Cesare Borgia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
maleborgia) wrote2010-11-19 09:53 am
maleborgia) wrote2010-11-19 09:53 am
Entry tags:
Historiography, take two
And then I changed my focus from irrationality to identity formation.
Redone first ten pages of "holy crap this is due tomorrow". Sections in here, especially towards the beginning are taken directly from my first go at this. The main difference is that it starts to go more in depth about ethnicity and less about a more generally defined irrationality in belief systems.
The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt is one of the oldest comprehensive studies of the Italian Renaissance and is still commonly quoted and referenced although it has also been challenged in the wake of the social history movement of the 1970s. It is stunning in its breadth as it seeks to cover nearly every event of note in the 14th and 15th centuries. Much of the criticism against it, however, comes from the fact that it was written in the 19th century, prior to popularity of looking at history from the bottom up and is deeply entrenched in the whiggish notion of history as a march towards progress and enlightenment. Burckhardt was clearly influenced by the views of his time and his tome reflects this, with its emphasis on reading the Renaissance as the struggle between the superstition and backwards thinking of the Middle Ages and the progressive views of modernity that, of course, his own time embodies. He argues that the man of the Italian Renaissance “was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe” and that it was in the Renaissance when man, due to the birth of a few great thinkers who revolutionized their society, managed to throw off the curtain of superstition and myth and take his first steps towards this bright new age of human history. It was then that man was “freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” History, then, is a linear process towards advancement, which the Middle Ages had retarded due to the suppression of science and the interference of the dogmatic Church. Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged for many decades, and even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. Burckhardt had successfully argued that this idealized man in the Renaissance had learned to reason objectively, saw himself as a spiritual individual, and was no longer bound by ideas of race.
Stepping aside for a moment from the implications this sentence has for man in modern times, it was only with the great social change that took place in the 1970s that led to the rewriting of history in drastically new ways and the reshaping of the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy. Renaissance studies had undergone a period of neglect, they became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period and there was not much else to say about its break with the past. Karl Oskar Kristeller, in revitalizing Renaissance studies, argued that there was more continuity with the Medieval Ages than had previously been acknowledged but that at the same time the Renaissance should still be looked at as significant because continuity is not the same as stability. Change was still happening and the centuries of the Renaissance looked distinct from those that came before them, but they should be understood as having their roots in the past (recent as well as distant). “The old and the new are inextricably intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the one or the other side, as has often been done.” Kristeller was writing in an era of change in historiography, when history was moving from being the story of the wealthy Caucasian men who were largely in power to the story of other social, gender, and ethnic groups as well. Political history was no longer the only viable form history could take, with great repercussions in all spheres of historical interest. The Kristeller thesis has become competition for the Burkhardt thesis and in modern Renaissance studies usually is the more influential of the two.
Historical studies of the Renaissance now are more often to focus on less enfranchised groups of peoples, whose daily lives experienced little change from before and after the period labeled the Renaissance. It has emphasized the continuities between the centuries before and after and sought to show how the Renaissance, while significant, was not a time of such drastic change as earlier historians tried to argue. “To posit the existence of a hiatus between the infancy of mankind, which ended with the Renaissance, and its maturity, culminating with the advent of modern technology, served [in texts prior to the 1970s] to bolster the sociopolitical pains of our partisans of progress, who thought they were, or who actually were, surrounded by hostile forces.” This argument is mirrored in L. R. Poos’ work in historical demography where he states that while there were periods of short-term instability in pre-modern Europe, the general trend was one of long-term stability and slow but steady growth. While isolated areas could have disastrous years, on the whole the history of the population of Europe was remarkably stable. The presence of non-scientific and non-Christian beliefs in popular culture during the Renaissance is also often brought up to challenge the idea of progress. Donald Nugent calls the Renaissance the “golden age of the occult” and argued that “the more exotic turn of humanism credulously rehabilitated the occult traditions of antiquity” , his logic flying in the face of the old notion that Renaissance humanism was the start of real modern thinking and belief. Studies on the Renaissance prior to the advent of social history rarely took this stance and when occult beliefs were noted they were asserted to be relics of the past and not truly indicative of the mindset of the time; they certainly were never tied to humanism.
