A “Crisis” in the Making: The Correspondence of Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller

Abstract

This article summarizes and contextualizes the vast unpublished correspondence between Hans Baron (1900–1988) and Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999), two of the most prominent twentieth-century scholars of Renaissance Humanism. It details how Baron and Kristeller came to take their first steps in Renaissance scholarship in Germany before political circumstances forced them into exile; it recounts the story of their emigration and their strategies for survival in Italy, Britain, and the United States; it reveals the impact of the American academy on their intellectual journeys and the extent to which they self-consciously stood for a methodology on the verge of extinction. Most important, the correspondence provides us with a personal etiology of the rebirth of Renaissance studies in the postwar period and of the concrete genesis of some of the books that brought it about.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Julius Kirshner, Anthony Molho, Ronald G. Witt, and the two anonymous reviewers for The European Legacy for their useful suggestions on this essay’s manuscript. I also wish to express my debt of gratitude to Elisabeth Blum and, especially, to Stephen Haswell Todd for their invaluable help in rendering archival sources into idiomatic English.

Notes

1. The paradigms of Kristeller and Garin, especially, have been put to mutually enlightening comparison. See Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), chap. 2; James Hankins, “Two Twentieth-Century Interpreters of Renaissance Humanism: Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller,” Comparative Criticism 23 (2001): 3–19; and Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 343ff.

2. See James Hankins, introduction to Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. The essays collected in this volume offer yet another critical appraisal of Baron’s characterization of early-fifteenth-century Florence as the site of modern Republicanism.

3. For Kristeller’s view that Quattrocento humanists were the successors of the professional practitioners of ars dictaminis, a view originally published in 1946, see his “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956), 553–83. For Kristeller’s defense of Neoplatonism as the true philosophy of the Renaissance, see The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 23: “Ficino is evidently convinced that he is doing for Platonic philosophy what, in the opinion of his contemporaries, Giotto had already done for painting and Dante for poetry. The Platonism of the Renaissance was really conceived as a genuine renaissance of Platonism, in other words, Ficino’s Platonism is not a philosophical conception that just happened to appear during the period of the Renaissance, it is, so to speak, the Renaissance become philosophical—in other words, the philosophical expression and manifestation of its leading idea.”

4. The genesis of Garin’s “humanism” can now be re-experienced via the reprint of a volume of his earliest essays. See Eugenio Garin, Interpretazioni del Rinascimento, ed. Michele Ciliberto, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2009).

5. Riccardo Fubini, “Renaissance Historian: The Career of Hans Baron,” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 541–74. See also James Hankins, “The Baron Thesis after Forty Years: Some Recent Studies on Leonardo Bruni,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 309–38.

6. On Baron’s émigré life see Kay Schiller, “Hans Baron’s Humanism,” Storia della storiografia 34 (1998): 51–99; Kay Schiller, “Made ‘fit for America’: The Renaissance Historian Hans Baron in London Exile 1936–1938,” in Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-Britischen Kulturellen Austausch, 1750-2000, ed. Stefan Berger et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2003), 345–59; and, more diffusely, Kay Schiller, Gelehrte Gegenwelten. Über humanistische Leitbilder in 20 Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000).

7. Anthony Molho, “Hans Baron’s Crisis,” in Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society, and Politics in Renaissance Italy, ed. David S. Peterson and Daniel E. Bornstein (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 62; and, again, Hankins, “The ‘Baron Thesis’.”

8. Eugenio Garin, “Le prime ricerche di Hans Baron sul Quattrocento e la loro influenza fra le due guerre,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), lxviii–lxix.

9. John Monfasani, ed., Kristeller Reconsidered: Essays on His Life and Scholarship (New York: Italica Press, 2006), x.

10. John Monfasani, “Kristeller and Manuscripts,” in Kristeller Reconsidered, 196.

11. Paul Richard Blum, “The Young Paul Oskar Kristeller as a Philosopher,” in Kristeller Reconsidered, 19–38.

12. See Rubini, The Other Renaissance, 330ff.

13. For a sample of letters, see the appendixes to James Hankins, “Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller: Existentialism, Neo-Kantianism, and the Post-War Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism,” in Eugenio Garin. Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, 497–99. The complete correspondence between Garin and Kristeller is forthcoming. I am grateful to the editors, James Hankins and Patrick Baker, for allowing me to read these documents in advance of publication. For other related letters and documents, see Rocco Rubini, “The Last Italian Philosopher: Eugenio Garin (with an Appendix of Documents),” Intellectual History Review 21.2 (2011): 209–30.

