Oral History Interview with Paul Grendler

JOHN TORTORICE: Well, I guess we're in business. So. Well, today is January, 12th 2022. I'm John Tortorice, director emeritus of the Mosse program at UW Madison, and I'm delighted and honored to welcome Paul F. Grendler professor emeritus of history, at the University of Toronto, to the Mosse oral history project. Professor Grendler, received his Doctorate in history, in 1964, under the direction of George L. Mosse. Thank you so much. Paul, if I may for agreeing to do this.

PAUL GRENDLER: I'm happy to do it.

JOHN TORTORICE: Great, so we'll start at the beginning. When and where were you born?

PAUL GRENDLER: I was born on May 24 1936. It's a while ago, in a little town called Armstrong, Iowa population 700 and I'm, my ancestors were really very modest. My grandparents on my father's side came from Silesia, which is now part of Poland between sometime between 1880 and 1890. My grandparents on my mother's side came from Luxembourg sometime between 1890 and 1900. I don't really know the dates. My parents were really, were not very wealthy. They were really blue collar etc. one interesting thing about my, both my parents. They both taught one-room country schools in counties in Northern Iowa, as adults. My father, did it from 1924 until 1942 that's 18 years and my mother did it from 1926 to 1935. Neither never had the opportunity to go to university. But you could do this sort of teaching. If you had an extension course, which is a few weeks of training in the, in the summer and then they sort of turn you Loose. And my father stopped doing this in 1942 because it's simply no longer supported a family. It just didn't earn enough. They married in 1935 and by 1942 they had two sons and a third child on the way. So he became a school custodian, which meant that he was in charge of cleaning the school and running the boiler, you have a boiler license to do that, you know, these gigantic places that burnt coal to produce steam to heat the building and all that sort of thing. So I grew up in a whole bunch of small towns. The smallest had 150 people, the largest had 00:03:00a magnificent total of thousand people. And I graduated from high school in Greene, Iowa has three Es in it, northern part of the state, not too far from the Minnesota border. It had a population of 1,300 now has a population of about 1,000. I got my high school diploma in 1953. I started college at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. Why Loras College, well, two reasons, first because it was Catholic and my parents were Catholic. Second the awfully competitive examination in which the reward was a was free tuition. And so one spring morning. I went down to Waterloo, a bigger town and along with, about 50, other students wrote an exam for about 3 hours. And the same thing happened in a half dozen other places in Northern Iowa and I assume Southern Wisconsin and so forth and I was very fortunate in that. I was one of the six winners which meant free tuition. Now free tuition was only, tuition was only three hundred dollars, but it's still meant a great deal to my parents. I should explain that even when I was in high school. It was always a given that I and my two brothers would go to college. I mean, they didn't have the opportunity, but they were determined that we would. So in addition to going to high school and so forth. I also had jobs before and after school and later on so did my two younger brothers. So I started school college, at Loras, the fall of 1953. My parents very sensibly, thought I should study to become a certified public accountant because I was very good at math. I didn't want to do that. All I really wanted to do is to play the piano and I also played the trombone. So I became a music major. And that seemed to go fairly well. Then my piano teacher and I thought that I needed to broaden my horizons and go to a Conservatory of Music. And so, I did I played a tape. I played a Beethoven Piano Sonata and applied to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. And to my surprise, they accepted me. So, I left Loras College in 1956 and began studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the fall of 1956. One of the great things about conservatories, is you meet all sorts of very, very good musicians, young musicians play, all sorts of 00:06:00instruments and you learn very quickly, how good you are not, and I realize, I really wasn't that good. I didn't have a good ear. That is I didn't have perfect pitch. I didn't have particularly good relative pitch, either. I realized that my career would be as a high school music teacher, which is a very honorable profession, but I didn't think it was for me. I'm not sure. I would not have been very good at dealing with a bunch of teenagers, leading them in a chorus or band. So, I transferred to Oberlin College. I wasn't