III
HISTORY AND HISTORIANS

12
Three Types of Historiography in Post-Renaissance Italy

This essay, another by-product of my Venice book, was first presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association at Philadelphia in 1963. It distinguished three major types of historiography in early modern Italy, correlating them with the widely differing political conditions in the peninsula. The essay was first published in History and Theory 4 (1965), 303–314, and is reprinted here with the permission of Wesleyan University Press .

Italy between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries was not a unity in any significant respect, but, perhaps even more than in the preceding age, only a collection of localities differing widely in economic and social structure, political organization, traditions, culture, and speed and direction of development. Profitable discussion of Italian affairs in this period must therefore make careful distinctions of place. This caveat is, indeed, particularly true for the period following the Peace of Bologna, early in 1530, which brought to an end the Italian phase of the Hapsburg-Valois wars; it marked the conclusion of a long ordeal which, however tragic for the peoples of Italy, had at least supplied a common thread for the history of the peninsula. It is thus hardly an accident that after Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia (written between 1537 and 1540, but published only in 1561) there was not another general history of Italy until well into the next century.^[1] Any account of historiography in Italy after the publication of his masterpiece must therefore recognize a variety of tendencies, related for the most part only dialectically, corresponding to the variety among political centers. Each of these had interests and

preoccupations of its own which imposed special requirements on historical composition.

Under these circumstances the historiography of three Italian centers assumed particular importance during the later sixteenth century. Although, under the Medici principate, the memory of the republican past was now fading, the contribution of Florentine republicanism to the formation of the modern historical consciousness gives a special interest to historical writing in Florence during this period of radically altered circumstances. Rome invites our attention because of her eagerness to press all forms of cultural expression into the service of the Counter-Reformation, as well as by her revitalized commitment to an ecclesiastical and political universalism which had profound implications for the interpretation of history. In Venice, meanwhile, in reaction to a now increasingly obvious decline in political and economic influence, this period saw a remarkable resurgence of the kind of republican enthusiasm once characteristic of Florence, with similarly fruitful results for the writing of history.

I

In Florence during the later sixteenth century, tendencies already apparent in Guicciardini were carried to extremes, and a historiography which had been based on the presumed utility of history for politics gradually disintegrated.^[2] The principle of utility had presupposed a certain confidence both in the ability of the historian to lay bare the workings of the political world, and in the ability of the ruler in some measure to control it on the basis of knowledge. But the helplessness of Florence to determine her own destiny in a world dominated by great powers had demonstrated the futility of the attempt to guide events; and the imposition of princely despotism gradually converted a responsible citizenry into passive subjects who lacked the motive to cultivate a larger political understanding through the study of history. Historiography, therefore, like classical studies in the same period, moved from the piazza into the studio , detached itself from active politics, and reflected a steady decline in human confidence.

The process took several generations, but it is already apparent in Guicciardini, whose concern with history was largely contemplative; for him, the only mastery man finally could hope to achieve over events was to understand them, and even in this effort man could not transcend particular phenomena and their very particular relationships.^[3] In fact, the limitation was useful to establish the independence of history from

politics, but it was also a confession of defeat. Guicciardini's successors were even less confident about the powers of the human understanding. In the historical vision of Varchi, man is a helpless victim in a swirling chaos of fragmented detail and compulsive egotism, in which even the best-laid plans are bound to fail.^[4] Increasingly the historian was limited to the exposition of detail whose authenticity he could vouch for with growing assurance, but whose meaning he hardly dared to suggest.

For several decades there remained in Florence enough former republicans to compose history with that sense of psychological nuance and of historical relationships which comes from personal experience and involvement, but at last these had died out altogether; and by the end of the century the official historiographer of Florence was a professional pedant from Naples, Scipione Ammirato. Ammirato was a collector of facts. His only practical function at the Tuscan court was to give satisfaction to his patron, and his Istorie fiorentine (1600) is both the end of the great tradition and its repudiation.^[5] In this work we can examine, therefore, the culmination of one important tendency in the historiography of post-Renaissance Italy.

Ammirato's engaging humility, as he compares himself with both the ancients and his modern predecessors—for he evidently saw himself as continuing a tradition^[6] —appears more than justified. As he informed his readers, he aimed only at conformity to the unexceptionable principles of order, piety, and fidelity to truth,^[7] and his history is defective in both analysis and synthesis. Indeed, Ammirato would hardly presume to attempt either. He is almost totally unable to distinguish themes and forces; he has no discrimination, no psychological insight, no dramatic sense; his organization is too primitive even for the division of narrative into paragraphs. His work is conventionally clerical, and it also finds occasion to praise the Medici, comparing the first Cosimo, for example, to the great Romans of antiquity.^[8] But gratuitous bias of this kind is not excessive, and the real weakness of the work lies in the opposite direction: in the absence of formal control. The history seems finally little more than an irrelevant accumulation of erudite and antiquarian detail, without insight into the meaning of events.

Yet even an empiricism run wild can, under certain circumstances, offer compensations; and Ammirato's work exhibits one useful virtue: a remarkable zest for the accumulation of facts. He was not imaginative, but he was vastly diligent and meticulous. His accounts of the Florentine past mark a great advance over those of all previous historians simply in their command of the detailed material of political narrative.^[9] His additions to the record, to be sure, do not much advance our under-

standing of Florentine history. They generally serve no function whatsoever, except perhaps in providing such satisfactions as crude data may afford to those in search of certainties in a time of deep insecurity. Yet, the fact that historiography should have been reduced to this is itself of some interest for the understanding of post-Renaissance Italy. Besides, scholarship of this kind also points toward the erudite accumulations of historical materials for which modern historians are still so heavily indebted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

II

While Florence suggests the end of the Renaissance tradition through sheer attrition, Rome in the period of the Counter-Reformation seems engaged in a direct attack on the historical accomplishment of the Renaissance. She evidently found several elements in later Renaissance historiography distasteful: in particular, the freedom with which historians treated ecclesiastical history, as though it were no different qualitatively from profane history; in general, their tendency to regard the study of the past as an autonomous science in which all phenomena are to be understood as a part of the natural order, and only conclusions derived from adequate evidence can be accepted as legitimate.

Much of the impact of Rome on Italian historiography in this period was thus merely restrictive. Because free investigation so often led in undesirable directions, ecclesiastical authority sought again and again to censor or suppress historical writings. A celebrated instance is the great work of Guicciardini. The first Italian text of the Storia d'Italia to include such passages as the author's full discussion of Alexander VI or the extended retrospective essay on the temporal power of the papacy did not appear until 1621, and then only in Geneva.^[10] Expurgation and suppression were also accompanied by an effort to make history "safe" through its diversion from research into rhetoric, and through the revival of the Ciceronian cliché historia magistra vitae , which reduced history to ethics teaching by example. These purposes were served by various clerical treatises on the art of historical composition, notably those of Agostino Mascardi and Sebastiano Macci.^[11]

Rome's fear of free intellectual activity was of obvious importance for cultural expression in most of Italy, and it no doubt helps to account for Ammirato's reluctance to interpret events.^[12] On the other hand, it seems to me a mistake to blame the cultural contraction which characterized Italy in general during this period, and of which the distrust of history was merely one symptom among others, simply on the Counter-

Reformation. In fact, the relationship may be essentially the reverse of what is conventionally supposed; the influence of Italy, for a variety of reasons exhausted and insecure, may well have been as decisive for the defensive mentality of the Counter-Reformation as was the challenge of Protestantism. The fathers at Trent were—most of them—Italians as well as ecclesiastics, and the predominance of Italians at the Curia increased in the course of the century.^[13]

In any case, however, the negative attitude of the Counter-Reformation toward historical study was not merely tactical; it also had deeper sources. For the categories by which the major Catholic thinkers of this period sought to comprehend all dimensions of reality were primarily systematic and rational, not historical; and discussion of the origins and development of phenomena seemed not only dangerous, but also essentially irrelevant to a world of eternal verities. Bellarmine himself largely ignored the Renaissance historians; and insofar as he required a framework of historical conceptions, he depended on the traditional four monarchies and a universal chronology which divided the history of the world into three ages, each lasting for two thousand years.^[14] The Jesuit Ratio studiorum allowed almost no place for historical study, which, as Polman has noted, failed to develop significantly wherever the Society of Jesus was influential.^[15]

If some of that zeal for research which characterized Ammirato also operated in Rome, the resemblance was superficial. The "positive theology" which the Catholic Reformation inherited from the Erasmians was, to be sure, concerned with the recovery, authentication, and study of ancient documents, and required the techniques of historical research; but its purposes were not those of the historian.^[16] And insofar as thinkers in Rome seriously concerned themselves with the past, they did so less to ascertain its actual character through free investigation than to construct an orthodox interpretation consistent with the interests of the church. In Rome, therefore, in contrast to Florence, a kind of vision still operated in connection with the past; but the vision was antecedent to investigation, not based upon or even responsive to it. A nice instance of the Roman attitude is provided by Bellarmine himself, offended by a Venetian pamphleteer who had ventured to express doubt that Charlemagne had, in fact, received his empire as the gift of the pope.^[17] This daring position, Bellarmine wrote, amounted to "heresy in history" as well as "temerity in theology"; it was "repugnant to all the historians and to the sacred canons."^[18] Thus the Counter-Reformation proposed to absorb history, even earlier than the physical sciences, into the larger structure of dogma.

The great historiographical monument to this attitude is, of course, the Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607) of Baronius, a work whose significance in cultural history as well as in the history of historiography deserves more serious attention. We are now chiefly inclined to think of the Annals as a massive repository of the sources of ancient and medieval ecclesiastical history, even when we recall its original polemical intent. But actually the work is of great substantive interest, as an effort to impose a certain interpretation on the history of the church; and it has another kind of interest because of the degree of its success. Its thesis is the essential invulnerability of the visible church, despite its operating in the world, to historical change. It argues that all the claims and characteristics of the modern church to which the enemies of Rome were now taking exception had been present, at least in embryo, from the beginning.^[19] Thus it attempts to show that the historical world is really a coordinate of the systematic order described, at about the same time, in the theological writings of Bellarmine. To these it seems to be related as if it were part of a larger strategy: as though Bellarmine's task had been to demonstrate rationally what ought to be true; that of Baronius, to demonstrate historically that it always had been true.

In the course of this undertaking the Annals give the first extended development of one of the hardiest myths in European historiography: the conception of medieval Christendom as a unified polity recognizing papal superiority in principle, and essentially responsive to papal direction.^[20] Even Unam sanctam (a composition which enjoyed new popularity in Rome during this period)^[21] had been only the enunciation of an ideal; it did not claim that the ideal had been realized. Now, however, in the second half of the sixteenth century, this claim was fully developed, as a kind of concession, perhaps, to the new historical consciousness of the age. There was an effort to show that all who rejected the leadership of the pope, including his authority over temporal affairs—whether direct or indirect makes little difference—were guilty of rebellion against an established order whose traditional character was fully supported by historical evidence. Thus a new historical orthodoxy was elaborated whose influence is still with us. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, a new edition of the Annals claimed for Baronius an authority in history comparable to that of Thomas Aquinas in theology.^[22]

III

The Roman conception of history as a branch of dogma is of interest in part because of its continuing importance; in part because of its

intimate relationship to the general atmosphere of fear, rigidity, and the search for secure authority in every sphere that characterized post-Renaissance Italy; and in part also because it helps to throw into relief the quite different historical consciousness developing during this period in Venice. That Venice should have become the scene of a vigorous historiography in the later sixteenth century must come as something of a surprise. In this as in other respects Venice had been singularly backward during the fifteenth century. When at last she had an official historian, the appointment of Bembo (1530), a self-confessed contemplative and a professional literary man without experience in practical affairs,^[23] seems singularly inappropriate; and for nearly three decades during the middle of the sixteenth century, Venice was comfortable without any historiographer at all.^[24]

The remarkable flowering of Venetian history which came at last during the later decades of that century, and which continued into the seventeenth, seems to express the slow reaction of a peculiarly conservative society to the fact of its gradual but steady decline in world importance. It may be associated with the mixture of self-confidence, alarm, and apprehension induced by the victory of Lepanto. It is also related to a shift in the control of the government from a smaller group of powerful families whose capital was now mainly invested in large-scale agriculture on the mainland, to a larger group of less wealthy nobles still engaged in commerce and convinced that the maintenance of Venetian greatness depended on the continuance of a traditional economy.^[25] For this group, therefore, a more broadly based republic and a constant appeal to tradition as the sanction for present policy went hand in hand.