14. See Eugenio Garin, “Humanism and Civic Life,” in The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays, 1860–1968, ed. Rocco Rubini (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2014), 214: “Ficino, a steady client of the Medici, is unable to hold back from dispensing insults and calumny. Letters like those of Marsilio and Ermolao are eloquent mirrors, not only of two men of immense learning but utterly lacking in character, but of a fatal disease that penetrated deep into the academic culture of Italy at the time. The highest praise for living men perceived to be useful and dangerous; insults for the dead, and groveling before the newly powerful. But this was not humanism; it was the end of humanism.” See also Rubini, The Other Renaissance, 234ff.

15. I have recovered and rearranged the correspondence between Hans Baron (1900–1988) and Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999), working at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University in New York (henceforth POKP)—where Kristeller’s archive is held—and at the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collection Library of Duke University in North Carolina (henceforth HBP)—where Baron’s archive is held. The correspondence, which I am presently editing for publication with Elisabeth Blum, amounts to approximately 346 letters sent and received between 1932 and 1988. A close perusal of the material indicates that four or five letters have gone missing. I thank Columbia University, which holds the rights to Kristeller’s papers, and Professor Ronald G. Witt (Duke University), literary executor of Baron’s estate, for allowing me to publish this material.

16. On Kristeller’s student years in Berlin, see Luigi Lehnus, “L’antichistica berlinese nella formazione di P. O. Kristeller,” in Gli studi umanistici e l’opera di Paul Oskar Kristeller (Milan: Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, 2003), 17–29.

17. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Der Begriff der Seele in der Ethik des Plotin (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929). Kristeller himself characterizes his dissertation as “an existentialist interpretation of Plotinus” (Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Recollections of my Life,” The European Legacy 1.6 [1996]: 1866), influenced by the work of and his acquaintance with Karl Jaspers and Heidegger. For a study of the existentialist traits in Kristeller’s early publications, see Blum, “The Young Paul Oskar Kristeller as a Philosopher.” Kristeller turned to Heidegger for his Habilitationsschrift on Ficino after having been turned down by his longtime mentor and advisor for the Plotinus project, Ernst Hoffmann.

18. Kristeller to Baron, 11 September 1932 (HBP). In this letter, Kristeller actually avows to have received the suggestion to contact Baron from Schadewaldt’s wife. Kristeller recalls Schadewaldt with justifiably mixed feelings as one of the sponsors of his early career: “My Habilitation was supported by several other Freiburg professors, especially Eduard Fraenkel, Helmut Ritter, and Wolfgang Schadewaldt (who later became a Nazi and an anti-semite)” (Kristeller, “Recollections,” 1867).

19. Baron to Kristeller, 28 December 1932 (POKP). In fact, Baron had himself tried his hand at Ficino’s astrological writing in one of his earliest publications. See Hans Baron, “Willensfreiheit und Astrologie bei Marsilio Ficino und Pico della Mirandola,” in Kultur- und Universalgeschichte: Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1927), 145–70.

20. Kristeller to Baron, 31 December 1932 (HBP). All translations are my own in collaboration with Stephen Haswell Todd.

21. Kristeller to Baron, 15 January 1933 (HBP).

22. Baron to Kristeller, 19 February 1933 (POKP).

23. On the immediate effects of anti-Semitic laws on Baron’s career, see Schiller, “Made ‘fit for America’,” 347ff.

24. Kristeller to Baron, 28 April 1933 (HBP).

25. Baron to Kristeller, 29 April 1933 (POKP).

26. Leonardo Olschki, Leo’s son, played an instrumental role in directing Kristeller’s career in Italy by mediating his acquaintance with Giovanni Gentile, thereafter Kristeller’s sponsor and mentor, who nevertheless goes unmentioned in the correspondence.

27. Kristeller to Baron, 29 March 1934 (HBP): “Ihr Entscheidung, die ich Sie bald zu treffen bitte, wird wesentlich davon abhängen, welche Bedeutung Sie den Ficintexten im Rahmen Ihrer übrigen wissenschaftlichen Arbeit beimessen.”

28. Baron to Kristeller, 3 April 1934 (POKP): “Auch ich habe auf die ganze Titelfrage nur solchen Wert gelegt, weil ich ja in der gleichen schlimmen Lage bin wie Sie und wir alle das Kapital an fertigen Arbeiten, mit dem wir eine neue Zukunft aufbauen wollen, sehr zusammenhalten müssen.”

29. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “La posizione storica di Marsilio Ficino,” Civiltà moderna 5 (1933): 438–45; and Paul Oskar Kristeller, “L’unità del mondo nella filosofia di Marsilio Ficino,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 15 (1934): 395–423.

30. Baron to Kristeller, 3 April 1934 (POKP): “Ich habe bisher die Verhältnisse in Italien für derart schwierig gehalten, dass ich glaubte, wenn man wie ich keine nennenswerten persönlichen Beziehungen besitzt, nichts versuchen zu sollen, bevor man ein gedrucktes italienisches Opus mit auf den Tisch legen kann.”

31. Kristeller to Baron, 9 May 1934 (HBP).

32. See Baron’s own recollection of the affaire in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays in the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 2.184: “the Neoplatonic generation seems abstruse and removed from the daily life of the city—material for students of philosophy rather than for historians eager to grasp the guiding idea and emotive and moral forces that helped Florence to remain a vital political and cultural center during the Quattrocento. So after some minor publications on the Neoplatonists, I gave my Platonic material to Paul Oskar Kristeller for use in his Supplementum Ficinianum and turned to the then much less known early Renaissance generation whose intellectual leader had been Bruni. In that new study perplexing surprises awaited me.”

33. Baron to Kristeller, 28 May 1934 (POKP): “Jedenfalls scheint es mir bei dieser verwandelten Lage jetzt nicht mehr erlaubt, meinerseits noch auf meinen Prioritätsrechten zu beharren die inzwischen durch Ihre tiefer greifende Arbeit überholt sind.”

34. Kristeller to Baron, 6 June 1934 (HBP).

35. See John Tedeschi, “Paul Oskar Kristeller: The Italian Years (1933–1939),” in Writing Relations: American Scholars in Italian Archives, ed. Deanna Shemek and Michael Wyatt (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 191–217; Warren Boutcher, “The Making of the Humane Philosopher: Paul Oskar Kristeller and Twentieth-Century Intellectual History,” in Kristeller Reconsidered, 39–70; and Rubini, The Other Renaissance, 307ff.

36. Hans Baron, ed., Leonardo Bruni Aretino: Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1928).

37. A titled (“Umanesimo e incunabuli”) version of the keynote speech later came to form chapter 1 of Gentile’s collected writings on the Renaissance. See Giovanni Gentile, Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento (Florence: Le Lettere, 2003), 3–13.

38. Eugenio Garin, “Un ricordo di Casa Olschki,” in Olschki. Un secolo di editoria (1886–1986), 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1986), 1.293; see also 2.168–71.

39. In his own recollection, Kristeller stated simply that “the ceremony was well attended” and that it was then that he met Garin for the first time, “with whom I have remained in cordial friendship and companionship ever since.” Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Recollections of My Association and Friendship with the House and Family of Leo S. Olschki over the Last Fifty Years,” in Olschki, 1.148.

40. Giovanni Gentile, “Nuova collezione di testi umanistici a cura di Giovanni Gentile e Paolo Oskar Kristeller,” in Supplementum, 2.380.

41. An accurate account of Kristeller’s involvement in some of these events can be found in Paolo Simoncelli, Cantimori, Gentile e la Normale di Pisa. Profili e documenti (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994), chap. 3.

42. Baron to Kristeller, 25 July 1935 (POKP).

43. Baron to Kristeller, 3 April 1936 (POKP).

44. Kristeller to Baron, 6 April 36 (HBP).

45. Baron to Kristeller, 5 August 1938 (POKP): “Ich hoffe noch immer, dass in Ihrem ungewöhnlichen Falle eine besondere Lösung möglich ist, denn ich denke, dass Sie nach Italien gehören und dort jetzt verwachsen sind, so wie ich selber mich noch immer nur eigentlich in Italien als ganz am Platze denken kann.”

46. Baron to Kristeller, 14 September 1938 (POKP).

47. Edith Baron to Kristeller, 18 November 1938 (POKP). Gentile, and especially Delio Cantimori, had already interceded for Kristeller with Bainton. See The Correspondence of Roland H. Bainton and Delio Cantimori 1932–1966: An Enduring Transatlantic Friendship between Two Historians of Religious Toleration, ed. John Tedeschi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), which includes thoroughly introduced letters to and from Kristeller.

48. Baron to Kristeller, 30. January 1939 (POKP).

49. On Kristeller’s American experience, see Kay Schiller, “Paul Oskar Kristeller, Ernst Cassirer, and the ‘Humanistic Turn’ in the American Emigration,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 125–38.

50. Baron to Kristeller, 8 March 1944 (POKP).

51. On the revolt of the medievalists, see Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (1948; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), chap. 11.

