PIPE Workshop: Steven Pfaff (Chapman University)

The Renaissance is widely understood to have been a period of intense cultural innovation in Europe laying the groundwork for the subsequent emergence of self-sustaining economic growth and the bureaucratic state.

The Renaissance movement began in northern and central Italy in the 14th Century but only gradually spread northward in the 16th Century. We focus here on a concrete indicator of the Renaissance's reach: buildings built according to new Renaissance principles. The spread of the Renaissance faced resistance for several reasons. First, Gothic construction techniques and styles were popular and well-entrenched in Northern and Central Europe. Second, Gothic architecture in the late medieval era was itself innovative and forward-looking. Third, adopting Renaissance building styles required substantial financial and human capital investment.

We offer a theory of cultural diffusion to account for the spread of the Renaissance across the length and breadth of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). To do our analysis, we constructed a data set of nearly 600 cities in the HRE, measuring the timing of the first Renaissance known building constructed in this style. Beginning at the end of the 15th Century, we show that improved communication through printing and post, the expanding Northern Humanist intellectual network, the reallocation of assets in the wake of the Reformation, and the desire for rulers to emulate Renaissance style led to the rapid diffusion of the new architecture in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire.

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