A continent in search of its origins

History had a moral purpose, according to humanist thought on the subject during the Renaissance. The past was a repository of knowledge that could be used by the wise to educate and, allied to rhetoric, persuade man in his earthly progress. With this in mind, The Making of Europe series, of which Peter Burke's The European Renaissance is one of 26 volumes (about half still in preparation), might be described as an historical exercise that borrows from the humanist ethic. As its editor, medievalist Jacques Le Goff, is aware, the question of what "Europe" is about not only persists but has re-emerged with some urgency, and he prescribes a cautiously optimistic, liberal politics for the project: that a "European enterprise" with a sense of progress is possible if based on an understanding of Europe's "united yet diverse" past.

For Burke, the Renaissance, the new intellectual engagement with classical Roman and Greek culture, is a long episode in that unified yet diverse past, and thus fits quite neatly into the series' agenda. Based on common models derived from antiquity, this "movement" was not a singular phenomenon, but was appropriated by different communities in specific ways. Yet an emphasis is placed on its overall binding power, its key contribution to the cultural unification or "Europeanisation of Europe".

Preconditions for this new engagement, the identification with classical Rome made by civic culture in the independent Italian city states, are dealt with only briefly. Burke is concerned more with the how than the why of the Renaissance. With chapters running from the "Age of discovery" to "Age of emulation" to "Age of variety" and "Domestication", he applies to it a general theory of cultural movements, one that has its own logic: rise, spread, modification and disintegration.

In some respects it is an organic model of development. The mental break with the immediate past - the "dark ages", as Petrarch described it by the mid-14th century - was accompanied by a desire to return to and recuperate origins. Thus, a classicising Latin, architecture, the development of perspective and a "naturalistic" style in painting and sculpture, and a new humanistic curriculum, which included poetry, rhetoric and history.

Emulation, or adulthood, around 1500, came with the perception that classical authorities were mastered or even surpassed, rather than merely imitated. But the ever-sharpening humanist historical consciousnessitself helped to precipitate a kind of mid-life crisis, a growing awareness of difference between the present and antiquity.

Nevertheless, humanist methods of analysis and classicising forms endured, albeit in more diversified ways, no longer able to be gathered under the idea of a movement. At the same time they became domesticated, normalised and habitual.

Burke's version of the story is not unfamiliar, nor is the customary primacy of Italy - the principal "centre" of the book's title - any surprise. And with an attention to the mechanics of transmission, such as humanist letter-writing and publishing, and the crucial advent of print, he offers both some sense of context and a check to the impression sometimes given of ineluctable development and assimilation. Similarly, the developmental model Burke has used to structure his narrative is nuanced by the pan-European perspective. We see the Renaissance more as a series of practices and intellectual methods rather than as a monolithic cultural ensemble, incorporated in localised, partial ways, and at different times.

This is particularly evident from the 16th century, where Francesaw a humanist rehabilitation of the "middle ages" - a return to a non-classical, Celtic past, in which Vercingetorix the Gaul was praised rather than his enemy Caesar. As with the growing prestige and use of vernacular languages as opposed to Latin, there are clearly other stories, other "movements" at work here, only very lightly sketched by Burke, such as the growth of national states and the religious break with Rome by much of northern Europe.

The wider proposition of Europe's progressive "Europeanisation" is problematic in itself and begs questions that are outside the parameters Burke has set himself. He is careful enough to distance himself from the whiff of 19th-century dialectical history, which at its most triumphalistic has the Renaissance as somewhere near the start of the West's "modern" march of progress, a benign vision of Europe's - implicitly, a European elite's - civilising mission at home and in the world. Still, questions of how changes in intellectual sensibilities and the arts might have related to the social structures and politics experienced in everyday life, or how the formation of any supposed "Europeanised" identity might have been as marginalising for some as it was inclusive for others are not really addressed. This is not a social history - and, as the author acknowledges, the humanist enterprise mainly involved literate urban elites and their patrons.

Nevertheless, Burke's remit remains refreshingly wide ranging. Here, as in previous titles, he confirms that his metier is the synthetic, and always enviably accessible introduction. As he says - echoing humanist sentiment towards scholasticism - the Renaissance has been atomised into specialisations that are often conservative and parochial. His particular specialisation, therefore, has a valuable contribution to make.

David Rosenthal is a PhD candidate in history, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.