The relationship between early modern Italy and its medieval past has become the object of new interest and debate in art history. To a certain extent, other fields of scholarship, such as history, history of literature, and history of philosophy, have remained alien to the discussion. Yet, the emergence of the humanities as autonomous disciplines in the nineteenth century was predicated on the arduous and sophisticated scrutiny and re-thinking of the 'divides' in the history of western Europe and their hermeneutical validity. Articulating the division between ancient / medieval and medieval / Renaissance has been particularly important in this discourse. At present, although the interpretation of the medieval / Renaissance divide no longer rests on the oversimplifying binomial of continuity / discontinuity, the identification and assessment of what historically constitutes a break, a transition, a regression, or a novelty are still topics of contention and ambivalence.
Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy approaches these important interpretive issues through the fresh lens of case studies carried out by scholars from the diverse fields of history of art and architecture, history of literature, and philosophy. In these essays, the notion of 'remembrance' is examined and inflected in multiple ways: as memory and survival, as a process of distance and clarification, and as nostalgia, repudiation, and revival. Remembering the Middle Ages also offers an updated survey on the ways in which the medieval / Renaissance divide was originally constructed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and subsequently interpreted from Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) to the present day.