sure what I wanted to study. It was either history or english. I'd always had an interest in history when I was in Greene, Iowa in high school, the public library. Got one by one, the six volumes of Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War and I read them as it came out. Whole books, even the appendices. I enjoyed it. So I always had an interest in history. So I opted for history then in my senior year at Oberlin, George Kren, he by the way, is the first of the three George's I'm going to talk about George Kren. Was there on a one-year appointment while he finished his dissertation to substitute for somebody who was on leave and I took three courses with him. One was a survey of European history in the 19th to 20th century. Another one was a seminar on historiography, which I enjoyed. And the third was a reading course in which I did a, I wrote a paper on the clerical fascist regime of Austria in the 1920s And 1930s. You know that George Kren came from Austria, I'm sure. And that he and his sister and later the rest of the family escaped in 1938 and then came to the United States, etc. You probably know all this. I'm going to say one other thing about Oberlin before I talk about applying to graduate school. I continued to have jobs all the way through my undergraduate years, my last two years. I was a waiter at the Oberlin Inn. Now, they hired about 16 to 20 students to be their waiters, waiters and waitresses, men and women. And this was part of the operation of their of their restaurant. What we got were tips. And of course, we pooled the tips. And every 00:09:00year they elected, that is the waiters themselves elected someone to be the co-head waiter. We had to have two, because always had to be true because the schedule is so complex, and for my senior year, they elected me co-head waiter at the Oberlin Inn. I know this sounds crazy. But I'm really proud of that. I mean I've been president of three scholarly organizations, but I think the one that meant the most was being elected co-head waiter anyway and my job, by the way, was to do the scheduling which was sometimes complex. The other thing about Oberlin, I'm going to mention is even though George Kren was really a historian of modern Europe, Modern Germany, to be particular. I developed an interest in the Reformation in my last year or so at Oberlin and this was because at that time, there was a Protestant, I've forgotten the denomination Graduate School of Theology on campus with a few graduate students in Theology and they had their own library, and it was a quiet place to study. So I go over there and study and the main reading room, their main room really. There are a whole lot of standard works on the Protestant Reformation and I started reading it and found them interesting. So I really wanted to study something having to do with the Protestant Reformation. The other thing about my preparation is this, as I knew I needed more language preparation and I had two years of Latin at Loras and one year of French at Oberlin and so, in the summer of 1959, when I graduated, I stayed at Oberlin for the summer. I worked full-time at the Oberlin Inn that summer and I took an intense course in German, two hours of the morning plus homework and all that sort of thing. So that was really my preparation for going to Wisconsin now. Kren recommended that I go to Wisconsin to study with George Mosse. I had no idea who George Mosse was and I wasn't bright enough to look up his works at that time. But George Kren strongly recommended that I go there. I applied to four or five different places. And I think I was turned down by one and accepted by two or three others, and I was accepted by Wisconsin and above all, they gave me a non-resident tuition remission, which meant that I didn't have to pay a non-resident tuition, and tuition and state resident, which really, they made it into was really almost nothing. I was very grateful for that and I'm very grateful that Mosse accepted me. I sometimes wonder why, I 00:12:00have very mixed record to put it mildly, but I assume, it was George Kren's letter and maybe the Oberlin undergraduate training that got me. Anyway, I got there. So I arrived at Madison in the fall of 1959. Mosse, did not do a seminar in the fall semester. So I signed up for Henry Hill's seminar and it was on the French Revolution. You know, that Mosse and Hill were great friends.

JOHN TORTORICE: Yes.

PAUL GRENDLER: And I also took Hill's course. On the, French history of some sort and that worked out very well. There's some very good historians who did French history in his seminar, [unclear] they're all very competent. They never, none of them ever became famous. My introduction to Mosse was in the first of his four semester sequence. What did he call it? I think he called it the Cultural History of Western Europe or something like that.

