Conservation and Innovation in Medieval Studies in Italy

Aldo Scaglione, New York University

The imposing presence of two idealistic philosopher-historian-literary critics, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, dominated the intellectual landscape of Italy in the first part of the twentieth century. Their influence, together with the cultural autarchy of Fascism (1922–43), conditioned the resistance to foreign schools of thought. Medieval studies, in particular, were accordingly imprinted with anti-clerical secularism, which brought about a strong emphasis on the opposition between the allegedly immanentistic Renaissance and Humanism on the one hand and the proclaimed transcendental, ascetic, and otherworldly religious orientation of medieval civilization on the other. In the wake of these trends an enormous amount of effort and research was devoted to the definitions of medievalism and Humanism, and it was in Italy that two divergent leaders of historical research began to define their distinct Weltanschauungen, which they exported to the United States when the racial laws forced them into exile: I am speaking of Hans Baron and Paul Oscar Kristeller, both originally working first in Berlin and then in Florence.