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A Comprehensive History of Renaissance Italy: 1464-1534
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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December 2, 2024
The serendipitous book is always a roll of the dice. I found this in my local library. It says on the back that students mostly learn about Florence, with a little bit of Venice and the Rome of the popes, but "seldom have a grasp of what is going on in other parts of Italy, and names like Ferrante of Naples, Andrea Doria or Francesco Gonzaga haunt a uniformly nebulous background." Well, that sounds like me, I thought, and I took it out with the expectation that it would fill in the gaps.
Actually it suffers from a classic historian's blunder: forgetting to give any kind of general overview, define terms, explain who people are, and instead leaps directly to details which can mean nothing to "the student" because we don't know who the fuck these people are, and all we have to guide us where the fuck the places are is the maps which have only city and river names and no other information. The very first chapter simply begins by listing what crops were grown, in deep detail, in various parts of Italy. There is a sort of incantory poetry to these quirky details ("For bread the Corsicans used the chestnuts from the hills") but like an unsorted box of gems there is no design and it all goes in one ear and out the other. Laven uses indiscriminately the birth name and the papal name of various Popes, so difficult to tell who is who, and loves to allude to their crimes without actually telling us anything about them ("There were never more corrupt leaders of the Church than Sixtus IV and Alexander VI") and his occasional humor about it somewhat falls flat because of that ("it must be remembered too that even the Popes were Christians.")
It definitely made me appreciate some of the "OK Books" that I have read, like A Short History of Africa and The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940, which are comparatively models of clarity and accessibility, and also the magnificent Hartt, who never fails to introduce a historical character when they come on the scene, and set the stage at the beginnings of chapters before getting down to the art-historical nitty gritty. It feels a little mean to negatively review this book, a totally forgotten book from the 60s which has as I write this literally zero other ratings of any kind, and which has barely been taken out from the library two dozen times since its acquisition. I'm afraid Professor Laven's hopes must have been disappointed by the lack of response his book received, but Peter, you needed to put yourself a little bit in the shoes of those students you wanted to help, because they have absolutely no idea what you're talking about most of the time, or why they should care.
Such is the fate of the failed attempt at the OK Book. He didn't even get a sale from Oakland Library, and the whole reason it was there for me to read is told in a little card stuck on the copyright page: "THIS BOOK IS THE GIFT OF THE PUBLISHER".
Actually it suffers from a classic historian's blunder: forgetting to give any kind of general overview, define terms, explain who people are, and instead leaps directly to details which can mean nothing to "the student" because we don't know who the fuck these people are, and all we have to guide us where the fuck the places are is the maps which have only city and river names and no other information. The very first chapter simply begins by listing what crops were grown, in deep detail, in various parts of Italy. There is a sort of incantory poetry to these quirky details ("For bread the Corsicans used the chestnuts from the hills") but like an unsorted box of gems there is no design and it all goes in one ear and out the other. Laven uses indiscriminately the birth name and the papal name of various Popes, so difficult to tell who is who, and loves to allude to their crimes without actually telling us anything about them ("There were never more corrupt leaders of the Church than Sixtus IV and Alexander VI") and his occasional humor about it somewhat falls flat because of that ("it must be remembered too that even the Popes were Christians.")
It definitely made me appreciate some of the "OK Books" that I have read, like A Short History of Africa and The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940, which are comparatively models of clarity and accessibility, and also the magnificent Hartt, who never fails to introduce a historical character when they come on the scene, and set the stage at the beginnings of chapters before getting down to the art-historical nitty gritty. It feels a little mean to negatively review this book, a totally forgotten book from the 60s which has as I write this literally zero other ratings of any kind, and which has barely been taken out from the library two dozen times since its acquisition. I'm afraid Professor Laven's hopes must have been disappointed by the lack of response his book received, but Peter, you needed to put yourself a little bit in the shoes of those students you wanted to help, because they have absolutely no idea what you're talking about most of the time, or why they should care.
Such is the fate of the failed attempt at the OK Book. He didn't even get a sale from Oakland Library, and the whole reason it was there for me to read is told in a little card stuck on the copyright page: "THIS BOOK IS THE GIFT OF THE PUBLISHER".
Displaying 1 of 1 review