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A History of Early Renaissance Italy: From the Mid-Thirteenth to the Mid-Fifteenth Century
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January 24, 2012
3.5 stars.
Writing a history of medieval/Renaissance Italy is really difficult. Anyone who attempts it runs into the tricky problem of trying to synthesize the a single history of a region that - during this period - was never really a cohesive whole. On a certain level, Milan didn't really have all that much in common with Naples, and Venice had a different set of concerns than Rome. Add in ongoing struggles between the Papacy and the Empire, Angevine and Aragonese contention in the South, and all of a sudden you've got yourself a pretty messy and scatter-shot history.
That said, Brian Pullan does about as well as can be expected, and does a nice job outlining what was going on in the Italian peninsula from 1250 to 1450 (and a little bit beyond). He does an especially nice job explaining economic and political history, especially discussing the concurrent political structures of individual communes and supranational interests like the papacy and the empire (and how both started to give way to territorial proto-states around 1350). Also nice is Pullan's care to avoid over-generalization. Guelfs and Ghibillines are nicely explained as part-ideological-party and part-convenient-label-for-local-factionalism. A nice balance between change and continuity is struck when discussing cultural/intellectual development in the Renaissance. Pullan is careful to show that individual communes often had very different economic and political fates. All in all, it's a very good introduction to the time period.
My one criticism is that there's an unfortunate tendency to keep different aspects of the study - intellectual, political, religious - distinct from each other. On one level it's a little inevitable. A book needs some sort of framework to avoid descending into a random collection of facts. But more effort should have been made to provide some intersection between different themes. It's especially noticeable in Pullan's chapters on religious history, which are by far the volume's weakest sections. While what he states in them is perfectly accurate, they aren't connected in any meaningful way to earlier religious history of the period, political or economic developments, or religious developments in other parts of Europe. They almost feel like postscripts to the more substantive chapters on social/economic/political history.
Still, though, it's a good introduction to the topic, and Pullan is a clear and enjoyable writer.
Writing a history of medieval/Renaissance Italy is really difficult. Anyone who attempts it runs into the tricky problem of trying to synthesize the a single history of a region that - during this period - was never really a cohesive whole. On a certain level, Milan didn't really have all that much in common with Naples, and Venice had a different set of concerns than Rome. Add in ongoing struggles between the Papacy and the Empire, Angevine and Aragonese contention in the South, and all of a sudden you've got yourself a pretty messy and scatter-shot history.
That said, Brian Pullan does about as well as can be expected, and does a nice job outlining what was going on in the Italian peninsula from 1250 to 1450 (and a little bit beyond). He does an especially nice job explaining economic and political history, especially discussing the concurrent political structures of individual communes and supranational interests like the papacy and the empire (and how both started to give way to territorial proto-states around 1350). Also nice is Pullan's care to avoid over-generalization. Guelfs and Ghibillines are nicely explained as part-ideological-party and part-convenient-label-for-local-factionalism. A nice balance between change and continuity is struck when discussing cultural/intellectual development in the Renaissance. Pullan is careful to show that individual communes often had very different economic and political fates. All in all, it's a very good introduction to the time period.
My one criticism is that there's an unfortunate tendency to keep different aspects of the study - intellectual, political, religious - distinct from each other. On one level it's a little inevitable. A book needs some sort of framework to avoid descending into a random collection of facts. But more effort should have been made to provide some intersection between different themes. It's especially noticeable in Pullan's chapters on religious history, which are by far the volume's weakest sections. While what he states in them is perfectly accurate, they aren't connected in any meaningful way to earlier religious history of the period, political or economic developments, or religious developments in other parts of Europe. They almost feel like postscripts to the more substantive chapters on social/economic/political history.
Still, though, it's a good introduction to the topic, and Pullan is a clear and enjoyable writer.
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