Thus Venetian historiography was in close contact with vital issues of political and social existence, but at the same time it was enriched by the sophisticated discussions about method carried on at Padua, now clearly the most vigorous intellectual center in Italy and the official academy of the Venetian patriciate. Here all the issues raised by Renaissance historical practice were debated and evaluated in the light of classical theory; and, because of the special Venetian predilection for Greek studies, men debated not only the relative merits of Livy and Tacitus, but also those of Herodotus and Thucydides, generally to the advantage of the latter.^[26] During the middle decades of the century, even Paduan discussion about history was largely directed to the formulation of a rigid Ciceronian orthodoxy which made of it only a body of examples illustrating the static principles of morality or politics. (It is perhaps significant that these were the years when Venice had no official historian.) But this tendency was gradually supplanted by a new

spirit which was given a strong impetus by the Dialoghi on history composed by Francesco Patrizzi. Patrizzi's skeptical tendencies undermined the authority of history as a repository of examples for the guidance of men in all ages, and at the same time he emphasized the importance of the formal elements in historical thought so conspicuously lacking in the work of Scipione Ammirato: organization, the selection of detail, the subordination of all elements to a major theme.^[27]

Training in such a school enabled the Venetians to appraise critically those tendencies in contemporary historical practice that we have observed elsewhere. So Nicolò Contarini, a prominent member of the reform group, one of the official historians it maintained, and eventually doge of Venice, attacked the adulation and the suppression of truth characteristic of so many histories of the age. his own work admitted quite candidly that all was not well, even with Venice.^[28] Another member of this circle, Paolo Paruta, also official historian of Venice and a dedicated servant of the state, composed a series of dialogues in praise of civic life, in one of which a Venetian patrician finds Guicciardini almost the equal of Thucydides, notably because he refused to present fact "simple and naked," clothing it rather "in its causes and in all the circumstances that accompany it"^[29] —one immediately thinks of contemporary historians of whom this could not have been said. Such discussion also equipped the Venetians to contest the assimilation of history into dogma. To Bellarmine's charge of heresy in history, our Venetian pamphleteer gave the reply direct: "There cannot be heresy in history which is profane and not contained in Holy Scripture . . . [on the coronation of Charlemagne] the historians are not in agreement. . . ."^[30] Another Venetian, somewhat later, responded dryly to a papalist effort to assert as an article of faith that the popes have perpetually and exclusively thirsted for the salvation of souls: "I believe he bases this on the goodness and sanctity of the present Highest Pontiff, disregarding the many histories of the lives of the popes, some by contemporaries who would swear that popes can have some other kind of thirst. This is to make an article of faith out of a matter of fact, which cannot be certain."^[31]

It is possible here only to hint at the bulk and richness of Venetian historical composition during this period; few societies can have cultivated a historical consciousness with such intensity. Official historians like Paruta, Contarini, and Andrea Morosini had, naturally, to view events from a Venetian point of view, but they gave substantially greater attention to internal development than conventional court historiography.^[32] The Relazioni of the Venetian ambassadors frequently contain historical analyses of considerable acumen,^[33] and they often collected

historical materials in their places of assignment: in the same generation, for example, Francesco Priuli at the imperial court, Ottaviano Bon in Constantinople, and the secretary Giambattista Padavino in Switzerland.^[34] Giovan Michele Bruto, one of the most colorful of the Venetians, traveled in Spain, became a Dominican in middle age, spent a year in Savonarola's San Marco in Florence where (one suspects) the quaestiones of Thomas were even yet not the sole subject of discussion, and emerged to write a republican history of Florence under the Medici which, tearing away the masks, interprets Cosimo as an ambitious and unscrupulous despot and glorifies tyrannicide in the name of liberty—and this as late as 1562. Bruto eventually became both a Protestant and historiographer at the Catholic court of Hungary.^[35] Giovan Francesco Biondi, a Protestant refugee in England, wrote a history of the Wars of the Roses;^[36] and Enrico Davila's famous account of the civil struggles in France,^[37] in its psychological interest and its analysis of causes, invites comparison with Guicciardini's work. We can also, perhaps, place beside these literary histories, as evidence of Venetian interest in the historical dimension of human experience, her leadership in the representation of historical events in art. A great fire in 1577 destroyed much of the ducal palace, including earlier cycles of paintings in the Great Council Chamber and the Hall of the Scrutinio, and a new plan was executed which depicted the glorious exploits of Venice throughout her past. The importance of the scheme was emphasized by the publication of a book to explain its various iconographical devices.^[38] Thus Venice was to be comprehended not merely as the ideal polity described in Gasparo Contarini's De republica venetorum but also as an historical entity.

The most distinguished product of the Venetian historical school, however, and certainly its most influential book, was Paolo Sarpi's Istoria del Concilio tridentino , smuggled out of Venice and first published in London in 1619.^[39] This work is, in spite of its ostensibly ecclesiastical character, a remarkable vehicle of the Venetian historical consciousness, and at the same time a deliberate refutation of both the method and the thesis of Baronius. It is, in effect, an assertion of the priority of historical truth over dogma wherever questions of fact are at stake, even in the history of the church. Sarpi's significance, therefore, consists first of all in his having applied the positive method of modern secular history, still best exemplified by the Florentine school, to ecclesiastical institutions and events. So he conceived his task as the careful accumulation of detail by research. He once compared his subject (the vision itself is eloquent) to a great lake spreading out over Europe: a lake, however, fed by numerous tiny rivulets, each of which the historian must follow

to its source and measure drop by drop.^[40] At the same time, Sarpi's purpose is to describe the formation of the lake, not to enumerate the droplets, and he uses his method to demonstrate the falseness of the claim that the church is invulnerable to change. In a series of retrospective essays related to the major issues debated at Trent, he aims to show that the institutional church, the church, that is to say, in those dimensions accessible to historical examination, is as much a child of time as any agency of the secular world. Above all he interprets its constitutional development as a product of the same tensions and human passions that have molded governments everywhere. Sarpi views the evolution of ecclesiastical polity as the slow degeneration from an original republicanism, of which Venice in his own time could be taken as the only surviving model, into a tyranny such as (if one may read between the lines) had engulfed other republics, notably Florence in the last century.

Furthermore, in developing this republican vision of church history which so strikingly transfers the preoccupations of Renaissance historiography to a new dimension, Sarpi exhibits all of the psychological insight and dramatic sense that had disappeared from Italian historiography elsewhere. The history of the Council of Trent is presented, with a mixture of distaste and admiration, as a kind of drama in which the popes, hopelessly at a disadvantage in a world controlled by power, fearful of the loss through reform of all they had gained in over a thousand years of self-aggrandizement, succeed nevertheless in winning total victory. Sarpi depicts the growth of reformist pressures and the gathering of the challenge to papal leadership at the council; France is hostile, Spain and the Empire demand reform, the Italians are restive; the crisis grows steadily more threatening; and then, at the last moment, defeat is deftly averted; the fox manages at the end to outwit and to survive among the lions. Indeed, one hardly knows in the end whether the work is best described as an anti-Machiavellian or a Machiavellian tract.

The extraordinary popularity of Sarpi's work^[41] did not derive solely from its presenting a thesis of such evident utility for religious controversy; it was due most of all to the fact that his history was a masterpiece on a subject of great general interest. It was a masterpiece, however, as the historical compositions of Ammirato and Baronius were not, precisely because it maintained the fruitful tension between the two essential elements of any vital historiography: empirical investigation and the creative vision, related to living needs, which it disciplines and by which it is informed. Apparently only Venice, in later sixteenth-century Italy, could still support their union. Histories written by Venetians were

therefore able to interest readers well into the eighteenth century; thus they served as a link between the historical consciousness of Renaissance Italy and later European historical discourse.

13
Gallicanism and the Nature of Christendom

This piece aimed to demonstrate the historical significance of Gallicanism and its view of the French past. Gallicanism, the ideology of most Frenchmen during the early modern period, involved a belief in the historical and legal autonomy of the French church within the Roman Catholic fold. Now virtually ignored by historians, it was of major importance, as I argue here, in the transition from medieval to modern conceptions of politics. The piece first appeared in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John Tedeschi (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 811–830, and is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher .

Over forty years ago Lucien Febvre insisted on the crucial importance of distinguishing between religious and ecclesiastical history, between powerful spiritual movements related to the major currents of European social and political development and the particular events and institutional forms through which, almost incidentally, they may find expression. The Reformation, in Febvre's perspective, was thus a movement of European scope that brought into focus, in areas destined to stay Catholic as well as in those that broke away from the medieval church, tendencies that had been gathering force for centuries. The problem for the historian, he suggested, was to identify these forces and then to show how they operated in various situations and were modified by local conditions.^[1]

Although his brilliant essay was directed finally to explaining the origins of the Reformation in France, Febvre confined his attention largely to the sources of French Protestantism, which, as it turned out, failed to win over more than a minority of Frenchmen. But the general

impulses behind the Reformation were often as effective among Catholics as among Protestants, as Febvre was well aware; and a better illustration of his point may perhaps be found in Gallicanism, which bridged the centuries before and after the Reformation proper, and which was attractive to generations of Frenchmen, among them not only personages of evident gravity, learning, and intelligence, but also in many cases men close to the center of public life.

Gallicanism has not been very positively regarded by historians, nor has it been closely associated with the problems posed by either the Reformation or the Renaissance. Standard general histories of France have viewed it largely as a dimension of politics, and it has suffered from the same distaste attached to other aspects of the Old Regime.^[2] On the other hand historians who have studied Gallicanism systematically have tended to see in it little more than an incoherent bundle of currents of opposition to the Holy See, based on an ignorance of history and defective theology and animated by a selfish indifference to the larger needs of the Christian community.^[3] For both, Gallicanism emerges as, in a rather precise sense, a transparent species of ideology, an elaborate mask for the special interests of crown and class. Students of ecclesiastical rather than of religious history (in Febvre's sense), its major historians, have assigned it only a limited significance even in the history of the church. Thus, in a manner ironically reminiscent of recent insistence that the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century was a national achievement, Victor Martin maintained that Gallicanism, native in origin and utterly self-absorbed, was "a movement specifically French." "Exported outside the kingdom," he declared, "it quickly died or was radically transformed."^[4]

Martin was obviously asking precisely the sort of question that Febvre had called on historians of the Reformation to reject, and this paper will not pursue Martin's question by arguing that Gallicanism had a large influence beyond the borders of France. I think that it had, in fact, some external effect, though the problem of what constitutes an "influence" and why a movement of thought exerts influence under some conditions but not others is in any case more complicated than is sometimes supposed. The primary interest of Gallicanism lies rather in what it reveals about the concern of pious Frenchmen, like other Europeans, to redefine Christianity and the idea of Christendom, and thus to bring religious life into a closer correspondence with the changing structures of European society. From this standpoint Gallicanism can hardly be viewed as a narrowly national movement; the more Gallican Frenchmen were, the more emphatically they affirmed their membership in a larger

European community. Thus it should hardly be surprising to discover that Gallican theorists were sometimes well aware of their affinities with men elsewhere; and, conversely, both as a practical and a speculative posture, Gallicanism was an object of general European interest, among Catholics as well as Protestants.

Although Gallicanism can be traced back at least to the fourteenth century and perhaps earlier,^[5] achieved a political climax of sorts in the later seventeenth century, and may be discerned again lurking behind the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and even later, the most significant chapter in its venerable history for the purposes of this paper was the heroic age of Gallican speculation extending from the end of the Council of Trent to the ministry of Richelieu. During this period Gallicanism enjoyed its maximum freedom from royal control, and it was therefore most spontaneous and responsive to a variety of contemporary impulses, both positive and negative. Notable among the latter was the challenge of the Counter-Reformation, during these years in its most militant mood and resolved to impose on Catholic Europe the whole pattern of universalist, hierarchical, and theocratic values elaborated by the papal theorists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This theoretical system had now been given concrete application in the decrees of Trent, whose significance was as much symbolic as practical.^[6] Gallicanism, during this period, saw itself clearly as the major obstacle, in France and 9 perhaps in all Europe, to a reactionary offensive stemming from Rome.

During this period, in addition, although the case of Edmond Richer shows that Gallicanism still found vigorous spokesmen among the clergy, its major champions came from the relatively independent magistracy, a group peculiarly fitted by its cosmopolitan culture as well as its specialized training to respond creatively to the general needs of the age.^[7] That the Gallican leadership in these years consisted so largely of lawyers deserves some emphasis.^[8] Supported by the prestige of imperial Rome and dedicated to the practical requirements of the vita activa , the civil law had long ignored the constraints of theology, and lawyers had perhaps earlier than any other social group insisted on a practical independence from ecclesiastical supervision; as early as the thirteenth century it was said that a good jurist was necessarily a bad Christian.^[9] Legal training was thus particularly calculated to nourish a sense of the dignity of the lay estate and the prerogatives of the secular power.

Much of what was most significant in the Gallicanism of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries may be associated with attitudes traditional among lawyers. Fundamental among these was an assumption that the entire institutional order was pluralistic rather than unitary; in

both Italy and France lawyers had early accustomed themselves to working within a framework composed of a congeries of particular states rather than an all-inclusive system, and thus they had long opposed the directive claims of the papacy. Their concern with clearly defined spheres of activity and established procedures gave them a certain bias towards constitutionalism, and the same tendencies nourished a spiritual conception of the church. Legal study had also relied heavily on a species of historical research potentially applicable to revealing the evolution of institutions through time. Guillaume Budé had already exhibited something of this interest in France during the earlier sixteenth century; and it was destined to develop during succeeding generations into an increasingly sophisticated historicism. This tendency among the Gallican magistrates combined with a professional interest in the relation between law and the immediate needs of time and place to produce a type of mind notable for its openness, its flexibility, and its resistance to dogmatic rigidities in all aspects of human experience. The Gallicanism of the lawyers during this period can therefore enlarge our understanding of the later Renaissance in France as well as of the Reformation.

Fundamental to Gallicanism in every period of its history was the assumption that Christendom properly consisted not of a unified, hierarchically organized system, but of discrete and parallel entities.^[10] This was taken to mean not only the independence of rulers from ecclesiastical supervision but also the legitimate existence of separate and independent states. As early as John of Paris (to whose authority later Gallicans appealed), Frenchmen had argued for a pluralistic political order;^[11] and by the later sixteenth century Gallicans simply assumed that, since traditions and problems differed widely throughout Europe, it was essential that institutions should vary locally, and that they should be locally and flexibly administered. Above all they were persuaded that what was appropriate for Italy was by no means necessarily suited to France.^[12] They were immediately concerned with the organization of the church, but this concern had a more general relation to the structure of European politics.

In its application to the church, the substitution of numerous parallel authorities for an arrangement in hierarchy led to a marked bias for the separate and independent authority of bishops,^[13] and even some tendency to insist on the independent, divinely bestowed authority of each individual priest.^[14] Their larger concern with local needs was also basic to Gallican hostility (most eloquently expressed in the pamphlets of Saint-Cyran, in this matter a close ally of Gallicanism) towards the

regular clergy, international rules governing administrative affairs being themselves generally suspect.^[15] This feeling was, of course, most vigorously directed against the Jesuits. The same interest was basic to Gallican support for conciliarism, one of the constants in the history of Gallicanism, equally shared by magistrates and theologians.^[16] The council was superior to the pope in their view, however, for practical as well as theoretical reasons, a fact of some interest for appraising the Gallican mind. Gallicans preferred councils because many heads are better than one and because the needs of the church are not single and general but plural and particular, the needs of individual churches and individual churchmen which can only achieve satisfactory expression in an assembly.^[17] The principle may be partly a feudal residue, partly a reflection of Aristotle; but the realities it reflected were those of the fragmented modern world.

