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By Paul Horton.

While the Renaissance has been presented as a European phenomenon, historians have recently begun to recognize the ways that other parts of the world participated in the intellectual and artistic achievements of those times. How can we challenge students to investigate what was happening beyond Europe? 

John Hale’s Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (1993) emphasizes the extent to which the cultural flowering of Italy and then Europe from 1400 to 1650 was predicated on the wealth generated by Mediterranean trade established during the Crusades that continued to yield profits for Italian merchants for hundreds of years. It was this wealth, Hale maintains, that provided the material basis for the patronage of the arts by wealthy families like the Medici in major urban centers.

Hale’s thesis rings familiar with its emphasis of on trade as a form of global contact, but also with the insistence that cultural innovations were a product of strictly Italian and European innovation and genius.

Two recent popular historical works have more or less continued this narrative. Both Stephan Greenblatt’s, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012), and Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge (2019) focus on the preservation of ancient texts that became important to Renaissance scholars in establishing what became known as Renaissance secularism. These works were preserved by Islamic scholars and found their way back into intellectual discourse through intercultural exchanges, but both Greenblatt and Moller focus their narratives on particular Greek and Roman texts and very little on the context of their preservation. Their narratives thus pretty much recapitulate the idea that, although the Renaissance was based on economic wealth generated through global trade, the cultural innovations that we call secular scholarship, the arts and sciences together with renewed conversations about virtue, civic duty, humanism, and the nature of republics center on the historical connections between Greece, Rome, and  contemporary Europe that were emphasized by Jacob Burkhardt in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

Historical Sociologist Gurminder K. Bhambra leads a chorus of critics who call attention to the myopic focus of such narratives that exclude, in her opinion, the cultural influences of other cities and civilizations on the so-called European Renaissance. She strongly asserts that

…the claims made for ‘modernity’ of the Renaissance rest in its recovery of ancient texts, the emergence of Humanism and the development of historical consciousness, and the seemingly innovative movements in the arts and science together with the ‘discovery’ of the New World…The perceptions of cultural commonality and superiority that these aspects subsequently engendered were intensified through the establishment of a geographically bounded understanding of Europe that focused on both its sense of difference  from those it encountered abroad…as well as its internal territorial organization and administration. (Rethinking Modernity, 2007, 90-1)

According to Bhambra, the very conception of Europe as a distinct historical entity that is somehow superior to other global civilizations was formulated in part by the construction of ideas about the Renaissance linkage between Greece and Rome in 1860 by Jacob Burkhardt in Basel to propagate the push toward a unified German nation as the core of Mitteleuropa. Burkhardt’s thesis focused on how the cultural legacies of Greece and Rome were appropriated by Italian scholars and artists and how these legacies were used to create something that came to be called European. That Greece and Rome may have been interconnected in turn with larger global cultural interactions was obviously not a part of Burkhardt’s interpretation because Europe had to be defined by “othering” connections beyond what came to be defined as “Europe.”

Changing historical perspectives have done much to reinforce Professor Bhambra’s understanding of the construction of the concept of the Renaissance. As Western Civilization courses are replaced by European History courses and as European History courses have been increasingly replaced by World, Global, and Transnational history courses over the last forty years, the Renaissance is increasingly seen as a trope of European exceptionalism that was initially constructed to justify cultural supremacy as the tide of European imperialism rose. As the “rest” has increasingly decentered the study of history away from European exceptionalism, the archaeology of the idea of the “west” is increasingly exposed as the construction of cultural epochs like the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

