1. “A Later Level of the Italian Renaissance,” in Society & History in the Renaissance, A Report of a Conference Held at the Folger Library on April 23 & 24, 1960 (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1960), p. 50.

2. Bibliographical articles on the concept of “Renaissance” are available, but none of them cover the period of this study. See, for example, Henry S. Lucas, “The Renaissance: A Review of Some Views,” Catholic Historical Review 35 (1950): 377–407; Antonio Antelo Iglesias, “El concepto de renacimiento,” Bolivar (Bogota), 19 (1953): 637–59; Wallace K. Ferguson, “The Reinterpretation of the Renaissance,” in Facets of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1959), 1–18; and especially Fraco Simone, “‘Nuovi contributi alla storia del termine e del concerto di ‘Renaissance,’” Studi Francesi 2 (1958): 353–78, 3 (1959): 390–411.

3. Ferguson, The Renaissance (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), p. 8.

4. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 391.

5. Ferguson, “The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 486–88; also “The Church in a Changing World: A Contribution to the Interpretation of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review 59 (1953): 2.

6. Ibid. Italics mine. At a 1952 Metropolitan Museum of Art symposium he explained that the distinctiveness of the period consists in “the uneasy coexistence within it of medieval and modern elements, of decaying or obsolescent institutions and ways of thinking, together with new institutions and ideas still imperfectly formed.” “Toward the Modern State,” The Renaissance: A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953), reprinted in The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 4. Also see his 1956 Arensberg lecture, “The Interpretation of the Renaissance,” esp. p. 16. Ferguson’s interpretation has had many supporters in the past fifteen years, both conscious and unintentional. The most succinct summary of the “transitional” idea is Giorgio de Santillana’s observation that “All eras are of transition, but some are more transitional than most.” The Age of Adventure: The Renaissance Philosophers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 9.

7. Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 2.

8. Ibid., p. 19. Whereas Hay underrates the role of technology in the Renaissance and neglects the effects of geographical expansion and discovery, Sir George Clark, in his shorter Early Modern Europe from about 1450 to about 1720 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), emphasizes these as primary characteristics of the Renaissance.

9. Hay, The Renaissance, p. 14. See also his “Burckhardt’s ‘Renaissance’: 1860–1960,” History Today 10 (1960): 14–23. What really characterizes the modern world, he asserts there, is “technology, mass media of communication, and—as an idea or ideology universally accepted, if not universally applied—‘government of the people by the people,’” p. 23. Cf. Mario M. Rossi, “Note sulla modernita del Rinascimento,” Nuova Rivista Storica 34 (1950): 1–32.

10. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).

11. La Signorie, 1313–1559, 2 vols. (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1950).

12. Nino Valeri, L’Italia nell’età dei principati (Verona: Arnaldo Monda-dori, 1950), pp. 263–65. For a contrasting view of the early Renaissance, emphasizing its ruthlessness and cynicism, see Edmond-René Labande, L’Italie de la Renaissance: Duecento, Trecento, Quattrocento (Paris: Payot, 1954).

13. Hans Baron, “A Struggle for Liberty in the Renaissance: Florence, Venice, and Milan in the Early Quattrocento,” American Historical Review 58 (1953): 265–89, 544–70, quote p. 289. Two years later he published his closely reasoned and carefully documented capstone, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). On Baron’s monumental work see Gennaro Sasso, “Florentina libertas e Rinascimento italiano nell’ opera di Hans Baron,” Rivista Storica Italiano 69 (1957): 250–76: and G. Radetti, “Le origini dell’umanesimo civile fiorentino nel Quattrocento,” Giornale Citrica di Filosofia Italiana 38 (1959): 98–122.

14. Baron, “Burckhardt’s ‘Civilization of the Renaissance’ a Century after Its Publication,” Renaissance News, 13 (1960), 207–22, esp. pp. 221–22.

15. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 11–12.

16. Mattingly, “Changing Attitudes towards the State During the Renaissance,” Facets of the Renaissance, pp. 19–40.

17. Mattingly, “Some Revisions of the Political History of the Renaissance,” in Tinsley Helton (ed.), The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of the Theories and Interpretations of the Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 11. On that University of Wisconsin symposium see Riccardo Fubini, “Un recente convegno sul Rinascimento a cent’anni dalla pubblicazione dell’opera di Jacob Burckhardt,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 25 (1963), 408–26.

