Individuals and Institutions in Renaissance Italy.

D. S. Chambers, Individuals and Institutions in Renaissance Italy (Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS619.) Aldershor, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. xii + 376 pp. $117.95. ISBN: 0-86078-699-4.

Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society

Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii + 372 pp. $39.95 (cl), $15.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8018-6269-8 (cl), 0-8018-6395-3 (pbk).

Marion Leathers Kuntz, Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century

(Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS668.) Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT Ashgate, 1999. xii + 332 pp. $105.95. ISBN: 0.86078-807-5.

Charles Trinkaus, Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought (Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS671.) Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. x + 374 pp. $111.95. ISBN: 0-86078-811-3.

Each of these useful volumes gathers articles and chapters by a distinguished historian. David Chambers's Individuals and Institutions comprises sixteen essays, two of which have not previously appeared: one concerning Francesco Gonzaga's time as a student at Pavia in 1460-1461, and one on the place of personal and public crises in the diaries of Main Sanudo. The selections fall into four main groups, centered on: 1) educational institutions and their practical organization; 2) Mantua and Mantuans; 3) Venice and Venecians; and 4) therapeutic spas. These groups are followed by two articles that link England with Italy, and one on papal conclaves. With its general index and eleven pages of additions and corrections keyed to the text by asterisks, the volume makes maximum use of the format of the Variorum series: since the articles appear as they originally did elsewhere, citations of page numbers are identical, and the revisions enhance the texts without intruding upon them.

In the preface Chambers argues that institutions of all sorts "are best understood by studying human beings" (vii). Consequently, he eschews macroscopic theorizing in favor of the close study of texts and documents with an eye for what they can tell us of the individuals who wrote them and whom they describe. Many essays focus upon a particular moment in a statesman's career and then fan out to provide rich context. Thus the new essay on Francesco Gonzaga's student days in Pavia explores the internal dynamics of his household (including a feud between his tutor, the priest Bartolomeo Marasca, and Francesco's more permissive steward, Baldassare Soardi), the youth's interactions with prominent figures such as Bianca Maria Visconti (wife of Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan), and the physical logistics of his stay in Pavia. The two essays on Main Sanudo illuminate the famous Diaries by showing how Sanudo's personal experiences as well as Venetian military crises relate to their composition. Other essays, by contra st, trace the changing faces of social and cultural institutions. These include a survey of "academies" in Italy up through the early Cinquecento, a meticulous study of the University of Rome in the Quattrocento, and a fascinating account of the ways that cardinals in papal conclaves in the Sistine Chapel sought to position themselves under auspicious artworks (e.g., The Donation of the Keys).

A stated preference for Burckhardt over Marx, along with a peremptory dismissal of the overarching claims that some social historians of Florence made back in the 1980s (vii, n.2), remove any doubt that those seeking explicit engagement with current theoretical debates had best look elsewhere. Instead, Chambers has crafted cautious, carefully circumscribed arguments that his archival research can fully sustain (it bears mention, too, that appendices include editions of a number of key sources).

Stanley Chojnacki's Women and Men in Renaissance Venice takes a quite different approach to the study of institutions and elite individuals. A substantial introduction, entitled "Family and State, Women and Men," deftly situates the essays that follow within the context of the past quarter century of scholarship on Venetian social history. Whereas Chambers prefers to work from the individual to the institution, Chojnacki emphasizes their dialogical relationship: "Identity, especially gender identity was fashioned by individuals dealing with the requirements and allurements associated with the roles assigned to them, and with other persons taking the measure of their own roles" (23).

Although the essays are grouped topically, they could also profitably be read in chronological order of composition as a case-study of one innovative scholar's continuing encounter with rapid historiographical change. Chojnacki's word choices over the years, for example, reflect transformations in the terminology of social scientists: the accessible diction in "Dowries and Kinsmen" (1975) gave way a decade later to the use of specialized terms such as "graduated liminality" and "ritual moments" (1986), "female social space" (1988), the metaphor of "mapping" (1992), and then to plasticity, the subaltern, and "instrumental inscription" (1994). In general, Chojnacki defines such terms explicitly and uses them to good effect. Equally importantly, he enriches his extensive base of quantitative data (drawn in large part from the serial analysis of wills) and his use of theory with vivid anecdotes that breathe life into the statistics and terms.

