In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, Volume 1

Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance is widely considered one of the most important works in Italian Renaissance studies. Princeton University Press published this seminal book in 1955. Now the Press makes available a two-volume collection of eighteen of Professor Baron's essays, most of them thoroughly revised, unpublished, or presented in English for the first time. Spanning the larger part of his career, they provide a continuation of, and complement to, the earlier book. The essays demonstrate that, contemporaneously with the revolution in art, modern humanistic thought developed in the city-state climate of early Renaissance Florence to a far greater extent than has generally been assumed. The publication of these volumes is a major scholarly event: a reinforcement and amplification of the author's conception of civic Humanism. The book includes studies of medieval antecedents and special studies of Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Leon Battista Alberti. It offers a thoroughly re-conceived profile of Machiavelli, drawn against the background of civic Humanism, as well as essays presenting evidence that French and English Humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied to Italian civic thought of the fifteenth. The work culminates in a reassessment of Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering thought on the Renaissance. Originally published in 1988. PREFACE vii CONTENTS xi PART I. AN ANATOMY OF FLORENTINE CIVIC HUMANISM One. The Background of the Early Florentine Renaissance 3 Two. New Historical and Psychological Ways of Thinking: From Petrarch to Brum and Machiavelli 24 Three. The Changed Perspective of the Past in Bruni's Histories of the Florentine People 43 Four. Bruni's Histories as an Expression of Modern Thought 68 Five. The Memory of Cicero's Roman Civic Spirit in the Medieval Centuries and in the Florentine Renaissance 94 Six. The Florentine Revival of the Philosophy of the Active Political Life 134 Seven. Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Petrarch 158 Eight. Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Florence 191 Nine. Civic Wealth and the New Values of the Renaissance: The Spirit of the Quattrocento 226 Ten. Leon Battista Alberti as an Heir and Critic of Florentine Civic Humanism 258 Index of Names