The limited role in the church that Gallicans attributed to the pope was a corollary of these views; they saw the church as a constitutional apparatus properly governed by duly established machinery according to general laws and set procedures. The pope was no longer, for them, the apex of a hierarchy, the church's ultimate point of contact with the divine authority claimed for the whole, but hardly more than primus inter pares , the president of a college in which no member was essentially higher or lower than another since each was appointed directly by God. Gallican theorists considered the pope neither infallible in matters of doctrine nor broadly competent in the administration of the church;^[18] they were utterly opposed to the doctrine of a papal plenitudo potestatis . No element in the pope's authority could be regarded, in their view, as unlimited; to the extent that he ruled the church, he did so as a constitutional monarch, and resistance to him was legitimate on conventional constitutional grounds.^[19] On this point the connections between secular and ecclesiastical thought seem unusually close.^[20] For the Gallican writers, however, the church, itself a congeries of particular churches, had not one but many constitutions: a universal constitution based on natural and divine law as implemented by the general council, but also a series of local constitutions based on local traditions and needs. "In France," declared Pithou, referring specifically to the church but certainly invoking a larger set of political conceptions, "absolute and infinite power has no place but is contained and limited by the canons and regulations of the ancient councils of the church received in this kingdom."^[21] The Gallican liberties may thus be understood as an elaborate parallel to the fundamental laws of France, and the Parlement of Paris was felt to be the proper guardian of both.^[22]

The pluralistic vision of the institutional order and the constitutionalism of the Gallican magistrates were directly related to a conception of the church that distinguished sharply between its mystical and spiritual dimension and the external and administrative framework through which the church operates in specific situations. If they gave special attention to the latter, it must be remembered that they were lawyers, professionally engaged with the definition of legal rights in concrete situations which they had to take into account. But as Christians in a period of deepening piety, in which they participated, they were aware that faith had other and more profound dimensions.^[23] And as Christian lawyers, they were faced with the problem of coordinating the particular institutional and local realities with which they were in regular professional contact and the inescapable fact that Christianity in some sense also transcended the local scene, that the church was in some sense (if not in what was a regular part of their own experience) a universal and single body.

Like many of their contemporaries in other parts of Europe, Catholic as well as Protestant, they did so by sharpening the distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms and limiting the church to the former.^[24] It is, indeed, not entirely clear what functions they were disposed to allow to the spiritual power; they were not systematic theologians in most cases, and perhaps it is best to speak rather of tendencies than of a mature theory of the church. Among these tendencies was an inclination to regard as the true church only what was immutable and therefore vulnerable neither to the vagaries of time nor to their own professional attention. Whatever history or the law could touch, whatever could be affected by the things they knew best, appeared to them as profane and tainted, as therefore not the true body of Christ, which by definition was spiritual, holy, subject to no shadow of turning.

This conclusion is difficult to demonstrate. No Gallican, as far as I am aware, quite said as much, and it must be deduced as the assumption underlying numerous general pronouncements. Here, for example, is a proposition of Jacques Leschassier, one of the most scholarly of the Gallican magistrates: "Among the political laws of the church, the divine or apostolic is the eternal and perpetual, the others are temporal and provisional, made for human and temporal reasons; and the church tends, by its duty and according to the opinion of all good Christians, to the restitution of the apostolic law."^[25] The attitudes to history and reform suggested by this statement will concern us in a moment; here what should be noticed is its appeal to an ideal model from which every historical accident must somehow be shucked away. Among such accidents Leschassier clearly included not only all political dominion and

property but rights of disposal over every temporal thing, which he explicitly denied either to the pope or to any clerical body. Pithou took much the same position, and the order of his argument implied (though it did not make explicit) the view that much and perhaps all the external administration of the church belonged to the temporal power. Thus he first denied the pope any general authority over temporal matters in France, and then he insisted that it belonged to the king to call national ecclesiastical councils responsible for the discipline of the clergy.^[26] There appears to have been a sense in which the Gallican liberties did not properly concern the spiritual "estate" at all, but only (to apply a distinction of Richer) the "government."^[27]

This position too had important implications for the role of the pope; the spirituality of the church as well as its decentralization severely limited his authority. It meant that the pope had no right to interfere in any way with political affairs or to call temporal magistrates to account.^[28] On this the Gallican magistrates, with their keen sense of the dignity of the lay condition as well as their concern as lawyers to maintain the rights of the crown, felt strongly; and whenever it arose they came into action. Many Gallican treatises were occasional, called into existence by efforts to assert papal authority over rulers. Pius IV's summons to Jeanne d'Albret to appear before the Holy Office produced the Mémoire of Du Mesnil; Gregory XIV's attack in 1591 on the rights of Henry of Navarre to the French throne resulted in works by Coquille, Fauchet, and Faye;^[29] the assassination of Henry IV (so widely attributed to a Jesuit and therefore papalist plot) was shortly followed by the treatise of Richer and certainly helps to explain Richer's wide support;^[30] Pierre Pithou composed a history of the interdict, the device by which popes had long sought to impose their authority on rulers, and now a potential danger to France.^[31] Although these men did not deny the right of the pope to excommunicate kings as individuals, they consistently rejected the alleged political implications of such action; they denied the pope's authority to depose any ruler or to release his subjects from obedience.^[32]

The large supervisory role Gallicanism assigned to the crown in the national church had several sources, among them the idea that his authority was derived directly from God (a belief much facilitated by the general denial of hierarchy) and the long tradition that saw the king as no mere layman but an ecclesiastical functionary bound by sacred oath to defend the church from all its enemies, notably including those in Rome.^[33] At the same time there had been a strong tendency from an early point for Gallican theorists to emphasize that the church consisted of the whole congregation of believers, laity as well as clergy;^[34] and this

view too implied the special responsibility of the king as primary layman. Finally, the distinction between the church's spirituality and its institutionality suggested parallel leadership, and Gallican theorists were prompt to attribute the direction of the institution to the crown. The duty of the king, as Leschassier remarked, was "not to baptize and to preach, but to provide for baptizing and preaching and to guard the rights of the church."^[35] Popes deceived themselves, declared Le Jay, if they supposed that they alone were concerned with the harmony of the church, a responsibility that devolved also on kings and princes;^[36] and Leschassier explained that it was above all to be exercised through their "sovereign judges," the "natural and legitimate protectors of the ancient law."^[37] Thus through a series of venerable conceptions the Gallican magistrates, at once pious and practical, managed to combine the most transcendent ideal for the church with practical accommodation to the world as they knew it.

The obvious contrast between this ideal and the contemporary church of their own experience cried out to them (as to other religious reformers) for explanation, and to this task they brought the techniques for the historical study of law at work in France and, under the influence of Jacques Cujas, already evident in the transition from the more systematic and general mos italicus to the more specific and historically oriented mos gallicus .^[38] Gallicanism thus participated fully in the broader movements that made of this period the first great age in French historiography.^[39] But while some secular historians in France were moving toward an idea of progress, the Gallican historians of the church proposed a return to ancient and even primitive models; they sought an antidote to history.^[40]

The Gallican view of church history thus resembled the vision of the European past shared by both medieval religious reformers and Renaissance humanists. In this perspective an original perfection had been succeeded by a long degeneration that had coincided precisely with the medieval centuries, and this in turn would be followed by a restoration in which, at least among humanists and Gallicans, the contemporary flowering of philological scholarship (as the key to grasping the whole pattern) would play the essential role. But Gallicanism, through its contact with legal study, was as a program of reform more concrete than medieval reformism or humanism. It perceived that change in the church (as in the law) responded to specific historical circumstances and it was therefore concerned not merely with a general educational and spiritual revival but also with the actual structure of institutions and their modes

of operation. Its historical analysis was also sharper. It had not only a general theory but also an interest in the actual processes and stages of historical change; the technical defects in its scholarship, which were those of its time, and the distortions stemming from its preconceptions should not be allowed to obscure these substantial merits.

A favorite Gallican text, cited by Pithou as a kind of summary at the end of his own major treatise, came from the book of Proverbs: "Pass not beyond the ancient bounds which thy fathers have set."^[41] The verse was more than a conservative slogan. It was an invitation to historical scholarship: the health of the church, it suggested, depended on a clear definition of the limitations on ecclesiastical action and organization established by the early church. For lawyers this implied the need for a systematic reconstruction of ancient canon law; and therefore, in contrast to earlier Gallicans, who had appealed to ancient practice merely in general, the Gallican magistrates of the seventeenth century made a serious attempt to describe it in specific detail. They published a series of canonical collections antedating Gratian, but they were chiefly interested in the practice of the first five centuries when, as they believed, popes were properly submissive to the temporal power and the church universal consisted of a federation of local churches, all respecting each other's autonomy and mutually related through general councils convened by emperors.^[42]

The most erudite among the Gallican students of the early church was probably Leschassier, whose De la liberté ancienne et canonique de l'Eglise Gallicane argued that the church had possessed an "ancient and common law," an antique codex canonum originated by the apostles, formulated through councils, and clearly recognized at Ephesus and Chalcedon, that had generally guaranteed "ancient and canonical liberty."^[43] For Leschassier this ancient instrument for the defense of the church against "servitude" (i.e., centralization) had supplied the model for the more specific liberties of the Gallican church; the ancient church, he believed, had recognized papal authority only legaliter et regulariter , legally (according to Roman law) and canonically.^[44] But it was all too obvious that, even in France, the original liberty of the church had not survived. The loosely federal constitution of the first centuries had collapsed under pressure from Rome, and thus the Middle Ages assumed a distinct identity.

This vision of the past is significant in several ways. It invested the autonomy of the Gallican church with the sanction of antiquity, and at the same time it depicted the Gallican liberties as rooted in the universal liberty enjoyed by the entire church during the first centuries of its

existence, not merely in peculiar and shifting local conditions. As an argument for reform it had, therefore, a very general bearing. It was both (in a precise sense) radical and dangerous. It is also of considerable historiographical interest. By recognizing that even in France the ancient liberty of the church had disappeared, it implies a break with the myth of national continuity so inhibiting to the emergence of the Renaissance consciousness in northern Europe. It also suggests a concern to identify the crucial elements, moments, and discrete stages in a long and general historical process of subversion and recovery in which (in contrast to the polemical historiography of contemporary Protestantism) the essential causes were natural and all too human rather than diabolical.

Their conception of the church as essentially spiritual helped the Gailican magistrates to take this cool view of its history, for a visible institution whose career is punctuated by distinct events and phases was for them not properly the church at all, and it could therefore be discussed like any other earthly phenomenon. The Gallican treatment of the historical church was in this respect much like that of their Venetian contemporary, Paolo Sarpi.^[45] Thus Coquille attributed the success of papal claims to temporal authority to the inherited prestige of ancient Rome, only by historical accident the see of Peter.^[46] For Charles Faye earlier popes had been generally submissive to secular authority, and the relationship between popes and emperors had been proper until the time of Hildebrand. But then, "finding that this violent remedy profited the church, that institution exchanged its ancient humility for pride, cruelty, and tyranny, fastened papal attention on temporal concerns, and brought scandal that caused schism and heresy."^[47] Leschassier associated the rise of ecclesiastical tyranny directly with internal developments in canon law, which had been compelled to express the "worldly greatness" that had penetrated the church. Under papal auspices the ancient code of the church universal had been gradually replaced by a specifically Roman canon law from which articles protecting local liberty were systematically excluded. He considered the process well under way with the code of Dionysius Exiguus and essentially completed by Gratian and his followers. After Gratian Christendom (except for the magistrates of Paris) entirely forgot "that the church had ever had any other law than this."^[48]

Not every Gallican admitted that even the church in France had shared in the general eclipse of liberty. Charles Faye, for example, claimed that she had remained twelve hundred years the same, without any alteration in her "laws and form of establishment and police." In this respect he believed that the French church had been unique; every other church had changed for the worse.^[49] But Leschassier knew better; he was explicit

that in spite of staunch resistance, the Gallican church had fallen into the same "miserable servitude" as the rest of Christendom. From this condition she had only been rescued by Saint Louis, but that ruler's assertion of the autonomy of the French church against Innocent IV had begun a steady recovery that was still continuing in Leschassier's own time. In his conception, therefore, there had already been three phases in the history of the church in France: an ancient era of freedom, an intervening period of tyranny, and a new age of freedom. The first and third were qualitatively identical: "the ancient and the modern . . . are one same liberty measured differently." The ancient was based on the code of the church universal, while "the modern is contained in the ordinances of our kings, in their concordats and in the judgments of their sovereign courts; and this second liberty has been introduced by necessity, as subsidiary to the first." Modern Gallicanism was the ancient church universal reborn in one nation, and thus the model as well for ecclesiastical reform everywhere.^[50]

The Gallican magistrates contemplated the accomplishments of Trent and the various reforms sponsored by Rome in the light of these conceptions. In their view these developments pointed not to the true reformation of the church but rather to a universal extension and consummation of that deformation so successfully prosecuted by the medieval papacy. Genuine reform, they believed, could proceed only along the lines marked out by Gallicanism; a reformed Christendom meant, for them, a collection of autonomous units modeled on France. As Leschassier declared, "The modern councils, which contain the servitude of the church, must yield to the ancient, which contain its liberty, since this is a common canonical and ancient right."^[51]

These rather summary remarks about the attitudes and content of Gallicanism should be enough to suggest why the works of Gallicans were of considerable interest to other Europeans, not only because Gallicanism presented itself as a potential ally against the pope but for more positive reasons. Gallicanism suggested that a certain undogmatic spiritual unity was consistent with the political pluralism required by the emerging identities of particular states. It associated dogmatic rigidity with the corrupt medieval past, and Gallican writers occasionally took a remarkably broad view about the definition of Christian belief;^[52] for Catholics Gallicanism offered a real alternative to the restrictive and often uncongenial orthodoxies required by the papacy. Basic to this attitude was also an intellectual style (among the Gallican magistrates

if not necessarily among their theological allies) that also made their position widely attractive. Precisely during a time when the Roman reform movement sought to reinvigorate rational and systematic modes of thought, denounced or tried to control free historical investigation, and took an increasingly dim view of the new science, the Gallicanism of the magistrates sought truth in the concrete and empirical world, worked towards increasingly sophisticated techniques of free historical investigation and analysis, and accepted the autonomy of science as well as of politics; a sympathetic interest in the new astronomy was only one reflection among others of the remarkably open attitude to all human experience that characterized the Gallican magistracy.^[53] Gallicanism thus brought into focus tendencies central to a whole generation of Europeans.

