The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.

Chapter 2 analyzes two works related to the Juan Manuel de Rosas era, one actually produced during this time and the other from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. In both, Afro-Porteños are present in large numbers, and their representation conflicts with literary discourses. While the writings are filled with defamatory adjectives that seek to create a chaotic and barbaric image of Afro-Porteños, the paintings present a pleasing and orderly image. After Rosas’s defeat in 1852, his opponents worked tirelessly to associate the group with Rosas and his barbaric era. This conception of Afro-Argentines has become a stereotype. They are thus confined to an abominable past that must not be repeated. This strategy constitutes one more way of rendering invisible a population whose extinction was prophesied as inevitable since the mid-nineteenth century. These ideas persist to this day, despite the actual presence of Afro-descendants in our territory, and they, in turn, clearly influence the racial classifications that operate in Argentine society.

This chapter explores how the Declaration of Independence was drafted and ratified. Congress created and assigned the task of drafting a declaration of independence to a committee of lawyers. When the draft went to the Congress, lawyers like Edward Rutledge had their chance to weigh in. The draft document and the final version was a legal document designed to place rebellion on a legal foundation. Jefferson later recalled that his draft of the Declaration of Independence merely recombined ideas that had long been discussed, and terminology long adopted, by Congress. The Declaration assumed independence, otherwise it would have had no foundation. Following this logic, as the members did, surely Jefferson among them, the Declaration was simply stating the reasons – a justification like the Declaratory Act of 1766, by which Parliament explained its authority over the colonies – for an event already transpired. The ringing elaboration of the rights of mankind, various borrowings from John Locke, echoes of natural law, and the language of prior resolves and declarations were not really pertinent to a declaration for the independence of a continent, but make sense in the more limited framework of Virginia constitutional change.

This chapter situates the Declaration of Independence in relation to another founding document of the United States, the federal Constitution. It assesses the Declaration’s role in debates over the Constitution, first during the latter’s framing in 1787, then in the struggle for ratification, and then later as political actors sought to interpret each document in light of the other. From the outset, debate over the Constitution highlighted the Declaration’s multivalence as well as its rhetorical power. Both defenders and opponents of the Constitution have sought to show how their cause best aligned with the ideals and aspirations expressed in the Declaration. Anti-federalists and their successors constructed a powerful narrative which juxtaposed the Declaration’s call to liberty with the Constitution’s blueprint for authority. Yet there was from the beginning an equally strong tradition that saw the Constitution as a consummation of the Declaration’s promise. Either way, this chapter argues, the Declaration continues to help shape the meaning of the Constitution – and to have its own meaning remolded in turn.

This chapter argues for the Italian Renaissance as a pivotal moment in women’s history. This was the first Western age in which secular women emerged in significant numbers as producers, as well as consumers, of high culture. It also witnessed the development of new ways of thinking about sex and gender, framed to counter traditional arguments for women’s inferiority to men. Like many Renaissance cultural innovations, the emergence of culturally active women was initially an elite phenomenon mainly limited to the princely courts, but practices like women’s writing later migrated down to lower strata of urban society. By the late sixteenth century, women writers were being joined by other species of virtuose such as singers, composers, actresses, painters, and other visual artists. The chapter argues that traditional periodizations of the Renaissance, which see the movement as ending in the mid sixteenth century, have led to a major underestimation of the degree to which women may be considered stakeholders in the movement alongside men.

This chapter traces the history of Renaissance Italy’s long and passionate love affair with the textual and material remnants of classical antiquity, exploring classical influences within literary and intellectual history, art history, and material culture. The classicizing movement known as humanism is charted here from its origins in the early 1300s to the moment sometimes called the High Renaissance in early sixteenth-century Rome. The chapter argues that past paradigms have often over-emphasized the secular leaning of Renaissance humanism or posited a sharp transition from a medieval, other-worldly to an earthly, human-focused world-view. Countering this, the chapter examines the ways in which a society and culture still deeply invested in Christianity responded to the philosophical challenges posed by pagan antiquity and the strategies it developed to reconcile the two.

It may be useful to start this book by making clear what it is not. The term ‘Renaissance’ is used in academic and everyday discourse in two senses. First, it is used to denote a cultural movement or tradition, centring on the recuperation of classical literature, art, and thought. Second, it is sometimes used to denote an ‘age’, or a chronological period (in the case of Italy, generally from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century; in northern Europe, generally later). This book takes ‘Renaissance’ in the first sense of the term. No attempt is made here to summarize the social, economic, religious, or political history of Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century in a systematic way, although mention is made of salient developments that impacted on cultural production. The chapters of this book are not organized in a chronologically narrated sequence, nor a geographical one, covering developments in the various Italian states. Instead, they take the freer form of thematic essays on key aspects of Renaissance culture, in a way that enables a deeper exploration than a book that aims at ‘coverage’ can afford.

This chapter examines three Renaissance social and cultural types, the merchant, the courtier, and the artist, the latter category encompassing not only painters, sculptors, and architects but also performance artists and skilled artisans and makers. The chapter uses self-descriptive writings produced by members of these professional groups to draw out their collective identities and value systems. Merchants are studied through the Florentine tradition of merchant ‘family books’, as well as in the more literary writings of Leon Battista Alberti and Benedetto Cotrugli, while the ethos of courtiers is examined through the justly famous analysis of Baldassare Castiglione. Where artists are concerned, an initial section on painters and sculptors, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Vasari, is followed by a discussion of lesser-known writings by court professionals, from dance masters to horse trainers to specialists associated with the arts of the table, such as cooks, stewards, and virtuoso carvers. The chapter argues that the much-studied rise of painting and sculpture from a lowly craft status to that of liberal arts was one instance of a broader phenomenon.

This chapter defines the nature of the Italian Renaissance as a cultural movement stemming from, but not defined by, a new, fascinated engagement with classical Roman and Greek culture. It locates the origins and primary contexts of this movement in the fiercely emulative and precociously urbanized mercantile city-republics of late-medieval central and northern Italy and their fourteenth and fifteenth-century successors, the Italian signorie or princely courts. The chapter also considers the periodization of the movement, arguing for a ‘long’ Renaissance, extending down to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hence incorporating the age of the Counter-Reformation. A longer Renaissance enables us to better understand the effects of important developments such as the introduction of printing and the rise of the vernacular to rival Latin as a literary language. These factors, over time, changed the demographics of Renaissance culture, opening it to less elite strata of society and to women.

This chapter examines the ways in which classical influences intersected in Italian Renaissance culture with modernizing impulses in an era of rapid social and material change. The early sixteenth century in Italy brought a series of devastating wars and a loss of political independence at the same time that Italian culture was absorbing significant novelties, such as the introduction of printing in Europe and the geographical ‘discoveries’ of the period, especially that of the transatlantic New World. The chapter foregrounds the sense of novelty and progress that was a marked feature of the later Renaissance in Italy, balancing humanism’s reverence for classical antiquity. This dialectic is examined through detailed case studies of the histories of geography and cartography, of the theory and practice of anatomy, of art-historical writing and conceptions of artistic progress, and of the social and cultural impact of print.