Why is it that when we think of the Renaissance, we think first of Italy? Why, when its motley 15th-century collection of duchies, republics and city states could scarcely be identified as the country they form today, do our minds leap straight to Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli, rather than their north European contemporaries Holbein, Copernicus and Erasmus?
In The Other Renaissance, Paul Strathern tasks himself with proving that Italy was not the only part of Europe looking both forward and backward in this “age of discovery” between the 15th and 17th centuries. The author of histories of the houses of Borgia and Medici has turned his attention across the Alps to defend the achievements of an eclectic range of artists, scientists, explorers and luminaries who contributed “at least as much” as anyone further south.
Take Paracelsus, the apron-clad, broadsword-wielding professor who insisted on lecturing in German rather than Latin so that the local barbers and alchemists could follow along. His empirical, diagnosis-led approach to medicine, revolutionary at the time, was as controversial as it was impactful: his inaugural lecture at the University of Basel in 1526 saw an exodus of attendees after he lifted the lid on a tray of human faeces.
“If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefaction, you are unworthy of the name of physicians,” he called after them.
Tycho Brahe was only slightly less eccentric. When not mapping the position of 777 stars, the Danish astronomer kept a moose in his vast palace and observatory, whose liberty to wander the corridors came to an abrupt end after it encountered an open vat of beer and a vertiginous cellar staircase. Yet the very foundations of the scientific revolution can be seen in the meticulous measurements of Brahe and his protégé Johannes Kepler, whose laws of planetary motion first mapped our movements around the sun.
From art and astronomy to medicine and exploration, The Other Renaissance covers a lot of ground, and the author’s biographical style is invariably engaging. What the book lacks, however, is a convincing, overarching narrative.
We read, for example, of Bruegel’s 1567 painting “The Land of Cockaigne”, a mythical place of plenty whose inhabitants the artist depicts as idle and gluttonous. We read separately of François Rabelais’ Thélème, an abbey built by the author’s giants in his 1534 book Gargantua whose occupants lived their lives “according to their own free will and pleasure”; and of Thomas More’s Utopia, the humanist’s at once ideal and impossible island whose customs he set down in a 1516 work of the same name. The decision of these artists to satirise exaggerated, fictional locations, rather than real-life targets, speaks to the political fragility and sensitivity they worked under, but Strathern’s largely single-subject chapters don’t always quite connect the dots as they ought to.
More broadly, the book comes at a time when the mere concept of the Renaissance — northern or southern — is increasingly murky. History has moved on since Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 assertion that in the Middle Ages, “both sides of human consciousness . . . lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil”. By the beginning of the Renaissance period, Arabic scholars and Toledo translators had already beaten Italy to the rediscovery of many ancient texts, while books such as Seb Falk’s The Light Ages are testament to the idea that the dark ages weren’t so dark after all.
All of which is rather hard to reconcile with Strathern’s conclusion that the Renaissance still constitutes a “paradigm shift” — a kind of cultural tipping point brought about by such a concurrent concentration of genius. Apart from anything, after such a lively and wide-ranging series of portraits, it just feels rather too neat a frame.
The Other Renaissance: From Copernicus to Shakespeare by Paul Strathern, Atlantic Books, £25, 400 pages
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