Renaissance Cities

“What does economic history have to do with Renaissance scholarship?” This is the question I asked myself when I was asked to participate in a panel with the title “Recent Trends in Renaissance Scholarship: Economic History.” Over a generation ago economic history escaped from the confines of conventional historical periodization, in which the Renaissance functions as the keystone, with its claim to being the origin of modernity. This conventional periodization, with its inconsistent mingling of political and cultural criteria for the organization of the narrative of modern history, makes whole categories of historical questions almost impossible to ask, let alone to answer. For many economic historians—and I count myself among them—it was a liberation to abandon all this in favor of a periodizing structure determined by long trends in population, price levels, relative prices, and other phenomena associated with these.