>What I find fascinating is to mull over the breaks and blendings
>rather than the theoretical continuity or evolution.
Me too. That's why I wanted to point out that ruling classes in Europe had been looking back to Rome for authenticity, example, and knowledge well before the modern period.
>It's interesting that you picked law and architecture. These form
>something of an administrative and hierarchical structured
>overlay. While there is a continuity in some regions, in other
>regions niether of these were successful in dominanting the
>pre-existing cultures and languages. I am thinking particularly about
>Germanic and Slavic people in middle and eastern Europe.
Right. If you read Carlo Ginzburg you see how pre-existing belief systems, commonly called agrarian or shamanic cults" still existed in Europe largely intact into 16th and 17th century Europe.
>But the national myths of state depend heavily on both law and
>architecture as their fundamental cultural expressions.
No argument there either. But this brings us to the 19th century, not back to the Renaissance, as was claimed yesterday. Even the Renaissance itself was a 19th century construct. The term wasn't widely used until after Burkhardt's "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" published in 1860.