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Fifty Years of the New England Renaissance Conference*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
I'll begin with a couple of disclaimers. First, though it is a good many years since I had to present a birth certificate in order to get my senior citizen's discount, I was not present at the beginnings of the New England Renaissance Conference (N.E.R.C.) but was still at Harvard in the Society of Fellows with a very new Ph.D. More important, I was a card-carrying medievalist at a time when medievalists were far more detached from the Renaissance than they are now. If we regarded the Renaissance at all, it was as a kind of mopping- up operation of the Middle Ages; perhaps we remembered Gilson's remark: “The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction.” But I slowly learned wisdom and first spoke to the N.E.R.C. in 1951. I had discovered that, contrary to Gilson, joining the Renaissance was not a subtraction but very much an addition. Nevertheless anything I say about the earliest period of the Conference is based only on information received.
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1989
Footnotes
*
This essay was presented as an address at the 1989 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. The author thanks the many friends whose help made the talk possible, notably Paul Oskar Kristeller of Columbia University, William Dinneen and Andrew J. Sabol, both of Brown University, Richard M. Douglas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Samuel Y. Edgerton of Williams College, Jane E. Ruby of Wheaton College, and Robert P. Sorlien of the University of Rhode Island.
References
1 Cited by Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1949), 382 Google Scholar.
2 See also the remarks by Kristeller, P. O., “Leicester Bradner,” Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988)Google Scholar: 777-78.
3 Renaissance News 7 (1954): 1-5.
4 For the following story I have relied primarily on “The Renaissance Society of America. An account by the Executive Board,” Renaissance News 7 (1954): 7-11.