The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (Yale Intellectual History of the West Se) [Hardcover]

Professor William J. Bouwsma (Author)

Book Description

Series: Yale Intellectual History of the West Se | Publication Date: January 11, 2001

Historians have conventionally viewed intellectual and artistic achievement as a seamless progression in a single direction, with the Renaissance, as identified by Jacob Burckhardt, as the root and foundation of modern culture. But in this brilliant new analysis William Bouwsma rethinks the accepted view, arguing that while the Renaissance had a beginning and, unquestionably, a climax, it also had an ending.

Examining the careers of some of the greatest figures of the age -- Montaigne, Galileo, Jonson, Descartes, Hooker, Shakespeare, and Cervantes among many others -- Bouwsma perceives in their work a growing sense of doubt and anxiety about the modern world. He considers first those features of modern European culture generally associated with the traditional Renaissance, features which reached their climax in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But even as the movements of the Renaissance gathered strength, simultaneous impulses operated in a contrary direction. Bouwsma identifies a growing concern with personal identity, shifts in the interests of major thinkers, a decline in confidence about the future, and a heightening of anxiety.

Exploring the fluctuating and sometimes contradictory atmosphere in which Renaissance artists and thinkers operated, Bouwsma shows how the very liberation from old boundaries and modes of expression that characterized the Renaissance became itself increasingly stifling and destructive. By drawing attention to the waning of the Renaissance culture of freedom and creativity, Bouwsma offers a wholly new and intriguing interpretation of the place of the European Renaissance in modern culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Consciously mirroring the title of Johan Huizinga's classic The Waning of the Middle Ages, this welcome addition to the Yale Intellectual History of the West series deconstructs European culture in the age of Cervantes, Montaigne and Galileo. Moving easily across national and disciplinary boundaries, Bouwsma (professor emeritus, UC Berkeley) challenges the assumption that we are direct heirs to the Renaissance. He argues with stunning clarity that the period from 1550 to 1640 was a phase of complex ambivalence, doubt and retreat, and that anxiety stimulated both cultural change and spectacular creativity. Along with the continuing Renaissance drive to destroy old barriers to understanding and human fulfillment came a countervailing concern that freedom had become absurd in excess, as suffocating as the overripe fruit of late-medieval culture, famously described by Huizinga. The imagery of disease, misbirth and disorder became pervasive, while a propensity to melancholy was fashionable in some circles. (Like a number of features of Bouwsma's argument, this has interesting implications for our own modern crises and depressions.) Nothing, people felt, was quite what it seemed; expectation and hypocrisy obscured the deeper self. There was, in short, "a profound set of discontents released by the peculiar freedoms of Renaissance culture." Out of these anxieties a craving for order emerged: a compulsion to categorize, an insistence on social boundaries and a growing attraction for mathematical certainties. Bouwsma produces a masterful portrait of an era, one deserving to become as canonical as Huizinga; it will be increasingly difficult to teach or discuss the 16th century without it. 20 illus. not seen by PW. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A masterful portrait of an era, one deserving to become as canonical as Huizinga." -- Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (January 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300085370
• ISBN-13: 978-0300085372
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,463,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bacon and Montaigne Omelette, July 29, 2002

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Thomas J. Burns (Apopka, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (Yale Intellectual History of the West Se) (Hardcover)

It is William Bouwsma's thesis that the Renaissance was not the budding spring of the modern age, but an organic era with a beginning and an end. Curiously, the forces given birth at the beginning of the era proved to be so frightening that the Renaissance players rushed to euthanize them. The Renaissance did not wane so much as it was dismantled, like an errant atomic bomb, by scientists overawed by their invention.

Bouwsma examines sixteenth century European thought in piecemeal-philosophy, theology, politics, science, literature, the theater-and with Newtonian precision describes how the adventuresome Renaissance spirit smashed molds of dated thinking and psychological ordering. Then, in reaction to its own recklessness, the Renaissance mind either retreated to old certainties rehabilitated or domesticated its inventions into a more tranquil conventionality.

Historical essays of this sort can make for delightful reading. Boorstin's "The Discoverers," for example, captures both the specificity and the poetry of scientific history. Bouwsma, unfortunately, errs on the side of specificity. The flow of the work reminds one of a lengthy receiving line where every great thinker gets a handshake and a bon mot, but soon it is time to move on to the next guest. This is not to say that some of the guests don't mingle excessively. The author has a warm spot in his heart for Shakespeare, Sarpi, Jonson, Hobbes, Hooker, Galileo, and in particular Bacon and Montaigne, who pop up dozens of times in the narrative. Regrettably, "pop up" is exactly what they do, to provide proof texts and anecdotal spicing. The reader who is not intimately familiar with Bacon, for example, will not get a significant taste of his thought.

This is most unfortunate, because I believe Bouwsma has at least scratched the surface of an interesting concept: the Renaissance as psychological event. From our vantage point the Renaissance looms as an unmitigated liberation. Bouwsma, on the other hand, implies that for every man who felt liberated, another felt terrified. The great irony is that frequently these were one and the same man, that few intellectuals were so dense as not to feel some fear at the rending of the medieval synthesis. There is no shortage of great Renaissance men in this work, but only a glimmer of their ambiguity.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New and focused, February 21, 2009

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Dr. Anacleto Dias - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (Paperback)

The book is teh result of long study. Happily the ideas that we can read here are completely new. It worth's really the while...

11 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hapters consider the yearning for order, April 27, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (Yale Intellectual History of the West Se) (Hardcover)

Historians have viewed Western cultural achievement as a singular progression; William Bouwsma's Waning Of The Renaissance rethinks the view, arguing that the period from 1550-1640 was a phase of complex ambivalence which stimulated cultural change. Chapters consider the yearning for order, social and political discontents of the times, and the process of change.