The 1870s was a critical period for the transformation of British aestheticism into a mainstream phenomenon that both commodified and parodied its avant-garde origins. This transformation unfolds through three representative controversies: the 1870 publication of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, which was savaged by Robert Buchanan in his review ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; the appearance of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which pitted an avant-garde aesthetics against conventional art historical criticism; and the notorious libel trial of 1878, in which John Ruskin’s attack on James McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket led to a legal dispute that hinged on the definition of art itself. All three episodes reveal a doubleness at the heart of aestheticism: it is committed to both idealised abstraction and concrete embodiment. This doubleness underlies aestheticism’s status as an arcane philosophy that nonetheless manifests itself in highly recognisable and commmercialisable popular forms.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

Opening with Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated definition of painting as a reflection on the surface of the water according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, the introduction elucidates the analysis of the inset-mirror motif in Renaissance painting as a form of mise-en-abyme that was central to the conceptualisation and reception of early modern art.

Explains the emergence of industrial policy during the mercantilism of the Renaissance and later.

In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

Florence in the fifteenth century was in transition from the medieval to the modern world, and sexual attitudes and practices were very much in flux. The most distinctive feature of Florentine sexuality was the city’s international reputation as a hotbed of ‘sodomy’. Traditional structures of marriage and the family coexisted with a widespread culture of male homoeroticism. Female prostitution was sanctioned by the state, in the hope that it would reduce both male homoeroticism and adulterous relations. At the same time the new ideal of romantic love was spreading to all social classes, bringing changes to the ways people thought about marital and intimate relations. This chapter focuses both on the idealization of male homoeroticism in humanist culture and on the repression of male homosexual activity by the Office of the Night, the judicial branch that policed sodomy. It contrasts the celebration of physical beauty in Florentine visual arts with the preaching of the Dominican reformer Savonarola, who harshly condemned worldly luxuries. Savonarola’s public execution by burning in 1498 provides an ironic contrast to his own bonfires of the vanities, in which luxury goods were burned, but it also mirrors the public burning that was the traditional punishment for sodomy.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

This chapter argues that visual art played a generative role in the compositional processes of Vaughan Williams. His taste in painting was influenced by the art historians Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, who lauded the formal simplicity of works by fifteenth-century Italian artists like Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, and Andrea Mantegna. The hymn tune ‘Mantegna’ was conceived as a ‘musical representation’ of that artist’s Agony in the Garden (c.1455–6, National Gallery, London). Reproductions of fifteenth-century paintings were displayed in the composer’s home, The White Gates, Dorking, from 1929.

English modernist painting developed rapidly after 1910. Among contemporary artists, Vaughan Williams particularly admired the work of the brothers Paul and John Nash. Their work has been described as ‘Neo-Romantic’, returning to the traditions of British landscape painting but with a modernist inflection. Vaughan Williams engaged directly with the visual legacies of the Romantic era in Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930), a musical response to William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Blake’s images were vividly translated into sets and costumes by wood engraver Gwendolen Raverat. The production represented a masterly fusion of visual and musical elements.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Chapter 2 describes how Roman and medieval of notions of imperium were re-appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe the sovereignty claims of nascent states as well as to legitimize their territorial aggrandizement in Europe and beyond. Since early modern conceptions of sovereignty came with few restrictions on the scope of rule in terms of peoples or places that could be legitimately subjected to its authority, early modern authors made no categorical distinction between empires and states. But even if these authors had no clear conception of a distinctive international realm, they nevertheless developed a rich vocabulary for describing relations between different polities in and out of Europe. Many of those who resisted imperial aggrandizement during this period maintained that the quest for universal sovereignty violated the natural liberty of both individuals and states and proposed that upholding the balance of power between European empires cum states was crucial to the preservation of natural liberty. From this Enlightenment historians and lawyers concluded that European powers constituted a system of sovereign and formally equal states held together by public law and balance of power in equal measures.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.