Reviews for The Last Days of the Renaissance: The End of the Renaissance and the Rise of Modernity

The average rating for The Last Days of the Renaissance: The End of the Renaissance and the Rise of Modernity based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-07 00:00:00 Michael Cassady This book started with great lucidity but somehow drifted off in the end for me. I'm also not sure why Rabb felt the need to bring the book to contemporary times because it sounded a bit too "rah rah" to me.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-09-02 00:00:00 Neil Newton A popularizing account (written for a general audience, the publisher's name "Basic Books" says it all) of the Renaissance by a Princeton professor characterized by a "longue durèe" approach to historiography. He gives a pretty standard by-the-book vision of the period that begins with Petrarch and the rebirth of Classical learning and ends with the overturning of Classical authority by the horizon-expanding field of Modern knowledge. Perhaps what makes his approach distinctly his own is that his hypothesis focuses on the shifting attitudes of society at large in two very specific areas: warfare and the supernatural. Prof. Rabb dabbles in art history to illustrate the point that the last Renaissance was characterized by an anti-heroic view of war that was impersonal and glorified no one. As a result of the rise of the cowardly (non-chivalric) use of gun powder and fire arms he persuasively follows the decline of heroic representations of leaders and individual fighters that had once been all the rage. As for the supernatural, he argues that the failure of the apocalypse to arrive in the year 1666 was the beginning of the end for over credulous religious sentiment and superstition. It was just a matter of time before the cold unimaginative rationality of the Enlightenment took hold. This brief portion of the penultimate chapter of the book was much less persuasively argued, though interesting in its own right due to the unique accounts he draws on from the period. However, it does give one pause to reflect on some of the similarities with our own period from Cold War paranoias to the superstitions and half truths the neo-Cons have tried to pawn off on us to the Millennium bug to any number of other things. Superstitions are either endemic to the human race or we're coming to the end of an era ourselves. Whither do we march from here? He doesn't attempt to smooth out all of the tensions and contradictions that he detects prior to and throughout the Renaissance, which really draws attention to the problem of periodization more generally and the shortcomings of attempting to define any period with huge monoliths like "Renaissance" or "Modernity" that are meant to encompass not only several centuries, dozens of generations as well as vast geographical expanses. While Rabb's introduction grapples with these problems, the reader may be surprised to follow the relatively traditional approach the book then goes on to take. Overall, a portrait painted in very, very broad brush strokes that again and again sums up the vast and complicated sweep of hundreds of years of history (from the fall of the Rome to Picasso and recent American history in the concluding chapter) in just a very pages. By no means boring due to the fact that it is hardly an arduous read.