REFLECTIONS ON THE RENAISSANCE

Thorndike, Lynn

Reflections on The Renaissance THE RENAISSANCE: Its Nature and Origins, by George Clarke Sellery. University of Wisconsin Press. 296 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Lynn Thorndike THIS attractive little...

...With reference to the footnote on p. 179 that there is more of Duhem's Le systeme du monde awaiting publication, I have it on good French authority that this common American impression is a mistaken one...
...Sellery writes in order to correct the traditional conception of the Renaissance, he still believes in a renaissance, but holds that "the revived knowledge of antiquity cannot have been the creative force which ushered in modernity...
...I wonder if he feels the same about the change from reading to radio and movies...
...Reviewed by Lynn Thorndike THIS attractive little volume is clearly and interestingly written, beautifully printed, and picturesquely illustrated...
...He well concludes his treatment of Dante by saying: One thing remains to be said...
...And that he spends some 10 pages on the quarrel between the papacy and Philip IV, but never says a word of the epoch-making Black Death of 1348...
...Sellery thinks that the change from Latin to the vernacular was a great boon and mark of modern progress...
...In my opinion, he still limits himself too much, although he has broken away somewhat, to the old familiar round of men and topics that have been envisaged under it...
...Although Prof...
...Dante preceded the Revival of Learning...
...Prof...
...As a work presenting the reflections of ripe scholarship and extensive reading in a lucid and pleasing style and attractive form for the benefit of the general cultured reader, it deserves his perusal and thanks...
...These pen-pictures are grouped in topical chapter such as Government and Politics, The Victory of the Vernacular, History, and Philosophy...
...But the emphasis is decidedly upon individuals and, among these, upon writers and thinkers...
...Yet he has included Dante and devoted pages 35-36 and 50-59 to him...
...The book is to a large extent made up of a series of vignettes or pen-pictures of prominent personalities and mentalities of the period or movement under consideration: Pierre Dubois, Marsiglio of Padua, Machiavelli, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Villon, Pulci, Boi-ardo, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Froissart, Commines, Dino Compagni, Giovanni Vullani, Leonardo Bruno, Poggio, Flavio Biondo, Guicciardini, Aquinas, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Ficino (who is given 14 pages, far more than he deserves), Pico della Mir-andola, Lorenzo Valla, Reginald Pecock, Columbus, Copernicus...
...of Valla's title De false credita et ementita Constatini donatione, has been omitted, for it is important to realize that the work was in the form of oratory, not of scholarly, dispassionate, objective historical criticism, and Sellery himself speaks of "its bitter diatribes...
...It is unfortunate that at p. 200 the last word, Declamatio...
...And that, instead of a whole chapter on Education, we find only scattered passages such as the footnotes on pages 259 and 261...
...The present writer will have none of it...
...But it is not this that I object to so much as it is that, while he has chapters on Economics and on Government and Politics, he has none on social life and thought...
...What he did he did within the limits of the Middle Ages and of their relation to the ancient classics...
...There is also discussion of subjects, such as Economics, the struggle between the papacy and Philip IV of France, the Greek Renaissance, Fine Arts, Printing, and growth of science...
...To call him a precursor of a herald or a harbinger of that revival—-"the two-faced Dante" is to deck the Revival with stolen jewels and to confuse the issue...

Vol. 14 • November 1950 • No. 11


 
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