Looking at the
Renaissance
Mysteries and
Methods
Analysing
texts
Historians have to be suspicious types who, when faced with any kind of
evidence, want to know why it was produced, who generated it and what message
they were wanting to put across. But the first task to tackle may be of a more
fundamental kind - actually reading what may be moth eaten and dog-eared
records. In Venice: A Second-hand City? Tricia Allerston speaks about
having to master the faded, scrawled over records of the guild of second-hand
traders. Her research also alerts us to another problem the historian must
contend with, the skewed nature of the evidence. The silences in texts can
speak as loudly as what is there. We need to think about whose voices seldom
get heard, rarely get recorded? We only see the poor when they are in trouble -
borrowing money, receiving charity or when they come up against the criminal
law; then they get into the records. Too often the fleeting traces of their
existence are in the form of ephemeral records which only occasionally survive.
Such are the few remaining the pawn tickets issued by the Banco de Conseio in
Venice, which document the traffic in shabby second hand goods, amongst those
whose capital resources were pitifully small (Venice: A Second-hand
City?). Even those higher up the social scale are not well documented for
it is only the rich and powerful who leave good biographical evidence. For
example our sole piece of biographical evidence for Gutenberg is a court case.
(What did Gutenberg Invent?).
The historian therefore
has to be ingenious and may have to use texts for very different purposes to
those for which they were made: for example 16th century tax records were not
designed to reveal information about family structure; the information has to
be teased out of them. Today we want to know about the effectiveness of medical
treatment in Renaissance Florence. Two of the most significant sources are the
statutes of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova and the hospital accounts. But,
we might ask ourselves, how much insight into the welfare of patients do we get
from the regulations and accounts of a modern Hospital Trust? A great deal
undoubtedly, but such information certainly has its limitations when assessing
delivery on the wards. The accountant is most interested in being answerable to
his managers for the funds. And in the case of the statutes drawn up for Santa
Maria Nuova, the governors of this Florentine hospital were primarily concerned
with being answerable to God for their souls and for the souls of all those who
served, or were treated, in the hospital.
Just as the invention of
print in the 15th century hugely enhanced the possibilities for scholarship, so
today the computer opens up new forms of textual criticism. Using computer
enhanced images it has been possible to make a detailed comparison of the
typefaces in the Gutenberg Bible with startling results. Universally held
assumptions about the way in which movable type was invented have had to be
overthrown. This particular historical enquiry has been shared by a physicist,
a historian and a craftsman, a reminder that innovative ideas are often the
result of co-operating across disciplines. We need also to use texts from many
different media. Given the extraordinarily rich visual culture of the
Renaissance, fine art and architecture are essential historical texts: so for
example, details of the statutes of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova are
confirmed by frescos in the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena
(The Italian Patient). But in using art or literature or archaeology
we need to be alert to the conventions and tools of analysis of those media.
The historian is indeed a Renaissance man or woman!
Associated image links
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Texts and contexts
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