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Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances

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 Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’

Peter Burke

A Case of Cultural Hybridity:

the European Renaissance

Goody Lecture 2012

 Jack Goody

Jack Goody was born near London in 1919. Formative experiences during the Second
World War led him to switch from studies of literature to social anthropology. He un-
dertook fieldwork in Northern Ghana during the last decade of British colonial rule
and taught anthropology at Cambridge University alongside Meyer Fortes and Edmund
Leach. Ghana remained important in Goody’s work for some years after independence
but, particularly after succeeding Fortes as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropo-
logy in 1972, he began to explore long-term historical contrasts between sub-Saharan
African societies and those of Europe and Asia. Goody views the Old World as a uni-
fied entity since the urban revolution of the Bronze Age; numerous publications have
highlighted developments in East Asia and criticised the eurocentric bias of Western
historians and social theorists. His many books engage with productive systems, the
transmission of property and class inequality in global history; with kinship, marriage
and the “domestic domain”; with technologies of communication, especially writing, the
transmission of myth and of knowledge generally; and with various realms of consump-
tion, including cuisine and flowers. These fields are not approached in isolation but in
their interconnections. Ethnographic insights are essential, but they are just one compo-
nent of Goody’s comparative, world-historical agenda. His best known works include
Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962); Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa
(1971); Production and Reproduction (1976); The Domestication of the Savage Mind
(1977); The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983); The Oriental,
The Ancient and the Primitive (1990); The East in the West (1996); The Theft of History
(2006); Renaissances: the one or the many? (2010); The Eurasian Miracle (2010).
Goody’s agenda, unique in contemporary anthropology, is one to which the Depart-
ment ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology seeks to contribute. In an annual lecture series, a distinguished scholar
addresses pertinent themes for anthropology and related fields:
Goody Lecture 2011: Keith Hart, “Jack Goody’s Vision of World History and African
Development Today”.
The second Goody Lecture was given by Peter Burke on 16th May 2012.
 Peter Burke

A Case of Cultural Hybridity:

