The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento, by Guido Ruggiero

Extract

This is the new ‘big book’ on the Italian Renaissance, and, as such, deserves to be taken seriously on the grounds of its overall vision, interpretation and scope. Its title invites comparison with Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). By calling his a social history as well as a cultural one, however, the author, Guido Ruggiero, distinguishes his work from the Swiss historian’s genre-busting classic. Like Burckhardt’s, Ruggiero’s Renaissance surges into the gap created in Italy by the medieval power struggle between Pope and Emperor. Unlike Burckhardt’s, this one is no spirit or ‘genius’ but the world view created by and for an ascendant and ambitious popolo grosso. Moreover, whereas Burckhardt (like the English language) was content to reuse Michelet’s French coinage for what he saw, warts and all, as a ‘civilization … the mother of our own’, Ruggiero differentiates a later European Renaissance from this first Italian Rinascimento, the fruit of a distinctly urban Italian civiltà. Told through roughly chronological but nominally thematic chapters, the expansion, evolution and decline of both world view and world from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries form the subject of this book.