More to the point, one need only to compare two treatments of the history of the Mediterranean World to view this sea change in historiography. Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, originally published in 1966, was reviewed as a masterpiece that combined social history, economics, demography, politics, and diplomacy in an Annales school model “total” history. Braudel’s work went beyond national and imperial history to produce an all-encompassing transnational history. Published almost fifty years later, David Abulafia’s The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011) ranges far beyond the Renaissance time period to encompass the entire recorded history of the sea, and, more, importantly to emphasize the constant economic, social, political, and cultural interactions from north to south, south to north and from west to east and east to west from the classical period to present. In doing so, Abulafia explodes the idea that any historical civilization or nation-state could be the product of one culture at any given period of time. The reality is that the experience of the Mediterranean world has always been a very complicated and intricate web, so much so that, for our purposes, the idea of a European Renaissance, or a southern Europe separate from north Africa, the Levant, or Constantinople, or Istanbul becomes almost an absurdity. All of these regions contributed to a “Southern Europe” constantly in a perpetual ebb and flow of people and ideas.

The “visual perspective” that was thought to be a product of Renaissance Italy was present hundreds of years earlier in Baghdad; secular thinking that was supposed to be a product of Renaissance letters and discourse had been a strong element of philosophy in Cairo and Fez in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and medical and scientific advances thought to made exclusively at European universities or at the Royal Academy in London had a basis in published works of thinkers based in Cordoba, Alexandria, and Cairo.

I do not mean to diminish the cultural achievements of Florence, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, or Delft from 1250-1650, but I do mean to call attention to the fact that many other cities may have also experienced Renaissance-like developments during this same time period and that, moreover, the closer we look at “connected histories” in microcosm, the more two-way cultural interaction and dialogic diffusion we see.

How can we challenge students to see other Renaissances and “connected histories”?

Lesson Plan: Rearticulating the Renaissance as a Global Process

Scenario: A group of wealthy donors have given 1 billion dollars to UNESCO to reexamine the idea of the Renaissance as recommended by a group of scholars from the World History Association.

UNESCO, in turn appointed a team of educators, architects, art historians, writers, scientists, and philosophers to redefine the concept of the Renaissance and to nominate cities of the postclassical and early modern periods that might be designated Global Renaissance Cities by UNESCO.

Each of the five cities initially chosen would be eligible for a 50 million dollar grant to preserve and promote their cultural achievements from the designated time period: 1200-1650.

Delegations from the nominated cities below are invited to attend a conference to present a case for this designation and award in Florence, Italy.

UNESCO’s Team of educators, curators, and scholars have redefined the Renaissance as a cultural synergy of ideas and innovation characterized by an exceptional encouragement and investment in the arts, sciences, and public life made by patrons to advance community and international understanding by encouraging experimentation with classical forms of knowledge in ways that move beyond those forms to achieve short and long term global historical significance.

You will be assigned to a team representing one of the following cities in presenting a bid for one of the five available 50 million dollar grants available this year:

Baghdad

Ming Beijing

Samarkand

Cairo

Cordoba

Fez

Timbuktu

Tenochtitlan

Cuzco

Bruges

Venice

You will make a ten-slide power point presentation that presents the cultural history of your city between 1200 and 1650 that fits the above definition of Global Renaissance agreed to by the UNESCO Committee. You should focus on achievements in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, and medicine. 

A three-page summary brief of your presentation should be submitted to the committee following your presentation that argues why your city fits the UNESCO Global Renaissance designation definition. Your summary brief should end in a bibliography cited in Chicago Style format of the sources you have used in your presentation or brief. You should cite a minimum of ten sources, including five books and five academic articles.

Committee Rubric

Evidence of:

Cultural synergy and innovation:       1          2         3          4          5

Exceptional Encouragement:             1          2          3          4          5

Advancement of Understanding:       1          2          3          4          5

Experimentation with Classics:           1          2          3          4          5

Advancement of Knowledge:             1          2          3          4          5

Short term global significance:           1          2          3          4          5

Long term global significance:            1          2          3          4          5

Total Points:  _______

Paul Horton is History Instructor at University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School

Featured Image by Mike Norton, used with Creative Commons License.

Author

Anthony Cody

Comments

  1. Willy Goat    

    Great content! Keep up the good work!

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