The European Renaissance

It is a pleasure and an honour to give the second lecture here in honour of Jack
Goody, who is not only a friend and a neighbour in Cambridge – which is still
a kind of village – but also a colleague, an anthropologist who has success-
fully re-invented himself as a historical sociologist or comparative historian
(Pallares-Burke 2003: 7–30). Jack’s work has been an inspiration to me, as to
many others, over more than forty years.
To a historian of early modern Europe, the Renaissance seemed an obvi-
ous choice of theme. Jack has already examined renaissances in the plural in a
comparative, sociological manner. In contrast, I shall focus here on what might
be called the ‘Big One’, the Western Renaissance, viewed here as a movement
for the revival of antiquity rather than more vaguely as a period in European
history (Goody 2009; Burke 2009b).
Given the importance of local variations, it might be prudent to think of even
the European Renaissance in the plural, in other words as a family of linked
movements that allow, indeed require approaches such as comparative history
and its younger sibling, histoire croisée or ‘connected history’ (Subrahmanyam
1997; Werner and Zimmermann 2003). At least some of these movements drew
ideas, forms or inspiration from cultures outside Europe, whether in Asia, Af-
rica or the Americas, offering striking examples of cultural hybridity.
The current concern with hybridity should be no surprise in an age of par-
ticularly intense migration between countries and continents – Indians and West
Indians in Britain, Arabs in France, Turks in Germany and so on; a migration
not only of individuals and families but of things and ideas as well. Interest in
this topic has become particularly intense in a cluster of disciplines, including
 4
anthropology and history, especially the discipline of historical anthropology
or anthropological history, itself a hybrid, a form of historical analysis whose
practitioners aspire like anthropologists to get down from the verandah and
study everyday life at ground level, at the grass-roots.
The idea that cultures are not pure but mixed is not a new one. It was the
Belgian classicist Franz Cumont who launched the idea of syncretism in his
book Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain. According to Cumont,
the religion of Egypt “adapted itself with ease to diverse milieux”. He wrote
of “penetration”, “infiltration” and the “mixture of races” (Cumont 1906: 2,
19, 82–83, 184–185). However, the systematic study of this domain goes back
to scholars working on Afro-American cultures, especially in the Caribbean
and Brazil, among them Gilberto Freyre (1933), Fernando Ortiz (1940), Alejo
Carpentier (1946) and Édouard Glissant (1981). The idea of cultural hybrid-
ity or métissage, mestizaje or mestiçagem is one of the rare successes of what
is sometimes called ‘Southern Theory’, produced on the cultural periphery, in
Havana, for instance, or Recife, and later adopted by the centre, in Paris and
New York.
As has often happened in the history of historical thought and writing, new
trends in the present have encouraged new questions about the past. In this
respect, cultural historians owe a debt to the anthropologists who preceded
them in the analysis of cultural encounters and their consequences. In return,
historians do have, in my opinion, something important to contribute to this
interdisciplinary field, focussing as they usually do on processes, especially
long-term processes, including hybridization. I shall argue that the concept of
hybridization helps us to understand cultural change in Europe as well as else-
where. As the English historian Christopher Dawson pointed out eighty years
ago, European culture itself emerged out of a process of fusion, the fusion of
classical traditions, Christianity and what might be called the ‘civilization of
the barbarians’, such as the Franks, Goths or Saxons (Dawson 1932). To begin
with, it may be useful to distinguish stages in the process of hybridization. Fol-
lowing the moment of cultural encounter comes the appropriation of fragments
of another culture. These fragments are often juxtaposed to traditional elements
rather than fusing with them (Rosenthal 1978). One might regard this first stage
as the equivalent of what linguists call a pidgin, in the sense of a simplified
language used as a lingua franca between two groups and drawing on the lan-
 5
guages of both. The second stage in the process is one of crystallization, in the
sense of the integration of the fragments into a new system. Linguists call this
creolization, thinking especially of cases in which a former pidgin turns into a
first language and so becomes more complex in both vocabulary and syntax.
Anthropologists will note the parallel with the ideas of Marshall Sahlins (1981)
on cultural change, in which a cultural order absorbs innovation until a tipping
point is reached and the order itself is transformed.
Changing metaphors, this second stage might be described as that of the
formation of local ecotypes or ‘oikotypes’, a term I have borrowed from the
Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow (1948) who took it in his turn from botany.
Metaphor seems unavoidable in this domain, whether the metaphor comes from
botany (‘hybridity’ or ‘ecotype’), metallurgy (‘fusion’ or ‘amalgamation’),
craftsmanship (bricolage) or language (‘creolization’ or ‘cultural translation’).
Metaphors are surely welcome in academic discourse as long as we are con-
scious of using them. As the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz puts it, “Whenever one
takes an intellectual ride on a metaphor, it is essential that one knows where to
get off” (Hannerz 1992: 264; cf. Burke 2009a; Chanson 2011). What follows
is an exploration of the place of hybridity in what we call the culture of the
Renaissance.

