Campanella, Tomasso | John M. Headley (essay date 1990)
John M. Headley (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "Tommaso Campanella and the End of the Renaissance," in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, Fall, 1990, pp. 157-74.
[In the following excerpt, Headley argues that the contradictory elements in Campanella's philosophy are representative of a changing historical movement as the Renaissance gave way to the modern age at the beginning of the seventeenth century.]
Do historical periods, or better yet historical movements, have an end, a definitive termination? It is hardly necessary to observe that historical periods exist in historians' heads as means of defining the past; such periods can only begin to have substantive meaning insofar as they are informed by a movement sufficiently self-conscious and coherent as to achieve contemporary identity over a succession of years, thereby demarcating a fairly distinct period, a historical period to the later historian. Rather than as...
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