Studies on ethnicity in the Renaissance, however, have remained largely unchanged from the time of Burckhardt, although the specific terminology has been updated and made more politically correct. Burckhardt wrote that Renaissance man had moved past the ties of racism while breaking the people of the peninsula up by province and city and assigning them specific historical characteristics and other authors still follow this pattern, such as Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s collection of essays, The Renaissance in National Context, which is organized by citystate. While Peter Burke’s essay, “The Uses of Italy” within this edited work argues that the Renaissance was a time of weaker national identity and should be seen not as Italian per se but as international, the very fact that his work is part of a collection still organized along national and regional lines is counter to his point and shows the larger trend still at work. While it certainly makes sense to look at the Renaissance as having distinctive characteristics in different places (Paul Grendler’s Renaissance Education Between Religion and Politics very concisely lays out the differences in educational systems in different parts of Europe, for example, and I understand the strength of the city-state and the rivalries between different ruling families), the tendency then is to assume that the people from these different places are themselves markedly different or in some ways incompatible with one another. Older texts make this point more clearly than do newer ones, but both tend to either imply or outright assert it yet rarely provide satisfactory explanation as to how this difference developed or how it affected people at the time. While there are authors who deal with the problems of ethnic or cultural identity, I have not found a comprehensive text that truly delves into the issue.
Edward Muir’s 2001 lecture probably does the best out of any text I have seen at dealing with this issue. He says “the idea of the city as a sacred community, a mystical corpus, was crucial to the political ideology of many late medieval towns” , agreeing with the longstanding believe in the importance of the city-state and specific locale in determining community and identity. At the same time, however, he elaborates by arguing “there was nothing ‘universal’ about Italian communities. The ‘public’ was a private club” and that “Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of skin pigmentation or ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others” . This expands his analysis of the situation tremendously, giving it greater weight in as much as no discussion about 2000s United States’ society would be complete without acknowledging both the power of the states and other smaller divisors in forming identity and that certain groups are excluded from “membership in the majority community” for various reasons. Muir’s lecture, however, focused on a single and isolated case study for the formation of community and identity. While he said that the conclusions he drew off of it could be applied to the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance in general, he made no attempt to show if this was indeed true or not. Similarly, Burke claims that the formation of national identity relied more heavily on exclusion than inclusion but fails to give any substantial evidence. Sarah Bradford, in her biography of Cesare Borgia, also asserts that the formation of a cultural or community identity in the Renaissance was based on exclusion but does not follow up her claim with any real analysis or documentation.
This lack of extensive research on the subject is my critique of more recent historiography of the Italian Renaissance. Works in the Burckhardtian style do explore in great detail the development of a certain “character” held by one population or another and give case studies and examples as evidence. I do not agree with the reasoning used in these older texts, however, as much of it is along the lines of statements such as that “freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form” . While this posits a community identity (in this case, Italian as a whole irregardless of specific location and the lack of a unified peninsula) and gives reasons for its formation (the freedom from various previous named bonds, the interest in the classical age), it is too generalizing and too stable. It is a product of the thoughts on racial hierarchy and identity formation at the time and, like many theories, has a tendency to read back onto the past the present it is embroiled in. Since this is my argument against the ideas of identity and community that so often parallel Burckhardtian texts, I should apply it to more modern ones as well. I do find problems with more liberal texts that superimpose this liberality onto the Renaissance in a way that I find jarring, such as when Ioan P. Culianu in 1987 claimed that modern sciences does not connect in any meaningfully direct way with the science of the Renaissance but that instead what they called science was really a purer and more powerful form of modern psychoanalysis. At the same time Culianu is very aware of the older literature he is writing in response to and neatly explains, as I quoted earlier, why they wrote about the Renaissance the way they did. Likewise, I understand why I want to find the information I do and yet am surprised that, given the strides ethnic studies has made in the last decades, it is largely absent or lacking.