II

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century movement that has become known as the
Renaissance might be described as hybrid by definition in the sense of being
an attempt within one culture, that of late medieval Europe, to revive another,
the culture of classical antiquity, especially ancient Rome. In the course of the
movement, some participants also drew ideas, forms or inspiration from cul-
tures outside Europe, whether in Asia, Africa, or the Americas.
All the same, insufficient attention has been paid to this process of hybridi-
zation, which took place in a variety of different situations and locales, from
Florence to Arequipa. The process needs to be studied at two levels, a macro-
level that examines the movement as a whole but also a micro-level attentive to
local and even individual variation.
 6
At the macro-historical level, we see the contact, indeed the collision, be-
tween what might be described (in the structuralist language of the 1960s and
1970s), as two ‘systems of signs’, in this case the Gothic and the classical.
These systems penetrated many domains, media and materials: stone, wood,
metal, glass, textiles, parchment and so on, decorating objects that ranged from
large buildings to tiny jewels.
At the micro-historical level, it is possible to observe a variety of individual
responses to this collision. I shall draw attention to three. The first took the
form of what linguists call ‘code-switching’, an idea that has its uses not only
in linguistics but in other domains as well. Take the case of painting: the 15th-
century Italian artist Pisanello, for instance, worked in two different styles,
Gothic and classical. He did not replace one style by the other but practiced
them simultaneously for different patrons (Woods-Marsden 1988).
A second reaction to the collision was self-conscious hybridization or syn-
cretism, a practice that is often described today as ‘cultural translation’. A book
by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, entitled Platonic Theology, makes an ap-
propriate symbol of this kind of syncretism, christening Plato and classicizing
Christianity. What allowed Ficino to take this bold step without falling into
heresy was his belief that God had granted a special revelation to Plato, who
knew about Christianity although he lived before Christ, participating in what
Renaissance humanists called ‘the ancient theology’, prisca theologia (Wind
1958; Walker 1972).
Another example comes from Africa. A few individuals with prominent
roles in the Renaissance, from Albrecht Dürer to Grand Duke Cosimo de’
Medici, owned objects from Africa such as forks, spoons, salt-cellars and ivory
horns made in what is now known as an ‘Afro-Portuguese’ style, the result of
local artisans consciously adapting their tradition to what Europeans wanted,
thus offering early examples of art made for export (Fagg 1959).
A third possibility, though not conscious this time, depends on what Pierre
Bourdieu famously called the ‘habitus’, in other words a set of dispositions
(in both mind and body) that are internalized and cease to be conscious, but
continue to generate cultural practices. The habitus is learned by imitation but
becomes a kind of second nature, whether for boxers, sculptors or indeed for
lecturers. Artisans who are asked to work in a new style may well assimilate it
 7
to their traditional habitus. Take the case of a scribe trying to imitate humanist
cursive, a new form of handwriting developed in 15th-century Italy and based
on ancient Roman models (more exactly, what were believed to be ancient Ro-
man models). In the handwriting of some scribes the traditional gothic forms
keep breaking through, in a sort of return of the repressed (Richardson 2009:
164).
(In parenthesis, an intellectual circular tour may be worth noting. Bourdieu
borrowed the idea of habitus from a historian of art, Erwin Panofsky, more ex-
actly from his famous essay on Gothic architecture and scholasticism. Bourdieu
much admired this essay, translated it into French and wrote a postface for it
(Panofsky 1967). In my turn I am using Bourdieu to understand what used to be
called the ‘diffusion’ or ‘reception’ of the Renaissance, including the obstacles
to this reception.)
To assess the importance of hybridity in the Renaissance in a thorough man-
ner it would of course be necessary to investigate a diverse range of cultural
items – language, literature, painting, sculpture, and even law (the encounter
between Roman law and local custom). Such an investigation would be difficult
indeed to present in a single lecture. Hence in what follows I shall concentrate
on a single art form, architecture.
Architecture is particularly likely to be hybrid for various reasons. In the
first place, patrons played a greater role in commissioning buildings than in the
case of paintings or statues. These patrons might have practical needs that con-
flicted with the architect’s plans, so that hybridity was sometimes the outcome
of a compromise. In the second place, building is a collective enterprise in
which architects collaborate with masons (indeed, a distinction between the two
roles was only beginning to emerge in the 15th century). Conflict and compro-
mise can be found here too. In the third place, local conditions such as climate
and materials are particularly important in the case of architecture.
Linguists have called attention to combinations of the vocabulary of one
language with the syntax of another, as in the case of the so called ‘mixed lan-
guage’ or media lengua of Ecuador, which is Spanish in its lexicon but follows
Quechua rules of syntax. A similar phenomenon is apparent in the language of
architecture (Muysken 1997; Summerson 1980). The metaphor is actually an
ancient one, since Doric and Ionic were the names of Greek dialects before the
 8
terms were applied to different forms of column and capital, while analogies
between architecture and language were drawn during the Renaissance, in Eng-
land and elsewhere (Anderson 2000).
I shall discuss Renaissance architecture in Italy, in the rest of Europe, and
beyond Europe, especially in the Americas. I shall begin with the Americas on
the grounds that the greater the distance between two cultures, the clearer the
process of hybridization becomes.

