¹ Another interesting case is the reception and ideological use of the Renaissance in China. On this topic see Gamsa, Mark, “Uses and Misuses of a Chinese Renaissance,” Modern Intellectual History, 10/3 (2013), 635–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² It is important to remember here that the extension of the adjective “Western” to all of Europe was debated during much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth because the German cultural mainstream perceived itself as essentially diverse from the liberal “Western powers.”

³ For a history of Renaissance historiography until the Second World War see the classic: Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (New York, 1948)Google Scholar. Another history of the development of a conception of the Renaissance which, although recently published, is already considered a milestone is Caferro, William, Contesting the Renaissance (Chichester, 2011)Google Scholar. See especially chap. 1 at 1–30.

⁴ Bouwsma, William J., “Eclipse of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review, 103/1 (1998), 115–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” American Historical Review, 84/1 (1979), 1–15; Starn, Randolph, “Historians and ‘Crisis’,” Past and Present, 52/1 (1971), 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Erasmus of Rotterdam revived the fame of Eucherius and took inspiration from his work to compose his own De contemptu mundi.

⁶ Chabod, F., Scritti sul Rinascimento (Torino, 1967), 49Google Scholar.

⁷ Garin, Eugenio, L'umanesimo italiano, 5th edn (Rome and Bari, 1993), 74Google Scholar. Here and elsewhere, the translation is mine.

⁸ Baron, Hans, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought (Princeton, 1988), 184Google Scholar.

⁹ Such an interpretation differs in many points with the other fundamental narrative of the Renaissance shaped by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–99), whose influence on Renaissance studies, especially in America, has been paramount. The debate between Kristeller, Garin, Baron and their many distinguished disciples cannot be summarized here, nor is its merit and resolution of interest to this article, which deals only with the historiography of the Renaissance rather than the Renaissance itself. For a thorough evaluation of the theory of civic humanism and its influence on other important issues of political and philosophical debate, such as communitarianism and New Republicanism, see Hankins, James, Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hankins studied under Kristeller.

¹⁰ Baron, Hans, The Crisis of Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, 1955)Google Scholar.

¹¹ A good analysis of Baron's personal and academic background and its influence on his theory of civic humanism can be found in Fubini, Riccardo, L'umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: origini rinascimentali, critica moderna (Milan, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Iggers, Georg G., “Refugee Historians from Nazi Germany: Political Attitudes towards Democracy” (Monna and Otto Weinmann Lecture Series, 14 Sept. 2005)Google Scholar. Finally, a recent and fundamental source is Ruehl, Martin, The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860–1930 (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The book contains a chapter dedicated to Baron, and Ruehl has made use of an array of sources, including the manuscripts collected at Duke University Library.

¹² Ruehl, Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 228 and passim.

¹³ Regarding earlier works and their take on the relationship between Republican and Medicean Florence see Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Leonardo Bruni Aretino: Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin, 1928).

¹⁴ Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 187.

¹⁵ Baron put considerable time and effort into answering the criticisms that other scholars had made of his work. See Ferguson, Wallace K., “The Interpretation of Italian Humanism: The Contribution of Hans Baron,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 19/1 (1958), 14–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baron, Hans, “Moot Problems of Renaissance Interpretation: An Answer to Wallace K. Ferguson,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 19/1 (1958), 26–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another important critic of Baron was Seigel, Jerrold E., “‘Civic Humanism’ or Ciceronian Rhetoric? The Culture of Petrarch and Bruni,” Past and Present, 34 (1966), 3–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Baron replied a year later. See Baron, Hans, “Leonardo Bruni: ‘Professional Rhetorician’ or ‘Civic Humanist’?” Past and Present, 36/1 (1967), 21–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Baron was very upset by Seigel's criticism and actively tried to curtail his influence on other scholars. He expressly asked Garin to write a refutation on his behalf on the pages of the most influential Italian journals (MS Archivio Garin, GT B265, Baron to Garin, Chicago, 1 July 1967).

¹⁶ Baron's theory, in particular, influenced authors such as Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, who in the following decades expanded on his view and explicitly connected Renaissance Florence's republican ideology to the development of British and American modern politics. Moreover, Baron had also an influence on some of the philosophers known as Communitarians.

¹⁷ Petrarch had been, according to Baron, “Moot Problems in Renaissance Interpretation,” 28, like “a Moses, first to see a new land, but not granted to enter it,” because he held public offices but could not frame in the end a complete theory of civic commitment.

