteristics and other authors still follow this pattern, such as Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s collection of essays, The Renaissance in National Context, which is organized by city-state. While Peter Burke’s essay, “The Uses of Italy” within this edited work argues that the Renaissance was a time of weaker national identity and should be seen not as Italian per se but as international, the very fact that his work is part of a collection still organized along national and regional lines is counter to his point and shows the larger trend still at work. It is similar to writing a text that talks about how all people in New York City think one way while all people in Chicago think another, ignoring other demographics beyond location that could serve to influence opinion and belief such as religion or socio-economic background. The “ethnicity” of New York City is in this way just as questionable as the “ethnicity” of Florence or Rome.
While it certainly makes sense to look at the Renaissance as having distinctive characteristics in different places (For example, Paul Grendler’s Renaissance Education Between Religion and Politics very concisely lays out the differences in educational systems in different parts of Europe, and I understand the strength of the city-state and the rivalries between different ruling families), the tendency then is to assume that the people from these different places are themselves markedly different or in some ways incompatible with one another and that these differences are inherent and immutable. Older texts make this point more clearly than do newer ones, but both tend to either imply or outright assert it yet rarely provide satisfactory explanation as to how this difference developed or how it affected people at the time. While there are authors who deal with the problems of ethnic or cultural identity, such as the ones touched on briefly above, I have not found a comprehensive text that truly delves into the issue.
Edward Muir’s 2001 lecture probably does the best out of any text I have seen at dealing with this issue. He says, “The idea of the city as a sacred community, a mystical corpus, was crucial to the political ideology of many late medieval towns,” agreeing with the longstanding belief in the importance of the city-state and specific locale in determining community and identity. At the same time, however, he elaborates by arguing, “There was nothing ‘universal’ about Italian communities. The ‘public’ was a private club” and that “Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of skin pigmentation or ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others.” This expands his analysis of the situation tremendously, giving it greater weight in as much as no discussion about 2000s United States’ society would be complete without acknowledging both the power of the individual states and other smaller divisors in forming identity and that certain groups are excluded from “membership in the majority community” for various reasons. Muir’s lecture, however, focused on a single and isolated case study (village of Brui in Friuli in 1516) for the formation of community and identity. While he said that the conclusions he drew off of it could be applied to the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance in general, he made no attempt to show if this was indeed true or not. Similarly, Burke claims that the formation of national identity relied more heavily on exclusion than inclusion (on rejecting certain persons rather than actively seeking to incorporate others) but fails to give any substantial evidence. Sarah Bradford, in her biography of Cesare Borgia, also asserts that the formation of a cultural or community identity in the Renaissance was based on exclusion but does not follow up her claim with any real analysis or documentation. This process of constructing communities through inclusion and exclusion has only been looked at by a few historians and although they have give widely differing examples there has been little if any attempt to look at continuities or patterns that stretched across Renaissance Europe or even Renaissance Italy. Research that strove to gather and synthesize the disparate strands of thought on this subject, even if on a general level, would be useful to bettering our understanding of the development of ethnicity and how different demographics interacted in this period.
This lack of extensive research on the subject is my criticism of more recent historiography of the Italian Renaissance. Works in the Burckhardtian style do explore in great detail the development of a certain “character” held by one population or another and give case studies and examples as evidence. I do not agree with the reasoning used in these older texts, however, as much of it is along the lines of statements such as 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 now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” While this posits a community identity (in this case, Italian as a whole irregardless of specific location and the lack of a unified peninsula) and gives reasons for its formation (the freedom from various previous named bonds, the interest in the classical age), it is too generalizing and too stable. It is a product of the thoughts on racial hierarchy and identity formation at the time and, like many such theories, has a tendency to read back onto the past the present it is embroiled in.