18. This view was recently emphasized in an article by D. Maland, in which he outlined the ways urban life had caused changes in the social patterns which in turn gave birth to the cultural Renaissance. “The Italian Renaissance: A Problem of Interpretation,” History, 44 (1959), 115–23.

19. David L. Hicks, “Sienese Society in the Renaissance,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1960), 412.

20. “The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance,” Journal of Modern History, 22 (1950), 1–20, reprinted in his Reappraisals in History (London: Longmans, 1961), pp. 45–70.

21. J. Russell Major, “The Renaissance Monarchy: A Contribution to the Periodization of History,” Emory University Quarterly, 13 (1957), 112–24.

22. Major, “The French Renaissance Monarchy as Seen through the Estates General,” Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 114. This thesis is further developed in his Representative Institutions in Renaissance France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), esp. chap. 1. Cf. also his “The Crown and the Aristocracy in Renaissance France,” American Historical Review 69 (1964): 631–45. In 1956 the great Italian scholar Frederico Chabod pointed out several of these characteristics of the Renaissance state, such as personalism and dynasticism, but placed more importance than does Major on the strength and loyalty of the bureaucracy. “Y a-t-il un état de la Renaissance?” Actes du Colloque sur la Renaissance (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958), pp. 57–74.

23. Michael Postan, “Rapport: Histoire èconomique, Moyen Age,” IXe Congres International des Sciences Historiques (Paris: A. Colin, 1950), 1:225–41, 2:110–14. See also E. Perroy, “Its crises du XIVe siècle,” Annales 4 (1949); Corrado Barbagallo, “La crisi economico-sociale dell’Italia della Rinascimento,” Nuova Rivista Storica 4 (1950): 389–411, 5 (1951): 1–38; and especially Enrico Fiume, “Fioritura e decadenza dell’economia fiorentina,” Archivio Storico Italiano 115 (1957): 385–439; 116 (1958): 443–510; 117 (1959): 427–502.

24. “Some Economic Evidence of Declining Population in the Late Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., 2 (1950): 221–46. “The Trade of Medieval Europe: the North,” The Cambridge Economic History, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1952), 191–216. Cf. W. C. Robinson, “Money, Population, and Economic Change in Late Medieval Europe,” The Economic History Review 12 (1959): 63–82; and most recently, Emil Lucki, History of the Renaissance: Book I, Economy and Society (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1963).

25. R. S. Lopez, “Hard Times and Investment in Culture,” The Renaissance: A Symposium, pp. 19–34. Cf. also R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., 14 (1962): 408–26. In 1960, Ferguson wrote that the economic depression, which he was finally ready to concede, actually accelerated the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. As a result, the wealth that remained became concentrated in fewer hands than before, thereby making the cultural revival possible. “Recent Trends in the Economic Historiography of the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1960): 7–26.

26. Armando Sapori, “Il problema economica,” Il Rinascimento, significato e limiti. Atti del III convegno internazionale sul Rinascimento (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1953), pp. 107–32.

27. Sapori, “Moyen Age et Renaissance vus d’Italie. Pour un remainiement des périodes historiques,” Annales 11 (1956): 433–57; and in a slightly revised form a year later in “Medioevo e Rinascimento: Spunti per una diversa periodizzazione,” Archivio Storico Italiano 115 (1957): 135–64. Cf. Delio Cantimori, “Il problema rinascimentale proposto da Armando Sapori,” Studi in onore de Armando Sapori (Milan: Cisalpino, 1957), 2:935–47, and in Studi de storia (Florence: Giulio Einaudi, 1959), 361–78; Nino Valeri, “La polemica sul Rinascimento nell’opera di Armando Sapori,” Nuova Rivista Storica 46 (1963): 187–94; and E. F. Jacob, “La periodizzazione dell’eta del Rinascimento nella storia d’Italia e in quella d’Europa,” X Congresso Internazionale de Scienze Storiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 4:335–63.

28. Carlo M. Cipolla, “The Trends in Italian Economic History in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., 2 (1949): 182; also his Storia de Milano (Milan: Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri, 1957), and “Per la storia della terre della ‘bassa’ Lombarda,” in Studi in onor e di Armando Sapori, 1:655 ff. Douglas Dowd follows Cipolla in showing that, in Lombardy at least, agriculture experienced a revival in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. “The Economic Expansion of Lombardy, 1300–1500,” Journal of Economic History 21 (1961): 143–60. M. Mollat points out that there was enormous regional variation in Renaissance economy but on the whole Europe witnessed a definite revival and expansion from the middle of the fifteenth century on, and in Italy it began earlier. “Y a-t-il une économie de la Renaissance?” Acres du colloque sur la Renaissance (Paris, 1958), pp. 37–48.

