Northern Renaissance? Burgundy And Netherlandish Art In Fifteenth-Century Europe
Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c.1300- c.1550: pp 269-288, (2010)
Everyone who has studied medieval or modern history knows that the periodisation of the eras on either side of the Renaissance provides much food for thought. This contribution aims irst to address the usefulness of the widespread concept of the ‘Northern Renaissance’. This will inevitably involve an examination of the more general concept of the ‘Renaissance’, but this will be considered in the context of the relationship between North and South in thirteenth-century Europe. On account of the massive bibliography on this topic, this article cannot claim to be comprehensive, but will examine only key works and some recent contributions. Second, I hope to show here that the history of the book, of book collecting and of library formation can shed new light on more general problems in cultural history.
In the irst pages of his 1944 article, which later became the basis for Renaissance and Renascences, Erwin Panofsky gave two deinitions of the Renaissance. In its more narrow sense, he calls the Renaissance ‘a rebirth of classical antiquity following a complete, or nearly complete, breakdown of classical traditions’ and, in its wider sense, the ‘universal elorescence of art, literature, philosophy, science and social accomplishments ater a period of decay and stagnation.’ Adding a third quite common deinition, we come to three: the Renaissance as a speciic revival (that is a as rebirth of classical Antiquity), as a more general revival (as an elorescence of culture), and as a period (generally used to speak about the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries). In what follows, I will refer to these three deinitions as a rebirth, an efflorescence, and a period.