It should be clear, then, why lines of communication were open between Gallican leaders and like-minded men, perhaps especially government officials, in other parts of Europe; and they operated in both directions. Gallican writings occupied a prominent place in the Calvinist Melchior Goldast's monumental Monarchia S. Romani imperii (Hanover and Frankfurt, 1611–1613).^[54] They were also read in England, occasionally in English translation;^[55] and conversely the oath of allegiance that the Gallican Third Estate proposed to impose on the realm at the Estates General of 1614 was modeled on the Anglican oath of James I.^[56]

The connections between Gallicanism and Venice, as another Catholic power, are, however, particularly instructive. After several decades of withdrawal from European affairs, the Serenissima, still regarded as a major state, was during the later sixteenth century drawing closer to France, whose recovery after the Religious Wars she welcomed as a make-weight on the Italian peninsula to Spain. An interest in French thought accompanied thoughts of political alliance, and both were mediated by ambassadors like Philippe Canaye, who, although forbidden direct contact with the Venetian patriciate, communicated with its more important members through such influential personages as Paolo Sarpi.^[57] The mentality of this group, among which Galileo spent his most happy and fruitful years, is suggested by its interest in such works as the essays of Montaigne and Francis Bacon. It was cosmopolitan, skeptical, generally suspicious of both the motives and the results of intellectual system building, and in politics resolved to defend the autonomy of the secular world and the absolute independence of the Republic.^[58]

Venetian interest in Gallicanism was notably stimulated by the papal

interdict of 1606–1607 and the tense years following that traumatic event. The Venetians helped Canaye himself to recognize the larger importance of Gallicanism. Possibly a bit misled by Venetian flattery, he wrote home from Venice: "The greater the effort to stifle our Gallican liberties, the more they are studied and embraced by all nations, so that here they are described as a law of nations necessary to the conservation of every kind of state."^[59] Such prominent Gallicans as Leschassier and Louis Servin were induced by the Venetian ambassador in Paris to compose treatises in behalf of Venice, whose cause against Rome was discovered to be much the same as that of France;^[60] and Sarpi, who had long been interested in the doctrines of Cujas, busied himself in securing copies of Gallican treatises to circulate among the Venetian leaders.^[61] In these works the Venetians found, if not novel arguments, valuable support for their general insistence that the autonomy they required for themselves represented the legitimate and historic organization of the church universal.

But here too the exchange moved in both directions, in spite of the complacency of Canaye. Gallicans admired and found encouragement in Venetian resistance to Rome, and they read the Venetian treatises with as much avidity as the Venetians read theirs. The magistrates of Paris followed the Venetian interdict with deep interest, collecting and passing around each scrap of news, and reacting with varying degrees of enthusiasm to the Venetian pamphlets as they reached Paris. For Pierre de l'Estoile, Paolo Sarpi, the leading Venetian theorist, was a kind of saint.^[62] Nor did the impression that the Venetian interdict left in France die quickly. The papal nuncio in Paris noted with alarm a year after the interdict came to an end how much encouragement "the contumacy of the Venetians" still gave to the French. In his view it continued to justify and to excuse "the faults and errors" of the French, among whom "papal jurisdiction is almost completely destroyed."^[63] After the assassination of Henry IV, the author of the famous Anticoton praised Venice for expelling the Jesuits. If France had been equally wise, he meant to imply, the king would still have been alive.^[64]

Viewed in this broader context, therefore, Gallicanism takes on a new and larger meaning. Religious thought has a unique capacity to bring into focus fundamental changes in the whole range of human values and attitudes which may find only partial expression in other aspects of human activity. And Gallicanism reveals, perhaps more generally than any other development in the religious history of France during the later medieval and early modern periods, how fully France participated in the spiritual and cultural crisis of the Renaissance and Reformation.

14
The Waning of the Middle Ages Revisited

The author of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga, is the historian who has most influenced my work, both more generally in his conception of the scope of cultural history and more specifically in his preoccupation with the relation between culture and anxiety. The essay is reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited," 103, no. 1 (Winter 1974), 35–43 .

We have come a long way since Bury informed us so firmly that history is a science, no more and no less. Historiography has now become so various and eclectic that it is often difficult to see it as the expression of any specific discipline; historians today seem to be united only by some common concern with the past and by a common allegiance, at least in principle, to respect for evidence, the exercise of critical intelligence, and openness of mind. They differ, on the whole amicably, about the questions they ask; and in answering these questions they draw freely on all the resources of their own intellectual and artistic culture. Their work often reveals highly personal qualities, sometimes latent, sometimes explicit and without apology; and although historical criticism can still find nothing better to say about much undistinguished work than that it is "definitive," it is likely to praise significant historical writing for its "imaginative power," its "vision," or its "originality." Johan Huizinga was a herald of this great change, and his Waning of the Middle Ages was one of the earliest and most influential models of the new history of the twentieth century.^[1]

He had, of course, distinguished predecessors. But Jacob Burckhardt,

to whom Huizinga was closer than has sometimes been recognized, had little general influence on the way history was written, however important he may have been for shaping the idea of the Renaissance; and Wilhelm Dilthey left no major work to illustrate his views, but only scattered essays and theoretical pronouncements not widely read by working historians. The historical profession continued on the whole, therefore, to follow what it thought of as scientific method, regarding its evidence as so much objective data to be accumulated bit by bit and then used like bricks for the construction of an edifice that was presumed to represent the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist . Because politics had been more fully recorded than anything else, the core of most historical composition was political narrative; and although other aspects of human experience in the past were not altogether ignored, they tended in the typical history to be held aside for discussion at the end in chapters that seemed more like appendices than like an integral part of the historian's conception. Man, in this historiography, seemed little more than Homo politicus . By precept, but above all by example, Huizinga taught us how to write history differently.

He could do so partly because he was not a historians' historian but always, to his profession, something of an outsider. Largely self-trained, he observed his fellow historians—their methods, their questions, and their assumptions—with remarkable detachment and a refined irony that, it must be admitted, sometimes seemed calculated rather to annoy than to persuade. There was, perhaps, a good deal of Homo ludens in Huizinga himself; and one suspects that he enjoyed teasing his professional colleagues by deliberately ignoring, in his own work, some of their favorite concerns, or by pointing out how little their solemn categories had to do with any objective historical reality. His manner, indeed, made him appear in some respects more iconoclastic than he was. Nevertheless, his rebellion against the tendencies dominant in the historical establishment of his time was fundamental; he rejected its scientific pretensions, its belief—attached to conceptions of geological and biological evolution—in progress, and its naive confidence that the facts speak for themselves.

The narrowing of the historian's audience, for which he partly blamed these tendencies, also troubled him. In "The Task of Cultural History," a lecture delivered in 1926, seven years after the appearance of The Waning of the Middle Ages , Huizinga exposed the concerns underlying that work. He proclaimed that history should serve as "the implement with which culture accounts for its past," and he argued that it must therefore "find its sphere and its sounding board in life in general in its own day" and be read as widely as possible. Few among the great his-

torians since the Renaissance, he pointed out with perhaps a hint of malice, had been university men; and the growing confinement of history within universities seemed to him symptomatic of an increasingly unhealthy relation between scholarship and the general culture of educated men.^[2] From this standpoint The Waning of the Middle Ages presents itself as a conscious effort to restore the health of the profession to which Huizinga belonged by striking out in a new direction. He was seeking, in that book, to reclaim history for the culture of his own time, and to do so in part by redefining the relationship of the historian to his subject along what might crudely be described as humanistic rather than scientific lines, in part by incorporating into historical thought new kinds of evidence and new conceptions drawn from other human (rather than scientific) disciplines: literature and aesthetics but also social studies in which, like few other historians of his generation, he was widely read.

The importance of The Waning of the Middle Ages does not, in fact, lie in its general thesis, which—a point not always realized—was a bit old-fashioned, even reactionary. Huizinga relied heavily on Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (I cite the German title because Kultur brings out, better than the English Civilization , the filiation between Burckhardt and Huizinga, the self-conscious historian of culture). Huizinga began with Burckhardt's view of cultural history as a study of the attitudes, values, and behavior patterns of men in groups in the past, a conception that largely ignored conventional political narrative. Such history turned out to have obvious affinities with sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and Huizinga, three-quarters of a century later, was in a better position to recognize this than Burckhardt.

Huizinga was also Burckhardtian in a more specific way. Far from attacking Burckhardt's conception of the Renaissance wholesale, The Waning of the Middle Ages accepted and reiterated its general validity. Burckhardt's work, after all, had been limited to Italy; and, by stressing the priority of Italy in the formation of modern culture, Burckhardt was also saying that the rest of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had remained essentially medieval. Huizinga's book revealed how well the courtly culture of France and the Netherlands supported this view, and the central thesis of the book was its least original quality. indeed, from time to time Huizinga paid explicit tribute to the Burckhardtian orthodoxies. He made much of Michelangelo's remarks about Flemish painting to show the contrast between Italy and the North, and he thought Burckhardt equally right about literature. "Thinking of the Italian literature of the same period, the fresh and lovely period of

the quattrocento ," Huizinga wrote, "we may perhaps wonder how the form and spirit of the Renaissance can still seem so remote from the regions on this side of the Alps."^[3] Huizinga's true target was not Burckhardt but those scholars, such as Konrad Burdach or the art historian Louis Courajod, who were attempting to annex parts of medieval culture to the Renaissance in a quite un-Burckhardtian spirit, to deny the uniqueness of Italy, and to claim the Renaissance as a European phenomenon.

Not that Huizinga was a slavish disciple. Like any able scholar working in the tradition of a respected master, he reviewed Burckhardt's insights critically, tested them with fresh evidence, and limited some of Burckhardt's claims; Burckhardt, after all, had invited such treatment by modestly calling his own great work "an essay." Huizinga had the advantage of knowing more about Northern Europe in the Middle Ages than Burckhardt, and he perceived that, in some matters of detail, Burckhardt had been mistaken about the peculiarities of the Italian Renaissance; medieval culture, too, had known Stoic concern with the inconstancy of Fortune and the natural equality of man, thirst for glory, and a bold naturalism, to cite a few examples.^[4] Again, the popularity of Petrarch and Boccaccio in France led Huizinga to take a brief but closer look at these supposed founding fathers of the Renaissance, and he discovered in them more ambiguity, more that seemed medieval, than had commonly been discerned.^[5] The result was a more nuanced but still fundamentally Burckhardtian perception of the Italian Renaissance that strikingly foreshadowed some of the most fruitful achievements of recent scholarship—for example, Hans Baron's treatment of the ambiguities of the fourteenth century or Charles Trinkaus's study of the moral and religious thought of the Italian humanists.^[6]

But Huizinga also felt compelled to deal in a more basic way with the problem of innovation and tradition so central to Renaissance scholarship. Medievalists since Burckhardt had shown conclusively that a broad and respectful knowledge of the classics had been common during the Middle Ages, so that classicism in itself could no longer be taken as an essential criterion of Renaissance culture. Yet Huizinga was fully persuaded, following Burckhardt, that there was some crucial difference between medieval and modern culture, however inaccurately this had been defined. And in his effort to solve this problem we can begin to sense both his originality and something of the larger resonance of his work. His solution took the shape of a distinction between the forms of a culture and its content or spirit. The true significance of the Renaissance, he argued, did not lie in its use of classical forms, since these had been known before, but in the convergence of these forms with a

new spirit.^[7] He was traditional enough to identify this new spirit with an authentic classicism, but the principle has led to a new precision in the understanding of what was peculiar to the Renaissance. By reuniting a genuinely classical spirit to classical forms, Renaissance culture could perceive the great Greeks and Romans as inhabitants of a world very different from its own, remote in time as well as in quality.

Huizinga's distinction between form and spirit, however vague it may have seemed at the outset, thus opened the way to the emphasis of twentieth-century scholars on the peculiar historicism of the Renaissance, that sense of temporal perspective which made it possible for the first time for men to contrast themselves with other men in the past and to consider themselves modern. From this standpoint, the men of the Renaissance were indeed the first modern men, not quite for Burckhardt's reasons but because they were the first Europeans to consider themselves so. Huizinga did not explore all this himself, but the insight, with its recognition of the historical significance of subjectivity, was typical of his kind of cultural history. It also had other implications important for later historians of the Renaissance. For Renaissance historicism pointed to the relativity of all human culture, including historical and perhaps even scientific thought, to historical conditions. Huizinga's conception of his own historical activity was thus closely related to his understanding of what had occurred in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe.

Thus, even as he wrestled with the Renaissance problem, Huizinga was opening up, in The Waning of the Middle Ages , a new way of thinking about every part of the past; and here, of course, lies the larger importance of the book. It was reassuring to historians in its adherence to guild standards: it was based on objective data critically scrutinized. Nevertheless, it departed radically from prevailing assumptions about the relation between the historian and his materials. Huizinga was, in fact, proposing a far more dynamic, creative, and personally responsible conception of the historian's task than a "scientific" idea of history had permitted. He saw clearly that the ability of the historian to make sense of the past did not depend primarily on his adding to an already unmanageable body of data but on the questions he asked, and that these were products of the historian's personal insight and imagination. "Ten fools can answer more questions than one wise man can ask," he declared, inverting an old proverb.^[8] Huizinga, by his own example, was exhorting the historian to make creative use of his unavoidable subjectivity and his dependence on the culture of his time. This, for him, was the only way to restore a healthy relation between history and culture.