As the works on orientalism, exemplified by Edward Said’s classic text by the term he coined, have pointed out about studies about Asia, it is a form of racial control to simplify another people’s history. It serves to claim that the people who are seen to be connected to it are only valuable inasmuch as their past can be seen as interesting or useful by the group studying them. Similarly, the men who wrote about the Italian Renaissance in the Burckhardtian style refuse to acknowledge the merits of the era on its own terms. The Renaissance was important only if it could be seen as the dawn of their own modern period. Because of this structuring of the history of the Renaissance, studies on the formation of community and identity also had to match up to how these enfranchised men understood them to exist in their own time. This is why Burckhardt was able to write that there were no racial or ethnic tensions in the Italian Renaissance. What he meant was that there were none of note-of course there were still conflicts between the Arabs and the Italians that were based on matters of religion (which tends to assume ethnicity) and he was well aware of the plethora of complaints written by many in Italy who came into contact with people from other parts of Europe. Burckhardt was using the men of the Italian Renaissance as a prop for his ideas about his own culture’s position in the world. Italy was important because he was able to use it to prove that Europe had advanced into a superior state of being. He did not understand his own period to be racist and, ergo, the Renaissance that birthed his own time could not be racist, either. It would be equally problematic if a text with a worldview more like that which we ascribe to today assigned this point of view to people in the Renaissance and tried to prove it by reading backwards onto history.
Discussions about the development of the political systems in the Renaissance are largely in the Burckhardtian style: progressive and concerned with drawing as direct a line as possible from the older and presumably worse forms of government to the enlightened models we are familiar with today. This is in part because political history was the focus in the earlier years of Renaissance studies when Burckhardt dominated the field and has simply carried over from then. David Sobek argues that the development of republics in the Italian peninsula led to the lessening in intensity and frequency of wars between city-states in part because “these ‘republics’ had more controls over citizenship and participation but fiercely protected civil liberties,” leading to greater concern for the loss of citizen life and the increased likelihood of seeing members of other republics as having the same shared rights, as theoretically our modern states today do. Brian Nelson follows the same logic in tracing back through history to try and figure out when the first notion of a modern state arose and when the first modern state was truly born. He describes the deterioration of the old, uncivilized feudal system and the rise of the city-state populated by urban bourgeoisie but also claims that “state consciousness,” what we might recognize as the awareness of and loyalty to a political system distinct from those of the past did not appear until much after it was seemingly described by Niccoló Machiavelli, the famous Italian Renaissance diplomat and political theorist.
While many historians claimed that it was during the Renaissance that a sense of nationalism was first developed, this nationalism should not be confused for ethnicity. The two terms could work together and often coincided but should be understood as distinct. Different ethnic groups could exist in the same nation and the same ethnic group could be found in different nations. Some authors wrote about Italy as a whole as if all the peoples in the peninsula could be grouped together others break it apart by region or city-state, stressing the differences between the populations. Similarly, both Gilbert and Nelson talked about the formation of political systems in Machiavelli’s time but drew very different conclusions. Nelson said that there was no contemporary notion of state consciousness, although it appeared that Machiavelli talked about it, and that while monarchs might claim to rule over a large area they did not have the power to affect their claims in reality. Gilbert on the other hand said that while there was no national Italian state until later, there was recognizable state consciousness in other parts of Europe such as Spain and France. This is an important contradiction to look at because of the assumption that regional and local identities or ethnicities form the building block for larger, national ones. This was not a train of thought that was very developed in the Renaissance, however, but was a reflection of later attempts to read back onto history a predetermined formation of identity even before the nation state had formed. It has led to, in more modern times, the formation of several ethnically determined countries in the reshuffling of European territories after World War I. It is problematic to look at ethnicity through the lens of national allegiance when dealing with time periods before formed (or before powerful) nation-states because it was simply not predetermined that these nations would come into being. Perhaps part of the reason that Italian ethnicity was so often broken up by city-state instead of by modern nation is because it was not a nation until relatively recently and the older works in particular reflect this fact.
