/lit/ - Literature

>>20357348
Asking "where should I start with the Renaissance?" is like asking "where should I start with NarutoxSasuke yaoi fiction?"
Well, you obviously gotta know the source in order to understand what it is, but besides that, it doesn't really need much of an introduction.

>>20357647
Fascinating stuff.

Any recommendations, my good man?

as long as you’ve read Augustine and Dante, you can read anything you like in Italian Renaissance
i would recommend petrarch, his sonnets are very influential and quite profound (esp in italian, if you can manage a bit with a dictionary)
but please read augustine and dante first, they are vital to understanding italian authorship even to today

Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy is still a mandatory classic but I recommend knowing a bit about the period and its structure first. Maybe the easiest way to do this is to pick one or two of the city states and learn their history internally so you have a reference point or "backbone" around which to organise the rest of your knowledge of the period. The best and easiest and most eventful city is obviously Florence, which has a very eventful history from the Trecento (Dante and in a sense Petrarch, Salutati and "civic humanism," the revolt of the Ciompi, the wars with Pisa), to the Quattrocento (obviously the Medici and the Florentine Academy, the beginnings of the Italian Wars), and is the centrepiece of the swan song of the Renaissance city state in the beginning of the Cinquecento (with the fall of the Machiavelli/Soderini Republic to the papal/ducal Medici). Through Florence you can basically see enough to get your sea legs.

Najemy's book on Florence is good and standard. Gene Brucker's Renaissance Florence too. Another benefit of focusing on Florence at first is that you can read the ricordanzi of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati, both Florentines. A brief primer on pre-Renaissance Italy might also be helpful. Wickham's Sleepwalking into a New World is cool. I also recommend learning, at least a bit, about why the failure of Frederick II Barbarossa to turn Italy into a permanent dynastic possession and apanage of his empire, and the "long interregnum" that followed, were so decisive in making Italy a political free for all. Just reading about Ezzelino III's exploits is a good window into the condottiere phenomenon avant la lettre. This helps you make sense of the absolute mess Italy was, how ambiguous the pope's situation was in it, why it wasn't that unusual for him to go live in Avignon during the Babylonian Captivity and barely give a shit about Rome, how such upstarts like Cola di Rienzo were possible and how major figures like Petrarch could support their utopian schemes, etc.

Anything was possible in Italy, politically and philosophically, and into that mix you then drop the revival of classical learning, civic humanism (the Baron thesis), the crazy dynamism of the Greek polis, technological revolutions, attempts to revive Plato's Academy and renew Christianity with hermeticism, religious autocrats, humanist popes and decadent horny popes. The most amazing thing about studying the Renaissance is when you start to feel and see what Machiavelli saw in the Republic and how he actually just wanted a Borgia to do it on a larger scale and make Italy into another great nation like France, but greater than all the others because cultured and lettered.

Definitely read PO Kristeller on the nature and spread of humanism. Understanding humanism is vital to understanding not just the Renaissance in Italy but particularly its diffusion abroad, since it was the humanist "way of thinking" that really spread.

>>20357647
>Machiavelli isn't hard to read. "Start with the Greeks" is famously daunting because nobody knows where exactly to start with the Greeks, and it's initially hard to appreciate whatever thing like Homer or Plato you finally decide half-heartedly to jump into. The Renaissance by comparison is much closer to us historically and mentally, it's fairly self-contained as an epoch, it has enormous influence for understanding modernity and all subsequent philosophy (far more than people think), it's just as exciting as Greek history and weirdly similar to it (poleis/republics in a political no man's land, Greece/Italy), there are highly readable and exciting classic works on it (Burckhardt, Cassirer, Kristeller), and most of its writers wrote shorter and less daunting things, or they wrote histories and letters. If you just want to get lost for a year deep-diving into some era, the Renaissance is a lot of fun and you can cover a surprising % of the total ground within a year or two of casual study.

>>20357814
this is such a good summery im not sure i can improve much except throw in a few more names.
First Id second Burckhardt: small great books are a wonderful discovery and this is one of them. On the more dull academic side Republic of Letters by Marc Fumaroli will take through the Latin intellectual movement and introduce you to name like Pico, ,Ficino and the like. In the lighter side there is J.H. Plumb's The Italian Renaissance, which is light and well written, and a great easy introduction, from a great historian.

One sate that (>>20357814) hasn't mentioned is Venice, for good reasons, as it was kind of it's own thing. But though late to the party, it was one of the great artistic centers of Italy. On the mature historian side i recommend A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. Again, light and fun. For a more architectural read a good abridgement of Ruskin's Stones of Venice will teach you more then you ever expected, though Ruskin is a dangerous influence for the uninitiated.

>>20357348
Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

Redpill me on renaissance magic

>>20359641

>>20359641
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>>20357814
This is one of the best and most informative posts I've read on /lit and has made me excited to learn about the renaissance. What a fascinating period of history.

I've saved your post and I will start with the Florentine republic.

Many thanks for the suggestions, you clearly know a lot about the subject matter.

>>20358345
>Ruskin is a dangerous influence for the uninitiated.

Why is he dangerous?

>>20361797

he will send you down some wrong paths. He is opinionated and such an extremely good writer you will more then likely be convinced into liking and disliking things based on nothing more then his word. Still a recommendation if nothing else

i dont quite approve of the bottom section of the pic, but it's a bad little list.