The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (Yale Intellectual History of the West)

Rating:
Summary: hapters consider the yearning for order
Review: Historians have viewed Western cultural achievement as a singular progression; William Bouwsma's Waning Of The Renaissance rethinks the view, arguing that the period from 1550-1640 was a phase of complex ambivalence which stimulated cultural change. Chapters consider the yearning for order, social and political discontents of the times, and the process of change.

Rating:
Summary: Bacon and Montaigne Omelette
Review: It is William Bouwsma's thesis that the Renaissance was not the budding spring of the modern age, but an organic era with a beginning and an end. Curiously, the forces given birth at the beginning of the era proved to be so frightening that the Renaissance players rushed to euthanize them. The Renaissance did not wane so much as it was dismantled, like an errant atomic bomb, by scientists overawed by their invention.

Bouwsma examines sixteenth century European thought in piecemeal-philosophy, theology, politics, science, literature, the theater-and with Newtonian precision describes how the adventuresome Renaissance spirit smashed molds of dated thinking and psychological ordering. Then, in reaction to its own recklessness, the Renaissance mind either retreated to old certainties rehabilitated or domesticated its inventions into a more tranquil conventionality.

Historical essays of this sort can make for delightful reading. Boorstin's "The Discoverers," for example, captures both the specificity and the poetry of scientific history. Bouwsma, unfortunately, errs on the side of specificity. The flow of the work reminds one of a lengthy receiving line where every great thinker gets a handshake and a bon mot, but soon it is time to move on to the next guest. This is not to say that some of the guests don't mingle excessively. The author has a warm spot in his heart for Shakespeare, Sarpi, Jonson, Hobbes, Hooker, Galileo, and in particular Bacon and Montaigne, who pop up dozens of times in the narrative. Regrettably, "pop up" is exactly what they do, to provide proof texts and anecdotal spicing. The reader who is not intimately familiar with Bacon, for example, will not get a significant taste of his thought.

This is most unfortunate, because I believe Bouwsma has at least scratched the surface of an interesting concept: the Renaissance as psychological event. From our vantage point the Renaissance looms as an unmitigated liberation. Bouwsma, on the other hand, implies that for every man who felt liberated, another felt terrified. The great irony is that frequently these were one and the same man, that few intellectuals were so dense as not to feel some fear at the rending of the medieval synthesis. There is no shortage of great Renaissance men in this work, but only a glimmer of their ambiguity.