Thirty-five years ago Robert Lopez, by his own description, “narrowly escaped lynching” at the hands of non-economic historians for proposing that economic depression was a fundamental cause of the cultural outpouring of the Renaissance (Lopez, 1953). Several years later, Lopez took heart that, despite “their occasional retard,” cultural historians were coming round to his view (Lopez and Miskimin, 408-09). Today, the situation is nearly reversed. A growing number of economic historians no longer subscribe to the depression thesis while most non-economic historians do. I will not speculate about whose “retardation” is to blame, but would like to take stock of some issues raised by the depression debate—a debate that transcends economic issues and raises important questions about definitions, periodization, and the cultural implications of economic conditions.

“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.

A product of the later Renaissance, a writer on behalf of the Counter Reformation but still “an inhabitant of Machiavelli's moral universe” (Skinner, 1; 249), Botero was remarkably precocious in observing and thinking about population issues and their relationship with economic conditions.

Sometime in the later 1590s Justus Lipsius and one of his Louvain students had a nice conversation about sewers. The student thought the topic comic and stifled a giggle, but Lipsius soon set him straight. The sewers of ancient Rome had been as physically imposing as any other great Roman artifact. Moreover—and more important to the student of history—they were directly linked with the other artifacts and institutions that had provided the material basis for Rome's uniquely splendid civilization, with its powerful armies, Stoic philosophy, and inimitable literature. Only a full study of the material life of ancient Rome could explain the continuous population growth that had enabled the city to expand so far and last so long. The two of them were off, happily embarked on a long inquiry into the secret and public means that Rome had used to enlarge its population, encourage trade, and avoid corruption over the many centuries between Romulus and the Antonines (Lipsius, 161-63).