Contesting the Renaissance

Contesting the Past

by William Caferro

In this book, William Caferro asks if the Renaissance was really a period of progress, reason, the emergence of the individual, and the beginning of modernity.

Genres: Renaissance, Nonfiction, History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published December 2, 2007

About the author

William Caferro teaches medieval European history at Vanderbilt University. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College in 1984 (with a history major at Bryn Mawr College) and his Ph.D from Yale University in 1992 (where he primarily studied Greek and Latin patristic). From 1984 to 1987, he taught high school mathematics in New York City and Connecticut.

William Caferro specializes in the history of medieval and Renaissance Italy. His research has focused on the transition from the medieval to Renaissance periods, on ascertaining the distinction between the two, particularly with regard to economic forces.
Caferro is author of Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Johns Hopkins, 1998) and John Hawkwood, English Mercenary in Fourteenth Century Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2006). John Hawkwood won the Otto Grundler Prize from the International Medieval Congress as the best book in medieval studies (2008). He is co-author of The Spinelli: Fortunes of a Renaissance Family (Penn State, 2001) and co-editor of The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (Routledge, 1996). His most recent book Contesting the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) traces the meaning and use of the term "Renaissance" in the major debates of the historiography.

Reviews

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renaissance historiographical debate is, at its heart, a periodization debate between an elusive medieval terminus and modern origin. And, like all periodization debates, it is extremely fun and completely pointless.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Caferro provides an excellent, broad synthesis of Renaissance (or early modern) scholarship on a variety of major themes including gender, economics, religion, science, politics, and humanism. After reading, I feel as though I have a much better grasp of the state of the field. However, the edition I read was in serious need of an editor to remove basic grammatical errors including frequent mistakes in punctuation and missing words.

[Thomas Noriega]

A useful historiographic survey of the Renaissance, but little more. It is shocking how much of the material Caferro draws on for his portrait of Renaissance historiographic debates is at least half a century old if not older. Unless a great deal has changed in the English-language history of the Renaissance, then it is urgent to start changing it rather than holding debates with sources so old they have become historical records.