The Twisted Tale of the Italian Renaissance in the United States

This talk uses the reception of a single manuscript to tell the changing story of the Italian Renaissance from the 1400s until the present. In 1469, the Venetian patrician Francesco Diedo delivered a congratulatory oration to the Holy Roman Emperor. The speech is a typical example of the sort of rhetoric central to Italian Renaissance culture. After the event, the speech disappeared for nearly four centuries before reappearing in Philadelphia, PA, in 1850. There, a Latin panegyric no longer served as a useful oratorical model. Instead, it became an historical curiosity for American bibliophiles. However, in 1850, most Americans were neither Catholic nor Italian. New England literary circles admired Protestant England not Catholic Italy. To accommodate these prejudices, the collectors left marginal notes that reassociated the manuscript into new, Protestant, English contexts. After 1900, writers like Jacob Burckhardt and Hans Baron created a narrative of Western Civilization that comfortably connected an Italian Renaissance to later Protestantism, England, and then American history. Renaissance objects that embodied ideas like “individuality” or “secularism” became keystones in historical stories about the origins of the United States. Yet, those narratives only fit a small sampling of Renaissance culture and an object like the Diedo manuscript lay forgotten in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. In the early twenty-first century myths about Western Civilization have finally started to give way to new assessments about the stories behind the connections between the United States and countries across Europe. Those reassessments have created new scholarly space for a work like the Diedo speech, even as it has created critical new questions about why or even if work on an “Italian Renaissance” remains significant in the twenty-first century United States.