III

The so-called expansion of Europe in the 16th century, the conquest of parts of
Asia, Africa and on a grander scale the Americas, had important cultural con-
sequences as well as economic, social and political ones. These cultural conse-
quences included attempts to convert the local population to Catholicism and
also to transport Renaissance and later, baroque art and architecture to the New
World. The resulting hybrid style of painting in Mexico has been perceptively
discussed by the French historian Serge Gruzinski (1999), inspired in part by an
anthropologist of West Africa, Jean-Loup Amselle (1990).
In the case of architecture, the Spaniards made few concessions to local
tradition. Indeed, it has been argued that the revived classical style both repre-
sented and reinforced the Spanish belief that their culture was superior to that
of the Aztecs and Incas (Fraser 1986, 1990). All the same, some churches were
built on the site of earlier temples and even used the same stones, as in the case
of the cathedral of Cusco, built from 1559 onwards on the ruins of the temple
known as Kiswarkancha.
In both Mexico and Peru, the masons and sculptors were mainly indigenous.
They probably had their own traditions, their own habitus (although we cannot
be sure that they had worked as masons and sculptors before they were trained
by the colonizers). As a result, the sculpture on church facades of the 16th and
17th centuries in the New World, especially Peru, may have been classical in its
syntax but it was partly indigenous in its lexicon, in other words the converse
of the media lengua of Ecuador.
 9
In the sixteenth century the combination of local and imported motifs is
already visible. However, it was in the seventeenth century that a distinctive Pe-
ruvian style or ecotype emerged, which some art historians have named the es-
tilo mestizo,and others ‘hybrid baroque’ (Kubler 1944; Neumeyer 1948; Bailey
2010). This hybrid style includes local items such as pumas on church facades
as well as a tendency to decorate surfaces more fully and in a flatter manner
than in the European architecture of the time, as if the artisans had translated
designs from indigenous textiles into stone. A famous example of the style is
the Jesuit church in Arequipa, known as La Compañía (fig.1, page 20).
The emergence of this estilo mestizo may have been encouraged by the Jes-
uits, whose missionary strategy in different parts of the world, from China to
Peru, was that of ‘accommodating’ Christianity to local tradition. Hybridity is
often the result of accommodation, a term that has recently come into use in lin-
guistics, or more exactly come back into use, since ancient Roman rhetoricians
already used the term (Mungello 1985; Giles, Coupland and Coupland 1991).
The hybrid style of Peru may also have been encouraged by the interpen-
etration of Christian and Muslim cultures in medieval Spain, divided as it was
into Christian and Muslim kingdoms. In Spain during the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, in Toledo, for instance, in Alcalà and elsewhere, some Chris-
tian churches were decorated by Arab artisans in the so-called mudejar style,
with geometrical and calligraphic motifs of the kind to be found in mosques. It
might therefore be suggested that Spanish colonial patrons of architecture were
prepared by their experience in the peninsula to favour or at least to accept a
mixture of European with indigenous artistic traditions (Toussaint 1946).
Traffic in the opposite direction was more limited, but it should not be for-
gotten. The best-known examples concern cultural borrowings from the Islamic
world, notably in Italy in the late Middle Ages as well as the Renaissance. In
Venice, for instance, the mosaics on the outside of the church of San Marco
followed Islamic precedent. The ogee arches framing the windows of late me-
dieval Venetian palaces were an ‘orientalizing’ touch, while the design of the
Doge’s Palace (it has recently been argued) alluded to the architecture of Mam-
luk Cairo (Howard 2000; Dale 2010).
Again, Indian culture made an impact on Renaissance architecture in Portu-
gal (the so-called ‘Manueline style’), before the Jesuits and others brought Re-
 10
naissance art in their baggage, as it were, to India (Dias 1988; Bailey 1998). Yet
again, as European knowledge of the material culture of the New World grew,
occasional American motifs can be found in Renaissance art and architecture,
from Rome to Liège (Dacos 1969).

