Hybrid Renaissance: Culture, Language, Architecture

Abstract

Whoever dares to posit a new interpretive model for the European Renaissance must allow for gaffes, gaps, and fuzzy edges. In Hybrid Renaissance: Culture, Language, Architecture, Peter Burke expands on his talk for the Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lectures at Central European University, as well as on his earlier work Cultural Hybridity from 2009. Burke applies his model of hybridization to the European Renaissance (which he dates from the fourteenth century to its "disintegration" in the seventeenth century). His work should be commended more for his general thesis and theoretical apparatus than for the details.Hybrid Renaissance is divided into nine chapters, plus an introduction and a coda. Burke argues for the importance of understanding hybridity and interactions in the period known as the Renaissance, with his examples of hybridization-and thus, the Renaissance-stretching across Europe (Western and Central/Eastern) and including Asia and the Americas. He argues for understanding this period through a lens of hybridity, focusing not on the Renaissance as a discrete temporal and cultural period in Europe, but rather on the Renaissance as defined by its interactions and encounters between different cultures: old and new, pagan and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, global and local, imperial and colonial. Burke thus argues for studying a European Renaissance as one marked predominantly by cultural interactions, hybridity, and hybridization. He defines hybridization as a "process" filled with varieties of encounters and mixes. Burke enjoys the flexibility that the word "hybridization" has to offer, rather than other words and concepts that come with scholarly baggage (5).Burke's chapters, highlighting architecture, language, literature, philosophy, and religion, all embrace the idea of hybridization. Burke consistently stretches past the "famous" examples (eschewing a high Great Renaissance for a more everyday one) to use lesser-known buildings, texts, and linguistic samples. Here, Burke should be commended for using material from the wider, non-Western world: from a curved elephant tusk from West Africa designed to cater to the European art market (89-90) to the presence of the