Bookwatch: Renaissance Italy

Renaissance Italy
Robert Hole
Hodder & Stoughton, 1998
136 pp, £6.50
ISBN 0 340 70136 6

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of this book is its capacity to engage. It deals with the contexts of cultural change historiography, economic, social, political and religious life – and then moves to the subject of humanism, before discussing the arts, concluding with a re-evaluation of the relationship between Renaissance Italy and modern world. The author assiduously follows the template set down by the series editor in the enormously helpful 'Study Guides', including a set of exercises, at the end of each chapter. Meticulous cross-referencing and the encouragement to re-read part of one chapter or perhaps skim through the whole of another will be enormously useful. In this way, students – both at school and at university – are encouraged not to read a history book as they would a novel: i.e. as a narrative from cover to cover. Moreover, with regard to content, the freshness of the author's approach provides an unselfconscious introduction to the methodology of cultural history. The chapter on "Renaissance Man and the Real World' is especially impressive in this regard. It points to the ambition of Renaissance ideals, which perhaps – at least prior to the Machiavellian revolution – induced a loss of touch with reality. Thus the neo-platonic guest for the sublime resonates with the catastrophes that overtook the peninsula after the French invasion of 1494. In the chapter on art itself, Dr Hole emphasises the sheer quantity of output, and this in turn sets the reader thinking about the changing quality of material life and of domestic surroundings that the Renaissance generated. There was also a valuable chapter dealing with the family, which provides a well-defined social backdrop.

However the connection that the author makes between economic life and cultural activity may strike some as both controversial and only a slight variation on a rather old-fashioned theme. Thus, the Renaissance was a 'capitalist not a feudal phenomenon' (p.5). 'Florence was at the centre of the ‘capitalist, urban and international economy which Renaissance Italy initiated’ (p.14). Perhaps, yet one wonders why the Renaissance developed most spectacularly after about 1400 – when urban prosperity did not flourish as it had in the earlier fourteenth century. There is a characteristically lucid assertion of the need to for the student to concentrate on ‘the few urban money-makers’ (p.18). However, if the Renaissance can be linked with the ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’, it is, to say the least, paradoxical that princely courts became centres of cultural activity, a process that some have referred to as ‘refeudalisation’. It is bold to argue that Filippino Lippi’s ‘lively brushstrokes’ reflect ‘the energy and enthusiasm with which merchants pursued profit’ (p.16), but the connection will not convince everyone. Yet the phrase provokes argument, and the final assessment of how far it was possible to reconcile Christian culture with the pagan classical past is sensitive and many-sided. The book is to be applauded as a masterpiece of compression and recommended as a stimulus to find out more.

Richard Mackenney is Reader in Early Modern European History, University of Edinburgh.