JOHN TORTORICE: That's correct. Yes. The first one I think 1500, Europe in 1500, something like that. Yes.

PAUL GRENDLER: Which was on the 16th century. Which was what I wanted to study and they were exciting lectures. He talked about Calvin, he talked about Luther, he talked about popular piety. He talked about the Baroque synthesis, all of which was really exciting and very interesting. And he was also really up-to-date. I remember some time in that first semester. He mentioned Annales school of French historians. Now, this is 1959 and I'm not sure that many historians in North America knew what the Annales people were like, but he knew them. And another small story, at one point he said something about Luther that I just didn't believe he said, Luther said this or was his influenced by the mystics or something like that. That this is totally new to me and I said, can this be right? Does he really know what he's talking about? So at noon when the lecture was over as they're getting lunch, I dashed over to Memorial Library and looked up the sources this, in translation, of course. And I discovered, yeah, he had read the sources. And yes, you could read Luther in this fashion. So after that, I didn't skip lunch. I took his word for it.

JOHN TORTORICE: So what was Madison like when you arrive there, what was the recreation of the history Department?

PAUL GRENDLER: Oh, I think it was, I believed it was one of the three or four, best history departments in North America. One of the reasons why I'm surprised 00:15:00they accepted me and they had some pretty famous people. You can just think of it. Well, the Americans were very famous. I'm going to jump ahead a bit. Well, I'll come back to this when we talk about 1967-68. I'll talk to you then about what Bill O'Neill had to say about the department. But, yes, it was a very well-known department and the the graduate students that I knew were eager willing, high speed, whatever term you want to use. It was also the people on the studies on the left. I didn't know them very well personally, but I knew they were there and they gave a kind of left-wing excitement to the campus. I mean, you could get into arguments. Well, we'd like calling them discussion, you could call them arguments in the Rathskeller on Marxism, what America should do, the Cold War anytime you wanted to. And so I found it very, very stimulating and I roomed with a couple of other, at one point 3 other graduate students. We sort of had a whole floor of a, in an old house on I think was Johnson Street. I think that entire area was later transformed into university buildings but at that time there were a number of rooming houses. And one year, I lived with someone who studying French history with Hill, and two political scientists. So we had very good discussions. So it was really quite exciting, at least it was to me, and could I go on to the first semester? The first seminar I had with Mosse?

JOHN TORTORICE: Yes. Yes. Yes, I think talking a bit about what he what he was like in those seminars and the broad range of students. What kind of what kind of teacher was he?

PAUL GRENDLER: It was the second semester of my first year there. And it was a dissertation seminar. That is he had some people were writing chapters on their dissertation and he's trying to get them finished. Get them pushed through. So it had a very mixed group of students. Cy Drescher was finishing, writing chapters on [unclear]. And Sterling Fishman was doing his thesis on the Munich revolution of 1919. And Margaret Donovan was writing on [unclear]. They were pretty formidable people actually for a beginning graduate student. And the new people, newcomers, were Bob Soucy. He already had a master's degree, I think from Kansas, but he was just starting at Wisconsin and you know, he went on to write several books on the French fascists in the 1930s. And, um, let me see, I 00:18:00think Stanley Grossman was there. Those are the names that I remember. Eugene McGee was there. I don't think he ever finished. I'm not sure he ever started studying with Mosse, but he was in the seminar. And so the papers were on a practically anything, you can imagine, and the discussion just flew back and forth, whether it was the Munich Revolution, or Marxist Humanism [unclear], and then maybe something on the 16th century. It was very exciting. And to be honest. I was just trying to keep up. And Mosse, this was in his home, of course, and he served beer, and I think it was someone there who really wasn't very eagerly drinking beer. And I think Mosse said drink up, it's very nourishing, drink your beer or something like that. Mosse sort of sat back in the big chair with his pipe and he would usually choose another student to begin the discussion. We had to submit our papers in advance. So everyone has a chance to read the papers in advance. You came primed to discuss the paper and primed to find fault with it. That was the spirit of it, the idea was that you presented a paper which tried to say something new. And then the other members of the seminar would question you and pick apart whatever was missing or didn't seem right to them. So you're going to defend your paper and Mosse would choose somebody to start the discussions. You did somebody who we figured knew something about the topic or maybe just chosen at random I don't know. And we would go, and it was very stimulating. You learn to defend yourself. You learn to defend your paper. And I think was very excellent training. I don't know if it would work for everybody. He said something like this in his memoir, but it works for the people that I knew and the people that were in the seminar because I think most of us were fairly self driven. We wanted to impress, of course, in my case. I knew I had to do well and also get A's if I was to continue graduate school because I didn't have any money. That was the way it was and I don't know exactly. Oh. Early on, we knew that as graduate students, not only his students, but others who knew that he was concentrating his attention on the 19th and 20th Century, even though he was very well-equipped and very learned on 16th century reformation and all that sort of thing. We knew at that time, that he really 00:21:00switched his research interests. And you could tell because topics in the 19th and 20th Century seemed to really excite him a bit more than talking about the Reformation. I don't know does this help to answer your question?

