Baron H. Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. — 700 p. — ISBN10: 0691007527; ISBN13: 978-0691007526.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.Changes in politics and historical thoughtThe Elements of the Crisis: Classicism and the Political Transformation
A Florentine War for Independence The Florentine Republic and the Visconti Tyranny of Milan
A new view of Roman history and of the Florentine pastPromise and tradition in politico-historical literature about 1400The interplay of ideas and events
A citizen's view and a humanist's view of Florentine history and culture: Cino Rinuccini AND Salutati
Republic and monarchy in late trecento thought
The place of Salutati's De Tyranno
Gregorio Dati's "Istoria of Florence 1380-1406" and the beginnings of Quattrocento historiographyThe rise OF Leonardo Bruni's civic humanism
The genesis of the Laudatio
The genesis of Bruni's Dialogi
Dialogus II and the Florentine environmentClassicism and the Trecento traditionThe Classicists as Seen by Volgare Writers
The dangers of early humanist classicism
Florentine humanism and the volgare in the Quattrocento
City-state liberty versus unifying tyranny
Niccoli, Poggio, Bruni, and the civic outlook
Ideas born of the Florentine crisis: Bruni's Oratio Funebris of 1428Appendices 1-8
Notes: documentary, chronological, critical