This chapter argues for the Italian Renaissance as a pivotal moment in women’s history. This was the first Western age in which secular women emerged in significant numbers as producers, as well as consumers, of high culture. It also witnessed the development of new ways of thinking about sex and gender, framed to counter traditional arguments for women’s inferiority to men. Like many Renaissance cultural innovations, the emergence of culturally active women was initially an elite phenomenon mainly limited to the princely courts, but practices like women’s writing later migrated down to lower strata of urban society. By the late sixteenth century, women writers were being joined by other species of virtuose such as singers, composers, actresses, painters, and other visual artists. The chapter argues that traditional periodizations of the Renaissance, which see the movement as ending in the mid sixteenth century, have led to a major underestimation of the degree to which women may be considered stakeholders in the movement alongside men.

This chapter traces the history of Renaissance Italy’s long and passionate love affair with the textual and material remnants of classical antiquity, exploring classical influences within literary and intellectual history, art history, and material culture. The classicizing movement known as humanism is charted here from its origins in the early 1300s to the moment sometimes called the High Renaissance in early sixteenth-century Rome. The chapter argues that past paradigms have often over-emphasized the secular leaning of Renaissance humanism or posited a sharp transition from a medieval, other-worldly to an earthly, human-focused world-view. Countering this, the chapter examines the ways in which a society and culture still deeply invested in Christianity responded to the philosophical challenges posed by pagan antiquity and the strategies it developed to reconcile the two.

It may be useful to start this book by making clear what it is not. The term ‘Renaissance’ is used in academic and everyday discourse in two senses. First, it is used to denote a cultural movement or tradition, centring on the recuperation of classical literature, art, and thought. Second, it is sometimes used to denote an ‘age’, or a chronological period (in the case of Italy, generally from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century; in northern Europe, generally later). This book takes ‘Renaissance’ in the first sense of the term. No attempt is made here to summarize the social, economic, religious, or political history of Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century in a systematic way, although mention is made of salient developments that impacted on cultural production. The chapters of this book are not organized in a chronologically narrated sequence, nor a geographical one, covering developments in the various Italian states. Instead, they take the freer form of thematic essays on key aspects of Renaissance culture, in a way that enables a deeper exploration than a book that aims at ‘coverage’ can afford.

This chapter examines three Renaissance social and cultural types, the merchant, the courtier, and the artist, the latter category encompassing not only painters, sculptors, and architects but also performance artists and skilled artisans and makers. The chapter uses self-descriptive writings produced by members of these professional groups to draw out their collective identities and value systems. Merchants are studied through the Florentine tradition of merchant ‘family books’, as well as in the more literary writings of Leon Battista Alberti and Benedetto Cotrugli, while the ethos of courtiers is examined through the justly famous analysis of Baldassare Castiglione. Where artists are concerned, an initial section on painters and sculptors, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Vasari, is followed by a discussion of lesser-known writings by court professionals, from dance masters to horse trainers to specialists associated with the arts of the table, such as cooks, stewards, and virtuoso carvers. The chapter argues that the much-studied rise of painting and sculpture from a lowly craft status to that of liberal arts was one instance of a broader phenomenon.

This chapter defines the nature of the Italian Renaissance as a cultural movement stemming from, but not defined by, a new, fascinated engagement with classical Roman and Greek culture. It locates the origins and primary contexts of this movement in the fiercely emulative and precociously urbanized mercantile city-republics of late-medieval central and northern Italy and their fourteenth and fifteenth-century successors, the Italian signorie or princely courts. The chapter also considers the periodization of the movement, arguing for a ‘long’ Renaissance, extending down to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hence incorporating the age of the Counter-Reformation. A longer Renaissance enables us to better understand the effects of important developments such as the introduction of printing and the rise of the vernacular to rival Latin as a literary language. These factors, over time, changed the demographics of Renaissance culture, opening it to less elite strata of society and to women.

This chapter examines the ways in which classical influences intersected in Italian Renaissance culture with modernizing impulses in an era of rapid social and material change. The early sixteenth century in Italy brought a series of devastating wars and a loss of political independence at the same time that Italian culture was absorbing significant novelties, such as the introduction of printing in Europe and the geographical ‘discoveries’ of the period, especially that of the transatlantic New World. The chapter foregrounds the sense of novelty and progress that was a marked feature of the later Renaissance in Italy, balancing humanism’s reverence for classical antiquity. This dialectic is examined through detailed case studies of the histories of geography and cartography, of the theory and practice of anatomy, of art-historical writing and conceptions of artistic progress, and of the social and cultural impact of print.

Asking the question of when the Renaissance ended, the Conclusion proposes it to be the early seventeenth century, with the advent of the Baroque as a literary and artistic movement. This shift was accompanied by a sharp change in gender attitudes, with the sixteenth century elites’ general stance of supportiveness to women’s cultural ambitions being displaced by a born-again misogyny, which began to abate only at the end of the seventeenth century. Postdating the end of the Renaissance to the early seventeenth century produces a more coherent narrative than traditional periodizations that regard the advent of the Counter-Reformation as a cultural end point. It also helps to challenge widely adopted but questionable constructions of European cultural history which posit a translatio imperii et studii from southern to northern Europe dating to the Protestant Reformation. The book concludes with a call for further work on the neglected Late Renaissance moment of the late sixteenth century with the aim of ‘reintegrating’ the Renaissance and enabling a better understanding of the full arc of the movement.

This chapter starts from Jacob Burkchardt’s famous contention that Renaissance Italy saw the birth of the modern individual. While acknowledging the limitations of this thesis, the chapter argues that a reconfigured notion of individualism can still have value in capturing aspects of Italian Renaissance culture. Renaissance Italians invested considerable energies in crafting attractive and distinctive social selves, and practices of self-fashioning, ranging from verbal and visual self-portraiture to dress and material culture, attained a high degree of sophistication. This phenomenon has generally been studied within elite contexts, but evidence is emerging that, by the Late Renaissance, such practices extended into lower strata of society. Case studies considered in the chapter range from famous elite self-fashioners such as Isabella d’Este and Pietro Bembo, to the disruptive, socially mobile figure of Pietro Aretino, born the son of a shoemaker, to actual shoemakers, tailors, and woodcarvers of the mid to late sixteenth century, whose material possessions, recorded in inventories, give evidence of intriguingly sophisticated and culturally aspirational selves.

This chapter considers Renaissance Italy and its culture from the perspective of its relations with the European and extra-European world. From an initial focus on religious and ethnic diversity within Italy with discussion of Greek, Jewish, and Ethiopian diaspora cultures, the chapter moves to consider the diffusion of the cultural innovations of the Italian Renaissance beyond the Alps. This is examined first within Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then within Europe’s colonial and missionary ‘contact zones’ in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The next section of the chapter focuses on a particularly rich intersection between Renaissance culture and extra-European transcultural exchange in the form of the work of Italian Jesuit missionaries in China, India, and Japan. A final section explores similarities between missionary practices of ‘accommodation’ and cultural outreach and those adopted by secular figures such as the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti and the traveller, diplomat, and early scholar of Persian Giovanni Battista Vecchietti.