Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T13:46:17.376Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The 2006 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture

A Postmodern Renaissance?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Randolph Starn
Randolph Starn*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The place of the Renaissance in historical narratives of modernity was problematic long before recent bouts of dismissal, denial, or indifference. However, the idea is a hardy survivor and the old phoenix is at it again. Has the Renaissance gained a new, postmodern lease on life? Plurality, discontinuity, and contingency are hallmarks of that protean, much-contested label and of current Renaissance studies, not to mention the Renaissance boom in pop culture. Is this a mirror reflecting only our own preconceptions or a window that discloses a Renaissance that was never convincingly modern in the first place? What are the implications, one way or another, for the present and future of Renaissance studies?

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

My thanks to The Renaissance Society of America’s Advisory Board for inviting me to deliver the Bennett Lecture and to Renaissance Quarterly Articles Editors Jeffrey Chipps Smith and Martin Elsky for encouraging me to publish it much as delivered at the Annual Meeting in San Francisco on 23 March 2006.

References

Alberti, Leon Battista. Momus. Ed. Virginia Brown and Sarah Knight. Trans. Sarah Knight. Cambridge, MA, 2003.Google Scholar
Aston, Trevor. ed Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660. New York, 1965.Google Scholar
Barbour, Richmond. Beyond Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge, 2003.Google Scholar
Baskins, Cristelle L. Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, 1998.Google Scholar
Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt: Vorträge in Basel und Princeton zum hundertsten Todestag. Ed. Andreas Cesana and Lionel Gossman. Basel, 2004.Google Scholar
Benedict, Philip. “Between Whig Traditions and New Histories: American Historical Writing about the Reformation and Early Modern Europe.” In Imagined Histories (1998), 295–323.Google Scholar
Bennett, Josephine Waters. “On the Causes of the Renaissance.” Renaissance News 2, no.1 (1949) : 4–6.Google Scholar
Bethencourt, Francisco. “European Expansion and a New Order of Knowledge.” In Renaissance World, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt. Berkeley, 1999.Google Scholar
Biernacki, Richard. “Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History.” In Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), 62–92.Google Scholar
Bonnell, Victoria E., and Lynn Hunt. “Introduction.” In Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), 1–34.Google Scholar
Bouwsma, William J. “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History.” In A Usable Past (1990a), 348–65.Google Scholar
Bouwsma, William J. “Renaissance and Reformation: An Essay in their Affinities and Connections.” In A Usable Past (1990b), 225–46.Google Scholar
Brewer, John and Hullmuth, Eckhart . Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany. Oxford, 1999.Google Scholar
Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford, 2002.Google Scholar
Broude, Norma, and Garrard, Mary, eds. Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism. Berkeley, 2005.Google Scholar
Brown, Bill, ed. Things. Chicago, 2004.Google Scholar
Bullen, J. B.. The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burckhardt, Jakob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. London, 1960.Google Scholar
Burke, Peter. “Renaissance Europe and the World.” In Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (2005), 52–70.Google Scholar
Burt, Richard. ed Shakespeare after Mass Media. New York, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Celenza, Christopher S.. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy. Baltimore, 2004.Google Scholar
Cesana, Andreas. “The New Burckhardt Edition, Basis and Intentions.” In Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt (2004), 357–71.Google Scholar
Chittolini, Giorgio. “The ’Private,’ the ’Public,’ the State.” In The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600, ed. Julius Kirshner, 34–61. Chicago, 1996.Google Scholar
Clark, G. N.. Early Modern Europe from about 1450 to about 1720. New York, 1957.Google Scholar
Clifford, James, and Marcus, George E.,eds, . Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, 1986.Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret, and Anne Higonnet. “Complex Culture.” In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (2004), 15–25.Google Scholar
Dandelet, Thomas. “An Imperial Renaissance.” In Renaissance World, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Darling, Linda T. “The Renaissance and the Middle East.” In A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. Guido Ruggiero, 55–69. Oxford, 2004.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds. New York, 2006.Google Scholar
Discimon, Robert, and Alain Guéry. “Un État des temps modernes?” In Histoire de France: L’état et les pouvoirs, ed. Jacques Le Goff, 183–356. Paris, 1989.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Wallace K.. The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Boston, 1948.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Wallace K. “The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis.” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951) : 483–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Wallace K.. Europe in Transition, 1300–1520. Boston, 1962.Google Scholar
Fiera, Battista. De Justicia Pingenda. Ed. and trans. James Wardrop. London, 1957.Google Scholar
Findlen, Paula, . ed Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York, 2004.Google Scholar
Fubini, Riccardo. “Origini e significato del ’Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien’ di Jacob Burckhardt.” In L’umanesimo italiano (2001a), 211–29.Google Scholar
Fubini, Riccardo. "Rinascimento Riscoperto? Studi Recenti su Jacob Burckhardt.” In L’umanesimo italiano (2001b), 239–65.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt, eds. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago, 2000.Google Scholar
Ganz, Peter. “Jacob Burckhardt and the Study of the Middle Ages.” In Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt (2004), 229–52.Google Scholar
Goffman, Daniel. “The Ottoman Empire and the Construction of Europe.” In Renaissance World, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H.. In Search of Cultural History: The Philip Maurice Deneke Lecture, 1967. Oxford, 1969.Google Scholar
Gossman, Lionel. Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas. Chicago, 2000.Google Scholar
Gossman, Lionel. “Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 3 (2002) : 538–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. 2 vols. Oxford, 1983–93.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton, 1990.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cambridge, MA, 1991.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. “Chronology and its Discontents in Renaissance Europe: The Vicissitudes of a Tradition.” In Time: Histories and Ethnographies, ed. Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann, 139–66. Ann Arbor, 1995.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Renaissance. New York, 2000.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago, 1980.Google Scholar
Grendler, Paul. The Renaissance in American Life. Westport, 2006.Google Scholar
