A Twenty-First-Century Renaissance

Abstract

IN A BRIEF, SATIRICAL PIECE published in 2009—“Old Debates Recycled”— Edward Muir imagined a bleak future for the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies. In the year 2049, the history department of the fictional SocratoConfucian University ignores the impassioned urging of the last specialist in the field to replace him upon his retirement, in preference for hiring a historian of fusion music. One implication of this thought experiment was that the field of fifteenthand sixteenth-century European history, while actually having important lessons to teach a world riven by sectarian and partisan divides, seems increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of the twenty-first-century university. Concern about the relevance of the history of the Renaissance was hardly new, as the title of Muir’s piece acknowledged in its doubled meaning. Forty years ago, William Bouwsma pronounced a public obituary on old arguments for its significance in the form of the American Historical Association’s 1978 presidential address, as well (although this seems more readily forgotten) as proposing new ones. Bouwsma’s suggestion for the continuing relevance of the Renaissance lay in his assertion that the period was defined by recognition of the contingency and plurality of human culture. While he expressed bewilderment at the concept of postmodernity, his claim has strong affinities with Randolph Starn’s articulation of a “Postmodern Renaissance” some thirty years later. Starn proposed that postmodernism offered a clear opportunity to scholars of the Renaissance—which was itself defined by pluralism, fragmentation,