Many writings on the development of a national consciousness in the Renaissance mirrored Burckhardt’s own text where he wrote that because of their suddenly superior (i.e. more like his own) mindsets and beliefs, men in the Italian Renaissance were able to craft what he saw as the foundations and beginnings of modern political states. “The Middle Ages paradoxically bequeathed to the modern world a concept of the structure of the modern state before it had any real idea of the state as such,” wrote Nelson, agreeing with the same basic thesis that although people in this period might have inadvertently created or done something that we can see to be “modern,” it was not really so because they were incapable for one reason or another of understanding what it was that they themselves had created. This emergence, for one reason or another, of national thinking was most commonly considered to entail recognizing different political organizations apart from one’s own and of including them in one’s world view-the recognition that peasants across the mountains were French while peasants in one’s own village were Italian, for example. As stated above, this related to the change in ethnic and racial thinking although it should not be confused for being the same.
Perhaps in part because so much of the dialogue about the development of the communities that were so important in the Renaissance has not changed, the discourse about the development of ethnic or cultural identity in the Renaissance remains largely static as well. While in both cases small adjustments have been made or new theories posited, they have been without any great depth to put them on par with the old ones and as such the conversation that is being had tends to refer more to older arguments than newer ones. It could also be that simply not enough time has elapsed in the dialogue for this change to come about. The idea of inclusion versus exclusion is one that I would like to see developed further, just as it has been in other realms of historical studies, and I feel that the current literature on the Renaissance, whether it is looking at small differences (such as between various Italian city-states) or larger ones (such as between Jews and Western European Christians), remains too vague and incomplete. Garrett Mattingly found it sufficient to state “in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics, and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest internal quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith” without any further explanation why this was-how did religion, in this case, override differences of region or other factors?-or what it meant for the individuals and societies involved.
Likewise, Robert Black wrote in 1992 that “ancient lineage was always praised in Florence, all the more so when newly enriched families were constantly trying to break into the exclusive circles of upper-class society” with no explanation other than saying that it had always been that way even though the economic and political implications of his statement pose potential threats to his very argument. How was “ancient lineage” so highly regarded if at the same time families who had recently acquired money or funds were able to threaten the upper crust? On the one hand the Medicis were considered to be relative newcomers (and, by this argument, of a lesser status) onto the scene, even while il Magnifico ran Florence at the end of the fifteenth century. At the same time they were undoubtedly one of the most powerful and well-connected families in the peninsula. There is an inherent contradiction to the argument that “ancient lineage” was so important if at the same time it was clearly obvious that one’s position at birth could be augmented and altered through the acquisition of money and power. While it is possible that birth and name were more important in theory than in practice, or that they were important factors in determining one’s social position but not the sole ones, it is also clear that this process needs to be better examined and explored. The creation of class is similar to the creation of ethnicities, since both are social constructs and means of grouping people, giving those in the preferred selections power and depriving those in the others of it.
Nicholas Davidson wrote about identity in abstract rather than real terms. His essay on Rome talks about the distinction between “civilis patria” and “naturalis patria”-between the influence and importance of Rome and the influence and importance of one’s native city-state. In this sense he posits a quasi-national ethnic identity for people in the peninsula. Other authors go farther and claim that this idea of connection to Rome in its form both as the Holy See and as the old capital of the Roman Empire created a pan-European identity, forming a “sense of a common bond, political as well as religious” . The formation of this theorized community, however, is based on intangible overarching systems of thought and is therefore fundamentally different from the one that Muir described that, while based more on a mythical ideology of a place than the reality of the physical location, was created and supported by public acts as well as these private or internal beliefs. Muir defined the idea of community as “less an abstract moral entity than the public representation of private arrangements,” distancing himself from authors who wrote about community and identity as formed by location and politics, as this type of identity often comes with moral underpinnings or value judgments. Mattingly agreed that community should be understood as abstract and not as literal as it was talked about under the Burckhardtian thesis but also that it was more clearly tied to location than Muir believed. They both felt, however, that the representation of location was important in popular perception, as it was a means of conveying belief about what was understood to be important. Florence, for example, could be associated with humanism and higher education, and the people who identified themselves with the city-state were also identifying themselves with these abstract concepts. Muir and Mattingly differed over how strongly this association could be felt, with Mattingly claiming that even places that one was not directly tied to could influence identity in a very real way. This debate over the necessity of a physical location in which to base community and ethnic identity is intriguing but not one that has been looked into much in the context of the Italian Renaissance.
