Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

How is it possible to think about the European Renaissance at the turn of this new century and millennium? There are good reasons, old and new, to begin point-blank with hard questions. The Renaissance was already in question as a kind of necromancer's trick in the fifteenth century. At one time or another it has served as a self-promoting professional gambit for backward-looking humanists, a shifty marker for the beginning of modern times, a trophy in triumphalist scenarios of Western Civilization. These days the idea of the Renaissance easily falls subject to the criticism that such ideas suppress the diversity of real historical experience and that modernity in any case means breaking with the past, not bringing it back. Meanwhile, “European” has come into terminological troubles of its own with the slippage of boundaries eastward since the end of the Cold War, the surfacing of regional and ethnic differences, and the blurring economic and cultural effects of globalization. What, if any, are the alternatives to dismissal, denial, or indifference in thinking about a European Renaissance?The challenge is to admit the critiques where they are justified and to recognize that as a historical tag or a heuristic lever the idea of the Renaissance is not, after all, going to disappear anytime soon. Perhaps the most familiar response has been to downsize; that is, to reduce the Renaissance ... log in or subscribe to read full text