IV

References to the mudejar style has introduced the theme of Renaissance ar-
chitecture in Europe. It is not difficult to find examples of Gothic structures
combined with classical ornament and also the reverse, classical structures
combined with Gothic ornament. We might speak of conflicting pressures, on
one side the desire for the fashionably classical, and on the other the need to
continue to build castles and churches, building types that had not existed in
classical antiquity.
Chambord, for instance (fig.2, page 21), is a hybrid castle-palace, built from
1519 onwards for François I from a design by the Italian Domenico da Cor-
tona, largely medieval but with an Italianate roof. In similar fashion Hampton
Court, in the South of England, built for Cardinal Wolsey but soon acquired by
Henry VIII, combines a medieval gatehouse with Renaissance roundels made
by the Italian Giovanni da Maiano and inspired by ancient Roman coins (fig.3,
page 22). A more unusual case is that of St Eustache in Paris, begun in 1532,
a church that looks medieval from a distance, especially from outside, while
classical details become apparent in close-up. The church has been described as
a ‘Gothic structure (…) clothed in Renaissance forms’ (Blunt 1999 [1953]: 30).
By contrast , hybridity is more obvious at St Etienne du Mont, another Paris
church, rebuilt between the late fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries
(fig.4, page 23).
Similar examples may be found elsewhere. Some Spanish architects and
masons worked in both Gothic and classical styles. They have been described
as ‘bilingual’ or ‘bimodal’ but they sometimes mix styles as well as switching
between them (Marías 1989: 33; cf Kavaler 2012: 17, 70–71, 265). In Prague,
in the Vladislav Hall, around the year 1500, Benedikt Ried used both Gothic
and Renaissance forms. The Renaissance motifs sometimes “seem to have been
 11
‘infected’ by Gothic movement”, as in the case of the famous twisted pilasters.
In Regensburg, the design by Hans Hieber for the Schöne Maria church (1520)
was in a ‘mixed style’ (Nussbaum 2000: 220, 223).
The process of hybridization was encouraged by the manner in which the
knowledge of the new style spread, often via treatises on the rules of classical
architecture that were usually produced in Italy but translated, sometimes rap-
idly, into other languages (Guillaume 1988; Hart and Hicks 1998; Payne 1999).
One imagines patrons with the new treatises in their hands, meeting masons
with their local architectural culture, and there is some hard evidence of such
encounters. As is often the case in history, misunderstanding probably played
a role here, although historians are often reluctant to recognize its importance.
In Germany, for instance, classical forms were employed ‘tentatively’ by archi-
tects who were concerned “how to get stonemasons trained in the Gothic style
to carry them out adequately” (Nussbaum 2000: 219).
The hybridization of architecture was also encouraged by what might be
called cultural translation at second or third hand. Although the spread of the
new style was assisted by a diaspora of Italian artists and artisans, there were
not enough Italians to go round. Hence Italianate motifs were introduced into
some places in Scotland by French masons and to Scandinavia (to Rosenborg
Slot in Denmark, for instance), by craftsmen from the Netherlands (Campbell
1995).
An extreme case of cultural distance within Europe may be revealing: the
case of a chapel at L’viv in the Ukraine, a city variously known as Lwów,
Lvov, Lemberg or Leopolis, a multicultural or hybrid city where different eth-
nic groups had long coexisted and interacted. The Boimi chapel (1609–1615,
fig. 5, page 24) was designed by a German from Silesia with the help of artisans
from his own region but also Armenians from L’viv itself, where an Armenian
community had been established by the late Middle Ages. North Italian artis-
ans had been working not far away at Zamość in Poland. Interaction between
these groups led to the development of a local style that has been described by
a leading Polish art historian as ‘a richly decorated Netherlandish Mannerism
which blended with oriental Armenian motifs and with a Venetian version of
the Tuscan and Doric orders’ (Miłobędzki 1996: 835). What may have begun as
a visual Babel was turning into a kind of polyphony.
 12
Awareness of the need to adapt the classical or Italian style to local con-
ditions, in Northern Europe in particular, was expressed at the time. In cold
climates chimneys were needed and they were sometimes disguised as classi-
cal columns, as in the case of Ionic capitals on the chimneys of an Elizabethan
country house such as Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire. Failure to adapt might
be criticized, as in the case of loggias for English country houses (Henderson
1995). The Netherlander Vredeman de Vries, well-known for his pattern-books,
openly declared that classical rules could be broken so as to accommodate art
to the situation and the needs of the country “accommoder l’art à la situation
et necessité du pais” (quoted in Mercer 1962: 77). Using the term favoured by
the Jesuit missionaries, Vredeman recommended what we now call ‘cultural
translation’.

