The Strictly Woven History. Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in the Thought of Gentile and De Ruggiero

This study examines the historical narratives of Giovanni Gentile and Guido De Ruggiero, focusing on their respective interpretations of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation. While Benedetto Croce famously presented these three movements as metaphors for political and cultural progress or regression, Gentile and De Ruggiero provided the historiographical scaffolding that shaped and contextualised Croce’s thesis. Drawing on Gentile’s Storia della filosofia italiana and successive editions of Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento, alongside De Ruggiero’s Sommario di storia della filosofia and Rinascimento, Riforma e Controriforma, this article reconstructs their historical outlooks. Despite political divergence – Gentile’s alignment with Fascism and De Ruggiero’s liberalism – their historical narratives reveal a shared emphasis on the Renaissance as a philosophical turning point. Grounded in his theory of actualism, Gentile highlighted the intellectual dimension of the Renaissance, whereas De Ruggiero emphasised its moral dimension and clarified the significance of the Reformation as a formative moment in modern European thought. Through comparative analysis, the study elucidates how both thinkers reinterpreted early modern intellectual history to articulate complementary visions of modernity.