More specifically, the general task of historical composition, as Hui-

zinga saw it, was not to review and describe "all" the evidence (though this had to be meticulously evaluated) but to penetrate beneath it to its underlying principles; we can thus discern here a more general application of his distinction between the forms and the content of culture. But this task could not be accomplished mechanically, by following the rules of an objective methodology. It required the full engagement of the historian both as a percipient individual and as a sensitive representative of his own culture, able to ask the questions that mattered in his own time. This conviction was a fundamental addition to Burckhardt's idea of cultural history. "Only when the scholar turns to determining the patterns of life, art, and thought taken all together can there actually be a question of cultural history," he wrote. But "the nature of those patterns is not set. They obtain their form beneath our hands."^[9] Following this principle the historian could present all that men had done in the period of his concern—the totality of human culture in a given place and time—in a way that was not only historically authentic but that also illuminated the broader possibilities of the human condition. For, in Huizinga's thought, man was always at the center of the historical stage; none of his activities could be hypostatized (the efforts of historians notwithstanding); all that man did was significant at least as a form of expressive behavior, telling us what, at some moment in the past, he was like at the center of his being.

The result was both a new concreteness and a new principle of synthesis, at once Burckhardtian and going beyond Burckhardt in its ability to give coherence to the historian's total enterprise. After Huizinga, for example, intellectual history, as the simple history of ideas, could no longer be fully satisfying; it had to be an integral part of life itself, pointing ultimately to deeper impulses flowing from social and political experience or from collective psychology.

His focus on the human being at the center of history allowed Huizinga to enlarge the scope of history in ways that remarkably anticipated many of the new directions history has taken in this century, for his conception of cultural history has tended to become the definition of what, for many of us, all history should now aspire to be, even when our particular studies seem far removed from his. Nor can we blame him for failing to pursue all the provocative suggestions offered, sometimes almost casually, in The Waning of the Middle Ages . Few of his successors have been able to follow more than one or two of them.

Much of the excitement of the book lay, therefore, in its demonstration of what could be done with kinds of evidence few previous historians had known how to exploit fruitfully. Huizinga was instructive not so

much because he used artistic and literary materials as for what he made them reveal. The peculiar responses of the senses, not only of the eye and ear but also of touch, smell, and even taste became, under his guidance, historically significant. The passions as well, the manner in which they were regarded, the ways they found expression, became a part of culture. So did dreams, fantasies, delusions, fads, games symbolic structures: these were no longer too frivolous to merit the attention of a serious historian, or errors happily transcended by a more enlightened age, but profoundly instructive reflections of the human condition. Apparently without the help of Freud, Huizinga was also aware of the erotic element in human culture, an insight that informed some of his most evocative chapters. And in spite of the elitism for which he has so often been condemned, Huizinga pointed too, in one of his pregnant asides, to the special importance for the historian of the humbler dimensions of life:

The specific forms of the thought of an epoch should not only be studied as they reveal themselves in theological and philosophic speculations, or in the conceptions of creeds, but also as they appear in practical wisdom and everyday life. We may even say that the true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science.^[10]

He was equally open to methodological innovation and in some cases he practiced it. He would, I think, have been deeply sympathetic to quantitative research; consider how useful he would have found the computer for solving the following problem, which he posed with a clarity not always characteristic of later quantifiers: "To determine the taste in colors characteristic of the epoch would require a comprehensive and statistical research, embracing the chromatic scale of painting as well as the colors of costume and decorative art."^[11] Meanwhile the work of sociologists like Weber encouraged him into occasional ventures in cross-cultural comparison; thus he bolstered his remarks about the aristocratic ideal of manly perfection in Europe by noting similar conceptions in India and Japan.^[12] And, more profoundly, his approach to the life of is the past took the form of a kind of cultural functionalism. The structures of culture, in his view, were of interest to the historian because they met the most serious social needs. Much of the special quality of Huizinga's thought is conveyed in a characteristic effort to apply this principle:

The passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty, between respect and insolence, between despondency and wantonness, could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism. All emotions required a rigid system of conventional forms, for without them passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life. By this sublimating faculty each event became a spectacle for others; mirth and sorrow were artificially and theatrically made up. For want of the faculty to express emotions in a simple and natural way, recourse must needs be had to esthetic representations of sorrow and joy.^[13]

All this can be said of the greatness of Huizinga and the distinction of The Waning of the Middle Ages , and yet it is also a flawed book which even a historian sensitive to its virtues cannot find altogether satisfactory. For Huizinga was an outsider not only in respect to his own profession but also in relation to the culture of his own time, and he was therefore imperfectly fitted to mediate between the two. He was uncomfortable in an increasingly democratic world, and the development of mass culture left him with a sense of foreboding to which he gave formal expression with In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935). The mood of that book was already present in The Waning of the Middle Ages and largely accounts for its defects as well as its peculiar point of view. Huizinga saw his own time as a period in which culture was also waning; and just as he was blind to much that others have seen as positive in the modern world, he ignored, though he was not altogether unaware of, the positive elements in the Northern European scene during the later Middle Ages.

Thus Huizinga's reaction against assumptions of progress made him reluctant to grapple with change, and his portrait of Northern Europe in the later Middle Ages is even more static than Burckhardt's of Italy. His resistance to the significance of change was reflected in a skepticism about historical periodization; and although this was wholesome in itself, it weakened his presentation of the peculiarities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which he never clearly distinguished from what had gone before. This unsolved problem is reflected in the original Dutch title of his book, whose ambiguity is concealed by its English translation: Waning is too unequivocally negative for Herfsttij , which suggests not only autumnal decline but also the ripe fruits of the harvest.^[14] Huizinga often seems unclear whether he is describing a "primitive" and "childlike"—these are among his favorite adjectives—or a decadent and sophisticated culture.

A related defect was his basic lack of concern with explanation. Again

his impulse here was in part a healthy reaction against the facile treatment of causality by some of his contemporaries, especially Marxists, but he weakened a good point by stating it in a way that was not only playful but perhaps frivolous:

Knowing in the historical sense rarely if ever means indicating a strictly closed causality. It is always an understanding of contexts. . . . This context is always an open one, which is to say that it may never be represented in the metaphor of links forming a chain, but only in that of a loosely bound bundle of sticks to which new twigs can be added as long as the band around them allows it. Perhaps more suitable than a bundle of sticks might be a bunch of wildflowers. In their variety and their difference in value new notions added to the conception of a historical context are like newly found flowers in the nosegay: each one changes the appearance of the whole bouquet.^[15]

The conception may have fitted the historical "still-lifes" that came out of his own study, but it was hardly helpful in accounting for the "waning" of the Middle Ages; and he could not altogether avoid the problem of cause. Yet when he did deal with it, he took refuge in a kind of organic cultural determinism that seems more like evasion than explanation. The waning of medieval culture, he suggested, was a product of fatigue, the result of the long and strenuous elaboration of its potentialities: "What may be called a stagnation of thought prevails, as though the mind, exhausted after building up the spiritual fabric of the Middle Ages, had sunk into inertia."^[16] But this was a betrayal of his own deepest insights. It implies that, in spite of his sociological interests, some part of his mind still clung to the notion of an autonomous culture developing, in the custody of a cultivated elite, according to its own internal dynamics.

Yet this also helps to explain why he refused to look seriously beyond aristocratic culture at the forces that were making the old nobility superfluous and at the energies already at work in the formation of a new culture—a serious limitation that also reflected his indifference to both change and cause. He did not choose to face the double significance of the notion of decadence at the heart of his book, the symbiosis of old and new, decay and growth. Every positive development he either minimized, like nominalism, or omitted, like the movements of religious renewal. He was not unaware of what was positive in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the end of his book suggested what a more balanced depiction of the later Middle Ages would have included: "A high and strong culture is declining, but at the same time and in the

same sphere new things are being born."^[17] He was even inconsistent enough to admire the novelties of Italy. But the contrast between "a high and strong culture" and "new things" sticks in the mind. Huizinga did not much care for new things, and so he left them out of what he nevertheless often seems to want us to accept as the essential truth about the later Middle Ages.

Yet, in spite of its defects, in spite of the fact that so much in The Waning of the Middle Ages has now become the common possession of historians so that its work has in this respect largely been done, the book is still well worth reading. It can be enjoyed as a work of high art, full of color and life, as in its marvelous opening chapter with its bells and processions, its public executions and public tears. Or it can be read as documentation of an important transition in the cultural history of our own century, as illuminating for its ambivalence and confusion as for its movement from one stage to the next. But the work will continue to be read above all, I think, for another reason. Just as man, in all his multifaceted complexity, is for Huizinga at the center of history, so Huizinga the man, in all his brilliance and complexity, remains at the center of the history he wrote. Since Huizinga revealed so much of himself in his work and since he had a singularly original and stimulating mind, provocative even when it seems most limited and perverse, The Waning of the Middle Ages has the kind of vitality that causes historical writing to be read long after its own time.

15
From History of Ideas to History of Meaning

In the summer of 1980, the editors of the Annales, of Past and Present, and of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History jointly sponsored a conference at the Villa Serbelloni, the conference center of the Rockefeller Foundation, to discuss the directions historical research might and should take in the decade of the eighties. I was asked to prepare this essay for the conference as a position paper an the present condition and the probable future of intellectual history. I was chiefly concerned with what intellectual history could still be now that the idealism implicit in much history of ideas has been generally abandoned. Reprinted from The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981), 279–291, with the permission of the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts , © by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

Intellectual history, until recently, was regarded with particular respect. It was probably the most interdisciplinary area of historical study and therefore seemed both unusually demanding and unusually prestigious. It was considered important. But during the last two decades, the impression has grown among historians that the kinds of material likely to be studied by intellectual historians are not very useful for telling us what we most need to know about the past.^[1]

As those of us who scrutinize the small number of job listings for our students have observed, intellectual history seems now to be considered less essential to the curriculum than other kinds of history. Fewer students care to be identified as intellectual historians, and the remaining practitioners of intellectual history are more and more uncertain about

their methods and purposes. And it is increasingly difficult to say what, at least in the abstract, intellectual history is about. For these reasons, as well as for others that will emerge later in this article, the question of the immediate future of intellectual history requires more radical treatment than may be appropriate for other dimensions of historiography.

The decline of intellectual history appears obvious, and probably irreversible. But despite a long identification with the problems and methods of intellectual history, I do not deplore this development. For although intellectual history has indeed declined as an isolated specialty, in another form it has never been more important. The resources of intellectual history, or of something related to and growing out of it, can be useful to historians precisely in the degree to which intellectual history is not treated separately but is generally assimilated by other kinds of historians. This is what has recently been happening. That intellectual history is now disappearing as one of the conventional specialties into which historians segregate themselves is a sign of the growing maturity of intellectual history, and of historiography more generally. We no longer need intellectual history because we have all become intellectual historians: some of us, no doubt, unintentionally, reluctantly, and without fully realizing what has happened. Since the explanation for this situation will itself require some exploitation of the resources of conventional intellectual history, it will also provide an example of the tasks that even an old-fashioned and specialized intellectual historian can continue to perform in any decade, notably for other historians: in this case the liberation—not always welcome—that can result from identifying and laying bare for inspection our own deepest assumptions about ourselves and the world. This useful service may suggest that the specialized techniques of intellectual historians are worth keeping alive.

Conventional intellectual history itself has a history that is instructive about its present predicament. Since this history is still largely unwritten, my observations about the origins and lineage of intellectual history will necessarily be somewhat speculative; but the word "intellectual" here holds some promise as a point of entry. This word is an adjective, based on a noun that refers to a faculty alleged—in a certain venerable tradition of thought which historians have never found very congenial—to reside in the human personality. This tradition is that of philosophical idealism, which, since its beginnings in classical antiquity, has depended on—and constantly reinforced—a characteristic anthropology that has had a major influence on the understanding of the human animal in the West.

According to this view, the human personality consists of a hierarchy of discrete faculties, among which intellect—more or less closely identified with reason—is highest. In the earlier stages of this tradition, the intellect was believed to constitute the divine element in man and so to distinguish him from the other animals; and a sense of the peculiar virtue and importance of the intellect and its works, although variously expressed, has always been a major element in this tradition. The association of the intellect with the brain gave the head ethical significance and converted it into a potent metaphor; the highest became best. And for two thousand years, in what was the main stream of Western thought, the erect stature of man was the visible sign of his distinction from and his superiority to nature. It raised him above the material earth and enabled him to contemplate the heavenly bodies, from which he first learned the eternal principles of order. As Plato himself had testified, this was the origin of philosophy, the noblest of human activities.^[2]

This remote background helps to explain both the special prestige once attached to intellectual history and the reasons for its recent decline. Intellectual history was perceived as the study of the working and the works of the human intellect through the centuries; and, since the intellect was the highest faculty in man, it followed that intellectual history was the highest type of history. As Hegel believed, it also could be seen as the source of such clues as we could have to the direction and meaning of all history. These ideas are still very much alive in the notion, which pervades much contemporary social and political speculation, that man, by taking thought, can add cubits to his stature: that is, that "intellectuals" can shape the world for the better. Furthermore, since society, in this tradition, was also conceived—following the general principle underlying all order—as a hierarchy, this line of thought also directed historical investigation toward the intellectual activity of elites. And such notions exerted a power over us, even just half a century ago, that was all the greater because we were unaware of them. A generation of academically precocious youths, too myopic or too light to be good in sports, found compensation in turning from physical activity to the higher concerns of the intellect. In this context intellectual history had obvious attractions.

But the marriage between an intellectuality that was focused on the progressively clearer grasp of the eternal, and history, which tended increasingly to view all things as mutable and even its own presuppositions as historical artifacts, was uncomfortable from the outset; and even in its purer forms intellectual history, although it was often hardly very historical, did not succeed in being philosophical.