It is time to turn to Italy itself, where the new style began, appropriately enough
given the number of ancient Roman buildings that had survived there. Imitating
these buildings was not as simple as it may seem in retrospect. As pioneers, the
Italians reveal that although it was easy to appropriate classical ornaments, it
took generations to understand the logic or grammar by which they had been
combined in antiquity, for example the use of the ‘orders’, with Doric capitals
on the ground floor, Ionic on the next and Corinthian above.
In any case, borrowing from antiquity was not necessarily viewed as in-
compatible with a taste for Gothic. The Tuscan Bernardo Rossellino, designing
a cathedral for pope Pius II in his native city (renamed Pienza in the pope’s
honour), drew on the traditions of Gothic hall churches (the plan and even
gothic tracery in the windows) combining them with classical columns and
round arches. From outside the cathedral looks Renaissance (fig. 6, page 25)
while from inside (fig.7, page 26) it looks Gothic (Mack 1987: 83, 93; Tönnes-
mann 1990: 40–45). What did the patron himself think? Luckily there is some
concrete evidence for his tastes. Pius, otherwise known as Enea Silvio Picco-
lomini, was a humanist as well as a pope, devoted to the classical tradition, but
he praised the Gothic churches of Germany, where he had lived as a diplomat,
 13
especially Strasbourg cathedral, the very building praised by Goethe in a text
that encouraged the Gothic revival of the 19th century (Gragg and Gabel 1936–
1957: 601–602). Today, we may see Gothic and classical as antithetical styles,
but some contemporaries appear to have regarded them as equally attractive
alternatives and even as allowing bricolage.
In short, the result of the collision between the revived classical style and
various local styles was the production of new ecotypes in the Old World as
well as the New. To make this statement is actually to enter a minefield, or
at least a territory disputed between two groups or schools of art historians.
On one side, the ‘centripetal’ scholars, as we might call them, emphasize the
common features of Renaissance architecture, speaking of an international
style that reached from Florence to Prague, Mexico or Arequipa (Kubler 1944;
Kaufmann 1995, 1999). On the other side, the ‘centrifugal’ scholars place their
emphasis on local variations, creative peripheries and hybrid styles (Neumeyer
1948; Białostocki 1976a, 1976b, 1986; Gruzinski 1999; Bailey 2010). An out-
sider to this debate may perhaps be permitted to remark that the differences
between the two schools sometimes appear to be exaggerated. They are mat-
ters of degree, or emphasis, rather than differences of kind. Returning to the
linguistic analogy that runs through the whole debate on cultural hybridity, a
leading centripetal scholar, Thomas Kaufmann, speaks of “dialects of an inter-
national language”. How far the dialects diverge from the standard languages
is of course an empirical matter, allowing different answers in different cases.
For example, the Hungarian ecotype of Renaissance architecture was closer
than the Polish to the Florentine model, thanks to the immigration of Florentine
artisans (Feuer-Tóth 1990).
It may be added that the term ‘ecotype’ seems particularly useful in this con-
text because it offers a solution to the problem of original purity. As was noted
earlier, the idea of cultural hybridity has often been criticized on the grounds
that it falsely assumes the purity of cultures before a given encounter occurs. If
every culture is hybrid, the concept loses its value. One possible reply to this
criticism is to suggest that the process of hybridization is more intense or more
rapid at some periods than others. In England, for example, the decades af-
ter 1066, with the Norman Conquest, and 1950, when large-scale immigration
from the West Indies, India and Pakistan began, might be regarded as periods
when this process was particularly important.
 14
Another possible reply is to speak of purity or homogeneity as relative. The
second phase of hybridization produces new ecotypes or creoles that remain
relatively stable (or even ‘pure’) until the next cultural encounter occurs and the
process begins all over again.