It might be more useful to examine what people in the time period thought of their own formations of identity and ethnicity. “‘I love my native city more than my own soul,’ said Machiavelli near the end of his life.” Clearly for him at least the city-state was a viable nexus of identity and many historians have picked up on this sentiment and written about the importance of the city-state, dividing up their tomes into chapters on Florence, Milan, Rome, et cetera. (There is nothing wrong with this division as long as it is understood to be more nuanced than black and white: all Florentines do not think one way and all Romans do not think another. The problem is that most texts that deal with community in this manner fail to properly recognize this, causing a stereotype for each locale to stand in for the different social dynamics that can be found in each.) These are posited, fairly accurately by all accounts and data, as being at war with one another or at least on uneasy ground. “These he [Machiavelli] referred especially to division: hostile states, jealous factions, universal selfishness. Once for a moment he becomes a dreamer, in the last chapter of The Prince imagining a united Italy.” It seems clear that many living in the midst of the Italian Renaissance understood identity at least to be formed in part by the social conditions in one’s environment. People saw themselves to be members of these communities and understood them as distinct, to the point that their goals were often incompatible and at odds with one another. A pan-Italian identity was unrealistic until one could be created that overshadowed regional ties and identifications.
Nicholas Davidson asserts that, whatever the condition between current populations, people of the Renaissance were better able to understand the similarities between themselves and those of the distant past than they had been able to just shortly before. “The Middle Ages, it seems, had lost the awareness that classical civilization was different, and buildings like the Pantheon inspired only dread because of their association with paganism.” While on the one hand his description of how this change came to be rectified rests a little too heavily on the concept of the Great Man, of individuals who single-handedly alter the views and opinions of the masses, he also posits the idea of a pan-peninsular (if not pan-European) identity based on this same process of exclusion: we are not the same as the people who lived a century before us. This is a unifying factor that can make the case for a singular identity across the whole of Italy. Because of the popularity of classical culture and the common knowledge that people a few generations before had not felt the same way, it was possible to create a popular identity based on this difference and that would have been the same throughout all of the city-states. It did not conflict with regional loyalties but at the same time it tied people together across Italy, similar (but arguably more inclusively since the only ones explicitly rejected from membership would be those members of previous generations who were no longer alive) to other organizations. It is the interplay between these various segments of time, location, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth that I wish to see elaborated on further, specifically that of ethnicity.
It has been claimed that Italian groups resisted the inclusion of foreigners into their ranks and that, to paraphrase Bradstreet, even if someone was born in Italy but their family came from a different area this realm of power was a world in which they could never belong, or at least never belong without conflict. Yet at the same time there are any number of texts that assert that what we might call ethnic or national identity did not form until the centuries after the Renaissance and that at the time it was much more important what language you spoke and where you were born, not where your parents hailed from. According to this latter thesis, it should not matter if you or your parents had immigrated form another city-state or nation. If you spoke the language and dialect and obeyed the customs of your locale, you were a member of the community. According to the prior, it was very difficult if not impossible to be accepted as part of the majority community because your background, something it was impossible to change, marked you out as foreign. These two theories are in sharp and obvious conflict and yet there is little work that focuses on analyzing the two points of view. This seems very strange to me, given that Renaissance Italy held many cosmopolitan towns, where people mingled from all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I feel that more work needs to be done on weighing the influences exerted by the immediate surroundings (Paul Grendler asserts, for example, “universities and their professors may have had greater influence on society in any era before or since” ) and by the unchangeable past. Clearly there was dialogue between nature and nurture, between those aspects of self such as language and customs that were created by society and those aspects such as appearance and parental background that were dictated by the chances of birth and could not be altered. How did these things come together to influence one’s ethnic identity and how did they influence the identity that was assigned by observers? Was there a difference between internal and assigned ethnic identity?