JOHN TORTORICE: Yes. Well during your time there, Paul. I know that the Culture of Western Europe was published, that textbook.

PAUL GRENDLER: Yes, published until 1961 right after he finished, in my case, the four semesters. And so it must have occurred after the four semesters. Cause the book was not available in the second semester of my second year there because the, it was all new to us. And when the Culture of Western Europe came out naturally, I read it and the curious sort of thing, I was a bit disappointed because the lectures, hearing the lecturers was really more exciting than reading them. I don't know. I realize that's a common reaction. That was my feeling and they were perfectly good. They were good in print but it was really more fun to hear them and see the interaction. Anyway.

JOHN TORTORICE: Well, he was a great teacher as you, well know, he, very, very challenging and and he made you participate and capture interest. I think he.. education, entertainment to some extent.

PAUL GRENDLER: Another reason that we knew that his interests had switched in my second year, there. This would be 61 his article in the Journal of the history of ideas. Entitled, the Mystical Origins of National Socialism. Now, I had to look up the title, but I remembered reading it when I was there, it came out in the Journal of the history of ideas. In fact, I first learned of it because there was a big box of the offprints in his office. You realize, at that time, TAs didn't have their own offices. So they use Mosse's, I used Mosse's office later as a TA in the second year, which I'll talk about next. And I saw the articles there and the offprints and I took one for myself, and read it. So we knew that his Interest really had shifted his research into the 19th and especially the [unclear]. And if I remember correctly, the early history of ideas article was a first go at some of the material that occurred in the, what what the the Crisis of German ideology, which appeared a few years later. You 00:24:00can probably check this. That's what I remember.

