The Routledge History of the Renaissance

William Caferro, William Caferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351849456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Drawing together the latest research in the field, The Routledge History of the Renaissance treats the Renaissance not as a static concept, but as one of ongoing change within an international framework. It takes as its unifying theme the idea of exchange and interchange through the movement of goods, ideas, disease and people, across social, religious, political and physical boundaries.

Covering a broad range of temporal periods and geographic regions, the chapters discuss topics such as the material cultures of Renaissance societies; the increased popularity of shopping as a pastime in fourteenth-century Italy; military entrepreneurs and their networks across Europe; the emergence and development of the Ottoman empire from the early fourteenth to the late sixteenth century; and women and humanism in Renaissance Europe. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, combining historical methodology with techniques from the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology and literary criticism. It allows for juxtapositions of approaches that are usually segregated into traditional subfields, such as intellectual, political, gender, military and economic history.

Capturing dynamic new approaches to the study of this fascinating period and illustrated throughout with images, figures and tables, this comprehensive volume is a valuable resource for all students and scholars of the Renaissance.

Part I

Disciplines and boundaries

1

The ‘economic’ thought of the Renaissance

Germano Maifreda

Recent decades have witnessed a substantial number of studies investigating the historical processes by which fields of knowledge such as economics came to claim status as a separate discipline, and how single sciences began to define and organize their own field of specialization, vocabulary and methods of study. Although the idea of continual and patient progress of scientific knowledge has been overturned by historians of science following Thomas Kuhn’s famed Structure of Scientific Revolutions, most economists still think that this was not the case in terms of their field.¹ As a consequence, according to the traditional approach to the history of economic thought, modern economic science originates from a theoretical revolution that occurred roughly in the second half of the eighteenth century; an epoch of ‘first great theoretical revolution’, as for example Ernesto Screpanti and Stefano Zamagni put it, ‘of great breaks with tradition … and reached its climax with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations’. ² Consequently, the theoretical and methodological innovations that were introduced in the period of transition to classical political economy by figures such as Petty, Hume, Galiani, Beccaria, Verri, Steuart, Anderson, Condillac, Mirabeau, Quesnay, Turgot and the whole physiocratic movement, have been well researched and described in general reference texts.

Nevertheless, the conventional approach to the history of economic thought has recently been called into question. Material, social and cultural contexts have become more central in the historical reconstructions, producing important studies specifically dedicated to the paths of construction of economic knowledge before the eighteenth century. With a few notable exceptions, such studies dwell too much upon the central years of the eighteenth century, underestimating the early modern cultural context.³ Inquiries into economic knowledge during the Renaissance and early modern age have often implicitly been based on assumptions that are not entirely satisfactory. They are founded on the idea that there was a basic theoretic flimsiness with regard to economic information by contemporaries (before ‘classical’ formulations) or that information was extremely specific, and therefore incapable of generalization both in terms of later developments and in comparison with other fields of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All this makes it difficult for economic historians, historians of economic thought, political or social historians and even historians of science to discuss their ideas and experiences usefully.⁴

The relationship between Renaissance economic knowledge and the political-economic science which took shape between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries may best be defined, in Michel Foucault’s terms, as ‘archaeological’. Just as someone uncovering the remains of a Roman basilica below a Christian cathedral is led to examine the nature of the basilica, the reader of this chapter is directed back to a historical period in which the topos of what would become political economy slowly took on the visible traits of objects of study and observation.⁵ I do not think it is rewarding today to go back in time to reconstruct a sort of continuity of economic discourse that hypothetically fell by the wayside and was forgotten. We should instead make a strenuous effort to maintain the discontinuity and the culturally fragmentary nature of the dispersion, which is historically more convincing and helpful in understanding ‘why economists think as they do’.⁶

Although admitting that humanism was not specifically scientific, historians have given several reasons why humanistic Renaissance culture constitutes an essential prerequisite for the genesis of the seventeenth-century methodological revolution that permeates the ambitions of economists to be, in turn, ‘scientists’. First of all, humanism was sceptical of pre-rational forms of knowledge deriving from the Middle Ages and had a positive attitude towards technology and innovation. Second, it accepted a model of debate that was internally coherent and suspicious of simple deduction from auctoritates (authority). Thanks to the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century redefinition of the nature and function of dialectics as a logical and rhetorical device through which knowledge affirms itself as discursive research and inter-subjective confrontation, the construction of Western knowledge spread outside of the medieval university and into the new urban society.⁷

Renaissance Neoplatonism and the construction of an economic rationality

This section briefly illuminates aspects of the Italian Platonic revival (fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries). It emphasizes the importance of the Platonic heritage through the analysis of conceptual repertoires deployed by humanists and philosophers to express their theories of economic life that would later develop into classical and post-classical theories of political economy.

