The Renaissance was largely invented by Burckhardt in the book you quote -- which remains a delightful read but (as you suggest) perhaps says as much about the 19th century as the 15th. The passage you quote is Burckhardt's caricature of the Middle Ages -- the stuff of a million Western Civ textbooks, but unrecognizable to readers of Aquinas or John of Salisbury.
Belief in the Renaissance is necessitated by a certain Whig interpretation of history, but a better evaluation of the period requires thinking about the transition to capitalism (again as you suggest). I think that the Renaissance was principally a colossal loss of nerve (to Burckhardt, "the discovery of the world and of man"), following on to the catastrophic collapse of the medieval mode of production in the 14th century.
Renaissance Humanism was an educational reform, an attempt to build a new man [sic] for a new world, the previous social certainties having given way. Since the recent past (the previous thousand years) was unusable, one had to cast back for the only other available example of human society, classical antiquity. Thus the "Middle Ages" were invented to be put aside, and the previous model celebrated.
Perhaps this is taken up in Grafton's new "What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe" (CUP 2007), which I haven't seen. --CGE
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> I don't take exception in the sense that Hamlet takes
> interiority to a whole nother level. But certainly
> it's been remarked that the sense of interiority gets
> going in the centuries just before Shakespeare, with
> the Renaissance -- as Charles would remind is, in the
> early days of the rise of capitalism.
>
> Generally speaking the idea that the concept of the
> individual arose in the Renaissance is stock stuff
> (which doesn't make it less true or less deep), going
> back to Jakob Burkhardt's Hegelian flavored The
> Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1867). E.g.,
> to quote JB:
>
> both sides of human consciousness - the side turned
> to the world and that turned inward - lay, as it were,
> beneath a common veil, dreaming or half awake. The
> veil was woven of faith, childlike prejudices, and
> illusion; seen through it, world and history appeared
> in strange hues; man recognized himself only as a
> member of a race, a nation, a party, a corporation, a
> family, or in some other general category. It was in
> Italy that this veil first melted into thin air, and
> awakened an objective perception and treatment of the
> state and all things of this world in general; but by
> its side, and with full power, there also arose the
> subjective; man becomes a self-aware individual and
> recognizes himself as such.
>
> That last clause is another paraphrase of the passage
> in Self-Consciousness in Hegel that I referred to. Btw
> while in Rome this last summer I passed a house that
> JB lived in in the 1840s while researching that book.
>
> I'm reading Tony Grafton's Book on Leon Battista
> Alberti, Master Builder of the Renaissance, 1404-71,
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Battista_Alberti
>
> btw Grafton's book
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Leon-Battista-Alberti-Builder-Renaissance/dp/0674008685/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197386281&sr=1-1
>
> is wonderful and wonderfully written, just like
> everything Grafton writes.
>
> Alberti invented the theory of perspective, designed
> important buildings, etc. Although he's very far from
> bring a fictional character, his writings, and those
> of other more ordinary Florentines Grafton discusses,
> display an intense and sensitive interiority 150 years
> before Hamlet was composed.
>
>
>
> --- Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Tahir Wood <twood at uwc.ac.za> wrote:
>>
>> "I wonder if anyone here is interested in the
>> topic of 'mind-culture
>> coevolution' - this article by Bill Benzon is one I
>> find extremely
>> interesting. It's called The Evolution of Narrative
>> and the Self, and it
>> situates Hamlet within the historical evolution of
>> narrative characters:
>> http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/LitEvol.shtml "
>>
>> I am. A recent Shakespearean called Hamlet the
>> first self-conscious character in Western literature
>> -- i.e. Shakespeare the first writer to portray
>> interiority. I'm sure Andie and Carrol and some
>> others will take exception to that, but Hamlet
>> certainly shows mental processes on a different
>> scale.
>> ...