JOHN TORTORICE: So in your field, the culture the Europe in the 16th century wasn't published until a little later but he had written of course on the Reformation, Luther. So it, he did have a lot of resonance with the work that you ended up doing. ,PAUL GRENDLER: Mosse and [unclear], [unclear] and Mosse, whatever it was on the Reformation was a very good textbook. I never used it in my courses because it never quite fit because I mostly taught Renaissance and that's really a book on the Reformation. But it's a good text and we did that little survey called the Reformation as well. I don't know if I read that, Mosse and [unclear] came out later. The Reformation thing I think came out, I don't know if I read at that time or not. Can I jump ahead to Summer of 1960? Oh, I started my Master's thesis that first year. The only language I could really handle was French. I went to Memorial Library to the rare book room, Mosse may have encouraged this, probably did, and they had a good collection of French historical pamphlets French pamphlets of the late 16th and early 17th century that dealt with views about the French Wars of religion. This is around 1570s to about the 1630s, they had good collection of them and I started reading in them and I came up with a Master's thesis topic, which is on [unclear]. These dates were 1541 to 1630 and he was a French Neo-stoic, and with a particular slant on the French War of religion. And the same time, a neo-stoic philosopher. And I started studying him, and that was to be my Master's thesis topic. And I did my first paper on [unclear] in Mosse's seminar in the second semester. Another thing about Mosse as a seminar director, sorry I'm going back and forth a bit. He really got after us. He would ask in the seminar: have you passed this test? Have you passed your German exam, etc, etc. At that time, everybody in European history had to pass a French exam and a German exam and being very bold and foolish. When I first arrived in the September of 1959, I tried both exams and I failed both of the exams. So I took a German course in addition, to my other courses and took german courses the first semester and the second semester to improve my German. And when he asked around, in the second semester have you 00:27:00passed your german exam. I was happy to say, yes in January of 1960 I passed my german exam maybe that helped. I don't know. And I passed the French exam, the following fall. So I really tried to get those out of the way. Now, back to the summer of 1960, instead of being a good boy and finishing my MA thesis. I had enough money, barely enough to buy a very cheap airline ticket, that enabled me to fly I think Chicago to Paris. And I bought a youth hostel pass. And so I spent the summer of 1960 hitchhiking around Europe, France, Spain, Germany and above all, Italy, oh and I even got to Yugoslavia, and Italy. And I really loved Italy. Arrived in Turin. I hitchhiked from Paris on a truck. And I loved it. And then, I hitchhiked all the way down to Rome, Florence, back up to Venice etcetera. It was just so exciting because you would simply walk down the streets and the history is all around you. And, you know, Italian. I knew that I really wanted to study the Italian Renaissance. I just had immediate empathy for it I suppose, that's the right term. Couple other things about being that summer. At that time. Berlin was not yet divided by the wall. This is 1960. However, there was East Germany and West Germany in order to get to Berlin in your hitchhiking. I had to find a ride with somebody at the Bavarian border with East Germany who was driving all the way to Berlin because you couldn't get off the Autobahn. And so, I found somebody willing to take me there. And so I hitchhiked to Berlin and at that time. You could go back and forth between East and West Germany. You could not go to [unclear]. That was outside the city limits. You needed special permission, which is very, very difficult to get. But there were students from East Berlin there, and I remember one evening sitting outdoors with some American students and some students from East Berlin. The street was named [unclear]. I'll say it was one of those big streets in which the East German government had, put up large apartment buildings for the workers. In sort of, I don't know what you call brutalist modern style. We're sitting outside, arguing the merits of east and west and all that sort of thing in what was pretty bad German and not perfect English. And I was trying to make the point that the West 00:30:00was freer and the East German students say, oh, no, no, we're totally free etc. In order to make my point. I raise my voice and started to say Ulbricht ist ein narr which is Ulbricht, the leader is a fool, and they asked me to be quiet. So I made my point. I mean, that's the sort of thing we did as students. It seems kind of foolish now. But it was, it was interesting. It was exciting. Okay, I go back to Madison second year. I finished my dissertation, but I also became mosse's teaching assistant for the Western Civ course. And at the very first meeting, I think about four of us who were TAs. He looked at me and said, you are the administrative assistant and I said, yes, because Mr. Mosse, I had no idea what the administrative assistant was. All I knew, is it meant one less quiz section, which is fine. I learned that what it meant is, you dealt with the nuts and bolts of the matters. That is one of the TAs has a terrible room, so it's my job to find him a better room, and all sorts of things like that, student wanted to transfer from one section to another, and it was interesting. Of course. I was a TA which meant that I attended the lectures and did my quiz sections as well. One story from that which you might find amusing, and this occurred in January, 1961 at the end of the first semester. At that time, the academic year was different from what it now is. The first semester didn't end until about two or three weeks into January. And the final exam was really about the third week in January, give or take. And the exam schedule was announced in early January, right after the students came back. And Mosse told me, I was going to office hours the next day using his office that you're going to have a parade of students who are going to come up with every possible excuse not to do the exam at the required time. And he said don't give any excuses, don't accept any excuse they all have to do it at the exact time. I said, yes, Mr. Mosse. So, I arrived the next day. I didn't know what he's talking about. I was using Mosse's office and there was a long line down the hallway around the corner, etc. in Bascom of students lined up to talk to me to ask if they could postpone the exam. What was going on is there seems to be a culture especially on Langdon 00:33:00street in the Fraternities and Sororities, that if you could skip the regular scheduled exam and take the makeup exam you'd have a better chance of doing well because you have a good idea what the exam was. I don't think that's true. But I think that was the culture. Anyway, I heard every excuse you could imagine. The student who came in and said, I can't come to the exam. Why not? Cuz my grandmother's going to die and I say, well that's two weeks from now, how do you know your grandma's going to die on the day of the exam? I just now she's going to die. Okay. I said, no, you can't do it. I was there for about 45 minutes hearing all these excuses. Getting very kind of short tempered. And a young woman came in. And she says, I can't make the exam on January 20th, and I said, why not? And she said because I have an invitation to the inaugural ball. Remember this is January 1961, and I said, hold it. She reached into her purse and drew out a big white envelope that said the White House on the outside. I opened it and it said, president-elect and Mrs. Kennedy had the honor of inviting Jane Smith or whatever it was to the inaugural ball at such and such a hotel such and such a time etc.. She really did have an invitation to the inaugural ball. I talked to her, it appears that her father had worked for the Kennedy campaign in Wisconsin. And as a reward, she and her family were able to go to Washington for the inaugural celebrations. Well, Mosse said don't accept any excuses, but I realized this was not a something that a TA should decide. So I talked to her, I said I'll talk to Professor Mosse and we'll see about this. So the next day I did, I explained the circumstances. He laughed and said let her go. It has a coda. One of my jobs was to proctor the final exam, the makeup exam because even when you say no to all the people who want an extension, you know can make the exam there always are in the middle of January and Madison a couple people who catch pneumonia, and that sort of thing. So my job was to proctor the handful of students didn't make the exam including this young woman and after it was over I asked her how was the inaugural ball and she just lit up. It was obviously the most exciting thing that ever happened in her young life. So that was kind of fun.