The book comprises three sections that perforce overlap substantially in content: 1) "The State, Its Institutions, and Gender"; 2) "Women, Marriage, and Motherhood"; and 3) "Varieties of Masculinity." In the decades around 1400 the Venetian oligarchy, like those of other nascent territorial states such as Florence, intensified its regulation of social identity by age and gender so as to bolster its own authority and police the boundaries of its membership. In so doing, the state both illumined and embodied conflicting models of patriarchy, not least because of the mutually opposed interests of fathers and husbands concerning the size and terms of dowries. In Venice, the institution of hereditary nobility with unique access to certain government offices and privileges meant that marriage and dowry regulation carried particularly high stakes. Tensions between noble families of ancient distinction and those of new wealth further complicated policymaking. The resultant struggle between conflicting patriarchal mo dels "marked out a space where women with economic resources, social support, and personal ability could maneuver their way through, between, against, or with those interests" [52]. The control Venetian women had over their own wealth and property (far greater than that which the law allowed women in Florence, for example) meant that they could significantly influence fathers' marriage strategies for their daughters. This in turn may have led to increased male regard for them. Yet changes in marriage legislation and practice had mixed results, and for men as well as for women. One of the more intriguing essays, on "Patrician Bachelors," shows how dowry inflation combined with laws about the restitution of dowries to prevent some sons (often the eldest) from marrying: something with social and political consequences in a society that placed such a premium on the ideal of fatherhood.

Chojnacki prudently resists forcing the evidence to correspond to preconceived models, and so his conclusions gain in accuracy and durability what they perhaps sacrifice in panache. Thus one article ends up acknowledging the "lack of compelling evidence either of sweeping patriarchy or of its absence" in Venetian patrician society [182], and another even asserts that "the most consistent characteristic of 'the state' in Venice was its mutability ..." [56]. Yet it is precisely this kind of nuanced appreciation of social complexities, undergirded but not overwhelmed by quantitative evidence, enriched by theory but not predetermined by ideology, that has made these articles so enduring in their importance. Rather than presenting men and women as types, he illumines the diversity of their experiences and opens a window onto their social world.

The collection by Marion Leathers Kuntz also contributes much to our understanding of Venice and Renaissance culture. Fifteen essays, all previously published, explicate the utopian themes, concepts of harmony and toleration, and variants of the "myth of Venice" in the writings of Cinquecento humanists. Kuntz gives particular attention to the prominent French scholars Guillaume Postel (in seven essays) and Jean Bodin (in five essays), but also treats lesser-known yet intriguing figures such as the humanist and prophet Dionisio Gallo.

Postel's elaborations of the myth of Venice centered on a certain Zuana (or, Giovanna), whose extraordinary acts of charity included preparing meals daily for hundreds of the homeless. In addition, she prophesied extensively about the imminent onset of the millennium. Called by some the "Venetian Virgin," Giovanna styled herself the "Papa Reformatore del mondo" and believed that she had achieved a state of spiritual androgyny transcending the male/female dualism. Postel identified her as the "angelic pastor" of the Scriptures and made of her a paradigm for the excellence of Venice, the "New Jerusalem" that would be the center of church reform and of universal monarchy.

Several essays treat aspects of Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres, a dialogue set in a Venetian patrician's home among men representing seven different faiths. The dialogue idealizes Venice as a haven of stability and free expression, and such it surely was in comparison with the France of Bodin's time. It presents an idealized view of a Venetian academy, which Kuntz speculates was based upon one in which Guillaume Postel acted as secretary. Bodin's interlocutors discuss the harmony of nature as represented in numbers, music, and religion, and their contrasting positions, like the seven strings of Apollo's lyre, proclaim aspects of the divine harmony, which one can detect as superintending the multiplicity of Venetian academic discussions, of the idealized Republic of Venice, and of the cosmos.

