Alexander Lee. Humanism and Empire

The Baron Thesis casts a long shadow: over sixty years after Hans Baron’s The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955) bundled classical scholarship and republican politics into “civic humanism,” the assumption that that link is somehow natural remains strong among scholars and students of premodern Italy. Baron’s argument rested on two premises: first, that a particular set of historical circumstances (the menacing of republican Florence by signorial Milan) prompted Florentines to a better appreciation of the classics, thereby initiating Renaissance humanism; and second, that early humanist thought was therefore ideologically committed to republican values and forms of government. While critics of Baron’s thesis (chief among them Ronald Witt) have effectively debunked the first premise, fewer efforts have addressed the second. Alexander Lee’s Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy thus provides a counterweight the field has long needed. Lee’s book details the intellectual engagement of early humanists with the Holy Roman Empire between 1260 and 1402—a time when interest in classical literary forms, ideas, and historical examples was growing across Italy, while imperial influence in Italy was simultaneously collapsing after the death of Frederick II and his heirs. Although Lee details the championing of particular emperors—Henry VII, Charles IV, Rupert of the Palatinate—by particular humanists, he is especially interested in how humanists thought more abstractly about the Roman Empire and imperial sovereignty. Part of the book’s value is therefore the expansiveness of its perspective as Lee considers the impact of humanistic political ideas all over northern Italy and across a time frame spanning the traditionally formulated “late Middle Ages” and “early Renaissance” (a division itself often drawn using the label of “humanist”). Most compelling, however, is the overwhelming evidence with which Lee documents the extent to which humanists of all stripes—not just Dante, who is often characterized as the lone monarchist in a crowd of republicans—were seriously committed to imperial sovereignty in northern Italy. The political currents of early humanist thought, therefore, are revealed as not exclusively or even chiefly republican leaning.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Early Modern Europe · Empire · Historiography · Humanism · Ideal (ethics) · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Roman Empire · Scholarship · Sovereignty · Theology · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies