Renaissance and Renascences

For many centuries the history of Europe has been divided into three periods: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Era, the latter ushered in by the Italian Renaissance. This scheme determines the curricula of our colleges and universities; it underlies the organization of our museums and Learned Societies; it plays a part in our everyday speech and thought. No matter where the main incisions are made (as a rule Antiquity ends approximately with the 5th Century A. D. while the Modern Era begins somewhere around 1400 in Italy and somewhere around 1500 in the countries north of the Alps): we generally conceive of history in terms of those three periods and thereby accept the Italian Renaissance as a, quite literally, epoch-making event.

This system of periodization was, characteristically, evolved by the Renaissance itself, and it was summed up, about the middle of the 19th Century, by two great scholars, Jules Michelet of Paris and Jacob Burckhardt of Basle. However, their all-too-impressive characterization of the Renaissance as “the discovery of the world and of man”—apparently implying that the Middle Ages had not been aware of either—was bound to arouse opposition. Generations of scholars set out to prove what Michelet and Burckhardt had never seriously questioned: that the Italian Renaissance, howsoever defined, did not emerge like Athene from the head of Zeus. It was shown that innumerable tendencies, ideas, inventions and discoveries credited to the Modern Era had announced themselves in the Middle Ages; that, conversely, the Renaissance was connected with the Middle Ages by a thousand ties; and that the heritage of classical Antiquity had never been lost beyond recuperation. It was conceded that the threads of tradition had been very thin at times, but it was also realized that there had been vigorous revivals long before the “Medicean Age.” Thus the Italian Renaissance seemed to have lost its uniqueness; and in recent years, there has been a growing tendency to discard the idea of periodization altogether and to perceive nothing but continuity. “Human nature,” writes one of our most distinguished historians, “tends to remain much the same at all times” (which, however, does not prevent him from making a sharp distinction between what even he cannot help calling the Middle Ages and “distant Greece and Rome”).