Lovejoy's treatment of the history of ideas is an illuminating example. His detachment of his "unit ideas" from a larger context of changing human needs and conditions suggests the autonomy of intellect in the idealist tradition; but when he faced the question of the significance of such conceptions as the great chain of being, Lovejoy could only reduce them to mysterious psychological impulses, inexplicable cravings for simplicity or complexity which were themselves, variations on what he called "metaphysical pathos."^[3]

The satisfaction of dealing with the morphology of ideas at the highest level in courses entitled "intellectual history" was rarely sufficient for historians, and the teachers of such courses tended increasingly to analyze a conventional body of texts (the standard works of "great thinkers") with the tools of psychohistory or one or another approach to the sociology of knowledge. In the degree to which it was genuinely historical, intellectual history was thus undermining its own claims to special respect.

Meanwhile these developments internal to the profession were complemented by the more important changes taking place in the larger world that historians inhabited—changes that radically subverted the claims of intellect not only to receive privileged treatment but even to any discrete existence. It is hardly necessary to review the role of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud in disintegrating the intellectual conception of man, although of the three Freud may prove to have been the most radical in his impact on anthropology. For Freud associated man's upright posture explicitly with his fall from a condition of primordial bliss; he saw in the erect stature of the human animal the sign, perhaps even the prehistorical cause, of that schism in the personality which, perversely dividing humanitas into an honorable portion above the neck and a shameful region below the waist, produced not wisdom and order, but neurosis, conflict, and despair. At any rate we can hardly any longer define man as an intellectual animal. However we regard him, he is both less and more than this—and infinitely more interesting, which is the major explanation for the fact that an autonomous intellectual history is now likely to seem, like the discrete intellect of the old anthropology, at best an irrelevant abstraction from real life.

Nevertheless the materials with which intellectual historians have traditionally worked cannot be dismissed as without interest or value for students of the past. Rather they must now be understood in a new way, as expressive or adaptive behavior of a kind still identifiable as (probably) peculiar to the human animal, and also as a subset of a larger category of such human behavior, to which they now solicit our atten-

tion. This category consists of all efforts to discover or to impose meaning on our experience, although some sense of meaning is also both a condition and a product of experience. These efforts are not the work of the "intellect" or of any particular area of the personality. They are rather a function of the human organism as a whole; they are carried on both consciously and unconsciously; and they are presupposed by, and merge with, every more specific human activity, including the begetting of children and their upbringing within families. I cite these examples not in order to put such matters down, but to reinforce the general point that the concern with meaning, which I take to be the remnant chiefly worth saving from intellectual history, has been profitably appropriated for their own purposes even by historians of those dimensions of human experience farthest removed from the sublime concerns of intellectual history.

The amalgamation of concerns once primarily limited to so-called intellectual historians with other kinds of history by way of a (usually only implicit) concern with meaning is the most significant development of the recent past from the standpoint of my argument in this article. The works that have most interested those of us who have sometimes thought of ourselves as intellectual historians, and that also have made the greatest impact on historiography, are virtually impossible to classify in terms of our conventional categories, but they come into focus as studies in the construction of meaning. I would cite from my own field (not because it is unanimously admired or because all of its conclusions have been accepted, but because it stimulated a whole generation of Renaissance scholars in various directions and in this way transformed a major area of European historiography) Baron's The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance . The very title of this work lets us know that we cannot put it into one of our standard categories, and indeed that such classification would be useless for understanding it. It draws on the resources of both political and intellectual history, and it touches also on social and economic matters. But it is basically an extended account of a collective discovery of meaning in the destiny of the Florentine polis.^[4]

A similar point could be made of May's The Enlightenment in America ; although its title seems to classify it as intellectual history, it is also heavily concerned with political, social, and institutional analysis as it reveals how Americans, who must first be understood in their own complex setting, struggled to find meaning in a complex set of European ideas. Again we can only classify a work like Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change as an assessment of the impact of technology

on the construction of meaning in various aspects of European experience. This work also provides us with an instance of the increasing tendency of historians to substitute the word "cultural" in places where they might earlier have employed the word "intellectual." No doubt this is partly because "cultural" seems less restrictive than "intellectual," but it also is an expression of an at least obscure association of "culture" with meaning in a larger sense.^[5]

Thus, if I discern any trend in the work of historians who were once clearly (but have perhaps not recently been) identified with intellectual history, it is an increasing concern with the location, the description, and perhaps the explanation of what passes for meaning in a variety of historical situations. Once this is recognized, a good deal of what seems most vague (and perhaps therefore irritating) about intellectual history will come into focus.

It explains, for example, a tendency for intellectual historians to exploit artistic expression. From the standpoint of a strictly "intellectual" history, this presents a serious conceptual difficulty, for art and intellect are not obviously synonymous and, since Plato, have often been at odds. But the difficulty evaporates once we have recognized that the arts have always been a primary vehicle for the expression of meaning (or more recently, sometimes, meaninglessness).

Intellectual historians have long sensed (without perhaps fully understanding) their affinities with art historians like Erwin Panofsky. Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy is an unusually valuable study of the artistic creation of fundamental meanings by an art historian. The possibilities of collaboration between art historians and a more general kind of cultural historian are suggested by A Renaissance Likeness by Partridge and Starn, which explores a whole milieu by the intensive study of a single painting. Schorske's Fin-de Siècle Vienna combines an interest in artistic meaning with the use of psychoanalysis to penetrate to other levels of meaning, which again are hardly to be described as "intellectual."^[6]

In reporting on the past and future of intellectual history, I am (somewhat to my own surprise) describing the metamorphosis of an old and familiar, although never very satisfactorily developed, field of historical activity into something new and strange that is likely to be far more useful. In its new state, however, it can also be seen to assimilate various kinds of history, some of them clearly growing in interest, which are otherwise hard to classify. A distinguished example is Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic . How are we to classify this work in terms of our conventional categories? It is not exactly intellectual history,

if only because intellectual activity as a high thing was almost by definition confined to the upper classes. That Thomas's book deals with structures of popular belief is hardly sufficient to call it social history, although the identity of social history sometimes raises difficulties for me almost as serious as those created by intellectual history. But if we recognize this work as an example of a new historical genre that might be called, for want of a more elegant term, the history of meanings, we have placed it within its own family of works, the members of which—once we recognize that they belong together—can illuminate each other.^[7]

Immediately one thinks of further candidates for membership in this group: some of the essays of Davis; Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou ; Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness , with its eloquent use of folklore; or Jordan's White over Black which, whatever else it may be, is a report on the tragic results of one kind of assertion of meaning.^[8]

In the same way other major kinds of recent work, too often ignored in historiographical discussions because they do not fit our conventional categories, can be seen as subsets of the history of meanings, and therefore well worth serious attention. One of the most important of these clearly is religious history, which is concerned in the most direct and ultimate way with the exploration of meaning, and in its institutional dimension with structures for the preservation, cultivation, and transmission or meaning. Thomas's work belongs partly in this category, and a substantial proportion of the activity of historians of every period and part of the world is now devoted to religious phenomena. Again this remarkable circumstance is easy to overlook because of an inherited system for the classification of historical scholarship in which it has no place.

The titles of a few major works concerned with the period with which I am most familiar convey some sense of the difficulty of classifying them according to our usual labels: among them are books by Reeves, Ozment, Tentler, O'Malley, and Rothkrug.^[9]

Still other kinds of scholarship can be brought into focus in this way. One thinks immediately of the history of education, which has normally had as its primary purpose the transmission of meanings from one generation to the next; a recent example is Strauss's Luther's House of Learning . The history of historiography, and perhaps of other branches of learning, also assumes more general significance when it is understood to be centrally concerned with meaning; every work of historical composition is, after all, a bit of documentation of what passes for meaning in the community and period out of which it arises. Such studies as

White's Metahistory may be highly "intellectual" (a term that now seems to mean something like "difficult to read"); but the awkward intrusion of the word "imagination" in the title suggests that it is not very usefully called "intellectual history." A similar point can be made about Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment . But meaning can also be expressed through institutions: constitutions, for example, judicial systems, or even bureaucracies. Thus Brentano's Two Churches is a distinguished investigation of the construction of meaning as well as utility out of materials not usually associated with such activity.^[10]

The kind of history that I am describing is characterized not (like traditional intellectual history) by the sources that it utilizes but by the questions that it asks. By the same token, it does not exclude attention to the creation of meaning by elites; it leaves open the considerable possibility that this may be of the greatest interest. It may be objected, indeed, that this redefinition of intellectual history is far too broadly conceived: that, indeed, in an outburst of disciplinary imperialism from the most unexpected quarter, and by the most arbitrary redefinition of my assignment, I have claimed almost everything in historiography for my province. I hope that this is not the case; but I do see, in the conception of man as an animal who must create or discern meaning in everything that he does, the most promising resource that has yet presented itself for overcoming the consequences—so devastating for the historical understanding in the long run, no matter how convenient in the short—of our proliferating specialization. The only antidote for this tendency in historiography, now so widely deplored, is a shift in emphasis from raw historical experience (i.e., what happens to people) to what human beings have made out of that experience. Such a shift should remind us, too, that the creative interpretation of experience also shapes experience, which is only in the abstract independent of the meaning imposed upon it.

As to the future, it is my hope that tendencies already discernible—the decline of traditional intellectual history as an area of specialization, the exploitation of its resources instead by historians who do not care to identify their work as intellectual history, and an expanded concern with the meanings expressed by every kind of human activity in the past—will grow stronger, be more explicitly embraced, and develop the more deliberate strategies that are likely to emerge when scholarship becomes conscious of what it is doing. I have one or two suggestions about what this might mean, but first it seems to me that a caveat against reductionism is in order.

I have referred to the role of Darwin, Marx, and Freud in the de-

struction of a traditional model of man; we owe them a great deal for this and will continue to benefit in various ways from the insights that they have released. But we should not, by following them, correct one kind of mistake only to make another. It is unlikely to help us much simply to reverse the hierarchy, and to put matter in the place of mind, or biological in the place of intellectual experience. This would still be too traditional; the structural principle—the principle that organizes phenomena as sub (or infra ) and super —would remain the same. A more novel anthropology (which is at the same time very old, since it too has a history), an anthropology that is more wholesome (in the sense of integrated and therefore irreducible), is fundamental to the notion of man as a creator of meanings, a conception that can only engender a sense of the unpredictability of the human condition and therefore of mystery and awe, sensations as appropriate to the historical as to the poetic understanding.

History, as has often been observed, is parasitical; but as it changes, so does the host on which it feeds. Traditional intellectual history was chiefly nourished by traditional philosophy; but as intellectual history has been transformed, it has been turning to the arts. I expect this tendency to grow stronger and to expand from literary, and visual art into music and dance, and from elite to popular expression in all the arts.

But art as expressive and integrative behavior points finally to anthropology, now as an academic discipline, and especially to cultural anthropology, which is likely to be the fundamental external resource for the kind of study that is being born out of a dying intellectual history. This is so for several reasons. The anthropological model which generally (with some exceptions) informs anthropology as a discipline underlies the conception that I have outlined of man as a creator of meanings. This model largely rejects the conception of man as a hierarchy of discrete faculties. It accordingly rejects also the assignment of privileged status a priori to one or another area of human activity. Since it conceives of the human personality as a mysterious whole, it is opposed to all reductionism. And, of course, it is centrally concerned with the construction and symbolic expression of meaning in every dimension of human activity. In short it is useful to the historian precisely because it is the least specialized among the social sciences; this is why, increasingly, it insists on a kind of "thick description" that many historians are finding so congenial. Most anthropologists have been content so far with a kind of systematic and static description that is fundamentally ahistorical (although even this has been useful for the—almost equally static—

study of mentalitées by historians); and I have heard anthropologists confess that their discipline has not dealt very satisfactorily with problems of cultural change. But the recent work of some anthropologists, for example Sahlins, Bourdieu, and Bloch, has been increasingly historical. It may be that future work in anthropology will be even more useful for historians, and also that historians can be of some help to anthropologists.^[11]

A second and closely related discipline that will probably be necessary for the development of intellectual history is linguistics. For if man (to quote once again a much-quoted remark) is "an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," he spins these webs primarily from—or with the help of—language. Through language man orders the chaos of data impinging on his sensorium from, in a singularly mysterious and problematic sense, "out there," organizing them into categories and so making them intelligible for himself, manageable, communicable, and therefore socially useful as well as essential to his private adaptation to the world. Indeed, as the humanists of the Renaissance maintained (the point was perhaps more profound than they could realize), language is the basis of society. The human and social world with which historians are all, in one way or another, concerned, might therefore be described as a vast rhetorical production; and rhetoric is also likely to become a major tool of the new intellectual history. For the operations that bring this human world into existence in consciousness and endow it with meaning are comparable to such basic rhetorical transactions as division and comparison, or metonymy and metaphor.^[12]

A few historians have pointed in this direction; but the connections between a language and the perceptions of reality peculiar to those who speak it, as well as the significance of linguistic change, although often recognized in the abstract, have not yet seriously engaged historians.^[13] Because of the basic role of language at once in perception, thought, and social existence, linguistics seems—in the most literal sense—of fundamental importance for historians, as indeed for other social scientists. Changes in language are likely to provide us with clues, of a kind previously lacking, to the human significance of various kinds of developments about which we have so far been able to form only the most unverifiable impressions. Here, indeed, might lie one of the possibilities, which may be rare in the kind of history with which I am concerned, for the application of quantitative methods.

I have noted that traditional intellectual history depended heavily on traditional philosophy, and, in conclusion, it is worth observing that traditional philosophy has been slowly dying, although with occasional

remissions, during the same period, at about the same speed, and for probably the same reasons as traditional intellectual history. But it has gradually been replaced by a quite different kind of wisdom than traditional philosophers were supposed to enunciate. It is thus possible that intellectual history, transformed in the manner that I have envisaged here, may also be able to renew its connections with philosophy, similarly transformed. Under new conditions, history and philosophy might once again have much to offer each other. Historians could help explain what has been happening to philosophy, and philosophers might help historians to scrutinize their own metahistorical assumptions. In this way one of the least historical among academic disciplines might at last join hands with one of the least philosophical. This is another possibility for the next decade.

