An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Charles Briggs (Visiting Research Fellow, 2024)
Reframing the Story of Early Renaissance Humanism in a Time of Crisis
In the middle of the nineteenth century, historians, literary scholars, and art historians searching for the origins of European modernity began to locate them in the so-called Italian Renaissance, a key component of which was the intellectual and cultural movement called humanism. Since then, two main origin narratives of humanism have developed. According to the older and most widely accepted of these, it was a creation of the ingenious poet and man of letters Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) which then took root primarily in Florence. The interpretation of more recent vintage argues for a much earlier beginning, in the 1260s, among a coterie of lay lawyers and notaries in the city of Padua. Both interpretations define humanism as a discrete and self-contained movement, with a core identifiable characterisic (i.e. an effort to resurrect the language and culture of classical antiquity), and whose first participants clearly distinguished themselves from the dominant “medieval” culture. My project challenges these narratives and many of the assumptions underlying them, and argues instead that there was a broadly shared culture of humanism in the late 1200s and early 1300s which was not limited to northern and central Italy – although it was most actively developed there. I also contend, however, that this particular culture of humanism underwent profound changes in the mid-fourteenth century in response to the negative effects of climate change, demographic collapse in the wake of the Black Death, and political and economic turmoil.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
Passcode: 6aSe7GF7