Just as Muir put forth the most comprehensive account of community building in this time period, Robert Bartlett wrote perhaps the most detailed discussion of ethnic formation in the Medieval period (and which, he argues, can be understood to be in effect throughout much if not all of the Renaissance). Bartlett asserts that “such a cluster of terms as ‘customs, language and law’ was an absolutely standard part of the thinking of medieval authors when it came to describing ethnic identity” but also writes that ethnicity could be biological and inherited. This statement is in less conflict that it might initially seem, as religion and language were usually inherited as well from one’s parents and family, although they could potentially be changed in later life while one’s descent group could not be. The tensions over this somewhat contradictory idea of ethnicity and self were reflected in the European unease with converted Jews. Ideas about the validity of conversion to Christianity from Judaism changed throughout the centuries, generally heading towards the belief that Judaism was a racial trait, not a cultural one, therefore feeding into the fear of “crypto-Jews” in the community who masqueraded as Christians but were not true believers. This fear was intensified with the belief that members of this ethnic group share certain unsavory characteristics, furthering the notion that ethnicity was inherited instead of created. Fear of “crypto-Jews” reflected the uncertainty of what counted as an inheritable trait. Some stories about the Jewish community contained voluntary conversions, showing that the negative traits associated with practitioners of Judaism were in fact tied to religion and were not an inherent part of the people. Later stories tended to focus on “crypto-Jews” who, even after conversion, retained the undesirable characteristics associated with Judaism. Although the reasoning was that they had not truly converted to Christianity at all, it pointed to the idea that it was impossible for members of the minority community to become members of the majority community: once a Jew, always a Jew.
Similarly, if this medley of “customs, language, and law” is applicable to the idea of ethnicity as it was understood in the Italian Renaissance, then it is certainly possible that the older method of assigning populations of city-states character traits holds some water. Even if the method was at odds with how we understand ethnicity today it would have to be given some credit for, in this case, aligning with how it was understood at the time. Still, it should not be forgotten that many the writers of Italian Renaissance history from the Enlightenment until fairly recent times felt that character traits were both racial and unchangeable, something that Bartlett’s thesis goes against. Although a citizen of Verona, for instance, might have different laws than a citizen of Pisa and, therefore, a different ethnic identity, this is something that could (and was often) changed. It was very possible for a person to move from place to place, learning new languages and customs and following new laws along the way. This sense of a mutable identity was reflected in the practice (as Bartlett says in a different text) of Italian merchants who created their own enclaves, where they spoke their native tongue and were compelled to follow their original laws, in trade cities outside of Italy. By their creation of these fortresses of familiarity, it appears that Bartlett is correct and that the merchants were very aware of ethnicity as changeable and something to be both protected and nourished. Some aspects of ethnic identity were easier to change than others both because they were more deeply ingrained (such as religion instead of regulatory laws) and because changing them was more strongly discouraged. It was much harder for a Jew to convert to Christianity than for a merchant to agree to participate by different laws even though in both cases the person might have been moving from a minority into a majority group. This is not to say that it either was impossible, simply that one was easier and as such more likely, making it more typical and acceptable and feeding back into the cycle.
The movement of individuals into the majority culture needs to be looked at in more detail. Joan-Pau Rubiés writes that merchants traveling abroad often took on “the local rules of dress and language in order to avoid conflicts with political authorities, but only in extreme cases of intolerance, or when they decided to settle abroad, did they change religion and private customs as well” but does not delve into the topic of ethnicity itself. Using Bartlett’s explanation of ethnicity in the time period, Rubiés can be understood to be saying that merchants adjusted to fit the cultures they were traveling through but did not make a complete shift into them and so did not change their ethnicities for such work. It required a more complete shift to count as taking on a new ethnicity, just as it requires more than simply learning the language to transition from being culturally American to culturally Japanese. Culture and ethnicity were thoroughly entwined. The debate over who was part of the ethnically dominant group was essentially the same as the debate over who was allowed into the cultural majority, with cultural outsiders being labeled ethnic outsiders as well. Although it was possible for someone to wholly adopt a new culture and as such a new ethnic identity, it was also equally possible for members of that culture to reject his attempts, barring him from acceptance.