¹⁸ In order to prove his thesis, Baron had to provide new dates for some of the most famous literary pieces of the quattrocento, especially those by Leonardo Bruni.

¹⁹ Garin, L'Umanesimo italiano, 20: “è vero che fisici e logici di Oxford e Parigi avevano da tempo cominciato a rodere dentro quelle strutture, che scricchiolavano parecchio dopo il terribile colpo dato da Occam. Ma solo la conquista del senso dell'antico come senso della storia – propria dell'umanesimo filologico – premise di valutare quelle teorie per cio’ che esse erano davvero: pensamenti d'uomini, prodotti di una certa cultura.”

²⁰ Ibid., 15: “Per questa via, proprio e solo l'umanesimo, concludendo del resto una lunga crisi, collocò nei suoi quadri storici e oltrepassò per sempre quell'antica visione del reale statica, strutture rigide, astorico oggetto di contemplazione, che la logica platonico-aristotelica aveva presupposto, e dove un moto ritornante in eterno su posizioni identiche si dissolve in una parvenza di moto, mentre l'uomo e la sua vita e la sua attività si perdono in una radicale insignificanza.”

²¹ However, the advancement of the humanities alone was not the product of this renewed attitude towards the past. In Garin's mind, the same epoch-making change produced the new scientific path as well. Garin's view was corroborated in the 1960s by a series of essays, some of which today appear dated. We remember here the masterwork of Vasoli, Cesare, La dialettica e la retorica dell'Umanesimo: “Invenzione” e “Metodo” nella cultura del XV e del XVI secolo (Milan, 1968)Google Scholar. Later on, other historians, such as Sapori, would have also added the beginning of the spirit of capitalism. For Garin, the scholars of the Renaissance, both the humanists and the “technicians and mathematicians,” were the active creators of a new time, which Cassirer (together with Dilthey a point of reference for Garin's theory), in his Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Berlin, 1927), 53, had epitomized in Cusanus.

²² Although Baron saw his intellectual career as in fundamental continuity with his days as a student in Germany, he also acknowledged that his thought on civic humanism only reached maturity around the end of the Second World War and that such mature thought had to be understood as part of a wider movement which included scholars such as Eugenio Garin, Federico Chabod and Nino Valeri. Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 188–9.

²³ Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 40.

²⁴ Garin, L'Umanesimo italiano, 2: “Avevo respirato l'atmosfera fra le due guerre, quando la parola del passato si caricava di tutte le tensioni di un momento di crisi … Fra le due guerre, quando la minaccia del nuovo conflitto si faceva sempre più grave, e sempre più chiara la consapevolezza di una crisi profonda di valori nel mondo occidentale, la riflessione non poteva non addensarsi sul momento in cui in Europa si era profilato l'assetto culturale e politico di cui la prima Guerra mondiale e la Rivoluzione d'ottobre sembravano avere tragicamente avviato il tramonto.”

²⁵ Moreover, this was a question that Garin posed as a man who had just gone through a personal crisis, losing his religious faith, as Michele Ciliberto has pointed out in his Eugenio Garin: Un intellettuale del Novecento, Kindle edn (Rome and Bari, 2011).

²⁶ MS Archivio Garin, GT K92, Kristeller to Garin, New York, 24 Aug. 1945.

²⁷ Togliatti had also favourably reviewed Garin's Cronache di filosofia italiana 1900–1943 (Bari, 1955) under the pen name of Rodrigo di Castiglia in Rinascita.

²⁸ Townsend, Susan, Miki Kiyoshi the Itinerant Philosopher (Leiden, 2007), 227Google Scholar. It is important to remember here that Miki—together with Hani—had studied in Germany under Heinrich Rickert and had had direct experience of the debate on the Renaissance which developed there during the 1920s.

²⁹ Such a point of view was fully developed after the war. See Gorō, Hani, Itaria shakaishi (Tokyo, 1952)Google Scholar, 65 and passim. Already before the war, a first exposition of such point of view is contained in the first chapter of Gorō, Hani, Machiavelli kunshuron: Sono rekishiteki fukei (Tokyo, 1936)Google Scholar.

³⁰ The essays were originally published from 1928 onwards.

³¹ Doak, K. M., Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Los Angeles, 1994), 107Google Scholar and passim.

