Customer Reviews

Renaissance Characters

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Renaissance Characters is a recent (1991) translation of an Italian text, L'uomo del Rinascimento, by an international assemblage of ten Renaissance scholars. The attempts to explain the main characteristics of the Renaissance through vignettes of various archetypical symbols of the Renaissance, from the Prince and the Condottiere to the Artist and the Explorer. Each vignette is written by a different contributor.

In general, this work is a fairly well-done example of the multi-authored collection common in historical studies. The quality of scholarship and eloquence is variable. Peter Burke's article on the Courtier is both well-written and was a mechanism for expressing the power of the state through courtly pageantry and display. Alberto Tenenti very ably demonstrates that the Renaissance merchant's pension for precision, order, and practicality had a significant (and essentially salutary) impact on Europe's cultural life, inspiring the rising scientist for a passion for exactitude, for instance. On the other hand, several essays suffer from presenting simplistic and sometimes poorly argued theses, of the "traditional scholarship has it all wrong" variety.

The essays lack any annoying preoccupation with technical jargon or obsession with dubious theoretical analyses. Nevertheless, the failure of the translator to render into English some quotations from Latin or the Romance languages can serve no purpose but to cloud the understanding of readers who cannot profess a mastery of the European family of languages.

The most severe problems with this work tend to be endemic with such collections of essays. There is virtually no attempt at any holistic unifying theme: the articles seem simply to have been collected together and published, without any attempt to inter-relate the Renaissance archetypes, or explain their importance for our understanding of the Renaissance, much less define what we really mean by the term "the Renaissance."

In addition, to reduce the Renaissance (both Italian and Northern) to 273 pages of text necessitates a cursory examination of the subject. For example, the almost breathless examination of the life of women in the Renaissance, by Margaret King, leaves the reader hungry for some flesh to be added to the mere skeletal outline she provides of her subject.

In conclusion, for those interested in a short work on the Renaissance which is nevertheless beyond the introductory level, I would recommend this work, with the limitations discussed above.