The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century = Le XIXe siècle renaissant

The nineteenth century witnessed rapid economic and social developments, profound political and intellectual upheaval, and startling innovations in art and literature. The pace of change was unmatched since the Renaissance. As Europeans peered into an uncertain future, they drew on the Renaissance for meaning, precedents, and identity. Many claimed to find  inspiration or models in the Renaissance, but as we move across the continent’s borders and through the century’s decades, we find that the Renaissance was many different things to many different people. This collection brings together an international collection of sixteen authors who examine the many Renaissances conceived by European novelists and poets, artists and composers, architects and city planners, political theorists and politicians, businessmen and advertisers.

The essays fall into three groups. Aesthetic Recoveries of Strategic Pasts looks primarily at the work of creative artists and writers in France, where the Renaissance was largely a sixteenth century affair. Many believed that it was France’s “true” tradition, that it demonstrated an immediacy and vigour which had been suffocated by the classicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Renaissance in Nineteenth Century Culture Wars turns the focus to political and religious issues in France and Italy, with a focus on the meaning of freedom, a concept commonly associated with the period but for very different reasons. Material Culture and Manufactured Memories looks at how new industrial techniques, new fortunes, and new political demands turned the Renaissance into a valuable and evocative brand in the marketplaces of the bourgeois century.

YANNICK PORTEBOIS (University of Toronto) dirige le Centre d’études du XIXe siècle français. Elle est l’auteur, en collaboration avec Dorothy Speirs, de Mon cher Maîre. Lettres d’Ernest Vizetelly à Emile Zola (2002), de Notes from Exile. Zola in England (2003), et d’un ouvrage portant sur l’histoire culturelle de la langue française (Les saisons de la langue, 1998)

NICHOLAS TERPSTRA (University of Toronto) is author of Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (1995), which won the Howard K. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies, and the editor of The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (2000).

REVIEW
University of Toronto Quarterly, 76.1 (2007), pp. 121-123. Reviewed by Janice Best.