We know that Renaissance Platonism was not just a hermetic and religious/mystical movement that masterfully emerged in the studies of Frances Yates; nevertheless, it is still primarily studied from strictly philosophical, religious and esoteric points of view.⁸ In the last few decades, scholars have however shown that Platonism played an important role in the development of early modern political knowledge and practices, radiating from fifteenth-century Florence. Plato and his ancient followers were employed also by the Italian ruling elite to support the idea of the necessity of aristocratic government. What has been defined as ‘Plato’s functionalism’ was employed by the Medici in order to give support to the idea of a necessary government of feudal aristocrats as well as guild-based communes.⁹

Eugenio Garin has argued that the reception of Plato in the early Renaissance should be seen as occurring in two stages, each of which reflects a political situation. The earlier phase was characterized by a fascination with the ‘rational city’ as laid out in the Republic, and lasted roughly from Petrarch to Bruni, when Florentine society was still relatively open, owing to free communal institutions. As is well known, the state in the Republic assures political stability by assigning a social task to all its components, following each one’s natural disposition. Oligarchy and democracies are dismissed as inferior forms of government, leading to tyranny. In the second stage of Plato’s reception, lasting from the Council of Florence (1438–39) until the end of the century, the Medici regime replaced the free civic life of the past with an artificial court life, reducing the intellectuals to political dependency. This was the age of the revival of Plato as theologian. Garin’s model, criticized as monofactorial, is useful in order to remind us of the institutional and political context in which the Florentine rediscovery of Plato took place.¹⁰

Cosimo de’ Medici, the first de facto ruler of the dynasty, commissioned Marsilio Ficino to complete the translation of Plato’s opus, which was concluded after his death in 1484–85. This edition was followed by Venetian editions in 1491, 1517 and 1581, Basel editions in 1546, 1551 and 1561, and a Lyons edition in 1550. The year 1492 also saw Ficino’s Latin translation of Plotinus’ Enneads, financed by Lorenzo il Magnifico, which had been completely unknown to Western European culture. Both Plato and Plotinus were translated from Greek books bought by Cosimo in 1441, and made fully available to Ficino in 1462.¹¹ A decisive role in inducing Cosimo to commission the translation of Plato’s work was his meeting with the Byzantine philosopher Gemistus Pletho at the Council of Florence in 1439.¹² Gemistus not only started teaching Strabo’s geography to the Western public, but he also popularized Platonic philosophy in Florence. Pletho had a practical and inductive approach to politics, which is reflected in the Mémoires he wrote for Prince Theodore Palaeologus and in his treatise On Laws. In the latter, he argued that laws standing out as identical throughout the diverse legislative systems of the world represented eternal principles of reason of Platonic ideas.¹³

Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Platonic ideas were widely transmitted in Florence and abroad not only through books (‘without books, nothing could be done’, observed Vespasiano da Bisticci in his Vite ¹⁴), but also thanks to the university teaching of scholars such as Carlo Marsuppini, a great admirer of Pletho, and to public oratory, church ceremonies, sermons to lay confraternities and popular religious plays. It is often forgotten that Ficino himself was a priest, and was responsible for three parishes, writing and preaching sermons both in Latin and in the Tuscan vernacular.¹⁵

The growing power of the Medici in Florence, and their threat to its political and judicial institutions, was therefore a fundamental prerequisite for the rediscovery of Plato and for the development of Platonism in the early modern period. Paradoxically, Platonism gave philosophical legitimacy to the transference of power to a professional Medicean elite, despite the fact that Plato was a critic of wealth. Plato’s elitism, his ideas about professionalism of government, the philosopher-ruler and the division of labour supported the rise in Florence of an administrative class of intendants and secretaries. As Alison Brown argues, ‘Plato’s influence is betrayed by exhortations to see the government in terms of its wisdom and flexibility, whereby men of ability would rule and allow others to protect the city and produce the necessaries of life.’¹⁶

We might add that Platonic inspiration led to the formulation of discourses on the ‘economy’ of the state, which were based on assumptions that were innovative in comparison to the medieval tradition. In fifteenth-century Florence, former political cultures, which were based on obedience to authority, were thus replaced with different, and frequently original, theories and practices regarding human intervention in the life of the community. Deepening those aspects would lead us to understand how the deductive method employed by Plato and the Neoplatonists (who find in such figures as Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino their most elegant expression) already established, during the fifteenth century, the foundations of a perception of what we now consider the ‘economy’ which was mechanical, model-forming and generalizable.

Several issues of intellectual discussion and political debate can be identified, over which there was disagreement between humanists, rulers and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: The Renaissance question
• Part I Disciplines and boundaries
• Part II Encounters and transformations
• Part III Society and environment
• Part IV Power and representation
• Further reading
• Index