The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
Hale, John
THE CIVILIZATION OF EUROPE IN THE RENAISSANCE John Hale Atheneum / 648 pages / $35 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA / f I say "the Renaissance," you may think of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel...
...There is nothing obtrusively theoretical here...
...whereas the political philosopher Justus Lipsius, "one of the most influential if not one of the most profound minds of the Renaissance," rates six pages for his role in the revival of Stoicism...
...The interconnections among nations, and among the various categories of human experience that historians investigate, are the fibers that hold Hale's story together...
...More than four pages on prostitution, largely from the prostitute's point of view, is a tribute to the influence of women's history...
...The diffusion of Italian culture during the period 1450-1620 (e.g., "the Renaissance in Spain"), and the localized outbreaks of creativity at the same time ("the Spanish Renaissance") were distinct but related events...
...The Taming of Nature" treats the history of science, but also includes landscape painting and pastoral literature...
...Nation," like "Europe," was a concept that emerged in the sixteenth century...
...No doubt The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance will become a staple of college intro courses, where it will fill a long conspicuous gap...
...for those who sought it, extramarital sex became more furtive and animalistic and less companionable, less holiday-like, no longer a more-or-less taken for granted rite of passage from adolescence to manhood...
...The term derives from rinascita, used by Giorgio Vasari in 1550, and was established as the name of the historical period in Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860...
...In the years since, we have come to speak of the Renaissance as an international movement, yet to most of us, "the revival of Classical culture" does not adequately express the zeitgeist of Elizabethan England or Martin Luther's Germany...
...Hale presumes a familiarity with the brightest luminaries (a presumption that will send many readers, shamefaced, to the encyclopedia...
...H ale's style is marked by restraint...
...Thomas More...
...Hale's definition of the Renaissance is generous enough to include Portugal's eccentric, extravagant Manueline architecture of the early 1500s, a stew of late-Gothic and Islamic ingredients that owed little to Italy and whose "export elsewhere was out of the question...
...Yet his perspective reveals unsuspected and sometimes startling contiguities that enrich our view of the entire field...
...Machiavelli and Montaigne are frequent-ly quoted, and yet they never get the spotlight...
...The voices of those neither famous nor powerful give depth to the story, but they do not predominate—only natural, since their traces survive in minuscule amounts compared to the writings by and about the era's great personalities...
...The supreme beauty of a book brimming with piquant and poignant details (and some 200 illustrations) is its organization, both impressively original and seemingly quite natural, into three parts and ten chapters with abstract titles such as "Traffic" and "Civility...
...Sir John Hale, Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor of Italian History at University College, London, has capped a distinguished career—he suffered a severe stroke a month after finishing the manuscript—with this sequel to Burckhardt, in which he means to define and explain the Renaissance as a pan-European phenomenon...
...Ronsard and his fellow Pleiade poets affirmed and expanded the potential of the French vernacular...
...Hale's lessons have the transparency that is the mark of a true teacher...
...offended against Italian decorum...
...Curiously, Shakespeare is the occasion of two errors in a work where errors are scarce...
...Italian ideas and accomplishments in art, architecture, literature, politics, and other fields were mimicked and absorbed from Hungary to Sweden...
...His narrative is alive with credible, sympathetic people of all kinds and conditions: a nine-year-old girl and her guardian molester, banished and hanged respectively by the authorities of their French town...
...and Dtirer, whose engravings and paintings unnerved Vasari with their psychological intensity, constitute the glory of the German Renaissance...
...Cranach and Grunwald, whose earthy paintings Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in Madrid...
...None of this seems contrived, and only very occasionally do the transitions feel a bit jerky, as when the great patroness of the arts Isabella d'Este The American Spectator November 1994 77 serves as a topical bridge between the art market and the economic status of women...
...But this is one of Hale's outstanding qualities...
...these schemes were marked by "a heartless prying into private lives" and a "ruthless planning zeal" that entailed eugenics, euthanasia, and thought control...
...When he does occasionally make his opinions pointedly clear, the effect is arresting, particularly when the opinion defies our expectations or the current wisdom...
...merchants and their wives bearing themselves with varying degrees of pride in portraits by van Eyck, Massys, and Darer...
...THE CIVILIZATION OF EUROPE IN THE RENAISSANCE John Hale Atheneum / 648 pages / $35 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA / f I say "the Renaissance," you may think of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling or Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man or a Raphael Madonna, but in any case you will think of Italy...
...twenty years ago such a book would have told this story very differently, if at all...
...Yet the conclusion is likely to make most feminists uneasy: After the Reformation, Protestant countries tried to abolish sex for pay, with the consequence that for the purveyors, unless they found rich protectors, life became more harassed and degrading...
...That it was recently a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club is even better news: the popular appetite for history is perennial, but the diet has always been variable...
...Under the rubric "The Control of Man" appear both the Inquisition and the cult of manners...
...Shakespeare, whom the Englishman Hale invokes on virtually every subject, gets more than two pages to himself, but that is as the embodiment of Elizabethan drama, which Hale considers the apogee of the English Renaissance...
...Moreover, although he declares it his intention "to provide a guidebook for time-travellers," this book is more like a map, accurately and significantly detailed, than a Baedeker, with blurbs on the main attractions...
...Whether 500 years ago or today, a distinguished humanist is not necessarily distinguished for his humanity...
...a German carpenter playing Emily Post as he exhorts his peers not to make pigs of themselves at the table...
...It is Hale's alertness to the position and fate of the individual—whose development Burckhardt identified as a crucial achievement of the period—that immunizes him to the appeal of Utopias, even that of the thinker who coined the word, St...
...This intricate network is so well constructed that its contents neither collapse into muddled generalization nor disintegrate into a grab bag of diverting facts and anecdotes...
...Yet the contributions posterity has come to treasure most were deeply rooted in the native soil of particular countries...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
