The Renaissance of Alberto Tenenti (1924-2002) : intellectual portrait of a Franco-Italian historian

To mark the tenth anniversary of Alberto Tenenti's death, the Collège de France, where two of his teachers, Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, taught, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he spent most of his career, and Florida State University, where one of his former students now teaches, have decided to pay tribute to one of the greatest historians of the Renaissance economy, culture and the state. Participants in the study days organized to mark this anniversary will reconstruct Alberto Tenenti's intellectual itinerary, based on the filial yet demanding relationships he forged early on with Delio Cantimori and Lucien Febvre, who persuaded this philosopher by training, the latter persuaded this philosopher, who had come to Paris after the Second World War to study Diderot's philosophy, to turn to history and the Renaissance, before his intellectual and personal proximity to Fernand Braudel linked him closely to the intersecting destinies of the VIe section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the "Annales". A first-rate testimony to Franco-Italian cultural exchanges in the field of history during the second half of the 20th century, Alberto Tenenti's highly original work - centered on a Mediterranean that is not the same as Fernand Braudel's, and whose center of gravity is Venice - will be "revisited" by historians of today, focusing on certain fields in which he was a pioneer and remains a master, such as attitudes to death or the social construction of the sense of time and space. More generally, we'll be emphasizing the link that, like Lucien Febvre, Alberto Tenenti always maintained between the study of material civilization, and first and foremost economics - he was, for example, a recognized specialist in the history of marine insurance - and that of Renaissance cultures and sensibilities in all their expressions, from the humblest Venetian notarial deeds to the frescoes of Pisa's Campo Santo or Montaigne's Essays, magnificently evoked in his masterwork on The Meaning of Death and the Love of Life.