Hans Baron was one of the many great German émigré scholars whose work Princeton brought into the Anglo-American world. His Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance has provoked more discussion and inspired more research than any other twentieth-century study of the Italian Renaissance.

Baron's book was the first historical synthesis of politics and humanism at that momentous critical juncture when Italy passed from medievalism to the thought of the Renaissance. Baron, unlike his peers, married culture and politics; he contended that to truly understand the Renaissance one must understand the rise of humanism within the political context of the day. This marked a significant departure for the field and one that changed the direction of Renaissance studies. Moreover, Baron's book was one of the first major attempts of any sort to ground intellectual history in a fully realized historical context and thus stands at the very origins of the interdisciplinary approach that is now the core of Renaissance studies.

Baron's analysis of the forces that changed life and thought in fifteenth-century Italy was widely reviewed domestically and internationally, and scholars quickly noted that the book "will henceforth be the starting point for any general discussion of the early Renaissance." The Times Literary Supplement called it "a model of the kind of intensive study on which all understanding of cultural process must rest." First published in 1955 in two volumes, the work was reissued in a one-volume Princeton edition in 1966.

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The 20th century's masterpiece about Renaissance humanism

Hans Baron successfully argues that civic humanists played a crucial role in the shift from the medieval to the modern age. These new humanists were - unlike their "ivory tower" isolated, contemplative, medieval counterparts - active citizens of the Florentine Republic and of their families and society.

The Crisis of the fourteenth century's "fin de siecle" was the culmination of a series of threats to the independence of the Florentine Republic: the Milanese Giangaleazzo Visconti had conquered most of northern and central Italy. Florence was surrounded, but in 1402 the tyrant suddenly died because of the plague.

Florentine citizens - and their intellectual leaders, the humanists - had acquired during these years a stronger civic spirit. They saw themselves as the saviours of republican liberty. This new vigor, sense of civic pride and independence, combined with a weakened papacy and a stronger sense of individualism, led to the artistic, humanistic and scientific (just think of the Tuscans Da Vinci and, much later, Galilei) "cultural blooming" of the Renaissance, which then spread throughout Europe.

Florence became the "Athens on the Arno." David became one of its symbols, for he had won against a much bigger adversary. Its most important early civic humanist was Leonardo Bruni (the modern world's first historian,) but civic humanism lived on even when the Republic ended under the Medicis, in Alberti, Machiavelli and other artists and humanists, even (to a lesser degree) in Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci (see the recently published book "Fortune is a River.")

A fascinating read, I highly recommend Baron's book to anyone seriously interested in Renaissance history or art. However, I wouldn't recommend it to readers who aren't already very familiar with the history of late medieval and early renaissance Florence, as the book focuses mostly on the Visconti threat and on the works of Bruni. This book has deepened my appreciation for Florentine art and history as well as my interest in many other related subjects.