Discussions about the development of the political systems in the Renaissance are largely progressionist and concerned with drawing as direct a line as possible from the older and presumably worse forms of government to the enlightened models we are familiar with today. David Sobek argues that the development of republics in the Italian peninsula led to the lessening in intensity and frequency of wars between citystates in part because “these ‘republics’ had more controls over citizenship and participation but fiercely protected civil liberties” , leading to greater concern for the loss of citizen life and the increased likelihood of seeing members of other republics as having the same shared rights. Brian Nelson follows the same logic in tracing back through history to try and figure out when the first notion of a modern state arose and when the first modern state was truly born. He describes the deterioration of the old, uncivilized feudal system and the rise of the city-state populated by urban bourgeoisie but also claims that “state consciousness”, what we might recognize as the awareness of and loyalty to a political system distinct from those of the past did not appear until much after it was seemingly described by Machiavelli. Their writings mirror Burckhardt’s own text where he writes that because of their suddenly superior (ie: more like his own) mindsets and beliefs, men in the Italian Renaissance were able to craft what he saw as the foundations and beginnings of modern political states. “The Middle Ages paradoxically bequeathed to the modern world a concept of the structure of the modern state before it had any real idea of the state as such” , writes Nelson, agreeing with the same basic thesis that although people in this period might have inadvertently created or done something that we can see to be “modern”, it was not really so because they were incapable for one reason or another of understanding what it was that they themselves had created.
Perhaps in part because so much of the dialogue about the development of the communities that were so important in the Renaissance has not changed, the dialogue about the development of ethnic or cultural identity in the Renaissance remains largely static as well. While in both cases small adjustments have been made or new theories posited, they have been without any great depth to put them on par with the old ones and as such the conversation that is being had tends to refer more to older arguments than newer ones. It could also be that simply not enough time has elapsed for this change to come about. The idea of inclusion versus exclusion is one that I would like to see developed further, just as it has been in other realms of historical studies, but I feel that whether it is looking at small differences (such as between city-states) or larger ones (such as between Jews and Western European Christians) it remains too vague and. Garrett Mattingly found it sufficient to state “in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics, and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest internal quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith” without any further explanation why this was—how did religion, in this case, override differences of region or other factors?—or what it meant for the individuals and societies involved. Likewise, Robert Black wrote in 1992 “ancient lineage was always praised in Florence, all the more so when newly enriched families were constantly trying to break into the exclusive circles of upper-class society” with no explanation other than saying that it had always been that way.
It might be more useful to examine what people in the time period thought of their own formations of identity and ethnicity. “‘I love my native city more than my own soul,’ said Machiavelli near the end of his life” . Clearly for him at least the city-state was a viable nexus of identity and many historians have picked up on this sentiment and written about the importance of the city-state, dividing up their tomes into chapters on Florence, Milan, Rome, et cetera. These are posited, fairly accurately by all accounts and data, as being at war with one another or at least on uneasy ground. “These he [Machiavelli] referred especially to division: hostile states, jealous factions, universal selfishness. Once for a moment he becomes a dreamer, in the last chapter of The Prince imagining a united Italy” . Nicholas Davidson asserts that, whatever the condition between current populations, people of the Renaissance were better able to understand the similarities between themselves and those of the distant past than they had been able to just shortly before. “The Middle Ages, it seems, had lost the awareness that classical civilization was different, and buildings like the Pantheon inspired only dread because of their association with paganism” . While on the one hand his description of how this change came to be rectified rests a little too heavily on the concept of the Great Man, he also posits the idea of a pan-peninsualar (if not pan-European) identity based on this same process of exclusion: we are not the people who lived a century before us. It is the interplay between these various lines of time, location, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth that I wish to see elaborated on further, specifically that of ethnicity. I have seen it claimed that Italian groups resisted the inclusion of foreigners into their ranks and that, to paraphrase Bradstreet, even if someone was born in Italy but came from a different area this realm of power was a world in which they could never belong, or at least never belong without conflict. Yet at the same time there are any number of texts that assert that what we might call ethnic or national identity did not form until the centuries after the Renaissance and that at the time it was much more important what language you spoke and where you were born, not where your parents hailed from. These two theories are in sharp and obvious conflict and yet there is little work that focuses on analyzing the two points of view. This seems very strange to me, given that Renaissance Italy held many cosmopolitan towns, where people mingled from all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I feel that more work needs to be done on weighing the influences exerted by the immediate surroundings (Paul Grendler asserts, for example, “universities and their professors may have had greater influence on society in any era before or since” ) and by the unchangeable past. How did these things come together to influence one’s ethnic identity and how did they influence the identity that was assigned by observers?
Redone first ten pages of "holy crap this is due tomorrow". Sections in here, especially towards the beginning are taken directly from my first go at this. The main difference is that it starts to go more in depth about ethnicity and less about a more generally defined irrationality in belief systems.