“Travel was a narrative structure for a geographic, economic and ethnological description,” and it is clear by looking at the contemporary texts that travel writing was indeed used to compare one’s own ethnic culture with others and, in this way, further define and refine it. It is understood that one of the things facilitated by these travel writings was the recognition of other, non-Christian, cultures. While these cultures were not always praised or lauded they were at the very least acknowledged and accepted as reality, forcing Christendom to understand itself as part of a larger world and as coexisting alongside places where various minority groups within Europe were in the majority outside of it. China and the Dar-al-Islam, at the very least, were unable to be ignored by learned individuals or by anyone involved in international trade. Through the process of identity formation through exclusion, the existence of these other societies allowed for the strengthening of a sense of broader self. Italy as a whole could be seen as a community when put into contrast with these Asian cultures. Ethnicity then was “community as a social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion,” as belonging to a particular ethnic group entailed belonging to a particular culture. It was not until regional connections gave way to more national and then international connections that ethnicity became tied to nationality as it is understood today. In this sense it is right to connect identity and ethnicity to city-state; it is wrong to assume that inhabitance in the city-state automatically confers acceptance into the majority community.
What should be done about the minorities living within Italy? Not all groups were as lucky (or, as in the case of the various Jewish ghettos that existed in Italy as in other parts of Europe, as pressured) to create ethnic havens and there were many who simply intermingled with the mainstream population. Would they be classified as ethnically Italian (or Veronian, Pisan, et cetera) or would their familial background win out? In biographies on the Borgias, emphasis is continuously laid on their Spanish roots (although to call them Spanish is in and of itself difficult because the Reconquista did not end until the year Alexander VI was elected pontiff and the dilemma of establishing a Spanish national or ethnic identity is one that also needs to be delved into), but individual analysis of the family members tends to become confused. Was Lucretia written about in a more moderated manner after her marriage to Alfonso d’Este and her removal from the rest of her family in the Vatican because of some actual change in her character or because she was no longer associated as strongly with a Spanish ethnicity? Was it a change in her behavior or in the willingness of the community that enabled her to finally enter and be labeled for the large part Italian? The Borgias had certainly resisted conforming to the norms of Italian society. They spoke Catalan between themselves in public, decorated their apartments with Spanish-style frescos, and introduced the very Spanish sport of bull fighting to various celebrations. At the same time, Cesare attended Università di Pisa and adopted the very Roman Julius Caesar as his inspiration. For most of his adult life, Cesare was on far better personal and working terms with the king of France than the king of Spain and Machiavelli fantasized about the Italian peninsula being united under his strength. He could not properly be called Spanish and neither could his siblings. At the same time he could not be called Italian or Roman and the family was summarily rejected from belonging even as they held positions of great power. It mirrored the position of the Medicis, rejected for not being an old name while at the same time practically ruling Florence. Clearly it was possible to do quite well without “membership in the majority community” and power and acceptance did not always go together.
