Author: SCHIFFMAN, Z.S.,
Title: On the Threshold of Modernity. Relativism in the French Renaissance.
Description: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore / London, 1991. XV,170p. Original grey cloth with dust wrappers. "?This useful, thoughtful and informative book in the intellectual history of the French Renaissance uses the concept of relativism to situate and compare the work of a number of major thinkers. Schiffman notes that his point of departure was the study of the ?classificatory way of thinking?, and this is, indeed, an important part of the work, but the search for certainty, for some principle by which skepticism might be refuted or contained, is shown at work even beyond schemes of classification. Schiffman?s aim is both ambitious and subtle, and he brings us (..) many interesting ramifications in the texts he studies (?). The Renaissance, Schiffman argues, had the ?experience of relativism? but did not adopt ?doctrines of relativism?. Instead (?) Schiffman is concerned with the strategies by which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers attempted to contain the relativism which they feared as they confronted an accumulation of sharply different values, laws, customs, and interpretations brought forth in humanistic philology and the Reformation. Thus relativism, understood as the collapse of a single, stable norm, is not produced by the unsettling discovery of the New World but by the recovery of antiquity, and especially by two practices that characterized this recovery; the gathering and manipulation of commonplaces, and the rhetorical discipline of arguing ?in utramque partem?. Schiffman makes the point, quite persuasively, that the latter induced a skeptical cast of mind which undermined the normative intent of the former. Indeed, the simple fact of taking statements out of context deprived them of stability and coherence and forced writers to invent new frames within which the commonplaces could be related. In successive chapters Schiffman describes the ways authors met the challenge of organising information while attempting to find some principle of truth or wisdom. (?) ?On the Threshold of Modernity? is carefully documented, and pays close attention to chronology and biography. (?) Schiffman?s book deserves a wide audience.? (JOHN D. LYONS in Renaissance Quarterly, 1993, pp.384-385)."

Keywords: 9780801842092