Daily Life in Renaissance Italy by Elizabeth S. Cohen & Thomas V. Cohen

Author:Elizabeth S. Cohen & Thomas V. Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2019-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

History and Time’s End

Although the cycles of days, months, and years dominated most of their experience of time, Renaissance Italians sometimes also placed themselves in long-term, linear courses of history. The Christian eschatological vision set a principal model. Looking backward, Renaissance culture framed its epoch as beginning with the birth of Jesus, before which Old Testament time counted generations back to Creation. Looking forward, all anticipated history’s ending in an apocalypse that would usher in the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment. No one knew when this end would come, but, even with no millennium on the calendar, a few prophets and their followers believed it might be nigh. On a less godly or cosmic plane, writers began to scan an earthly past with largely human import. From the Middle Ages chroniclers recorded notable events, year by year. In the Renaissance, histories acquired a new dimension, as scholars and statesmen began to assign meanings, logical connections, and narrative line to events’ sequence, all less tethered to heaven’s frame. To insert firm rungs on history’s long ladder, lining up and conjoining distant events, some sacred, others secular, took hard intellectual work. For many ordinary folk, however, the past probably seemed less an unbroken line than a clutter of isolated noteworthy moments: hardships, losses, anomalies, occasionally a victory or heroic feat. As reminder or as heirloom, things from the past that cast glory were treasured. Yet, the record of the past was very malleable, readily reshaped to serve present needs. (See Chapter 8.) Major events in living memory could serve as temporal markers. Someone might tie a lesser happening to a greater, as before or after the big flood or fire or when the soldiers marched off to war. Speaking of the more distant past, however, most Italians would re-create stories but seldom evoke periods, let alone precise years or centuries.

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