It is agreed that there was tension felt in Italy towards non-Italians in much the same way that there was tension felt in Venice towards non-Venetians. At the same time, however, it has been asserted that the concept of Christendom was a “triumph of the idea of unity over the facts of diversity.” While this statement most generally applies to the period shortly before the oft-perceived turbulence of the Renaissance it still raises questions. How can there be ethnic division while still having a sense of unity? It is clear that division among different cultural or ethnic groups did not spring into being in the fourteenth century but was present in some form before. Was it simply a matter of proportion-of another Christian from a different province being “more accepted” than a non-Christian because they were understood to be more culturally (and by extension, ethnically) similar? What, then, of Christians who were not in Europe? There were Christian populations by the Renaissance established along the Silk Road, made up of both European settlers and merchants and peoples from China and the Middle East. Was a Uighur Catholic living in northwestern China more or less accepted by the Florentine mainstream than a practitioner of Judaism whose family had been living in Florence for centuries? It seems that there is no one catch-all answer to these questions but that, rather, different minority groups were met with more or less acceptance at different times depending on the circumstances. Groups that were seen as threatening to the norm were less likely to be accepted. At times this meant religious outsiders and at times this meant geographic outsiders. Muir quotes Shepherd and Withington as saying that this process of conflict and exclusion created a sense of self in relation to the other and that “precepts and practices of community were invariably crystallized through attempts to resolve and contain it.” Ethnicity was formed in order to define the safe mainstream when society was broadened enough that other groups of people were encountered and the whole was no longer homogenous.
By reading the problems of ethnicity onto Randolf Starn’s work, published in the mid-80s, it seems that ethnicity in the Renaissance was indeed changeable, although it required a certain amount of effort to do so. “With the erosion of communal institutions and the conversions of the party boss, ambitious noble, or upstart oligarch into princes, cults of personality and dynasty and the cultivation of the rhetoric and iconography of heroism were often inseparable.” If it is possible to place this formulation of individual heroism onto (as is implied) less than heroic persons and if there is a public awareness that “heroes are not born but made-or, rather, re-made” , then it seems possible that ethnicity could function in the same way. Indeed, using the Borgia family as an example again, while their being initially from Spain was an issue for their contemporaries it in and of itself was not brought up as often as was the way in which they continued to highlight and perpetuate this ethnic identity. Their ethnicity was not based solely on birth nor on the culture they lived in (and to a large degree took part in) but was rather an aspect of their lives that they actively participated in shaping. The design for their apartments in the Vatican, for instance, included over 200 bull motifs (both featured on the family crest and in the iconography of Spain) and had a distinctly Mozarabic or Spanish flair. This propagating of the language and culture of Spain was seen to override any religious similarities, thrusting the family out of the mainstream Italian community even as Alexander VI resided as pontiff. This example shows the clear conflict between statements such as Mattingly’s that there was “a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith” that was at the core of the formation of ethnic identity and Bartlett’s that it was a conglomeration of different mutable factors that made up ethnicity, to say nothing of the older Burckhardtian method of looking at ethnicity as defined by birth and (presumably stationary) residence alone.
Within the society of the Renaissance there were tensions between people of different cultural backgrounds. Ethnicity was one of the grouping factors which defined who a person was and how he or she related to the surrounding culture and society. It was possible to be a member of Christendom without being part of a majority culture. It was possible to be Christian and a citizen of Rome without being a part of majority Roman culture. It was even possible to obey Bartlett’s formula for ethnicity and speak the Roman dialect, obey its laws, and follow its customs and still not be accepted as a member of its ethnic majority if your family came from a different area. This was harder to do and for the most part seems not to have been worth the potential social or economic cost of exclusion. It did happen in certain cases, however, where the person at risk for being excluded was seen to be a threat in some way. Just as the individual could choose their ethnic identity and in this way exert control, so too could the community chose to reject an individual from entry. Ethnic identity was a mode through which power was articulated and expressed. This is why it was connected to national identity in later years but not so strongly during the Renaissance. It was not important until later to have a distinct sense of national ethnicity because there was no strong nation state until later. During the Italian Renaissance, the centers of power were the city-states and they developed their own senses of self as such. These communities shaped identity and ethnicity because it was important for people to feel attached to them in order to perpetuate them. As the community grew and incorporated more people into itself, it also continued to exclude others as not being the same for various reasons that boiled down to a sense of ethnicity that was both flexible and rigid. On the one hand it could be changed by modifying certain non-essential aspects such as language and law and in this way allowed for the community to grow. On the other hand it provided a means for persons to be rejected from the majority and to be refused entry. Both the individual and the surrounding community shaped perceptions of ethnicity in the Italian Renaissance.