Die europaische Spatrenaissance.

Manfred Welti. Die europ[ddot{a}]ische Sp[ddot{a}]trenaissance.

Basel: Friedrich Reinhard, 1998. 336 pp. illus. n.p. ISBN: 3-7245-0988-X.

At a time in which historians favor microhistorical and local studies, writing a comprehensive work on an entire period, such as the late Renaissance or "Sp[ddot{a}]trenaissance," the century roughly between 1520 to 1545 and 1620 to 1640, as Weld defines it, takes considerable courage. It requires even more valor if the aim of such a study is not just a political history but a total history, covering political, philosophical, social, art historical, and psychological aspects. In addition, the author attempts to tackle the European Renaissance, not merely a national variety of it, although, in a small concession to manageability, Welti concentrates on Italy, France, England and Germany, leaving out the countries at the margins of Europe, the "Randstaaten."

A tall order indeed.

Relying on sources and critical literature from half a dozen languages and drawing on the methodologies of a number of schools, Welti structures his study in ten chapters. In the first chapter he argues that doubt (der Zweifel) and a profound skepticism were characteristic features of the age, documenting his thesis with examples from religion, astronomy, geography, medicine, jurisprudence, and literature. However, this doubt and uncertainty is balanced and complemented by a trend towards rationalism. This trend manifests itself most clearly in the so-called "Tafelwerke," schematic representations of certain fields of knowledge, diagrams that appeal both to the mind and to the senses, a topic he explores in two chapters called "Struktur I and II." Becoming fashionable around 1540, culminating between 1560 and 1590 and then disappearing towards the end of the sixteenth century, these tabulae are, according to Welti, a sign of the need for systematization, structure, and hieratchization, and a clear rejection of the humanist narrative form. While these chapters are based on Welti's own archival research, the next two chapters dealing with political, religious, and economic "blocks" -- such is Welti's term for the different states, confessions, social groups and economic monopolies emerging at the time -- draw on the rich literature available for that period. After a short chapter on intellectual aggression as it manifests itself in literature, Welti discusses in two chapters called "Lebensgef[ddot{u}]hl I and II" what in more mainstream studies would be termed social and mental history, ranging from the "Paracelsan Revival," black and white magic, dueling, theater, to women, children, music, and drinking. In chapter 9 Welti turns to the visual arts, while the last chapter deals with soldiering, museums and travels.

While such a brief summary obviously does not do justice to the wealth of the topics Welti discusses, it is possible to identify his main theme. The Swiss author sees the entire period characterized by a polarization. On the one hand there is a trend towards rationalism (see the phenomena of the tabulae), while on the other there is an increased turn to the occult sciences and towards emotionalism. To a certain degree, this dichotomy anticipates the two great opposites of the eighteenth century, Voltaire and Rousseau, or as Welti (with his fondness for drawing parallels to our own age) says, the computer and the yoga mat.

Welti's attempt to establish the late Renaissance as a historical period sui generis and not merely view it as the end of the Renaissance, as the name implies, is laudable. His considerable erudition and familiarity with the sources and with modern methods of interpretation allow him to make sometimes surprising connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.

But the strength of the book is also its weakness. Its broad scope often tempts the author into sweeping generalizations which are either so general that they amount to truisms or are indefensible. Is it really possible to call that era "the Protestant Century"? Is it justified to reduce that period -- any period for that matter -- to a single "mentality"? And yet this is precisely what Welti aims to do when he says that he does not want to write an "histoire des mentalit[acute{e}]s" but an "histoire de la mentalit[acute{e}]." Is not any culture a complex network of diverse, sometimes converging, at other times conflicting cultures? Moreover, don't we have to differentiate between the various countries? What was true for Venice, might not have been valid for London. After all, Europe was a highly diverse continent with vastly different traditions.

Although Welti makes his case in a German that is fashionably and liberally sprinkled with Anglicisms, his core terminology is anachronistically old-fashioned. Who else is still using Seelengeschichte, Seelenkunde, das innere Sein, Herz and Gem[ddot{u}]t as scholarly categories? But far more annoying are his questionable psychological interpretations. For example, Welti believes in a clear and rigid distinction between the "female" and the "male," a distinction he considers natural and biologically anchored. While the female represents warmth, feeling, emotion, tenderness, and intuition, the male stands for strength, ratio, logic, knowledge, and aggression. Any deviation from these "natural" roles and qualities Welti considers unnatural. After praising a female scholar's book on soldiering in the sixteenth century, for instance, he criticizes this study for a lack of "femininity" ("Fraulichkeit," 281). For this reason he also interprets the "androgynezation" of the late Renaissance, the blurring of the male- female dichotomy, as ruinous. Welti argues that the woman with a strong male element remains unsatisfied by a man with a strong female element. The result is that she neither loves him nor the children resulting from this union. Consequently, the children, thus bereft of a warm upbringing, become radicals ("schlagen nach rechts und links aus," 267). If this is quirky enough, another result of this blurring of the clear sexual roles is that women, sexually unsatisfied by these androgynous men become "furies" ("Furien," 302) in their frustration, whereby Welti cryptically adds that the age saw a marked increase of the witch hunts. Are sexually frustrated women to blame for the witch hunts? This is, by the way, one of the few places where witch hunts are mentioned. Otherwise the author who devotes an entire chapter to the rare phenomena of the tabulae cavalierly glosses over this important aspect. Nor is Doctor Faustus, the quintessential figure of the late Renaissance, ever mentioned in the book.

Welti is deeply pessimistic about his own time, which experiences the same trend towards "androgynezation" -- with the same disastrous consequences. Reading his frequent references to the sixties when in his view "all the trouble started," one can't help but wonder whether he does not project his own anxieties and resentments into the sixteenth century, a time he revealingly calls "my century."

Welti's book is a stimulating book full of surprising and revealing insights. But it is also a seriously flawed and at times very annoying book that should be read with a great deal of that attitude that characterized the late Renaissance, skepticism.