The History of the Civilisation of the Renaissance by Jacob Burckhardt is one of the oldest comprehensive studies of the Italian Renaissance and is still commonly quoted and referenced although it has also been challenged in the wake of the social history movement of the 1970s. It is stunning in its breadth as it seeks to cover nearly every event of note in the 14th and 15th centuries. Much of the criticism against it, however, comes from the fact that it was written in the 19th century, prior to popularity of looking at history from the bottom up and is deeply entrenched in the whiggish notion of history as a march towards progress and enlightenment. Burckhardt was clearly influenced by the views of his time and his tome reflects this, with its emphasis on reading the Renaissance as the struggle between the superstition and backwards thinking of the Middle Ages and the progressive views of modernity that, of course, his own time embodies. He argues that the man of the Italian Renaissance “was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe” and that it was in the Renaissance when man, due to the birth of a few great thinkers who revolutionized their society, managed to throw off the curtain of superstition and myth and take his first steps towards this bright new age of human history. It was then that man was “freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.” History, then, is a linear process towards advancement, which the Middle Ages had retarded due to the suppression of science and the interference of the dogmatic Church. Burckhardt’s views went largely unchallenged for many decades, and even when minor facts and points were argued against by historians, the general opinion of the Renaissance as a pivotal moment in human evolution was agreed upon. Burckhardt had successfully argued that this idealized man in the Renaissance had learned to reason objectively, saw himself as a spiritual individual, and was no longer bound by ideas of race.
Stepping aside for a moment from the implications this sentence has for man in modern times, it was only with the great social change that took place in the 1970s that led to the rewriting of history in drastically new ways and the reshaping of the discourse on the Renaissance in Italy. Renaissance studies had undergone a period of neglect, they became seen as old and without much new potential. Of course the Italian Renaissance was an important period and there was not much else to say about its break with the past. Karl Oskar Kristeller, in revitalizing Renaissance studies, argued that there was more continuity with the Medieval Ages than had previously been acknowledged but that at the same time the Renaissance should still be looked at as significant because continuity is not the same as stability. Change was still happening and the centuries of the Renaissance looked distinct from those that came before them, but they should be understood as having their roots in the past (recent as well as distant). “The old and the new are inextricably intertwined, and we should avoid stressing only the one or the other side, as has often been done.” Kristeller was writing in an era of change in historiography, when history was moving from being the story of the wealthy Caucasian men who were largely in power to the story of other social, gender, and ethnic groups as well. Political history was no longer the only viable form history could take, with great repercussions in all spheres of historical interest. The Kristeller thesis has become competition for the Burkhardt thesis and in modern Renaissance studies usually is the more influential of the two.
Historical studies of the Renaissance now are more often to focus on less enfranchised groups of peoples, whose daily lives experienced little change from before and after the period labeled the Renaissance. It has emphasized the continuities between the centuries before and after and sought to show how the Renaissance, while significant, was not a time of such drastic change as earlier historians tried to argue. “To posit the existence of a hiatus between the infancy of mankind, which ended with the Renaissance, and its maturity, culminating with the advent of modern technology, served [in texts prior to the 1970s] to bolster the sociopolitical pains of our partisans of progress, who thought they were, or who actually were, surrounded by hostile forces.” This argument is mirrored in L. R. Poos’ work in historical demography where he states that while there were periods of short-term instability in pre-modern Europe, the general trend was one of long-term stability and slow but steady growth. While isolated areas could have disastrous years, on the whole the history of the population of Europe was remarkably stable. The presence of non-scientific and non-Christian beliefs in popular culture during the Renaissance is also often brought up to challenge the idea of progress. Donald Nugent calls the Renaissance the “golden age of the occult” and argued that “the more exotic turn of humanism credulously rehabilitated the occult traditions of antiquity” , his logic flying in the face of the old notion that Renaissance humanism was the start of real modern thinking and belief. Studies on the Renaissance prior to the advent of social history rarely took this stance and when occult beliefs were noted they were asserted to be relics of the past and not truly indicative of the mindset of the time; they certainly were never tied to humanism.