A particularly noteworthy essay analyzes unpublished writings by two humanists, Francesco Spinola and Dionisio Gallo, who shared a prison cell in the Ducal Palace in 1556-57. Both held unorthodox religious views that they preached day and night, much to the disgruntlement of their fellow inmates. Ultimately Spinola was executed, above all because of his connections with prominent Huguenots in France. Yet his initial popularity among Venetian patricians, like that of the prophet Gallo, attests to the ways that a fusion of religious, political, and humanistic themes could still be socially significant in later Cinquecento Venice.

Like Chojnacki, Kuntz makes rigorous yet creative use of archival sources to build innovative arguments; yet in approach, method, and foci, these two volumes could scarcely be more different. Taken together, they represent the range of fine historical work being done on distinct aspects of Venetian culture that may be interrelated in ways as yet unstudied.

The volume by Charles Trinkaus gathers sixteen essays that postdate (with one exception) the publication of his lengthier collection, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (1983). Twelve address aspects of the thought of leading humanists and situate them in the contexts of medieval antecedents and contemporary rivalries. Here, Trinkaus details critical innovations in an intellectual current running from Petrarch and then Salutati, on to Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pontano, and Erasmus. The remaining four essays are review articles that appeared in 1976, 1986, 1988, and 1990.

Trinkaus elaborates upon his earlier assessments of the place of humanity and divinity in Italian Renaissance thought, most influentially stated in his magisterial two-volume work, "In Our Image and Likeness" (1970). As before, his meticulous explications and comparisons of texts demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt the centrality of religious issues to figures such as Petrarch and Valla, whom he situates squarely in the intellectual contexts of their own times. New here, however, is an investigation of humanist forays into natural philosophy, as well as an emphasis upon anti-Scholastic and anti-Aristotelian elements in humanist thought. In addition, Trinkaus identifies a division within the humanist movement (as within the Scholasticism of its time) between a Via antiqua and a Via moderna: a continuing debate over whether ancient culture was to be venerated and fully imitated, or whether instead its tools of learning should be shorn of philosophical and religious content and appropriated ad hoc in the servic e of Christianity (2.21).

Trinkaus gives most attention to Lorenzo Valla, and in a particularly penetrating essay (6) he identifies Valla as the "Instaurator of the Theory of Humanism." Meticulous analysis of the Respastinatio dialectice et philosophie demonstrates how Valla appropriated theoretical tools from Quintilian to help him build an intellectual system of humanism that could "be asserted as a counter-weight to scholastic reliance on Aristotelian metaphysics and dialectic" (6.92). Trinkaus deftly shows how Valla does not quite say in the Repastinatio that language determines thought and even things, as some have mistakenly inferred from isolated passages. To be sure, Valla attacks the Scholastic appropriation of the Aristotelian category of "being," but he does so as part of a larger project: the construction of a theory of humanism in which "[e]ither words or things can represent or constitute substance, quality and action either in speech or in actuality" (6.81).

Deeply learned and carefully argued, these articles evidence Trinkaus's extraordinary gift for explicating the complex theological and philosophical arguments of leading humanists and setting them in intellectual context. His methodology does have an inherent limitation: ways that political, social, or economic factors may have influenced the course of the history of ideas receive minimal attention. Trinkaus is least in his element when he critiques others' efforts to situate thought sociopolitically, as for example in his presentation of what he terms the civic humanist syndrome" (1.327). Nonetheless, through his intense focus on ideas, Trinkaus has greatly enhanced our ability to distinguish the original from the traditional in Renaissance thought, as well as our understanding of the contemporaneous intellectual currents that leading humanists reacted against and, at times, transcended.

In sum, all four of these volumes gather important essays that had previously been scattered and at times difficult to obtain. All four will be worthwhile additions to research libraries.