Hampton, Timothy. Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France. Ithaca, 2001.Google Scholar
Halverson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago, 1992.Google Scholar
Heller, Thomas C., Morton Sosa, and David K. Wilber, eds. Reconstructing Individualism : Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford, 1986.Google Scholar
Hermann, Klaus. “Ludwig Geiger as Redactor of Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2003) : 377–400.Google Scholar
Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. Ithaca, 1996.Google Scholar
Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood. Princeton, 1998.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, 1991.Google Scholar
Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York, 1996.Google Scholar
Kaegi, Werner. Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie. 7 vols. Basel, 1947–82.Google Scholar
Kagan, Richard L. “Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain.” In Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, 73–99. Cambridge, 1995.Google Scholar
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. “Changing One’s Mind: Transformations in Reformation History from a Germanist’s Perspective.” Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2005) : 1011–27.Google Scholar
Klein, Julie Thompson. Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy. Albany, 2005.Google Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA, 1985.Google Scholar
Landauer, Carl. “Erwin Panofsky and the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1994) : 255–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA, 1993.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Terrence J., ed. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Leah S. “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies.” In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 41–63. New York, 1992.Google Scholar
Marino, John. “The Invention of Europe.” In Renaissance World, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Martin, John Jeffries. “Introduction — The Renaissance: Between Myth and History.” In The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad, ed. John Jeffries Martin, 1–23. New York, 2003.Google Scholar
Martin, John Jeffries. Myths of Renaissance Individualism. London, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, John Jeffries. “Religion.” In Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (2005), 193–209.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. “Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 102 (1987) : 281–91.10.2307/462476CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitzman, Arthur. Michelet, ou, la subversion du passé: Quatre leçons au Collège de France. Paris, 1999.Google Scholar
Molho, Anthony. “The Italian Renaissance: Made in the USA.” In Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, 263–94. Princeton, 1998.Google Scholar
Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago, 2006.Google Scholar
Muir, Edward. “The Italian Renaissance in America.” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (1995) : 1095–1110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Najemy, John M. “Politics and Political Thought.” In Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (2005), 270–97.Google Scholar
The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski. New York, 2004.Google Scholar
Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France, and Spain, 1400–1800. New Haven, 1995.Google Scholar
Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography. Ed. Jonathan Woolfson. London, 2005.Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. 1960. Reprint, New York, 1972.Google Scholar
Parker, Geoffrey. ed Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648. Oxford, 2001.Google Scholar
Parks, George B. “Other News and Communications.” Renaissance News 1, no. 1 (Spring 1948): 10–11.Google Scholar
Peterson, David. “Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2000) : 835–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomper, Philip. “The History and Theory of Empire.” History and Theory 44, no. 4 (2005) : 1–27.10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00340.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, Roy. ed Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. New York, 1997.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul, and William M. Sullivan, eds. Interpretive Social Science: A Reader. 1979. Rev. ed., Berkeley, 1987.Google Scholar
Renaissance World. Ed. John Jeffries Martin. New York, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Rorty, Richard. ed The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1992.Google Scholar
Rowen, Herbert H.. History of Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800. New York, 1960.Google Scholar
Rüsen, Jörn. “Jacob Burckhardt: Politi-scher Standpunkt und historische Einsicht an der Schwelle zur Post-moderne.” In Umgang mit Jacob Burckhardt: Zwölf Studien, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg, 101–16. Basel, 1994.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Vanessa R., and Jeannene M. Przyblyski. “Visual Culture’s History: Twenty-First Century Interdiscipli-narity and Its Nineteenth-Century Objects.” In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (2004), 3–14.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H., Jr. “The Concept(s) of Culture.” In Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), 35–61.Google Scholar
Shanahan, Daniel. Toward a Genealogy of Individualism. Amherst, 1992.Google Scholar
Sheehan, James J. “The German Renaissance in America.” In The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, 47–63. Florence, 2002.Google Scholar
Sigurdson, Richard. Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought. Toronto, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sim, Stuart. ed The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 2nd ed, New York, 2005.Google Scholar
Starn, Randolph. “The Early Modern Muddle.” Journal of Early Modern History 6, no. 3 (2002) : 296–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterk, Andrea. ed Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects. Notre Dame, 2002.Google Scholar
Strauss, Gerald. “Ideas of Reformatio and Renovatio from the Middle Ages to the Reformation.” In Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 2:11–30. Grand Rapids, 1996.Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century.” Representations 91 (2005) : 26–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Victor E., and Charles E. Winquist, eds. Postmodernism: Critical Concepts. 4 vols. New York, 1998.Google Scholar
The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Symposium. London, 1954.Google Scholar
L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini Rinascimentali-Critica Moderna. By Riccardo Fubini. Milan, 2001.Google Scholar
A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History. By William Bouwsma. Berkeley, 1990.Google Scholar
Veeser, H. Avram. The New Historicism. New York, 1989.Google Scholar
Wiesner, Merry E.. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2000.Google Scholar
Wilson, Michael L. “Visual Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (2004), 26–33.Google Scholar
Woolfson, Jonathan. “Burckhardt’s Ambivalent Renaissance.” In Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, 9–26.Google Scholar
Županov, Ines G.. Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries). Ann Arbor, 2005.10.3998/mpub.93538CrossRefGoogle Scholar