Studies on ethnicity in the Renaissance, however, have remained largely unchanged from the time of Burckhardt, although the specific terminology has been updated and made more politically correct. Burckhardt wrote that Renaissance man had moved past the ties of racism while breaking the people of the peninsula up by province and city and assigning them specific historical characteristics and other authors still follow this pattern, such as Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s collection of essays, The Renaissance in National Context, which is organized by citystate. While Peter Burke’s essay, “The Uses of Italy” within this edited work argues that the Renaissance was a time of weaker national identity and should be seen not as Italian per se but as international, the very fact that his work is part of a collection still organized along national and regional lines is counter to his point and shows the larger trend still at work. While it certainly makes sense to look at the Renaissance as having distinctive characteristics in different places (Paul Grendler’s Renaissance Education Between Religion and Politics very concisely lays out the differences in educational systems in different parts of Europe, for example, and I understand the strength of the city-state and the rivalries between different ruling families), the tendency then is to assume that the people from these different places are themselves markedly different or in some ways incompatible with one another. Older texts make this point more clearly than do newer ones, but both tend to either imply or outright assert it yet rarely provide satisfactory explanation as to how this difference developed or how it affected people at the time. While there are authors who deal with the problems of ethnic or cultural identity, I have not found a comprehensive text that truly delves into the issue.
Edward Muir’s 2001 lecture probably does the best out of any text I have seen at dealing with this issue. He says “the idea of the city as a sacred community, a mystical corpus, was crucial to the political ideology of many late medieval towns” , agreeing with the longstanding believe in the importance of the city-state and specific locale in determining community and identity. At the same time, however, he elaborates by arguing “there was nothing ‘universal’ about Italian communities. The ‘public’ was a private club” and that “Italy was no stranger to rejecting certain persons because of skin pigmentation or ethnicity from membership in the majority community. Renaissance communities became communities by including some, ostracizing others” . This expands his analysis of the situation tremendously, giving it greater weight in as much as no discussion about 2000s United States’ society would be complete without acknowledging both the power of the states and other smaller divisors in forming identity and that certain groups are excluded from “membership in the majority community” for various reasons. Muir’s lecture, however, focused on a single and isolated case study for the formation of community and identity. While he said that the conclusions he drew off of it could be applied to the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance in general, he made no attempt to show if this was indeed true or not. Similarly, Burke claims that the formation of national identity relied more heavily on exclusion than inclusion but fails to give any substantial evidence. Sarah Bradford, in her biography of Cesare Borgia, also asserts that the formation of a cultural or community identity in the Renaissance was based on exclusion but does not follow up her claim with any real analysis or documentation.
This lack of extensive research on the subject is my critique of more recent historiography of the Italian Renaissance. Works in the Burckhardtian style do explore in great detail the development of a certain “character” held by one population or another and give case studies and examples as evidence. I do not agree with the reasoning used in these older texts, however, as much of it is along the lines of statements such as that “freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form” . While this posits a community identity (in this case, Italian as a whole irregardless of specific location and the lack of a unified peninsula) and gives reasons for its formation (the freedom from various previous named bonds, the interest in the classical age), it is too generalizing and too stable. It is a product of the thoughts on racial hierarchy and identity formation at the time and, like many theories, has a tendency to read back onto the past the present it is embroiled in. Since this is my argument against the ideas of identity and community that so often parallel Burckhardtian texts, I should apply it to more modern ones as well. I do find problems with more liberal texts that superimpose this liberality onto the Renaissance in a way that I find jarring, such as when Ioan P. Culianu in 1987 claimed that modern sciences does not connect in any meaningfully direct way with the science of the Renaissance but that instead what they called science was really a purer and more powerful form of modern psychoanalysis. At the same time Culianu is very aware of the older literature he is writing in response to and neatly explains, as I quoted earlier, why they wrote about the Renaissance the way they did. Likewise, I understand why I want to find the information I do and yet am surprised that, given the strides ethnic studies has made in the last decades, it is largely absent or lacking.
