Explains the emergence of industrial policy during the mercantilism of the Renaissance and later.

In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

Florence in the fifteenth century was in transition from the medieval to the modern world, and sexual attitudes and practices were very much in flux. The most distinctive feature of Florentine sexuality was the city’s international reputation as a hotbed of ‘sodomy’. Traditional structures of marriage and the family coexisted with a widespread culture of male homoeroticism. Female prostitution was sanctioned by the state, in the hope that it would reduce both male homoeroticism and adulterous relations. At the same time the new ideal of romantic love was spreading to all social classes, bringing changes to the ways people thought about marital and intimate relations. This chapter focuses both on the idealization of male homoeroticism in humanist culture and on the repression of male homosexual activity by the Office of the Night, the judicial branch that policed sodomy. It contrasts the celebration of physical beauty in Florentine visual arts with the preaching of the Dominican reformer Savonarola, who harshly condemned worldly luxuries. Savonarola’s public execution by burning in 1498 provides an ironic contrast to his own bonfires of the vanities, in which luxury goods were burned, but it also mirrors the public burning that was the traditional punishment for sodomy.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

This chapter argues that visual art played a generative role in the compositional processes of Vaughan Williams. His taste in painting was influenced by the art historians Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, who lauded the formal simplicity of works by fifteenth-century Italian artists like Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, and Andrea Mantegna. The hymn tune ‘Mantegna’ was conceived as a ‘musical representation’ of that artist’s Agony in the Garden (c.1455–6, National Gallery, London). Reproductions of fifteenth-century paintings were displayed in the composer’s home, The White Gates, Dorking, from 1929.

English modernist painting developed rapidly after 1910. Among contemporary artists, Vaughan Williams particularly admired the work of the brothers Paul and John Nash. Their work has been described as ‘Neo-Romantic’, returning to the traditions of British landscape painting but with a modernist inflection. Vaughan Williams engaged directly with the visual legacies of the Romantic era in Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930), a musical response to William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Blake’s images were vividly translated into sets and costumes by wood engraver Gwendolen Raverat. The production represented a masterly fusion of visual and musical elements.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Chapter 2 describes how Roman and medieval of notions of imperium were re-appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe the sovereignty claims of nascent states as well as to legitimize their territorial aggrandizement in Europe and beyond. Since early modern conceptions of sovereignty came with few restrictions on the scope of rule in terms of peoples or places that could be legitimately subjected to its authority, early modern authors made no categorical distinction between empires and states. But even if these authors had no clear conception of a distinctive international realm, they nevertheless developed a rich vocabulary for describing relations between different polities in and out of Europe. Many of those who resisted imperial aggrandizement during this period maintained that the quest for universal sovereignty violated the natural liberty of both individuals and states and proposed that upholding the balance of power between European empires cum states was crucial to the preservation of natural liberty. From this Enlightenment historians and lawyers concluded that European powers constituted a system of sovereign and formally equal states held together by public law and balance of power in equal measures.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.

Monteverdi’s relationship with Torquato Tasso (1544–95) is typically associated with the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624; pub. Eighth Book, 1638): a spectacular musical scena drawn from Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata, in which the crusader knight Tancredi battles the Saracen heroine Clorinda. But Monteverdi’s introduction to the musical possibilities of the Gerusalemme began decades before, just as his experiments with the musical lament long predated the opera Arianna (1608). This chapter examines Monteverdi’s earliest settings of Tasso’s epic – the lamentations of Tancredi and Armida in the Third Book (1592) – as musical representations of lament through not the verisimilitude of opera but rather the artifice of five-voice madrigals. Monteverdi’s initial engagement with Tasso’s Gerusalemme catalysed the composer’s early experiments with the musical lament, a topos that occupied an important space both in opera and in madrigals.

Machiavellis attack on the civic humanism of Leonardo Bruni reveals Bruni to be a substantial opponent.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives – in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizses Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

High rates of interpersonal violence in Renaissance Italy were not signs of backwardness, requiring repression in order for the conditions of modernity to be set: quite the opposite. Italy, the most economically advanced and urbanised region of Europe, was the first to experience the negative consequences of social mobility and social differentiation. Notaries, accountants and lawyers were not modern bureaucratic functionaries. In order to be accepted as gentlemen they also had to act like gentlemen. The creation of a more amorphous social elite forced Italians to rethink the rules regulating social conduct, codifying the laws of civility and the duel, and elaborating the art of peacemaking. None of this stopped the violence however. Renaissance ideals of glory triumphed over the pious trappings of chivalry. Fighting was liberating, permitting any man, whatever his status, to win fame. Duelling became endemic, a corollary to and consequence of vendetta. The rest of this chapter outlines the contours of the new Renaissance masculine culture.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book. The erosion of medieval hierarchies and systems of mediation made competition for material resources and status rivalries more intense after 1500. Enmity is rooted in a sense of injustice and there was a growth in distrust between those who gained from and those who lost out to the burgeoning of state power. The law shaped enmity and mediated violence, but it did not repress them altogether. Enmity was a major threat to public order because its scale and intensity was related to the struggle for social and political capital. Most significant in generating the rise in elite violence was social change and the development of a caste code in which retaliation was seen as socially acceptable and politically necessary. The social elite were the most avid consumers of the law, and they used the courts alongside violence to uphold their honour and enforce their rights: rising rates of litigation in the sixteenth century were part of the same process of contention as rising rates of homicide. And just as violence declined in the eighteenth century, so did rates of litigation. The law promoted arbitration and reconciliation at every stage of the process. But the desire of the parties to fulfil their obligations and make use of the myriad institutions of mediation was dependent on social and political circumstance.