Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Future of Italian Renaissance History

PONDERING WHAT TO WRITE for this special cluster, I was jump-started by reminiscences from rather an unlikely quarter. Niall Ferguson’s June 23, 2019, Sunday Times obituary of the maverick historian Norman Stone, in which Ferguson recounted the reasoning behind his choice of German twentieth-century history as the subject area for his dissertation at Oxford in the mid-1980s, claimed there were three language choices for budding historians wanting to study European history: Russian (for the Cold War), Italian (for the Renaissance), and German. And the reason he gave for not learning Italian was: “I knew there was no future in the Renaissance.” In terms of academic jobs in England, Ferguson was right. Famously, the last academic job in Italian Renaissance history for over thirty years was advertised in 1978. Oxford—never a center for Italian Renaissance studies—also suffered historically from a surfeit of masculinity, and way before academic positions dried up, male students were steered away from Renaissance subjects. Denys Hay, a historian of Renaissance Italy, famously recalled that when, in 1936, he said he wanted to take the Italian Renaissance special subject, his tutor said “that only girls did that: I was to concentrate on the manly Middle Ages.” Sandwiched between the more acceptable Middle Ages and the more job-oriented twentieth century, the Renaissance was relegated to the bloody-minded and determined, who had to make their way upstream against this choppy current as best they could. Choosing to work on Italian Renaissance history effectively entailed extra dollops ofwhat would nowbe termed anxiety-inducing disappointments and failures. Interview panels at every job interview I have ever had for positions on three continents have tried to force me to say that the Renaissance was finished and I was really an early modernist—and I always refused.