ABSTRACT
The ‘development of the individual’ – of men and women highly conscious of their personal abilities and supremely assured of their place in the secular world – was regarded by the nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt as one of the defining moments of the Renaissance in Italy and one of the period’s most distinctive contributions to the modern age.3 After 1300, Burckhardt suggested, men and women increasingly substituted corporate loyalties with the pursuit of personal advancement, fame, or individual artistic expression in the growing cities and courts of the Italian peninsula. Burckhardt described an Italy ‘swarming with individuals’ after 1300, as the ‘ban laid upon human personality was dissolved’. This dynamic but paradoxical image suggests that the emergence of individuals and of secular individualism could undermine traditional corporate structures like the monastery and the church and Burckhardt viewed this process
1 I would like to record my gratitude to the late D. Francesco Andreu for providing me with access to the Theatine archive at Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, and to Dr David Rundle for guiding me through the Vatican Library. For their comments on earlier versions of parts of this essay, I am grateful to Professors Elisabeth Gleason, John Martin and Tom Mayer. I am also grateful to audiences in Edinburgh, San Francisco and Leeds for criticism and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Abi Brundin and Dr Matthew Treherne for inviting me to present this paper at the ‘Forms of Faith’ conference.
