Historical Imagination by Paul Fairfield;

Author:Paul Fairfield;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Renaissance Reimaginings

We now fast forward from late antiquity to the Italian renaissance. Our reason for doing so is not, as one might suppose, that nothing much happened during the intervening centuries but that from the point of view of imaginative history the period or movement commonly designated by the term “renaissance” again witnessed a transformation in the zeitgeist or a relatively active phase in the life of the western historical imagination, and it is this activity that warrants our attention. What transformation was this, what were some of its underlying dynamics, and how in general terms did it come to pass that “classical antiquity” went from being a prelude to Christianization to a pinnacle of cultural achievement, and what light does this shed upon historical consciousness itself? The past was reimagined, not in every particular but relatively and for reasons that must be examined. One cultural narrative in some measure displaced another, and our questions are how, why, and what this entails for our larger theme. I have suggested that wholesale revolution is not the model, and if exhibit A was late antiquity then exhibit B will be the general phenomenon that is encompassed by the Italian word rinascita. What had been reborn and where had it been prior to its celebrated rebirth?

Let us begin with some dates and with the word itself. Since the publication in 1860 of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, many historians have spoken of the renaissance as in some sense the beginning of the modern era. This period, in his words, constituted “not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the Western world” from the time of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) in the fourteenth century to about the middle part of the sixteenth (many would extend this to the mid-seventeenth).1 While employed by sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Vasari, rinascita and its French translation did not come into common usage until the eighteenth and (especially) nineteenth centuries. The idea was that the majesty of Greek and Roman civilization or many of its higher attainments had been revivified from an approximately thousand-year slumber and turned to a variety of contemporary purposes in the various city-states of Italy and subsequently through the better part of Western Europe. This reemergence of the classical constituted a monumental transition from the “medieval” to the early modern, a kind of bridge spanning two more or less discrete historical periods and a golden era that followed an agonizingly long period of cultural stagnation. Rebirth was not a value-neutral designation but a decidedly partisan and largely retrospective notion. Citizens of the renaissance commonly referred to themselves and their times as “modern,” and not in categorical opposition to what had come before. While some degree of hindsight is a condition of the possibility of historical understanding in general, it should give us pause that the note of idealization so pronounced in Burckhardt’s text and century was decidedly less evident through the two or three centuries of which we are speaking.

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