ABSTRACT
Runnin g throug h all the previou s chapters have been recurrin g themes or ideas - what I have called Renaissance passions - that seem to acquire coherence by their relevance to the wide r social and economic environmen t in whic h they developed. Self-construction, literacy and communicatio n skill s were valuabl e assets not only to urban elites and court nobilit y in the post-plague era but also to up-and-comin g 'new men' - 'the meaner men's children' , as Roger Ascham called them. It was the response of thi s very mixed group of people to the new ideas that transformed them int o a new culture : a consumer-led boom i n material goods and possessions that in tur n helped to expand and change the old universe. 'Commerce' seems to provid e a convincin g metaphor for the productio n and circulatio n of Renaissance cultur e in it s widest sense of goods and innovativ e ideas. Yet is there a danger of confiden t nineteenth-century belief in progress creeping in throug h the back door , despite the apparently non-evaluativ e language of thi s new metaphor? It is useful to retur n to the discovery of the New Wor l d i n 1492 and the revisionar y writing s its 500th anniversit y triggered in 1992, since they provid e an evaluativ e critiqu e of the Renaissance absent fro m the language of consumerism. They encourage an equally rich , but much less civilised , Renaissance - as I argued, as the basis for wha t follows , i n an earlier reassessment of thi s other Renaissance [36].