52. Baron to Kristeller, 14 April 1939 (POKP). See Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 4.562. As Thorndike explains in a footnote, it was Juan Luis Vives who first called Ficino a philosophaster.

53. Kristeller discusses his sympathies for the activities and stance of the Medieval Academy of America in Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 3.

54. Baron to Kristeller, 10 July 1939 and Baron to Kristeller, 23 December 1939 (POKP).

55. Baron’s characterization was not unwarranted, as Kristeller’s study, written in German and completed by 1937, was first translated into Italian, then finally for publication in English. The Italian version appeared in 1953, while the original German manuscript was only published in 1972, with a preface detailing the book’s vicissitudes. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Die Philosophie des Marsilio Ficino (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), vii. For a contextualization, see Warren Boutcher, “From Germany to Italy to America: The Migratory Significance of Kristeller’s Ficino in the 1930s,” in Weltoffener Humanismus. Philosophie, Philologie und Geschichte in der deutsch-jüdischen Emigration, ed. Gerald Hartung and Kay Schiller (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006), 133–53.

56. Baron to Kristeller, 17 June 1943 (POKP).

57. Baron to Kristeller, 9 May 1944 (POKP): “dass Empfehlung durch einen anderen “refugee Scholar,” selbst in dem Falle, dass er selber eine erste Stelle besitzt, fast immer schadet.”

58. Baron to Kristeller, 16 February 1944 (POKP). For the essay referenced in this exchange, see Hans Baron, “Articulation and Unity in the Italian Renaissance and in the Modern West,” in The Quest for Political Unity in World History, ed. Stanley Pargellis (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1944), 123–38.

59. See Molho, “Hans Baron’s Crisis.”

60. Baron to Kristeller, 8 March 1944 (POKP).

61. Baron to Kristeller, 19 March 1944 (POKP).

62. Baron to Kristeller, 19 March 1944 (POKP).

63. Baron to Kristeller, 27 November 1946 (POKP).

64. Baron to Kristeller, 1 January 1947 (POKP).

65. Baron to Kristeller, 6 April 1948 (POKP).

66. Kristeller to Baron, 9 April 1948 (HBP).

67. Baron to Kristeller, 12 May 1948 (POKP).

68. Baron to Kristeller, 7 October 1950 (POKP).

69. Kristeller to Baron, 26 January 1953 (HBP).

70. Baron to Kristeller, 31 January 1953 (POKP).

71. Kristeller to Baron, 3 February 1953 (HBP).

72. Baron to Kristeller, 5 February 1953 (POKP).

73. Baron to Kristeller, 9 May 1953 (POKP).

74. Kristeller to Baron, 15 May 1953 (HBP), and Baron to Kristeller, 24 May 1953 (POKP).

75. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955). A second, single-volume edition free of cumbersome appendices and notes appeared in 1966.

76. The obituary was first published in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 42 (1960): 388–89. I cite from the reprint in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, vol. 4 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1996), 4.485–87.

77. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought, 4.485.

78. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought, 4.486.

79. Baron to Kristeller, 11 October 1960 (POKP).

80. The two reviews appeared, respectively, in Archivum Romanicum 15 (1931): 284–323 and in Historische Vierteljahrschrift 29 (1934): 385–400.

81. Hans Baron, “Forschungen über Leonardo Bruni Aretino. Eine Erwiderung,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 22 (1932): 352–71.

82. Baron to Kristeller, 11 October 1960 (POKP).

83. Kristeller to Baron, 15 October 1960 (HBP).

84. Baron to Kristeller, 19 April 1961 (POKP).

85. Baron to Kristeller, 16 March 1966 (POKP).

86. Kristeller to Baron, 22 March 1966 (HBP) and, the reply, Baron to Kristeller, 26 March 1966 (POKP).

87. Kristeller to Baron, 26 March 1966 (HBP).

88. Kristeller to Baron, 5 April 1966 (HBP). See also the reply, Baron to Kristeller, 31 March 1966 (POKP).

89. Kristeller to Baron, 13 April 1971 (HBP).

90. Kristeller to Baron, 4 May 1971 (HBP).

91. Kristeller to Baron, 10 August 1971 (HBP). See also Baron to Kristeller, 14 July 1971 (POKP).

92. Ludwig Bertalot, Studien zum Italienischen und Deutschen Humanismus, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975), 2.375.

93. Baron to Kristeller, 23 September 1970 (POKP).

94. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence: Sansoni, 1971).

95. Baron to Kristeller, 3 December 1972 (POKP).