Discussions about the development of the political systems in the Renaissance are largely progressionist and concerned with drawing as direct a line as possible from the older and presumably worse forms of government to the enlightened models we are familiar with today. David Sobek argues that the development of republics in the Italian peninsula led to the lessening in intensity and frequency of wars between citystates in part because “these ‘republics’ had more controls over citizenship and participation but fiercely protected civil liberties” , leading to greater concern for the loss of citizen life and the increased likelihood of seeing members of other republics as having the same shared rights. Brian Nelson follows the same logic in tracing back through history to try and figure out when the first notion of a modern state arose and when the first modern state was truly born. He describes the deterioration of the old, uncivilized feudal system and the rise of the city-state populated by urban bourgeoisie but also claims that “state consciousness”, what we might recognize as the awareness of and loyalty to a political system distinct from those of the past did not appear until much after it was seemingly described by Machiavelli. Their writings mirror Burckhardt’s own text where he writes that because of their suddenly superior (ie: more like his own) mindsets and beliefs, men in the Italian Renaissance were able to craft what he saw as the foundations and beginnings of modern political states. “The Middle Ages paradoxically bequeathed to the modern world a concept of the structure of the modern state before it had any real idea of the state as such” , writes Nelson, agreeing with the same basic thesis that although people in this period might have inadvertently created or done something that we can see to be “modern”, it was not really so because they were incapable for one reason or another of understanding what it was that they themselves had created.
Perhaps in part because so much of the dialogue about the development of the communities that were so important in the Renaissance has not changed, the dialogue about the development of ethnic or cultural identity in the Renaissance remains largely static as well. While in both cases small adjustments have been made or new theories posited, they have been without any great depth to put them on par with the old ones and as such the conversation that is being had tends to refer more to older arguments than newer ones. It could also be that simply not enough time has elapsed for this change to come about. The idea of inclusion versus exclusion is one that I would like to see developed further, just as it has been in other realms of historical studies, but I feel that whether it is looking at small differences (such as between city-states) or larger ones (such as between Jews and Western European Christians) it remains too vague and. Garrett Mattingly found it sufficient to state “in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics, and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest internal quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith” without any further explanation why this was—how did religion, in this case, override differences of region or other factors?—or what it meant for the individuals and societies involved. Likewise, Robert Black wrote in 1992 “ancient lineage was always praised in Florence, all the more so when newly enriched families were constantly trying to break into the exclusive circles of upper-class society” with no explanation other than saying that it had always been that way.
It might be more useful to examine what people in the time period thought of their own formations of identity and ethnicity. “‘I love my native city more than my own soul,’ said Machiavelli near the end of his life” . Clearly for him at least the city-state was a viable nexus of identity and many historians have picked up on this sentiment and written about the importance of the city-state, dividing up their tomes into chapters on Florence, Milan, Rome, et cetera. These are posited, fairly accurately by all accounts and data, as being at war with one another or at least on uneasy ground. “These he [Machiavelli] referred especially to division: hostile states, jealous factions, universal selfishness. Once for a moment he becomes a dreamer, in the last chapter of The Prince imagining a united Italy” . Nicholas Davidson asserts that, whatever the condition between current populations, people of the Renaissance were better able to understand the similarities between themselves and those of the distant past than they had been able to just shortly before. “The Middle Ages, it seems, had lost the awareness that classical civilization was different, and buildings like the Pantheon inspired only dread because of their association with paganism” . While on the one hand his description of how this change came to be rectified rests a little too heavily on the concept of the Great Man, he also posits the idea of a pan-peninsualar (if not pan-European) identity based on this same process of exclusion: we are not the people who lived a century before us. It is the interplay between these various lines of time, location, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth that I wish to see elaborated on further, specifically that of ethnicity. I have seen it claimed that Italian groups resisted the inclusion of foreigners into their ranks and that, to paraphrase Bradstreet, even if someone was born in Italy but came from a different area this realm of power was a world in which they could never belong, or at least never belong without conflict. Yet at the same time there are any number of texts that assert that what we might call ethnic or national identity did not form until the centuries after the Renaissance and that at the time it was much more important what language you spoke and where you were born, not where your parents hailed from. These two theories are in sharp and obvious conflict and yet there is little work that focuses on analyzing the two points of view. This seems very strange to me, given that Renaissance Italy held many cosmopolitan towns, where people mingled from all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I feel that more work needs to be done on weighing the influences exerted by the immediate surroundings (Paul Grendler asserts, for example, “universities and their professors may have had greater influence on society in any era before or since” ) and by the unchangeable past. How did these things come together to influence one’s ethnic identity and how did they influence the identity that was assigned by observers?