Myths of Renaissance Individualism

Early Modern History: Society and Culture

by John Jeffries Martin

The idea that the Renaissance witnessed the emergence of the modern individual remains a powerful myth. In this important new book Martin examines the Renaissance self with attention to both social history and literary theory and offers a new typology of Renaissance selfhood which was at once collective, performative and porous. At the same time, he stresses the layered qualities of the Renaissance self and the salient role of interiority and notions of inwardness in the shaping of identity.

Genres: History, Renaissance

197 pages, Paperback

First published June 21, 2004

About the author

John Jeffries Martin, Chair of the Department of History, is a historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004). In addition, he is the editor or co-editor of several volumes: Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State (2002); The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (2002); Heresy, Culture and Religion in Early Modern Italy: Contexts and Contestations (2006); and The Renaissance World (2007) as well as some fifty articles and essays. He is currently completing the first volume of Europe's Providential Modernity, 1492-1792, a work that offers a new interpretation not only of Europe in the early modern period but a rethinking of modernity itself. Martin’s further research focuses on the history of torture in early modern Italy, a topic he is pursuing through a study of Francesco Casoni, a provincial intellectual, whose writings on evidence and the art of conjecture did much to undermine the need for the use of torture in the courts of Europe in the early modern period.

Martin has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, twice of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and has received support for his research from the American Philosophical Association, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America. He has lectured, as the Alphonse Dupront Chair, at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and, as Distinguished Visiting Scholar, at Victoria College, the University of Toronto. He also lectures frequently to broader publics, most recently through a series of presentations on early modern Europe through the Program in the Humanities and Human Values at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

With Richard Newhauser, Martin is editor of the series Vices & Virtues for Yale University Press. Martin teaches courses in Italian and European history. His most recent courses include a graduate seminar on the history of the early modern Mediterranean and an undergraduate seminar on the history of torture in the West. In the spring of 2013 he offered, together with Sara Galletti, a course entitled “Mapping Knowledge in the Renaissance: Raphael’s School of Athens,” a collaborative that investigated the epistemologies of various disciplines in Rome in the High Renaissance. The course was funded by a grant from the Humanities Writ Large initiative at Duke.

Before joining the history faculty at Duke in 2007, Martin taught at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he also served as Chair of the History Department (2004-2007). Martin grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia, attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard.

Reviews

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting with a delineation between the Burckhardtian view of the Renaissance as the birth of the self-willing and autonomous individual and the Greenblattian view that, like today's post-modern individual, the Renaissance man was a patchwork of culturally conditioned forms, John Jeffries Martin, in his "Myths of Renaissance Individualism," postulates that the Renaissance man is better seen as a dialectic between the realm of the interior self and the performative and prudent selves. Mr. Martin does this by insightfully researching inquisitorial records from early modern Venice and comparing them to allied trends throughout Europe of the era. Though somewhat marred by a certain slowness of pace in some portions, the book is, with that caveat, a fine, informative, and completely relevant exploration of the changing sense of the self in this most essential and transformative time period. The book is particularly enlightening in its discussion of "Concordia," or the connection between the nature of man and of God, and, additionally, the final chapter nicely links the whole book to the contemporary plight of the self in our world. I found this book stimulating, thoughtful, and over with far too soon. A must for students of history and the self (who isn't?), please read this book!

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting premise and points throughout - but it felt like an essay which had been padded out with repetitions to make a book.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. The idea that individualism is a historically specific concept is interesting. People in past eras — the Renaissance, in this case — conceived of their selves in different ways than we do today. Martin exhibits shades of Michel Foucault in his reject of a universally applicable definition of the self, except that Foucault would talk more about souls than selves (see: "Discipline and Punish"). To Martin, this means that the philosophy of individualism didn't develop until the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, there's a lot of really abstract language that makes Martin's argument inaccessible. For die-hard Renaissance lovers/scholars only.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Goodreads description of this book makes it sound seriously daunting, but this book is surprisingly readable and enjoyable. It's a very clear and level account of how the Renaissance wasn't the amazing explosions of individuality as it's sometimes described, but a more complicated interaction between people and the world around them.

It's nicely structured as well, with each chapter almost functioning as a case study or 'short story.' Definitely worth a read!