Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While many of the critical judgments expressed in Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1958) have not survived in the more rigorous and specialized environment for scholarship of the past several decades, at least one of his observations seems to have remained uncontested: that the Italian Renaissance witnessed the birth of a distinctly modern spirit of “wit and satire” ( Burckhardt 1958 : 1.163–82). The production of satirical writing in Italy from roughly the middle of the fifteenth century onwards attests to its popularity in increasingly literate urban milieux, where literature that focused on the contemporary scene (as all satire does) probably held the same level of interest for the consuming public that modern journalism holds today. The use of satire as a genre for the expression of social dissensus and, perhaps most interestingly, its potential as a form of writing that could be flexible, experimental, and even avant-garde, made it an especially appealing form for those who appreciated strong opinions, whether progressive or reactionary, and who found those opinions more easily digestible when spiced with humor, ridicule, or even abuse. And while another of Burckhardt's observations — his thesis concerning the birth of “the individual” in the Italian Renaissance — has been repudiated by many recent historians of culture, we would do well to ... log in or subscribe to read full text