29. Atti del X Congresso Internazionale (Rome, 1955), pp. 395–96. “Peut-onconsiderer le XIVe et le XVe siècles comme l’époque de la décadence de l’économie européenne?” Studi in onore di Armando Sapori, pp. 551–70.

30. Gino Luzzatto, An Economic History of Italy from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 142–43. The articles appearing in the third volume of The Cambridge Economic History (1963) show a notable change in tone from those published eleven years earlier. Raymond de Roover, Edward Miller, and Carlo Cipolla all emphasize the regional variations in economic conditions, but seem to agree that Italy retained its economic preeminence throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Also cf. Raymond de Roover’s recent masterpiece, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

31. See William J. Bouwsma, The Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism (Washington, D.C.: Service Center for Teachers of History, 1959) on post-Burckhardtian interpretations, and also Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Studies in Renaissance Humanism during the Last Twenty Years,” Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 7–30.

32. For the period of this study, see Toffanin’s L’uorno antico nel pensiero del Rinascimento (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1957), in which he continues, as in his earlier Storia dell’Umanesimo, to interpret humanism not as a revival of classical paganism but as the expansion of Catholic spirituality. Also see his essay in Il mondo antico nel Rinascimento, Atti del V Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1958), pp. 19–38, and most recently in his Ultimi Saggi (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1960), esp. pp. 195–214. For the more Burckhardtian approach of Saitta, see Il pensiero italiano nell’umanesimo e nel Rinascimento, 3 vols. (Bologna: Cesare Zuffi, 1949–51; new edition, Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1961).

33. Dal medioevo al Rinascimento (Florence: Sansoni, 1950); L’Umanesimo italiano: filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1952); Medioevo e Rinascimento: Studi e ricerche (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1954); and La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1961).

34. See Arturo Beccari, “Interpretazioni del Rinascimento,” Humanitas (Revista Mensile di Cultura), 10 (1955): 29–37, on Garin’s work; and Nicola Abbagnano, “The Italian Renaissance Humanism,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 7, no. 2 (1962): 269–82.

35. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 1:vii. In a closely related study published in the same year, Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), Baron makes a systematic review of the sources upon which he has constructed The Crisis.

36. Wallace K. Ferguson, “The Interpretation of Italian Humanism: The Contribution of Hans Baron,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 14–25.

37. Hans Baron, “Moot Problems of Renaissance Interpretation: An Answer to Wallace K. Ferguson,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 26–34. For a very penetrating elaboration of this idea, along with a sketch of the decline of civic humanism in the second half of the century, see Lauro Martines’ outstanding The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

38. Paul O. Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 3–4.

39. Kristeller, “Humanist Learning in the Italian Renaissance,” Centennial Review of Arts and Science 4 (1960): 243–66. Cf. Ferguson’s “The Revival of Classical Antiquity or the First Century of Humanism: A Reappraisal,” Report of the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting (1957), pp. 13–20.

40. Kristeller, “Changing Views of the Intellectual History of the Renaissance since Jacob Burckhardt,” in Helton, The Renaissance, p. 28. Cf. the useful collection of many of Kristeller’s essays in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956), and the similar interpretations of B. L. Ullman in Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955); see also Ullman’s The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua: Antenore, 1963).

41. Kristeller, “Changing Views,” pp. 40–43, and “Renaissance Platonism,” Faces of the Renaissance, pp. 104–5. Kristeller’s colleague at Columbia University, however, John Herman Randall Jr. sees humanism as a religious movement resisting the Aristotelian naturalism of the Middle Ages. The Career of Philosophy, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 49 ff. Similarly, George Clarke Sellery disparages the humanists as “Ivory tower grammarians,” who “cannot have been the creative force which ushered in Modernity,” The Renaissance: Its Nature and Origins (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1950), p. 257. Cf. Emil Lucki’s related, but more thorough and balanced judgment in History of the Renaissance: Book III, Education, Learning, and Thought. The most direct attack on Kristeller’s view has come from Giocchino Paparelli, who boldly equates “humanism” with “Renaissance,” thereby contradicting Kristeller’s distinction between the literary humanist movement and the later philosophical Renaissance. Giocchino Paparelli, Feritas humanitas divinitas, le components dell’umanesimo (Messina-Firenze, 1960). See the review of Paparelli in Nicolas Perella, “Humanism and the Spirit of the Renaissance,” Italica 40 (1963): 132–43.

