The culture of profession in late Renaissance Italy / George W. McClure.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

If the conventional view is that Italian Renaissance society generally grew more aristocratic in the later period, this and other sources reveal a professional ethos more democratic in nature and bespeak the full cultural discovery of the middling and lowly professions in the late Renaissance.

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CHOICE Review

Challenging the view that Renaissance Italy became more culturally aristocratic as time progressed, McClure (Univ. of Alabama) argues that a democratic ethos emerged in at least one important area: perceptions of profession. Examining a variety of works from such varied genres as humanism, scholasticism, comedy, carnevale, and even manuals on dress and the art of dying, McClure skillfully traces the trajectory of attitudes toward a variety of trades from high to low and from learned to manual. At the center of this study lies Tomasso Garzoni's fascinating and popular Universal Piazza of All the Professions of the World (1585), an encyclopedic work that examines over 150 professions on equal terms. McClure's study closely analyzes Garzoni's work and others like it; equally important, it explains how these authors and their readers came to develop such elevated and democratic notions of work in an age heralded by Petrarch's elitist rants against the active life. This is a readable, lucid, and engaging work. McClure builds a convincing case with nuanced readings of his sources juxtaposed against a rich map of textual cross-references. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. N. Bisaha Vassar College