³² Tasman, Alan, “Bridges to Nowhere: Yasuda Yojūrō’s Language of Violence and Desire,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 56/1 (1996), 35–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 60.

³³ Yojūrō, Yasuda, Nippon no hashi, trans. as Japanese Bridges, Journal of Japanese Studies, 34/2 (2008), 257–94, at 266Google Scholar.

³⁴ Kiyoshi, Miki, “Neohyūmanizumu no mondai to bungaku,” in Kiyoshi, Miki Kiyoshi Zenshū, 20 vols. (Tokyo, 1984–86), 11: 215–44Google Scholar. See also Tasman, “Bridges to Nowhere,” 43. Christian Uhl has addressed the relationship between literature and philosophy concerning the Japanese debate on Bungeifukkō and Romanticism in Wer war Takeuchi Yoshimis Lu Xun? Ein Annäherungsversuch an ein Monument der japanischen Sinologie (Munich, 2003), 350 and passim, esp. 380 on Tosaka Jun.

³⁵ For instance Hayashi Tatsuo, Shisō no unmei (Tokyo, 1939).

³⁶ Hayashi Tatsuo, Bungei Fukkō (Tokyo, 1928), 180.

³⁷ Ibid., 195, italics mine.

³⁸ Kazuo, Watanabe, Watanabe Kazuo haisen nikki, ed. Kushida Magoichi and Ninomiya Takashi (Tokyo, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁹ He had done the same with Benedetto Croce, whose work he translated and was acquainted with through correspondence. One of his last books was eloquently entitled Benedetto Croce Teikō no Tetsugaku (Benedetto Croce: Philosophy of Resistance) (Tokyo, 1972). Croce published the letter he received from Hani: Croce, Benedetto, “Ricordi e lettere di amici giapponesi,” Quaderni della “Critica”, 5 (1946), 101–11Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Kazuo, Watanabe, “Runesansu no itanseishin ni kan suru nōto,” Tenbō, 37/1 (1949), 53–7Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Kazuo, Watanabe, Runesansu no hitobito (Tokyo, 1949)Google Scholar; and Watanabe, Furansu Runesansu danshō (Tokyo, 1950). The two books were republished together, with the title Furansu Runesansu no Hitobito (Tokyo, 1964).

⁴² See also Watanabe, Furansu Runesansu danshō, 11, where the spirit of free examination and enquiry is linked to both chishiki and ketsudan.

⁴³ Watanabe clearly states at the very beginning of Furansu Runesansu no Hitobito, 9, that the dynamics of creation and “stiffening” that are the basis of the Renaissance reproduce themselves throughout history. The Renaissance is simply the most evident case and becomes therefore paradigmatic for all other instances of such patterns. In Furansu Runesansu danshō, 12, all history is depicted as the struggle between the spirit of the Renaissance and the spirit of the Middle Ages.

⁴⁴ Watanabe, Furansu Runesansu danshō, 5

⁴⁵ Watanabe Kazutami suggested that Watanabe Kazuo cannot be defined as a humanist because he does not believe in the perfectibility and progress of a human being. According to him, Watanabe Kazuo would rather believe in an endless return of the same evil under different disguises (the religious wars and persecution of the infidels in Geneva, the militarist government and totalitarianism, the horrors of Stalin's dictatorship). Kazutami, Watanabe, Hayashi Tatsuo to sono Jidai (Tokyo, 1988), 317Google Scholar. I disagree with his interpretation, which seems to me a too narrow interpretation of the term “humanist.”

⁴⁶ Watanabe's unsystematic style itself is an effort to be true to his principles. In Furansu Runesansu danshō, 3, Watanabe himself stresses the idiosyncratic and personal nature of the collection of portraits that he labels unsystematic fragments (kakera, danpen) and reading notes with no scientific authority.

