The phrase “culture wars,” referring to a perceived divide over values, was popularized in the 1990s. Yet in this small volume of three elegant essays, presented by the author at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, in 2007, Edward Muir argues that such struggles for cultural hegemony are not unique to now. The battleground for Muir's earlier clashes was Venice and its hinterland in the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, a time and place ripe for cultural controversy. Venice housed the largest printing industry in Europe and had a reputation for relative intellectual freedom. Its territories included nearby Padua and its well-respected university. Perhaps most importantly, Venice and the papacy engaged in a battle of wills.
The battle originated in divergent pedagogies and philosophies at the two major institutions of higher learning in Padua: the ancient university and a recently founded Jesuit school. The latter's disciplined learning environment differed greatly from the university's lax lecture system. Jesuit competition prompted unruly university students to attack the school, along with a plea to the doge to intervene on the university's behalf, presented by Professor Cesare Cremonini. His impassioned oration, labeling the Jesuit school as illegal and sanctioned by foreign powers, triggered a series of Jesuit counterattacks, critiquing not only university pedagogy, but also the lecture content of professors such as Cremonini, a “‘stinking spider’ that … spat into the ears of his students only ‘pestilential venom’” (27). At issue were Cremonini's skepticism and his unorthodox teachings on Aristotle and the immortality of the soul, which led to an Inquisition charge in 1604. Colleague Galileo Galilei, like Cremonini a founder of the Accademia dei Ricoverati (recovered), a forum for the discussion of scientific and religious ideas, was likewise denounced. Muir argues that much of Galileo's thinking was influenced by his more heretical colleague Cremonini. Cremonini, by masking his real beliefs and remaining in Padua under Venetian protection, was spared Galileo's fate but also his fame.
Cremonini's students brought his ideas and their unruly behavior to the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti (unknowns) in the 1630s. This academy formed the intellectual milieu for Ferrante Pallavicino, whose works frequently satirized the church. In a critique evocative of Erasmus's Julius Exclusis, Pallavicino, in his The Celestial Divorce, recounted Jesus' desire for a divorce from his bride, the church, on account of her adulteries and vice. Discourses of sexuality were a hallmark of many Incogniti satires, including Pallavicino's Rhetoric of Whores, in which the narrator, a prostitute, uses the Jesuits' rhetoric handbook to instruct young women in her trade. Pallavicino's attacks on the church resulted in his capture and execution. His assessment of women as duplicitous, irrational, and insatiable drew a spirited response from nun Arcangela Tarabotti, who surprisingly relied on the Incogniti for patronage. Like the Incogniti, Tarabotti criticized the church, but more generally patriarchy, a system embraced by the church but also the Venetian state, which sanctioned a marriage market in which ever fewer men could take wives. Both the literary sexual libertinism of the Incogniti and Tarabotti's representation of the suffering caused by forced claustration of un-marriageable women were symptomatic of the “disintegration of the Venetian artistocratic marriage and family life” (107), according to Muir, a collapse evident in the behavior and writing of some Venetian intellects, in libretti as well as philosophy.
In the final essay Muir addresses the libretto for Monteverdi's opera Incoronatione di Poppea, by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, in which Emperor Nero repudiates his wife Octavia and arranges for the death of philosopher Seneca in order to marry Poppea, the wife of Otho. Muir stipulates that both the plot and audience reflected (and glorified) the Venetian reality of extramarital partnerships and women of questionable morals filling theater seats. It was there, in this specific sociopolitical context, and sponsored by the Incogniti, that opera transitioned from courtly to civic entertainment during Carnival, a period of controlled chaos and reversal when women's appearance in public (and on stage) might be tolerated. But Venetian opera was at odds with the Jesuits, who attacked female actors as promiscuous and duplicitous (echoing Poppea and the misogyny of Pallavicino), and whose own plays instructed and offered an alternative to ribald Carnival entertainments. The Jesuits won this round of cultural combat: Muir argues that the age of Venetian intellectual freedom faded when the pressures of war forced the city to acquiesce to the papacy and allow the return of the Jesuits.
These highly readable essays are remarkable for their interdisciplinarity, “reuniting what the modern disciplines of the history of science, philosophy, literature, religion and music … have tended to keep separate” (1). In addition, Muir builds on William Bouwsma's concept of late Renaissance anxiety (The Waning of the Renaissance [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002]) to explain not only intellectual clashes, but also their reliance on metaphors of gender; thus, he places well-known men and women in a broad context that draws on scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the history of the family. The work responds and contributes to the current abundance of scholarship on seventeenth-century Venice, highlighting the rich sociocultural complexities of a period previously regarded to be in economic decline and politically moribund. Although Venice's political system suffered in the eyes of early modern critics, it promoted (perhaps unintentionally) a climate where limited proto-enlightened and proto-feminist thought could flourish: a perhaps undercelebrated element of the oft-cited myth of Venetian singularity and freedom.
For Muir and Bouwsma, the Renaissance retains its vitality as a concept and a period whose influence and significance extend far beyond its traditional periodization. But when and how did the Renaissance end? Muir answers that it ended in the mid-seventeenth century but is ambivalent on causation, asserting that skepticism about life and nature embraced by the intelligentsia and manifested in “Venetian opera … brought the Renaissance to an end” (145), only to argue elsewhere that it concluded “with the demise of the Incogniti,” the very purveyors of the fatal skepticism (148). Given the rich fusion of ideas, disciplines, and historiographical debate evidenced in these essays, a bibliography or suggestions for further reading would have been a welcome addition.
A century or more of scholarship saw the Renaissance as a bridge to modernity—a teleology recent scholars have challenged. While some might question Muir's use of postmodern terminology, these essays clearly elucidate parallels between past and present. Although Muir's battles situate the church and intellectuals in opposing camps, then as now, arguments pit peoples of like religion but varied interpretations against one another on issues as diverse as “the virtues and perils of doubt, the place of homosexuals and women in society, the consequences of the breakdown of marriage structures and the power of arts to stir sometimes disturbing emotions” (11). Then as now, partisans on either side occasionally relied on extreme methods to illustrate their views. Finally, in the seventeenth century as in the twenty-first, academia was both a crucible for divergent ideas and the focus of criticism, as were the media, be they the emergent print culture or twenty-four-hour news and the Internet.