42. Hiram Haydn, The Counter Renaissance (New York: Scribners, 1950), xiii.

43. Baird Whitlock, “The Counter-Renaissance,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 20 (1958): 441. Also see Eugenio Battisti’s recent and very detailed study of the same subject, L’antirinascimento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962). Battisti’s outstanding work on sixteenth-century culture deserves much wider circulation among non-Italian readers but, unfortunately, has not yet been translated.

44. Whitlock, “The Counter-Renaissance,” p. 449. John L. Lievsay and H. G. Koenigsberger both agree that there was a sharp difference between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but do not accept the Haydn-Whitlock suggestion that it was a decline from the former to the latter. Lievsay maintains that the late sixteenth century was more important than any earlier period in Italian literature, especially in its influence on England. Soc. and Hist. in the Ren., pp. 49–56. Koenigsberger demonstrates that the apparently decadent Italian culture of the second half of the sixteenth century really represented a shift in emphasis and expression rather than a deterioration. “Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilization of Italy and Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Society, 5th Ser., 10 (1960): 1–18.

45. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Knopf, 1952; and Vintage Books, 1960). In this respect see also Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Priciples in the Age of Humanism (London: The Warburg Institute, 1952). Cf. B. L. Ullman, “Renaissance—the Word and the Underlying Concept,” Studies in Philology 49 (1952): 105–18; Frederick B. Artz, From the Renaissance to Romanticism: Trends in Style in Art, Literature, and Music, 1300–1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); and Ernest DeWald, Italian Painting 1200–1600 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961).

46. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960), p. 42.

47. See Franco Simone’s outstanding Il Rinascimento francese (Turin: Societa Editrice Internazionale, 1961), on the Renaissance attitude toward its time.

48. Renaissance and Renascences, p. 162. Panofsky further illustrated the almost autonomous nature of the Renaissance, equally separated from the Middle Ages and from the modern world, by the close association of art and science in the period, a phenomenon which from the seventeenth century on ceased to be true. “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the ‘Renaissance-Dämmerung,’” in The Renaissance: Six Essays, pp. 121–82.

49. J. H. Randall, Making of the Modern Mind, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), p. 212.

50. In Marshall Clagett (ed.), Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 33–65. This view is reflected in the increased interest in Leonardo da Vinci’s contributions to science. See, for example, Kenneth Clark, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Note on the Relation between His Science and His Art,” History Today 2 (1952): 301–13; George Sarton, Six Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), pp. 219–33; J. H. Randall, “The Place of Leonardo da Vinci in the Emergence of Modern Sciences,” Journal of the History of Ideas 14 (1953): 191–202; and Ivor B. Hart, The World of Leonardo da Vinci (Toronto: Nelson, 1961).

51. A. R. Hall. “The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution,” Clagett, Critical Problems, pp. 3–23.

52. George Sarton, “Science in the Renaissance,” in J. W. Thompson, et al., The Civilization of the Renaissance (New York: Ungar, 1929), p. 75.

53. Sarton, “The Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress during the Renaissance,” The Renaissance: Six Essays, p. 57. Also reprinted in Robert M. Palter (ed.), Toward Modern Science (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 2:3–24. Cf. Six Wings, 4. Harcourt Brown maintains, in “The Renaissance and Historians of Science,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1960): 27–42, that Sarton never really changed his position on Renaissance science; he merely became more interested in the human qualities of some of the Renaissance men, like Leonardo da Vinci. “But Sarton never to my knowledge withdrew his fundamental view that the so-called Renaissance was an episode between two creative ages, a period of preparation for the truly great seventeenth century,” p. 42.

54. Randall, The Career of Philosophy, p. 49. In somewhat the same light, see A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954); Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); and Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, new ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

55. Alistair Crombie also illustrates the trend of recent historians of science to look more favorably upon the Renaissance in direct proportion to its disassociation with humanism. Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science A.D. 400–1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), and Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). Paul Chauchard, L’humanisme et la science (Paris: Sped, 1961).

56. Robert Klein, “Les humanistes et la science,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 23 (1961): 7. Strangely enough, Jean Pelseneer, in “La Réforme du XVIe siècle a l’origine de la science moderne,” La Science au seizième siècle [Colloque International de Royaumont], (Paris: Hermann, 1960), pp. 153–65, sees the origin of modern science in the Reformation, particularly in the socially “outward” view of Protestantism.

57. The Rise of Modern Science (New York and London: Harper and Brothers; Collins, 1962), 2:13.

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