The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance

Around fifteen years ago, Christopher Celenza issued a manifesto. In The Lost Italian Renaissance (2004), he called for a re-animation of Italian Renaissance intellectual history—academically marginalised by disciplinary divisions and by the progress of social and cultural history—through a recovery of the Latin literature in which Italian thinkers of the long fifteenth century primarily made their unique, important and overlooked contributions. The years since Celenza’s call have witnessed a notable expansion in the number of available editions and in the amount and density of scholarship on Renaissance and Neo-Latin literature, much to the benefit of social and cultural historians; but the field has been admittedly less quick to take on board his insistence on the importance of these texts within a broader history of western thought. The book presently under review can be read as his own response. Celenza’s vision of the intellectual world of the Italian Renaissance and its import is distinctive. Although the protagonists are, by and large, humanists, humanism per se, either as an educational programme or as conduit for the impact of the revival of antiquity on culture and society, is implicitly given a reduced significance. Indeed, the significance of the Italian Renaissance in Celenza’s presentation is found less in its place in an intellectual genealogy (though it sometimes had later, largely unanticipated effects), than in its own inherent interest. This body of thought has been so often overlooked by intellectual historians, Celenza argues, in large part because of its particular social embeddedness. The word ‘premodern’ is employed regularly as a marker of the society and thought-world that intellectuals inhabited, and as a reminder of the difference in values and preoccupations that separate us from them

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