16
The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History

This essay was my presidential address before the American Historical Association at its annual meeting in 1978. I chose to discuss, for this occasion, what could be salvaged for the conception of the Renaissance as the great turning point in the history of the West, now that historians have largely lost confidence in the old dramatic scenario on which its significance depended. The address was published in the American Historical Review 94 (1979), 1–15 .

I should like to discuss a remarkable historiographical event—an event so recent that it may have escaped general notice, yet of considerable importance both for historians and for the larger culture of which we are a part. This event is the collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history. We have long depended upon it, as inhabitants of the modern world, to put the present into some distant temporal perspective and, as professional historians pursuing our particular investigations, to provide us with some sense of how the various fields of history are related to each other as parts of a larger whole. Thus, the subject seems appropriate for a general session of our annual meeting. The subject is also appropriate for me, as a historian of the Renaissance, because of the pivotal position of the Renaissance in the traditional pattern. Indeed, the historian of the Renaissance has long been the principal guardian of that pattern. But historians of the Renaissance have lately been unable—or unwilling—to fulfill this old responsibility. Hence, this essay is also a kind of oblique professional autobiography, though I point this out only for the sake of candor, not as a further inducement to your attention.

Nothing seemed less likely than this development when I entered the

profession some thirty years ago or, indeed, before the last two decades. Earlier in this century, the Burckhardtian vision of the importance of the Renaissance for the formation of the modern world had been under attack in the "revolt of the medievalists"; and in 1940 Wallace K. Ferguson had described the Renaissance as "the most intractable problem child of historiography."^[1] But Ferguson had himself never been without hope for straightening out his problem child; and less than a decade later, after studying the history of the case from many directions, he predicted for it a tranquil and prosperous maturity. The time was ripe, he declared, for "a new and more comprehensive synthesis."^[2] The revolt of the medievalists had apparently been beaten back; indeed, by teaching us greater care in distinguishing the new from the old, they seemed only to have strengthened our sense of the originality and modernity of the Renaissance. In the years after the war a group of unusually distinguished scholars brought new excitement to Renaissance studies; the concreteness and depth of their learning seemed to confirm Ferguson's expectations.^[3]

During the fifties, therefore, it was common for Renaissance specialists from various disciplines to celebrate, by reading papers to each other, their triumph over the medievalists and the world-historical significance of the Renaissance. Our agreement was remarkable. The editor of one volume of such papers noted with satisfaction "the virtual disappearance of the disposition to deny that there was a Renaissance." And he ventured to predict, obviously recalling controversies now happily over, "that future soldier scholars will beat their swords into ploughshares and that what has long been the Renaissance battleground will be transformed into a plain of peace and plenty." On the other hand, he also hinted that the occasion evoking these papers was a bit dull. "The atmosphere of charitable catholicity was so all pervading during the symposium," he remarked, "that even the moderators' valiant efforts to provoke controversy were largely futile."^[4] That the Renaissance was the critical episode in a dramatic process that would culminate in ourselves had become an orthodoxy that few cared—or dared—to question.

The notion of an abiding consensus among historians of any complex subject may now seem rather surprising, and this agreeable situation was probably in part a reflection of the general consensus of the Eisenhower years, when we were all beating our swords into ploughshares. That same irenic mood, that same amiable but slightly complacent consensus. also left its mark on other fields of history. The gentle complaint of our editor, disappointed in his hopes for a little fun at a scholarly symposium, hinted at the charge of dullness brought by bored professors against their boring students of the silent generation—upon which we would

soon enough be looking back with a degree of nostalgia. For since the 1960s the world around us has dramatically changed, and with it historiography.

These two sets of changes are not unrelated, and the result for the Renaissance has been rather different from what Ferguson foresaw. In his vision the Renaissance was to retain its pivotal position in the old scenario, but our knowledge of it would be better pulled together. But this has not occurred. Although the consensus of the golden 1950s has not been seriously challenged, we are now remarkably indifferent to the world-historical importance of the Renaissance.^[5] We go about our particular investigations as though the Renaissance problem had evaporated; we neither affirm nor bother to deny that there was a Renaissance. And the venerable Renaissance label has become little more than an administrative convenience. a kind of blanket under which we huddle together less out of mutual attraction than because, for certain purposes, we have nowhere else to go.^[6]

I do not mean to exaggerate the abruptness of this development. In retrospect we can see that the role of historians in the postwar rehabilitation of the Renaissance was always somewhat ambiguous. We accepted what was said in praise of the Renaissance by representatives of other humanistic disciplines; the importance of the Renaissance for them enhanced our own importance. But, like Garrett B. Martingly on one such occasion, we were sometimes "puzzled" about what we might contribute to a Renaissance symposium.^[7] The normal skepticism of a professional historian in the presence of large views has now given way, however, to agnosticism and even indifference about what was once the central claim of Renaissance scholarship.

This result may have been implicit in Ferguson's call for synthesis. with which most of us were sympathetic even in the 1950s without fully realizing its implications. It implied the integration of all of our data, an aspiration that seemed unexceptionable. But the ideal of "synthesis"—at least for a generation not yet dialectically sophisticated—was essentially static. Synthesis tended to shift the emphasis in Renaissance studies from process, on which the traditional estimate of the Renaissance depended, to structure or, minimally, from the long-range processes which gave European history a larger narrative shape to particular, ostensibly self-contained (and in this sense inconsequential), more limited processes. This tendency was supplemented by an influence from another direction: our supposedly innocent but in fact deeply insidious course catalogues. We should treat the course catalogue with more respect.

Partly because we are inclined to take it so lightly, it is one of the most potent forces in historiography: it tends to organize the past, for the sake of "coverage," as a sequence of chronologically bounded segments, the number of which reflects the size of our departments. The individual historian is then made responsible for one of these segments, with the expectation that he will deal with it in all of its aspects. And the assignment defined for him by the catalogue, when he is young and malleable, is likely to shape his general understanding of what it means to "do" history.^[8] Thus, the influence of the catalogue has various consequences, among which the most positive is to deepen the historian's sense of complexity. But the catalogue also discourages him from intruding into adjacent segments that "belong" to his colleagues; and by the same token it encourages him, however conscious he may be of the arbitrariness of the dates bounding his assignment, to treat his segment as self-contained. At the very least, he feels compelled out of esthetic motives to portray it as some kind of intelligible unity.^[9]

Historians of the Renaissance have responded to these pressures in two ways. First, we began to distinguish more and more clearly between "the Renaissance" itself, a cluster of cultural movements pregnant with the future, and the "age of the Renaissance," the more general context within which we encountered these movements. The "age of the Renaissance" was invoked to accommodate in some unstable tension with the novelty and modernity of Renaissance culture whatever seemed inconsistent or in tension with it. But we tended at first to regard these anomalies as so many medieval residues, destined to yield ineluctably, in the long run, to its modernizing forces. This approach was hardly the method of synthesis.

But at the same time we were increasingly uncomfortable with the rather mechanical work of sorting our data into two heaps, one marked continuities," the other "innovations." This discomfort led to a second move that seems on the surface to have brought us closer to synthesis: we began to describe the age of the Renaissance as the age of transition to the modern world. And this formula, which now appears with some regularity in our textbooks, has provoked little dissent. Indeed, the formula appears to exclude the possibility of dissent, for it is nicely calculated to accommodate every anomaly and at the same time to protect the significance of the Renaissance. This, of course, is its purpose. To the objection that every past age might equally be represented as transitional, we can reply that this one was unusually transitional, that it was an age of accelerated transition.^[10] This position now gives a semblance of agreement to Renaissance scholarship, enabling us to engage in a wide variety

of tasks, comfortable in the belief that our larger claims are secure—and effectively indifferent to them.

Nevertheless, there are difficulties in this apparently unexceptionable strategy. For one thing, it neglects to state the criteria by which one age can be considered more transitional than another; by begging this question, which was at the heart of our controversy with the medievalists. it invites a new revolt from that direction as well as protests from other quarters. The strategy also seems to me conceptually confused, a reflection of the chronic temptation of the historian to identify "history" as the actuality of the past with "history" as the construction he makes of its records. For history as actuality, an "age" is simply a considerable span of time; for history as construction, an "age" is a segment of the past on which he can impose some intelligibility. The notion of an "age of transition" thus exploits what is essentially a structural conception to assert for the Renaissance a continuing significance that actually derives from its place in a process.

This confusion points to a further problem, since the notion of a transitional age depends on the intelligibility of the "ages" it supposedly connects. The Renaissance as "transition" suggests something like an unsteady bridge between two granitic headlands, clearly identifiable as the Middle Ages and the modern (or, at least, the early modern) world. As a Renaissance specialist, I am reluctant to commit myself about the present stability of these two adjacent historiographical promontories. But my impression is that neither medieval nor early modern historians would be altogether comfortable with the image.^[11] And as an inhabitant of the modern world, I find it rather too amorphous, unintelligible, and contradictory, at least as a whole, to provide any stable mooring for such a bridge. I am, in short, doubtful whether we are yet in any position to represent our own time as an intelligible age.

But a reflection of this kind takes us beyond internal historiographical pressures to the impact of contemporary experience on historiography. And such experience may, in the end, be the major cause for the present disarray of Renaissance scholarship: since we are baffled by the modern world, we are hardly in a position to argue for the relevance to it, at least in the traditional way, of the Renaissance.^[12] For the argument that attached the Renaissance to the modern world was based on two assumptions: that the modern world does, in fact, constitute some kind of intelligible entity, and that modernity has emerged by way of a single linear process. Neither of these assumptions is, at least for me, self-evident. To be a competent historian of the Renaissance is, of course, hard enough, even without engaging in extracurricular ventures of this

kind; but my efforts to sample the work of those scholars who have struggled to define the modern condition leave me as uncertain as the modern world itself.^[13] And I am further bewildered by the suggestion that we have now entered into a "postmodern" age. Meanwhile, the collapse of the idea of progress has profoundly subverted our sense of the direction of history. We can agree, perhaps, only that the present is the complex product of a remarkably tangled past.

Other pressures from the surrounding world have also weakened the ability of the historian of the Renaissance to defend the old dramatic organization of Western history and have at the same time promoted an alternative. Brought into focus by the social and cultural ferment of the 1960s, so stimulating to historiography in other areas, these pressures have left the Renaissance in a partial eclipse. They pose a radical challenge—one that we have largely ignored—to our own doubtful compromise between process and structure.^[14]

This challenge is related to a generous concern with the historio-graphically neglected and suffering majority of mankind that has diverted attention from those elites whose achievements have been the mainstay of claims for the Renaissance. From this standpoint historical significance tends to be defined largely as a function of numbers, of mass, and, hence, of the masses; this interest in the masses may suggest an ideological and even sentimental content in the supposedly cold and scientific impulse toward quantification. But mass also suggests matter and, therefore, points to the material basis of human existence, with a concomitant tendency to rely on the architectural model—so disruptive of traditional historiography—of superstructure and infrastructure, against the idealism often implicit in the preoccupation of historians of the Renaissance with high culture. A further consequence of this interest has been an emphasis on the more inert aspects of the past, with reduced attention to what had traditionally been seen as the source of the most dynamic forces in modern history. Meanwhile, the peculiar insecurity of the last two decades seems to have intensified the occasional yearning of the historian to regard himself as a scientist; and the methods recently devised to promote this aspiration and to open up new social groups to investigation have not been suited to the ways of Renaissance study, which has depended chiefly on the cultivated judgment and creative imagination of the individual historian.

These impulses have conspicuously been at work in the new social history, which has produced results of great interest, if chiefly for a later period, and which seems to me itself a remarkable feat of the historical

imagination. This much is, I think, indisputable, however skeptical one may be of its scientific pretensions^[15] and of the claims of some of its practitioners to have overcome at last the distinction between history as actuality and history as construction. And it is particularly instructive from the standpoint of our present difficulties with the Renaissance, because it displays the results of a deliberate and wholehearted acceptance of that notion of an "age" with which the historian of the Renaissance has dealt so gingerly. It may also help to explain why he has preferred compromise.

I am referring to the concept of the longue durée , the intelligible age par excellence, whose implications for the Renaissance emerge with special clarity in a recent essay by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.^[16] This piece offers a general interpretation of the extended period between about the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries. Situated between two intervals of innovation and expansion, this true age is, for Le Roy Ladurie, an intelligible unity, given fundamental coherence by a kind of grim Malthusian balance. The productivity of agriculture was limited, population was limited by it, and the material conditions of life for the vast majority were virtually unchangeable. By the democratic criterion of numbers, this long period was, except in insignificant detail, changeless; Le Roy Ladurie has accordingly described it as "motionless."

From this standpoint the period of the Renaissance appears as little more than, in a double sense, the dead center of a much longer age in which the conventional distinction between medieval and early modern Europe has been obliterated. At most, the Renaissance is a conjoncture that is intelligible only in a far larger temporal context. But the full implications of the argument emerge only in Le Roy Ladurie's reply to the objections that might be raised against it by more traditional historians:

One might object to this conception of motionless history . . . because it is a little too negligent of such fundamental innovations of the period as Pascal's divine revelation, Papin's steam engine and the growth of a very great city like Paris, or the progress of civility among the upper classes as symbolized by the introduction of the dinner fork. Far be it from me to question the radically new character of these episodes. But what interests me is the becoming , or rather the non-becoming of the faceless mass of people. The accomplishments of the elite are situated on a higher and more isolated plane and are not really significant except from the point of view of a noisy minority, carriers of progress without doubt, but as yet incapable of mobi-

lizing the enormous mass of rural humanity enmeshed in its Ricardian feedback.^[17]

One has only to substitute—for Pascal, Papin, Paris, and the dinner fork—any random set of Renaissance accomplishments—Petrarch's historical consciousness, the Copernican Revolution, the Florentine city-state with its civic rhetoric, and double-entry bookkeeping, for example—to appreciate the mordant implications here for the Renaissance.

