THE WORLD AT FIRST LIGHT

A sprawling, rich narrative of a climacteric in world history.

Why did the Renaissance take hold in Italy, but not in China? University of Zurich historian Roeck ventures a long—at more than 1,100 pages—response, beginning at the very beginning of what we call the “West.” One necessary condition for the development of a society in the “Latin part of Europe” in which the Renaissance was possible, he holds, was the competition offered by multiple small states, a competition that gave rise to the middle class while “mustering culture and science for the fray and financing scholars and inventors.” Another was proximity to the Arabic world, which preserved so much of the Greek tradition that underlies the Renaissance: “Without Greek thought,” he writes, “the ­Renaissance and European modernity would be unthinkable. For it is, above all, Greek thought that was ‘reborn’ and led to the creation of new ­things.” Although the Renaissance began in Italy when the papacy held great power and heretics were still being burned at the stake, Roeck observes, the fact that religion was “contained” and that the “worldly” was an object of attention, giving rise to modern sciences, is also material. Roeck ranges widely across time and space: He writes here of the early medieval German invasions of Rome (“it has always been more attractive to pillage high cultures than to clear forests”), there of the role of trade routes in cultural exchange, of Jan Van Eyck and other artists outside of Italy proper, and, meaningfully, of Leonardo da Vinci as a true, well, Renaissance man, “a strange mix of nervous tinkerer and genius, perfectionist and experimenter.” And as for China? By Roeck’s lights, “in the long term, it is liberal democracies and not authoritarian states that promote scientific, technological, and economic success.”

Beautifully argued, an essential addition to the history and historiography of the Renaissance.