George Huppert

After the black death : a social history of early modern Europe

Preface to the Second Edition Preface 1. The Eternal Village 2. The Freedom of the City 3. The Urban Community 4. The Urban Elite 5. The Privileged Estates 6. The Evolution of Rural Society 7. Rebellion 8. On the Margins of the Community 9. Private Lives 10. Worldly Minds 11. War and Plunder 12. Conclusion Notes Bibliographical Essay Index

Antiquity observed: A French naturalist in the Aegean Sea in 1547

The focus of this article is the mind of a young French botanist who visits the islands of the Aegean Sea in 1547. Although he is not a professional classicist, he is on the alert for survivals of classical culture among the Greek-speaking natives on Crete, Chios and Lemnos. His chief concern, as a patented Renaissance intellectual, is to find an explanation for the total absence of learning in the Greek world, which appears to him as an antique setting filled with ruined marble and ruined minds. Not given to nostalgia or pathos, he observes the flora and fauna described by Galen and Dioscorides: Nature, at least, remains constant.

Reviews : Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds, The Renaissance in National Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; ix + 239 pp.; L35.00 hardback, L11.95 paperback

This is a collection of essays by ten different specialists each of whom sums up, in something like twenty pages, the meaning of Renaissance culture in a particular territory: Florence, Rome, Venice, the Low Countries, Germany, France, England, Hungary, Poland and the Czech lands. Can anyone be expected to present original research on such broad topics in so few pages? Several of the contributors are in fact defeated by the task. Some of the essays are pedestrian. But at least three of the contributors have something to say. Richard Mackenney’s crisp little tour of Venice is filled with fresh detail and makes the point, convincingly, that if Renaissance culture is to be defined, as it was in Florence, as the revival of the values of the classical past, then Venice participated in the Renaissance only marginally. On the other hand, the author points to ’a great burst of cultural creativity fuelled by the energies of the laity’, in the face of clerical resistance, and he links the Venetian Renaissance to Amsterdam as much as to Florence (63). Writing of ’the arrival in Venice, in 1508, of an illegitimate visitor who collaborated with an immigrant from Rome’, he singles out the collaboration between Erasmus and his printer as a ’distinctly unacademic’ enterprise (61). Unacademic and un-Florentine, the Venetian Renaissance in no way resembles the German one. James Overfield’s essay on Germany expresses some pretty sophisticated nuances while remaining lucid and meaningful to the non-specialist reader. In Overfield’s view, Renaissance culture in Germany was not simply defeated by the Reformation. Some