Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance

"Lisa Jardine’s book Worldly Goods is quite a personal book for me. It remains one of the most influential crossover books on the Renaissance by an academic writing for a broader audience. Jardine was my academic mentor and I did the research for the book. She was my professor and we used to joke that she became my surrogate Jewish mother. She was, again, someone who was coming out of the humanist tradition. She read Greek and Latin and worked on archival sources from the High Renaissance. What we see in this period is the birth of modernity, as we understand it today, as late modern or postmodernists. We’re looking at this period and we can see a glimpse of—and the foundation of—our modern society and our own sense of self. Characters like Shakespeare’s Hamlet are crucial because they seem, in all their complexity, as somehow connected to us. These works of art are created under very specific historical conditions but something about those conditions allows us to connect with them. Jardine’s work was reacting to a neoliberal economic moment in the late 70s and early 80s when the market became all-powerful. People in academia said, ‘We’re all on the left and we oppose what’s going on with Reagan and Thatcher, but we probably have to acknowledge that that’s the way culture is going.’ Jardine is therefore looking back to the late 15th and 16th centuries and saying that trade, exchange, financial developments, and the development of overseas long distance trade, are all playing their part in these iconic art objects and literary texts which we see as quintessentially Renaissance. It’s the birth of our own modern society. “What we see in this period is the birth of modernity, as we understand it today” For Jardine, even things like the creation of manuscripts or printed books are driven by very specific commercial and financial imperatives. Again, merchants are crucial figures. Jardine says that we should look at the middlemen who are financing these great art artefacts. This doesn’t mean that we diminish the artists, but we need to understand that they don’t just spring out of the genius of the soil of the Italian peninsula. We have this notion that the Renaissance is a European phenomenon, that it emerges somewhere on the Italian peninsula and affects northern Europe in a slightly more attenuated way, with artists like Dürer, Montaigne, Erasmus, and Shakespeare. But we never really look elsewhere. Jardine moves the emphasis east. This is something that I’ve also been working on, exchange with the East, and particularly the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were a key player in the Renaissance. Jardine is interested in what happened after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and how important that becomes in the High Renaissance. Jardine believes we need to think about what’s happening in North Africa, and Muslim societies there and the Ottoman and Persian empires, because they’ve been completely excluded from the story. That’s a really important aspect of her book, putting cultural exchange with other societies as central. The book was written before 9/11 but it’s prescient to read it again in the light of recent debates about the west’s relations with the Muslim world."