Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1300-1550

Writing a history of Renaissance Italy is a difficult task. Writing one for a series called the Short Oxford History of Italy—which aims to provide accounts of how ‘each period of Italy's history is currently being redefined’ and ‘rewritten’—compounds the difficulty. To the problem of conjuring complexity into brevity are joined the hazards of sequencing and readership. Is the volume well co-ordinated with preceding and following volumes in the series? How well does the volume work for the intended audience of those likely to pick up a short history? Here twelve authors, orchestrated by John Najemy, take up the challenge. Nine of the chapters fall into three themes: cultural (Black on education, Quillen on humanism, Muir on representations of power, Brown on crisis), social (Kirshner on family and marriage, Hughes on bodies and disease), and socio-political (Zorzi on the popolo, Kent on elites, Najemy on governments). These are supplemented by Franceschi on ‘work and wealth’ (friendly economic history), Peterson on religion and the church, and Abulafia on the south (a model of clarity and inclusiveness). Taken as a whole, these authors deliver surveys and summaries of high quality. Single chapters provide good introductions to their themes. Internally, the contributions are (mostly) well co-ordinated, with useful overlap between, for example, Zorzi on the popolo and Kent on elites. Mostly, too, the contributors write in an accessible way, for example translating names of Italian institutions, or explaining, as Abulafia does, that the Grand Seneschal of the kingdom of Naples was ‘in effect, prime minister’. Najemy's own chapter, on governments and governance, and Peterson's on the church and religion, stand out for their lively style. The volume also includes a date chart, five maps and nearly thirty pages of suggested further reading. All of these are likely to aid the ‘many readers’, as Najemy foresees, who ‘will come to these pages from an interest in the Renaissance’. While those readers might be perplexed at the absence of a chapter devoted to the visual arts, they will find references to painting scattered through many of the contributions (though sculpture and buildings are less well covered), as is appropriate in ‘a history of Italy in the ... Renaissance, not a history of the Renaissance’. What is slightly lost sight of, however, is the historiographical dimension. Some contributors seem to start off with good intentions, and make some reference to Burckhardt and to contrasting modern historiography; some make a serious effort to engage with the agenda of ‘redefinition’ and ‘rewriting’ (Franceschi and Abulafia, in particular); while others ignore this dimension altogether. The effort for inclusiveness—all parts of the peninsula and all types of regime—also comes under strain, as an implicit hierarchy of importance peeps through, with a number of pieces suffering from a recurrent ‘Florence-first’ approach. Whenever a general statement is substantiated, the first reference is to Florence, while places outside Florence come second. The repetition of this device can give the impression that the rest of the peninsula is being judged by a Florentine yardstick. This is reinforced by the occasional uncertainty, bordering on inaccuracy, which befalls some contributors when writing of developments outside Florence or Tuscany. Inclusiveness is also weakened by the absence of a chapter on the countryside, unlike the previous volume in this series; this is a decidedly urban history of Italy. Lastly, any readers who do read this book from cover to cover might be perplexed at some minor inconsistencies between the chapters. Was the number of sodomites convicted in Florence between 1432 and 1502 one thousand (thus Kent, p. 114) or three thousand (thus Najemy, p. 206)? Was the duke of Milan assassinated in 1476 by students who had read Sallust and wanted to imitate ancient Romans (thus Brown, p. 260), or by courtiers, one motivated by material loss and another by revenge (thus Muir, p. 243)? Why was early humanism a tool of the popolo in its challenge against the elite (thus Najemy, p. 10), but a humanist education c. 1400 a tool for the elite to ‘set itself apart from the middle and lower classes’ (thus Black, p. 29)? Perhaps these could be ironed out in a second edition, along with the error on p. 72 (‘due’ for ‘do’)

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