How did the Renaissance and the Enlightenment contribute to the making of modern world?
This essay introduces the gathering of articles contained
during this special issue, explaining their necessity and contextualizing them
within the historiographical debates around “ancient theology” and “civil
religion”. It does so by pertaining to well-known influential figures in
Renaissance and Enlightenment studies like Daniel P. Walker, Frances A. How did the Renaissance and the Enlightenment contribute to the making of modern
world? Yates,
Charles B. Schmitt, Eugenio Garin, Cesare Vasoli and Franco Venturi, also on
newer studies like that by Dmitri Levitin. It further provides a quick overview
of every contribution and places the special issue within the disciplinary
context of worldwide and comparative intellectual history.
the essays presented herein partly originate from a
symposium titled “From Ancient Theology to Civil Religion, from the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment”, which was held under the aegis of the Sydney
Intellectual History Network at the University of Sydney, Australia, 9–10
November 2015. Six of the papers – those by Vasileios Syros, Fabrizio Lelli,
Miguel Vatter, Umberto Grassi, Daniel Canaris and Jennifer Mensch – were
presented there and are subsequently significantly revised for publication
during this special issue, while Maurizio Campanelli, Giacomo Corazzol and
Jeremy Kleidosty were invited to hitch the project at a later stage with
original contributions. so as to start to summarize the papers and therefore
the special issue as an entire , the range of methodological approaches adopted
by each author should be emphasized. The widely differing approaches relate to
how Martin Mulsow describes “global intellectual history” as a discipline
within the making
which not only displays many of the characteristics of
already existing sorts of intellectual history – from conceptual history to
network analysis, from the history of political languages to the philological
study of texts – but which ultimately amount[s] to innovative approaches to an
old subject. The extension of the attitude into the worldwide creates new and
unique problems that need imaginative solutions.
1. Recent scholarship on the “radical Enlightenment” has
emphasized the theologico-political strategies adopted by this philosophical
movement to cause a conception of the state that's “neutral” or “tolerant” in
reference to religious (and perhaps also non-religious) world views. However,
while one among the important concepts employed during this strategy revolves
round the idea of a “civil religion”, the prehistory of this civil or political
conception of faith remains less well explored. This special issue aims to
bridge this gap by exploring the connections between the Renaissance idea of
“ancient theology” and therefore the Enlightenment idea of “civil religion”.
Although influential scholars like Daniel P. Walker, Frances Yates and Charles
B. Schmitt have argued that the Renaissance idea of “ancient theology” proved
fundamental to the event of the ecu and Anglo-American Enlightenment, and
especially led to a republican conception of civil religion that inscribes
religious tolerance into the political constitution, the precise nature of this
filiation and its meaning has until recently remained to be explored. How did the Renaissance and the Enlightenment contribute to the making of modern
world? Moreover, not enough attention has been given to the ramifications of this
movement in reference to early eighteenth-century theological writings, which –
although resisting the secularist currents of the Enlightenment – similarly
drew upon and reacted to the Hermetic tradition in an effort to accommodate
other religions within a Christian theological framework. This collection of
essays has been created so as to supply a contribution to fill such lacunae.
2. As emphasized by one among the volume's reviewers, Guido
Giglioni, the state – just like the bodies of all living beings – is inherently
vulnerable and exposed to the chances of decline and destruction. Within this
traditional way of representing the character of human commonwealths, Giglioni
continues, religion are often seen as both the pathogen and therefore the
antidote (as, as an example , addressed by Miguel Vatter's essay on Machiavelli).
Between the late medieval and early modern periods, when religious divisions
were often the explanation for or trigger for political and social unrest,
reflections over the essence of divine creation and governance of the planet
represented an integral a part of the political thinking of the days (an
example of this is often Jeremy Kleidosty's article on Hobbes, who built his
theory of political sovereignty on the experience of English war and therefore
the notion that religion had a fundamental public role on which the steadiness
of a commonwealth depended).
This collection of articles engages with this
theologico-political predicament, moving from the idea that a number of its
more original and innovative features originated from the way during which
Renaissance authors (such as Leonardo Bruni, Jochanan Alemanno, Georgios
Gemistos Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico and Machiavelli , among others
examined within the volume) recovered and reinterpreted themes belonging to the
tradition of Greco-Roman historiography and political thought, also on biblical
exegesis, historical narratives of ancient wisdom and travel reports on Indian
and Chinese cultures.
3. Although such feeling can't be assumed for all
contributors, I felt the urgency to assemble a set of critical perspectives to
interact with traditional accounts of the connection between the “Renaissance”
and therefore the “Enlightenment” periods and integrate them with newer
interpretations of the first modern period in Europe. At first, my interest was
sparked by Italian historian of philosophy Eugenio Garin's notion of an
extended Enlightenment, which spans from Petrarch's fourteenth century to
Rousseau's eighteenth century, and which Garin himself problematized further
after borrowing it from Delio Cantimori's work on the periodization of European
history.Such a notion, in short, considers the French Revolution because the
end of the age of Renaissance Humanism, enclosing in one ideal world
scholastics and humanists and therefore the revolutionary thinkers of the first
Enlightenment “from Petrarch to Rousseau”. How did the Renaissance and the Enlightenment contribute to the making of modern
world? the foremost influential Italian
historian of the Enlightenment, Franco Venturi (1914–1994), reacted to the
present interpretation in his “Trevelyan Lectures” delivered at Cambridge
University in 1969, during which he protested against the tendency of students
like Peter Gay and Cassirer to match philosophy and history of the
Enlightenment, and especially against Cantimori, “one of the lads for whom the
age of humanism ended with the French Revolution . He too enclosed in a perfect
world scholasticism and therefore the humanists up to the dawn of the
Enlightenment, from Petrarch to Rousseau