Although the plausibility of this argument, which appears to illustrate the consequences of a thoroughgoing "synthesis," has perhaps been one element in the present disarray of Renaissance historiography, its approach also has limitations (as I am hardly the first to point out)^[18] that make it less decisive for the Renaissance than it may first appear. Largely an adaptation of French structuralism, Le Roy Ladurie's thesis carries with it the antihistorical bias of that movement: structuralist analysis of the past has never been well adapted to deal with change. The consequences are apparent when Le Roy Ladurie, too good a historian to ignore this problem, must account for the end of his longue durée , when motion was finally restored to human affairs, the constraints on agriculture loosened, the old Malthusian cycle was broken, the migration from field to factory could begin, and the masses were at last expelled from the traditional world into, presumably, a new age.

At this point Le Roy Ladurie's rich ironies seem to serve chiefly as a rhetorical justification for the limitation of his vision to what, as he so disarmingly puts it, "interests" him. Here we become aware of a difference in both strategy and tone. Since the masses were helpless to bring about this ambiguous denouement, that ridiculous noisy minority becomes unexpectedly important. Now it represents "forces of elitist renovation which had been building up slowly over the course of centuries" and which finally succeeded, after about 1720, in "setting off an avalanche."^[19] This "build-up of forces" might suggest that Paris and the steam engine—and even, more obscurely, Pascal and the fork—are after all, if one is interested in that "avalanche," worth some attention. And back of them lies the Renaissance—not, perhaps, as an "age" but (in the terms of its traditional interpretation) as a critical moment in a process that would in the long run significantly transform the world. The impulses not altogether arbitrarily associated with the Renaissance—its individualism and its practical and empirical rationality—were, though immediately limited to a statistically insignificant minority, destined for some importance even from the standpoint of the majority.^[20] I do not mean to deny the value of structural description;

indeed, it provides essential safeguards against anachronism for the historian primarily interested in process.^[21] But structures can hardly exhaust the concern of the historian; the past is not simply a world we have lost.

The inability of a history of structures to deal with change has, however, a further consequence. Its neglect of the continuities that link the past with the present and one "age" to the next opens the way to an interpretation of change as cataclysm, with the implication that the modern world is genetically related to the past only remotely. Our own time thus appears as something like a biological mutation, whose survival value remains an open question. For the structural approach to the past may ignore but cannot, after all, repudiate process altogether. One set of structures obviously does, somehow, give way to another. The effect of this approach is to promote, however inadvertently, a discontinuous concept of process. Thus, for the myth of continuity with the Renaissance it substitutes what I will call the myth of apocalyptic modernization. In calling this a myth, I mean nothing pejorative.^[22] A myth is, for the historian, the dynamic equivalent of a model in the social sciences, and we can hardly do without it. The crucial transition from chronicle to history depended on the application of some principle of mythical organization to previously discrete data: the myth of the hero, the myth of collective advance, the myth of decline. That the weakening of one mythical pattern should have left a kind of vacuum for another myth to fill is hardly surprising.

So the apocalyptic myth—a product partly of our own self-importance and partly of the mingled hopes and anxieties generated by recent experience—has emerged, though it is not itself peculiarly modern. A modification of the basic Western myth of linear time of a type periodically recurrent under conditions of stress, the apocalyptic myth provides an alternative to the idea of continuous development, with which it can be variously combined. Indeed, it is not altogether different from the Renaissance notion of radical discontinuity with the Middle Ages. In discussing it critically, I am aware of a certain analogy with the medievalists' protests against the idea of the Renaissance.

Largely, as a result of those protests, historians of the Renaissance generally gave up the apocalyptic dimension of the original Renaissance myth, at least as it related to the past. Without renouncing the novelties of the Renaissance, they recognized its continuities with the Middle Ages, themselves increasingly seen as complex. In other words, they made distinctions, within both periods, among contrary tendencies. But these careful distinctions took care of only half of the Renaissance problem. Thus, if we are still in disarray, the explanation may ultimately be that

we have failed to modify in the same way that element in the Renaissance myth that pointed to the future: its perception of the modern world—the goal of the historical process—as a coherent entity. Since we can no longer support our claims for the Renaissance origins of the modern world so conceived, we have fallen silent. If this is true, the full solution to the Renaissance problem would thus depend on our giving, as much attention to the complexities and contradictions of our own time as we have given to those of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and on being equally selective about the relation of the Renaissance to the modern world. Among its other advantages, this solution might enable us to put the apocalyptic myth itself in some perspective; we might then notice that some reaction against it is already under way in the social sciences.^[23]

Such selectivity might enable us to claim for the Renaissance a substantial role in the formation of those tendencies in our own world that perhaps have a better claim to modernity than does the present apocalyptic mood: the skeptical, relativistic, and pragmatic strains in contemporary culture.^[24] These strains would suggest, in place of the apocalyptic myth, something like the myth of Prometheus, itself of some interest to Renaissance thought^[25] —Prometheus who, by tricking Zeus and stealing the fire that made possible the arts, endowed man with the power to create a world in which he could survive alone. Such a myth might be interpreted to mean that the world man inhabits is formed, not through some transcendent and ineluctable process—whether cataclysmic or uniform—but only out of his own shifting needs and unpredictable inventiveness. From this standpoint, the basic peculiarity of the modern world might be seen as the present consciousness of human beings of their power to shape the world they inhabit, including the social world and, by extension, themselves. A (for us) poignant reflection of this situation might be the unique predicament of the modern historian, who is in a position to choose, among various possibilities, the myth most useful to impose dramatic organization on his data—a problem of which previous historians were largely unaware. In modern culture, then, the determinism and helplessness implicit in the apocalyptic myth are opposed by a still lively belief in human freedom.

The modern sense of the creative freedom of mankind now finds stimulating expression in a concept of culture that underlies the work of a group of distinguished contemporary anthropologists.^[26] According to this view of the human condition, the universe man inhabits is essentially a complex of meanings of his own devising; man, as Max Weber perceived him, is "an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself

has spun."^[27] These webs make up his culture or, more exactly, since they are utterly various, his cultures. Furthermore, as philosophers and linguists have made increasingly clear, he spins these webs from language. Through language man orders the chaos or data impinging on his sensorium from, in a singularly mysterious and problematic sense, "out there," organizing them into categories and so making them intelligible, manageable, and useful. The human world might, therefore, be described as a vast rhetorical production, for the operations that bring it into existence are comparable to such basic rhetorical transactions as division and comparison, or metonymy and metaphor.^[28] This concept denies not that an objective universe exists but only that man has direct access to it or can know what it is apart from what he makes of it, out of his own limited perceptual and intellectual resources and for his own purposes, whatever these might be.^[29]

The epistemological decisions embedded in language are thus the precondition of human apprehension of an external world; culture in this sense is prior to both materialism and idealism, which represent contrary efforts to assign ontological status to—in the language of sociology, to legitimize—a world whose actual source in the creativity of man violates the all-too-human need for transcendence.^[30] From this standpoint history presents itself not as a single process but as a complex of processes, which interests us insofar as we are interested in the almost infinite possibilities of human existence. Beyond this, history as construction often tends to be a misleading and sometimes pernicious reification.

Here, I am only advancing on an old position in the historiography of the Renaissance from a somewhat new direction. For the kind of history this approach suggests was very much that of the most distinguished historians of the Renaissance of the last hundred years, Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga, notable pioneers in what both called cultural history. Misled by their concentration on evidence drawn from the culture of elites, we have tended to see in their work no more than the study of "superstructure," losing sight of the generous conception of culture underlying their work. For Burckhardt, the proper subject of Kulturgeschichte was not simply the arts, which were relatively neglected in his account of the Renaissance, but "what moves the world and what is of penetrating influence, . . . the indispensable."^[31] For Huizinga, cultural history required the identification of "deeper, general themes" and "the patterns of life, thought, and art taken all together," which he was prepared to pursue in every dimension of human experience.^[32] And both

had such reservations about the modern world that neither would have found much satisfaction in representing it as the goal of history.

This conception of culture is perhaps the contemporary world's most general legacy from the Renaissance: the recognition that culture is a product of the creative adjustment of the human race to its varying historical circumstances rather than a function of universal and changeless nature, and the perception that culture accordingly differs from time to time and group to group. This insight of the Renaissance suggested that mankind, by its own initiatives, could, for better or worse, shape its own earthly condition. Hints of this idea can be found earlier, of course, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages; and even in the Renaissance the idea was limited to certain groups in which it only occasionally became explicit—as it did for Petrarch and Nicholas of Cusa (though only at certain moments), for Sir Philip Sidney, and for Montaigne. But this shocking view of the human condition made its first durable impression on the Western consciousness then and has continued to shape our world.

The high culture of the Renaissance immediately revealed some of the implications of the new conception of culture. Scholars became aware of the distinct, historically contingent cultures of antiquity, while the voyages of exploration discovered the varieties of contemporary culture in America and the Orient. Although the first European responses to these revelations tended to be ethnocentric, the relativism of Montaigne suggested that another kind of reaction was already possible. Meanwhile, cultural expression was being conceived, more modestly, not as a total and authoritative reflection of external reality but as a particular human insight, conveyed by isolated proverbs, pensées, familiar essays, small areas of practical or esthetic order, of which the autonomous painting of Renaissance art provides a nice symbol.

Perhaps the most profound indication that a radical shift in the understanding of culture was taking place—and, hence, a shift in the sense of man's relation to the world and to himself—can be seen in the Renaissance crisis of language, that basic instrument in the formation of culture.^[33] The first sign of that crisis was a growing uneasiness, at first among the most abstract thinkers but then more broadly, that the human vocabulary was failing to mirror the objective world. Words , it was widely lamented, no longer corresponded to things . This lament was often taken to mean that the vocabulary should be reformed so that this traditional identity could be restored: a demand, in effect, for a return to the dependence of culture upon external nature. But then an alternative solution to the problem began to unfold. Skepticism about the capacity

of the human mind to grasp the structures of nature directly led to growing doubt about the possibility of such an identity, to a recognition of the conventionality of language and its susceptibility to change, to the perception of language as a human creation, and eventually to the conclusion that, as the creator of language, man also shapes through language the only world he can know directly, including even himself.

This insight was a major impulse behind the brilliant imaginative literature of the Renaissance, which was one channel for the diffusion of this new concept of language. So was the steady displacement of Latin, the language of absolute truths both sacred and profane, by the European vernaculars, not only in literature but in law and administration. The variety of the vernaculars suggested that language was based on the consensus of particular peoples, arrived at by the processes of history; and the growing expressiveness of the various languages of Europe appeared to demonstrate that linguistic change signified not that the primordial identity of language with the real world was being corrupted—the traditional view propounded by Socrates in the Cratylus —but that language is a flexible tool. The rich elaboration of vernacular languages was not only the deliberate project of elites but a spontaneous and increasingly popular eruption to meet the shifting requirements of existence.

There was thus nothing ethereal about this portentous cultural shift. If a common culture is the foundation of community and limits the possible modes of social organization and social action, it is also responsive to changing social needs, themselves culturally defined. And, like other historical phenomena, the subtle and reciprocal dialogue between culture and society is open to investigations.^[34] The expanding linguistic resources of Renaissance culture simultaneously facilitated and reflected the development of a more complex urban and monarchical society. The sense that language does not simply mirror, passively, the structures of external nature but functions as a tool to serve the practical needs of social existence eventually stimulated reflection about the uses and creative possibilities of language. And we can see in those reflections the germ of a new vision of human culture.

Whether given practical expression in the creative modification of language or, at another level, in the Renaissance idea of self-fashioning,^[35] the notion of man as creator of himself and the world was heady stuff. It found expression in the modern expectation that government, the economy, and education should constantly reconstruct society, the environment, and man himself in accordance with the constantly changing expectations of mankind. There are doubtless limits to such an enterprise,

both in the malleability of physical and biological reality and in man's own moral capacities,^[36] that this aspiration tends to overlook. These limits and the attempts to exceed them help to explain a perennial impulse since the Renaissance to react against the creativity and freedom of Renaissance culture toward various types of philosophical and scientific determinism and, thus, also to explain the contradictions of the modern world. Perhaps the Renaissance vision of man with its vast practical consequences has needed, from time to time, to be chastened in this way. But it has so far survived as the major resource with which to oppose the temptation to escape from the anxieties of the human condition into new versions of authoritarianism.

I began these remarks by announcing the collapse of the dramatic scheme that has long organized our vision of the general career of Western history. Since I think that drama is vital to historiography, because it enables us to impose form on the processes of history and so to make them intelligible, this seems to me an ominous development, especially since it has invited the substitution of another dramatic scheme that would deprive us of our roots in the past. But, although I have argued for the continuing significance of the Renaissance, I have not tried simply to defend the traditional pattern, which seems to me seriously defective, in ways that the legacy of Renaissance culture also helps us understand. The old dramatic pattern, with its concept of linear history moving the human race ineluctably to its goal in the modern world, depended on concealed principles of transcendence inappropriate to the human understanding of human affairs. The trinity of acts composing the great drama of human history and its concept of the modern epoch as not just the latest but the last act of the play bear witness to its eschatological origins,^[37] and such notions seem to me peculiarly inappropriate to so human an enterprise as that of the historian. But I also find the traditional scheme unsatisfactory because it is not dramatic enough. It fails to accommodate the sense of contingency and, therefore, suspense—the sense that the drama might have turned out otherwise—that belongs to all human temporal experience. Though it has survived for over five centuries, for example, I see no reason to assume that the anthropological vision we owe to the Renaissance is destined to triumph forever over the forces arrayed against it, and much in the modern world suggests the contrary.

But the more human concept of the drama of history that had its effective origins in the Renaissance understanding of culture overcomes these various disadvantages. Its pluralism implies the possibility of a

multiplicity of historical dramas, both simultaneous and successive; and so it relieves us of the embarrassment, inherent in a linear and eschatological vision of time, of repeatedly having to reclassify in other terms what for a previous generation seemed modern. Since it perceives history as a part of culture and also, therefore, a human creation, it permits us constantly to reconstruct the dramas of history and so to see the past in fresh relationships to ourselves. Above all, since it insists on no particular outcome for the dramas of history, it leaves the future open.