⁴⁷ Kenzaburō, Ōe, Nihon gendai no Yumanisuto:Watanabe Kazuo wo yomu (Tokyo, 1984), 29Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Founder of the avant-garde association Yoru no Kai, Hanada exerted a direct influence on important Japanese intellectuals such as writer Abe Kōbo and artist Okamoto Tarō. See Noburo, Okaniwa, Hanada Kiyoteru to Abe Kōbō: Avangarudo bungaku no saisei no tame ni (Tokyo, 1980)Google Scholar; Shōgo, Ōtani, “Okamoto Tarō no taikyokushugi no seiritsu wo megutte,” Tōkyō kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan kenkyū kiyō, 13 (2009), 18–36Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Yukio, Kurihara, “‘Sengo bungaku’ no kigen ni tsuite: ‘Saigo no pēji’ kara no shuppatsu”, in Minato, Kawamura, ed., “Sengo” to iu seido: Sengo shakai no “kigen” wo motomete, Bungaku wo yomikaeru, vol. 5 (Tokyo, 2002), 140–41Google Scholar. Originally Hanada had intended to entitle the book Tenkeiki no seishin (the spirit of a time of change). Using the word fukkōki was an editorial decision based on the great cultural resonance that the term was enjoying in the aftermath of the war.

⁵⁰ Kiyoteru, Hanada, Fukkōki no seishin (Tokyo, 1946), 47Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., 53. Hanada aligns himself with all those interpreters who traditionally saw the study of mathematics recommended by Plato as a form of mediated entering into the world of ideas. Myles Burnyeat has offered a different explanation of the place that mathematics has in Plato's system. Rather than just being instrumental to the understanding of metaphysical Good, mathematics would be an essential part of it. Burnyeat, Myles, “Plato on Why Mathematics Is Good for the Soul,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 103 (2000), 1–81Google Scholar, esp. at 45. I am grateful to Duncan Kelly for pointing me to Burnyeat's work.

⁵² Hanada's account of both Machiavelli and Leonardo is simplistic in its assumption of an unambiguous path from Renaissance to modernity. In this sense he follows Burckhardt's pattern far more thoroughly than Garin or Baron themselves, who had championed modernism.

⁵³ Kurihara Yukio, “‘Sengo bungaku’ no kigen ni tsuite,” 126–50.

⁵⁴ “The responses to this question were varied. Some people were plunged into the abyss of despair (kyodatsu), while others revelled in a sense of liberation and new life (saisei). These two extremes formed the basic structure of the discourse of defeat; within them were contained all possible responses available in early postwar Japan. The polar extremes of kyodatsu and saisei were not mere binary opposites where the appearance of one precluded the existence of the other. Nor were they causally linked in a temporal sense with one necessarily giving way to the other. They were in fact a coexistential pair whereby the presence of one necessitated the appearance of the other.” Owen Griffiths, “The Reconstruction of Self and Society in Early Postwar Japan 1945–1949” (Ph.D. thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1999), 11.

⁵⁵ Crainz, Guido, l'ombra della guerra: Il 1945; l'Italia (Rome, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ciliberto, Eugenio Garin, defines this as Garin's “religious existentialist period.”

⁵⁷ Watanabe, Hayashi Tatsuo to sono jidai, 185–6.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 188 and passim.

⁵⁹ Morio, Minami, “Kyōyō to Senso,” Kyōyō to kyōiku, 4 (2004), 1–10Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ciliberto, Eugenio Garin; Kenzaburō, Ōe, “On Politics and Literature: Two Lectures by Kenzaburo Oe,” Doreen B. Townsend Center Occasional Papers, 18 (1999), 1–47, at 10Google Scholar. The lectures by Ōe were introducted by Randolph Starn, the famous scholar of the Renaissance, quoted elsewhere in this paper.

⁶¹ Garin, Eugenio, Intervista sull'intellettuale, ed. Ajello, Mario (Rome and Bari, 1997), 42Google Scholar.

⁶² Kiyoteru, Hanada, “Sabaku ni tsuite,” Shisaku, 7 (1947), 74Google Scholar. Concerning this passage see Tsuyoshi, Namigata, “Suna no shigaku to seijigaku,” Tsukuba kenkyū ronshū, 19 (2001), 147–61Google Scholar, at 151.

⁶³ In the last essay of Fukkōki no seishin (“Warau otoko” (The Man Who Laughs)), 239–50, at 247), dedicated to the political meaning of Aristophanes’ comedies, Hanada points out that the contrivance and extolling of morals is a tool of control over the common people (shomin), of which both the ruling class and “the so-called world revolutionaries” make an identical use (247). See also Yuichi, Asao, Seijiteki geijutsu: Brecht, Hanada Kiyoteru, Oonishi Kyojin, Takei Teruo (Tokyo, 2006), 134Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Starn, Randolph, “A Postmodern Renaissance?”, Renaissance Quarterly, 60/1 (2007), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History”; Bouwsma, “Eclipse of the Renaissance.”