In “Breaking the Renaissance myth,” an appreciative review in the online NewStatesman.com of Catherine Fletcher’s
The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance, the Anglican prelate-theologian-poet Rowan Williams agrees that the supposed Golden Age of Western Civilization at the start of the 16th century was a time of great exuberance and creativity as well as intellectual freshness.
However, he argues that the official history of the Italian Renaissance did conceal the uncomfortable truth that it contributed very little to innovation in science, having largely focused on literary and rhetorical accomplishment rather than on empirical observation or technical skill in logic and mathematics.
IMAGE CREDIT: HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGESWilliams observes: “The force of Fletcher’s narrative is not so much in offering a radical new evaluation of Italian Renaissance civilisation as in insisting that we see it as a cluster of cultural strategies and techniques within an exceptionally turbulent political milieu. This does not mean for a moment that we relegate da Vinci or Michelangelo to some dramatically inferior position, but it might prompt us to greater caution about the way in which the Renaissance myth has served a rather dubious geopolitical agenda.”
Read Rowan Williams’ review of Catherine Fletcher’s The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance in the May 27, 2020 issue of the online NewStatesman.com of UK now! RELATED READINGS:
Check this related 2011 reading in the Forum, “The Middle Ages weren’t just a time of long religious delirium and hysteria,” and this 2015 reading, “The real wonder is that humans ever discovered science at all.”
