ABSTRACT
While the title of my chapter – a title which to a large extent coincides with that of the conference itself – might at first sight seem quite unproblematic, on reflection it reveals itself quite questionable from various angles. Unproblematic at first sight because the philosopher in question does chronologically belong to a period of European cultural history which since the nineteenth century has been included in a wider period historiographically labelled as the Renaissance. Already at this factual chronological and descriptive level, however, marginal doubt could be raised. Although Giordano Bruno’s life started in 1548 and ended in the year 1600, his extant works – the only ones on which we can base our judgement – date from 1582; and men of my generation cannot forget that in the 30s and early 40s of the last century, when Italian historians were busy suggesting a periodization for the literary and philosophical output of the past – not unlike their counterparts in the field of the history of art, who had found an indeed easy solution by adopting a periodization by centuries (the Trecento, the Quattrocento, Cinquecento and so on) – for the literary and philosophical output as well, the Italian historians, or some of them, adopted a similar periodization. This is still generally accepted in the histories of literature, albeit with some variations, by which, for example, the Cinquecento, or sixteenth century, does not terminate at the end of the sixteenth century but, for reasons not entirely evident to me, 20 years earlier, namely in 1580, while the Seicento, or seventeenth century, in its turn, does not terminate at the end of the seventeenth century but in 1690, in coincidence with the foundation of the Arcadia Academy. If this is the case, Bruno’s extant production would not find a place within the Renaissance Cinquecento, but rather in the following baroque and scientific Seicento. But let us put aside or even forget altogether such subtle questions of periodization. There is, on reflection, another more recent difficulty inherent in the very concept of the Renaissance, a concept which is becoming a historiographical notion in the process of
the illustrious critic of English Literature, Frank Kermode, had to say in his 1998 Presidential Address to the Modern Humanities Research Association – I deplored such a process which seems to be due to the misconceived persuasion that the term ‘Renaissance’ is not, to use a current expression, politically correct. This is because it would seem to imply the approval of a male-dominated society and culture, and also to be partial, in its implicit exaltation of artistic and literary values, at the expense of civil and social considerations. To this could be added that the term itself is semantically conservative in that it implies the revival of a culture belonging to the classical past. I deplore the recent tendency of historians and critics – prevalently American (but which seems to have extended to most European countries, including Britain and Italy) – by which a new terminology is being applied to historical and cultural notions: a change which, however, does not necessarily find correspondence in an actual change of method. So, in our particular case, it has happened that, in the English-speaking countries, the term Renaissance used in an adjectival way has been substituted by the compound adjective ‘Early Modern’ (for example, Early Modern England, or Italy and so on). To the partialities mentioned earlier, new ones have been substituted, which are implicit in the new expression. Among the most obvious I would like to note the inversion of the referential pole – classical antiquity has been substituted by modern civilization; art and literature by science (also modern, if not altogether contemporary), not to mention technology and so on. However, it is not by changing terminology that the objective meaning of observed phenomena can be altered. In fact, between the two poles – classical and modern – the phenomena themselves continue to appear equidistant, as was clearly formulated (long before the present preoccupation with terminology took place) by that great student of humanism and the Renaissance, Eugenio Garin. In a preliminary Note (Avvertenza) to the first edition (dated 1970) of his collection of essays entitled Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo (From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment) Garin wrote with reference to the Italian humanism of the early fifteenth century that: ‘Initially, the going back to the past and the coming back of the past basically expressed a project fed by a myth and which in its turn nourished that myth, namely the myth of classical Graeco-Roman civilisation as a model to be imitated.’
