Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy, by Alexander Lee

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 134; Issue: 570 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cez241

1477-4534

Brian Jeffrey Maxson,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Alexander Lee’s book argues for the centrality of the empire to late medieval politics and early humanist thought. Lee combines an impressive array of primary texts with detailed analyses that often reach from Antiquity to the early fifteenth century; from classical and patristic writers to Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni. This is a book that all scholars of learned culture and politics in late medieval and even early modern Europe will need to read. The book is broken into two sections. In the first, Lee traces changing approaches to the empire by humanists in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He argues that between roughly 1260 and 1335 thinkers such as Rolandino da Padova and Albertino Mussato appealed to the empire to return their cities to a ‘buon tempo antico’. Surprisingly, appeals to the empire were more common in communes, which were frequently racked with internal discord, than among signorial areas where a ruler could, rhetorically, himself play the role of peacemaker. Lee continues this argument in Chapter Two with the writings of Riccobaldo da Verona and Giovanni da Cermenate. Empire was central to the thought of these writers as well, but these writers used historical scholarship—a feature of early humanism in Verona during the Trecento—to link the chaos of their present with moral decay. Consequently, they looked to the empire to re-establish peace. Building upon these earlier writers, humanists between 1335 and 1369 made important changes to the perceived benefits of a return of empire to the Italian peninsula. During these three decades, writers such as Petrarch, Cola di Rienzo and Convenevole da Prato urged the return of the empire to bring peace, not just to individual spheres of influence, but to the entire regnum italicum. Writers naturally disagreed on specifics—would a renewal of morals come from the emperor, or bring a new emperor about? Which virtues specifically would be reborn?—but their focus on trans-peninsular peace distinguished these decades from those before and after them. Lee concludes this chronological sweep with a final thirty-year block, 1369–1402. Political failures and disillusionment moved thinkers such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni away from the hopes of previous decades and squarely back onto the benefits of empire to individual city-states. Writers abandoned the moral component to imperial appeals. Ultimately, by the early fifteenth century, an early text by Bruni, the Carmen de adventu imperatoris, called for arms to be taken up against the empire on behalf of Florentine liberty. This text, Lee claims, ‘marked the end of humanism’s romance with empire’ (p. 181).