Introduction: Hans Baron's Renaissance Humanism

Author(s): Ronald Witt

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 107-109
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2169225
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 AHR Forum
Introduction: Hans Baron's Renaissance Humanism

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS in 1955, The Crisis of the Early Italian
Renaissance by Hans Baron has become one of the major works on the Italian
Renaissance written in this century. Itself the product of decades of research and
numerous specialized articles, the book imposed a broad interpretive framework on
Italian humanism, endeavoring to relate intellectual change to political and
sociological development. In place of the relatively vague evolutionary approach to
humanism characteristic of pre-World War II scholarship, Baron sharply con-
trasted Trecento with Quattrocento humanism, explaining the passage from the
first to the second as the result of a crisis. He buttressed his thesis with substantial
documentation from literary sources, many of them hitherto neglected. Having
established in the Crisis to his satisfaction the developmental outlines of the
movement in the two centuries, he devoted much of his energy after 1955 to
exploring the writings of Petrarch and Machiavelli, the greatest Italian humanists at
the beginning and end of the movement's most creative period. Working now with
well-known texts, he subjected the writings of these authors to minute scrutiny and
produced significant reinterpretations of the lives and writings of both thinkers.
Born in Berlin in 1900 of Jewish parents, Baron studied under an impressive
array of teachers at the University of Berlin: Werner Jaeger, Ernst Troeltsch,
Friedrich Meinecke, and Walter Goetz among them. Of these, Baron himself
recognized Goetz as having had the greatest influence on his intellectual develop-
ment. As he wrote in dedicating the Crisis, "To Walter Goetz, my teacher and
friend, who introduced me to the Renaissance and taught me that history should be
the study of both politics and culture." Baron was barred from academic advance-
ment because of his Jewish heritage. Suffering the indignities and dangers common
to Jews living in Nazi Germany, Baron with his wife Edith and two children went to
England in 1937 and then to the United States in 1938. He taught at Queens
College in New York City (1939-1942) and was a member of the Princeton Institute
for Advanced Study (1944-1948). In 1949, he was appointed research fellow and
bibliographer at the Newberry Library, where he remained until retirement in 197
He continued his research and writing until just a few weeks before his death on
November 26, 1988.
The Crisis appeared in a revised edition in 1966 and in an Italian translation in
1970. Baron's earliest book, Calvins Staatsanschauung und das konfessionelle
Zeitalter, was published in 1924, and four years later his Leonardo Bruni Aretino:
Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe
appeared. In 1968, he published From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in

107

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 108 Ronald Witt

Humanistic and Political Literature; in 1985, Petrarch's "Secretum ": Its Making and
Its Meaning; and just before his death in 1988, he published a collection of new and
revised essays, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition
from Medieval to Modem Thought.
Baron's interpretation of what he considered the titanic struggle between
Republican Florence and Giangaleazzo Visconti from 1389 to 1402 as a battle
between the forces of freedom and those of tyranny has too easily been assumed to
be an expression of his own experience in Nazi Germany. For the same reason, the
Crisis has sometimes been seen as an indictment of ivory-tower German intellec-
tuals too detached from their society to protest the loss of Weimar liberty. In a
brilliant article, "Renaissance Historian: The Career of Hans Baron," Joumal of
Modem History, 64 (1992): 541-74, Riccardo Fubini has identified nineteenth-
century and early twentieth-century debates among German scholars as the major
influences on Baron's thought, and he has traced Baron's first use of the term
Biirgerhumanismus to 1925, well before Nazism posed a serious threat to the
Weimar Republic. While Baron's writings in the 1930s suggest that many of the
ideas connected with civic humanism were already well developed by the end of that
decade, the war and the subsequent defeat of Hitler may have contributed to the
key argument of the Crisis, that the new humanism came out of the victory of
Florence over Giangaleazzo.
Plagued throughout his mature life by deafness, Hans Baron never held a
permanent academic appointment. Nevertheless, both in his position as research
fellow at the Newberry Library and afterward in retirement, first in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and then in Urbana, Illinois, he played a major role in educating
dozens of scholars, mostly American, many no longer young, whose work he read
with utmost seriousness. He spent countless hours on our drafts of books and
articles, and the returned manuscripts, filled with his comments, were master classes
in historical research and writing.
The short papers that follow are substantially those given at a session entitled
"Hans Baron's Renaissance Humanism," held at the Annual Meeting of the
American Historical Association in January 1995. The intent of the session was to
consider critically the contribution of Baron in the three main areas of his
scholarship, the Crisis, Petrarch, and Machiavelli, at a distance of forty years since
the publication of his major book. Of the four speakers, all but one were closely
connected with Baron during his life. Because it was felt that personal reminis-
cences had a bearing on Hans Baron's scholarship, the session, both the papers and
the discussion that followed, tended to be somewhat personal. Our main goal,
nevertheless, has been to suggest critical and interpretive perspectives for a
rethinking of Hans Baron's contribution to Renaissance scholarship.

RONALD WITT

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1996

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 Introduction: Hans Baron's Renaissance Humanism 109

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1996~~~~~~~~~~~~... ............... ..

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