The Renaissance – as the name of a cultural movement and a period – enjoys the still-lasting distinction of self-creation. Not since Athena sprang full-grown from the forehead of Zeus (or Sin from Lucifer's, in Milton's version) has an epoch so self-consciously defined itself, along with and against the preceding one, for all posterity. The humanists' cultural self-flattery was of course expanded and intensified in the later nineteenth century by Jakob Burckhardt, whose particular praises of the artistic, idealistic, and individualistic energies of the period continue to command allegiance and stimulate debate today. Most periods are obliged to make do with what posterity makes of them – no contemporaneous residents ever labelled themselves ‘antique’, or ‘medieval’ – or get designated merely by the decimal tyranny of the calendar (the Mauve Decade; the twelfth century) or by the dynastic accident of a long reign (Victorian England; Carolingian France). Other periods may try to name themselves, as our own seeks to call itself ‘postmodern’, only to produce continual dispute over the contents of the label, and the additional irony that its inventor (Jean-François Lyotard) did not use it as an exclusive ‘period’ designation.

But no such disputation or irony ever seemed to afflict the earlier generation of Italian humanists (from Petrarch through Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati to Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla) who decided that they were the midwives of the ‘rebirth’ of a classical culture incontestably superior to that of their own time and place. In their manifold efforts to make this culture live again, in literature, education, and politics, these writers disputed mainly with each other.