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A Short History of the Italian Renaissance - Softcover

Bartlett, Kenneth R.

 
9781442600140: A Short History of the Italian Renaissance
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1442600144 ISBN 13: 9781442600140
Verlag: University of Toronto Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Award-winning lecturer Kenneth R. Bartlett applies his decades of experience teaching the Italian Renaissance to this beautifully illustrated overview. In his introductory Note to the Reader, Bartlett first explains why he chose Jacob Burckhardt's classic narrative to guide students through the complex history of the Renaissance and then provides his own contemporary interpretation of that narrative. Over seventy color illustrations, genealogies of important Renaissance families, eight maps, a list of popes, a timeline of events, a bibliography, and an index are included.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kenneth R. Bartlett is Professor of History and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The English in Italy 1525–1558: A Study in Culture and Politics (1991), The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook (2011), and A Short History of the Italian Renaissance (2013).

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A NOTE TO THE READER

It has been my pleasure to have taught courses on the Italian Renaissance for more than thirty years. My students have always been an inspiration, and the material continually intrigues, astounds, and delights me. This book is the result of those years in the classroom. My approach to the subject has always been the interdisciplinary, ?mosaic? structure that introduces Italy as a complex laboratory of ideas and practices in all areas of human experience. It is this interpenetration of perspectives that has enlivened discussions and introduced students to the rich intensity of Renaissance life. The readings assigned in my courses have largely been primary sources so that students might see the past through the eyes of those who were alive in Italy between about 1350 and 1550. All classes and occupations, all regions and perspectives are discussed as a means to understand how complex were both the explosion of art and culture and the experimentation in social, political, and economic systems.

I want my students to see the Italian Renaissance on its own terms, rather than reading the scholarly debates of the present back into our narrative of the past. Consequently, there will be times in this book when inclusive language is consciously not employed?such as in discussion of the political structures of Florence or Venice or the hierarchy of the Roman Church?because to do so would be anachronistic. Equally, I have refused to hold the past accountable for the concerns of the present. Italians of the Renaissance had their own issues and obsessions; they were not ours, but they were valid and consuming nonetheless. Although we have knowledge of how things turned out, we should not apply this privileged information when assessing the decisions, fears, and ambitions of those who confronted their challenges as best they could.

Jacob Burckhardt?s great book of 1860, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, provides a general framework for certain parts of my book. This is not because his is the defining text in the field but because he helped design how the Renaissance is still studied: an interdisciplinary, dynamic period in which it is counterproductive to separate out elements for undergraduate study in an almost scholastic manner. The distinctions and sub-distinctions of ?The Poor,? ?Women,? ?The Church,? and so on were not part of the Renaissance Italian worldview. Theirs was a very integrated perspective in which many things contributed to a relatively coherent understanding of their own times. Consequently, I will follow the same model, as my intention is to have students see the past through the experience of Italians who served as witnesses to contemporary events. The past is indeed a different country and one whose history was formed by different ideas and forces. To understand them we must accept that observation; otherwise, we will always be describing the past with the vocabulary of the present.

It is also my expectation that this book will be both useful in courses outside my own discipline and of interest to general readers who want to know more about this most engaging historical moment. My intention has been to construct a book with wide appeal that would attract any reader curious about the Italian Renaissance. The book is very heavily illustrated, as many readers today need and desire a visual component that elucidates ideas through painting, sculpture, or architecture. All the images have detailed captions so that they can serve as an entry point into the material of the chapter or as informative in themselves. In my many years as a scholar and teacher of the Italian Renaissance, I have come to recognize the signal importance of images as instruments for sparking interest and breaking into the minds of generations long past, far from the experience of our own time.

My hope, then, is that everyone who reads this book will discover or rediscover the excitement of the Italian Renaissance and see how much that period has bequeathed to the present. In celebrating what the eye sees, the Renaissance has shown us how to interpret our world as well; my sincere desire is that the past will come alive once more through knowledge and imagination so that the Italian Renaissance can continue to animate our appreciation of the human condition.

Kenneth Bartlett
Toronto

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Verlag
University of Toronto Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1442600144
ISBN 13 
9781442600140
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
402
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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