Faculty Book Review--September 2002
Anthony Grafton’s
Bring
Out Your Dead:
The Past As Revelation
By Richard Beattie
“It’s getting late. We better hurry, soon the Renaissance will be here and we’ll all be busy painting.
—Woody Allen in the movie Sleeper
Though none of my students have ever seemed to care all that much; starting a course on modern European history with the Renaissance, as we do in our curriculum, is a matter of some debate. I have argued that this choice may be appropriate, but others have seen the Renaissance “revival of antiquity” as more reactionary than progressive and downplay its impact in creating the “modern west” (whatever that might be). As is usually the case, the truth may lie somewhere in the middle. The Renaissance may very well have been an elitist, class oriented movement, but it’s radical nature rested not on what they studied, but in how they studied it; not in what they thought, but in how they thought.
We tend to associate the Renaissance with the artistic “giants” of the era: Michelangelo, DaVinci, Botticelli, Raphael. When we limit our perceptions of the Renaissance to this particular element we run the risk of marginalizing the work done in other areas. It is this work that Anthony Grafton wants us to be aware of in his book Bring Out Your Dead: The Past As Revelation (Harvard University Press, 2001). Grafton is Henry Putman University Professor of History at Princeton University, and Bring Out Your Dead essentially serves as a collection of his essays and lectures dealing with Renaissance culture and the work of Renaissance Humanist scholars. It is the scholar, not the painter that Grafton celebrates. It has long been thought that the Renaissance scholar worked individually in anonymity. He (and I don’t use the gender pronoun carelessly) poured over his classical texts, worked on his translations, wrote his journal entries and cared little for the lack of general interest his work would provoke, or its practical applications. In refutation, Grafton argues that quite the opposite was true. That in fact, the Renaissance scholar worked in community with other Renaissance scholars, and that his work was of vital importance in application to Renaissance thought on politics, architecture, science, art and literature.
Grafton attempts to redefine and redeem the Renaissance Humanist, arguing almost like a defense attorney for a publicly maligned client. No, Grafton implores, the Renaissance Humanist scholar was not necessarily a “cranky pendant,” working to advance the agenda of a snobbish, overly erudite, elite Republic of Letters. Instead, they were more than aware of their role in creating the new culture of Renaissance thought, and their work was intimately linked to the work of the scientist, the naturalist, the historian and the artist. Two areas where these contributions were most directly felt were in publishing and antiquarianism, which is the historical precursor to what we would now refer to as archaeology, anthropology and cultural studies. Lisa Jardine has argued in her book Worldly Gods that materialism and commercialism were central motors of change for Renaissance culture. While Grafton seems to agree with this assessment in his chapter on the Renaissance publishing houses; he also reminds us of the importance of translation, editing and scholarship necessary for an archaic or academic text to see the light of day. It was not simply a matter of typesetting and printing, Renaissance publishers needed an almost encyclopedic knowledge of their craft and the subjects of the books being published. Machiavelli wrote The Prince, but who would have read it without the work of Renaissance scholar publishers such as Jerome Hornschuch, or Aldo Manuzio?
Jerome Hornschuch, or Aldo Manuzio? Never heard of them. Which, of course, is part of the point. Grafton employs a much more liberal chronological context for the Renaissance than is common; going as far as to include the Scientific Revolution and early Enlightenment thought of the early 18th century as part of the Renaissance legacy. Though one may see this as “cheating” it does allow him to pursue one of the underlying (if very subtle) reading experiences of Bring Out Your Dead. The book is full of people the reader, who may not be an Ivy League professor, has never heard of: Niccolò Perotti, Lorenzo Pignoria, Giambattista Vico or Jean Hardouin. But they are linked to people we have heard of: Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Alberti or Luther. It is through these lineages that Grafton really establishes the sense of scholarly “community” he so diligently wants to emphasize in Bring Out Your Dead.
If you plan on doing some reading on subways, at the beach, or on long van rides to JV Soccer games in Massachusetts, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation is probably not for you. 300 pages of anecdotal evidence and profiles of archaic humanists, followed by 50 pages of bibliographic work, frequently in Latin, doesn’t track very easily when Mr. Withstandley is regaling the team with his impersonation of Tony the barber, or the staff of Hunan Gourmet. One should really be in a wood paneled library with stain glassed windows and leather furniture. But, though not for the light of heart or the limited attention span, Bring Out Your Dead serves as a unique narrative of the history of the Renaissance, and with its substantial historiography, as a history of the history of Renaissance. Walking along the line between reinterpreting and reinventing the past is an ambiguous and perilous academic venture, but historians can reinvent the past; not by changing what happened, but in changing how we think about what happened.