VI

This approach to the Renaissance in terms of cultural hybridity is not comple-

tely new. The life’s work of the German scholar Aby Warburg, for instance,
was a concern with the transformations of the classical tradition, especially
during the Renaissance. Like his contemporary Franz Cumont, he emphasized
the coexistence and the interaction of different world-views in the same milieu,
such as fifteenth-century Florence, and even in the same individual, such as the
merchant Francesco Sassetti (Warburg 1932: 213–246). Other students of the
Italian Renaissance, particularly in Germany, followed his example (Schmar-
sow 1921; Weise 1952).
All the same, the place of hybridity in the Renaissance as well as in other
cultural movements, surely deserves – and is now beginning to attract – further
exploration (Chatenet 2011; Kavaler 2012: 242–257). This approach focuses
attention on a range of artefacts that had fallen into neglect precisely because
they did not offer sufficiently clear, distinct or pure examples of the art of the
period. However, these mixed productions have their place in history, and in-
deed their own beauty. We should not allow purist prejudices to prevent us from
appreciating it.
The study of the Renaissance, or of other cultural movements, from this
angle requires, appropriately enough, a combination of two approaches, a mi-
crohistory that resembles traditional anthropology and a macrohistory that is
closer to sociology. It is surely unnecessary to remind you that Jack Goody is a
master of both approaches. For this reason, among others, his work remains an
inspiration for historians and anthropologists alike.
 15

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 19

List of Illustrations

Page 20 Fig.1: Façade, church of La Compañía, Arequipa, Peru.

Page 21 Fig.2: Château of Chambord, France.
Page 22 Fig.3: Gateway, palace of Hampton Court, Surrey, UK.
Page 23 Fig.4: Church of St Etienne du Mont, Paris, France.
Page 24 Fig.5: Boimi Chapel, L’viv, Ukraine.
Page 25 Fig.6: Cathedral, Pienza, Italy, exterior.
Page 26 Fig.7: Cathedral, Pienza, Italy, interior.
 20

Fig.1: Façade, church of La Compañía, Arequipa, Peru. (Photo: Rafael

Estrella, http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafaelestrella/3460817483/sizes/o/in/
photostream/ – Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0)
 21

Fig.2: Château of Chambord, France. (Photo: Patrick Giraud, http://upload.wikimedia.org/

wikipedia/commons/8/80/France_Loir-et-Cher_Chambord_Chateau_03.jpg– Creative Commons
BY-SA 3.0)
 22

Fig.3: Gateway, palace of Hampton Court, Surrey, United Kingdom. (Photo:

ashleyl23x, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashleylaurenphotography/
6030043412/sizes/l/in/photostream/ – Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0)
 23

Fig.4: Church of St Etienne du Mont, Paris, France. (Photo: Mbzt, http://

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/P1020128_Paris_V_Eglise
_Saint-Etienne-du-Mont_reductwk.JPG – Creative Commons BY 3.0)
 24

Fig.5: Boimi Chapel, L’viv, Ukraine. (Photo: Jennifer Boyer, http://www.flickr.

com/photos/jenniferboyer/5894776062/sizes/o/in/photostream/ – Creative
Commons BY 2.0)
 25

Fig.6: Cathedral, Pienza, Italy, exterior. (Photo: Helena, Flickr: http://www.

flickr.com/photos/heleenmeijer/5214385752/sizes/o/in/photostream/ – Creative
Commons BY 2.0)
 26

Fig.7: Cathedral, Pienza, Italy, interior. (Photo: Ho Visto Nina Volare, http://
www.flickr.com/photos/41099823@N00/652916222/sizes/o/in/photostream/ –
Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0)
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