The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640. (Reviews).

William H Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. xi + 288 pp. np. ISBN: 0-300-08537-0.

William Bouwsma's book on the waning of the Renaissance amplifies ideas developed in a number of brilliant essays, especially in "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought" (1975) and "Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture" (1980). While not denying that economic, political, and social changes in the society were also involved, Bouwsma interprets the end of the Renaissance as the result of a cultural crisis.

Because he considers the religious currents of the period as part of the Renaissance culture of freedom and creativity, he sees the Protestant and Catholic Reformations as involved in the crisis as well. Put simply, by the mid-sixteenth century the Renaissance's liberation of western Europe from the ordering conventions of the Middle Ages constituted a serious threat to the stability of the society and increasingly encouraged a counter tendency, hitherto present to a lesser degree, to limit freedom in the name of order. Significantly, the author describes the result of this tension not as the end of the Renaissance but rather as its "waning." Presumably this is the closest translation English has to approximate Herfsttij der Middleleeuwen, the Dutch title of Huizinga's famous book, a title which, according to Bouwsma in his 1974 review of Huizinga, "The Waning of the Middle Ages Revisited," suggests not only the decay of autumn but also the fruits of the autumnal season.

Divided into three parts, the work first discusses the Renaissance attitude toward human nature and its cultural manifestations from the sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. In this section as throughout, Bouwsma's profound knowledge of the sources allows him to marshall a rich array of contemporary witnesses to support his position. He identifies Augustinian spirituality as the major source for the Renaissance emphasis on the will and passions as opposed to reason; for its skeptical attitude toward systematic knowledge; its emphasis on historical knowledge; and its biblical fideism hostile to institutional centralization and dogma. Just as scholars came to reject cyclical history in favor of historical change, moreover, scientists found that the heavens like the earth were subject to change. These new ideas threatened social and political hierarchies and undercut traditional certainties.

The second section of the work briefly discusses the rising tide of anxiety often exhibited by the very thinkers and artists who were in the vanguard of the Renaissance. A superlative chapter on the Renaissance theater deals with the stage as the ideal medium for expressing "the unlimited and frightening possibilities of the human condition" (142) and as the epitome of deception in the eyes of its critics.

The final division of the book is reserved for an analysis of the culture of order, the reaction after 1550 to the destabilizing tendencies of the Renaissance generally affecting European society. The traditional hierarchy of the human faculties returned: reason was sovereign and the passions and imagination fell under suspicion. Philosophers and theologians alike, among them some of Calvin's heirs, turned to constructing conceptual systems. Political thinkers insisted on the patriarchal character of kingship and theories of universal monarchy mirroring the government of the heavens flourished. Religion was openly used as a form of social control; art and literature closely supervised; and conformity encouraged.

In previous writing on Renaissance humanism Bouwsma has analyzed the movement as intermingling influences from two polar conceptual schemes, Augustinianism and Stoicism. In the present work the anxiety-producing aspects of the Renaissance are distinctly associated with Augustine while Stoicism emerges as the dominant philosophical influence in the reaction. With its emphasis on the rational structure of the universe, its confidence in the power of human reason to establish natural laws for government and personal morality, and its cultivation of a passive acceptance of the political and social status quo, Stoicism provided the basis on which a society concerned with order, limits, and certainty could rest.

Like Huizinga, Bouwsma relies on anxiety to explain major cultural change, but unlike Huizinga, who resorts to a superficial organic metaphor as cause of the waning of late medieval northern culture, Bouwsma presents the later waning as a product of two dynamic forces in which the need for order ultimately outbalanced the desire for freedom. To what degree, however, was the prevalence of the sterner tendency in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a result of material causes such economic turndown and state development rather than anxiety? Or was anxiety the product of material and intellectual factors combined? Moreover, in associating the two massive tendencies to freedom and repression with Augustinianism and Stoicism do not the terms become emblems for two conflicting psychological states basic to human nature? Is anxiety the primary cause of intellectual change throughout western history and does its varying intensity determine which of the tendencies dominates at the moment? If the general ization cannot be made, why not? If it can, how does the cyclical conception affect historical explanation?

Perhaps the first monographic treatment of the end of the European Renaissance, The Waning of the Renaissance is a rewarding and challenging book by a master scholar.