Forgetting the Italian Renaissance and Other Irreverent Suggestions for the Future

Abstract

LIKE MANY OTHERS , I have long been concerned about the ongoing slide of the Italian Renaissance along with Renaissance studies to the periphery of scholarly interest and the concomitant disappearance of academic positions in the field, as a host of apparently more inclusive or currently popular areas of inquiry have grabbed the scholarly imagination. As departments across the humanities have ceased to hire bright young scholars in the area—of whom there are no lack—and as funds and positions are relocated to other more fashionable areas or reallocated by deans and provosts to other more “important” disciplines such as business, communications, or the sciences, the field seems doomed. Some have even suggested forgetting the Italian Renaissance as hopelessly out-of-date and irrelevant. In the face of these unhappy trends, many excellent scholars have stepped up with impressive suggestions for future approaches to the field that might save it. But I would like to go against that admirable and optimistic current to suggest irreverently that we give in to these bleak developments and simply forget the Italian Renaissance. And from that irreverent point of departure I would like to suggest a few possible futures that might make use of our well-trained and enthusiastic, but largely unemployable, new generation of scholars working in the area and perhaps even rejuvenate our ongoing interest in a past that is indeed deeply past and, for that, interesting and valuable. Interesting and valuable especially for a present that is often all too present and, largely because of that, often too narrow and shortsighted, lost in the hubris of a timeless modernity without history or future. First, then, forgetting the Italian Renaissance would take care of a troubling problem with traditional terminology. Never all that comfortable with the name, Italian