JOHN TORTORICE: So you you then were what, the only student really doctoral student working in specifically, in Italian history at that time? And the topic 00:36:00of your thesis was Anton Francesco Doni, the critic. Did you choose that or was that George?

PAUL GRENDLER: That was Giorgio Spini.

JOHN TORTORICE: Oh, yes, Giorgio Spini.

PAUL GRENDLER: Yes now. My third year there, 1961-61 Mosse was on leave. And Giorgio Spini substituted for him the first semester. Giorgio, he was a very unusual man. Absolutely brilliant historian. Well known famous, in Italy. And he spoke excellent English. Why? He told me, Spini did, that his father was an anglophile. So his father insisted that Giorgio and his siblings learn English when they grew up instead of French, which was the normal language was taught in the Italian school. Italian schools didn't really teach much English at all. You learned Italian, Latin. etc., and if you did a foreign language, you did, usually, Italian [French?]. Or during the fascist era in which he grew up when he went to high school maybe they would learn German. I don't know, Spini was a very unusual guy. He was a socialist and that's not unusual, committed socialist, and he was also a Waldensian, now who are Waldensians? It's a Protestant group whose roots go back to Middle Ages. I know that's complicated and I will explain it. But he's a Protestant living in Italy. A very Catholic country. If you like, religions in Italy at the time were either Catholicism or Marxism. Well, he was a Marxist, but he was not a Catholic, he was a Waldensian. And he was an absolutely great historian. He wrote books on the 16th century and the 17th century and the 19th century. All about Italy, and he wrote a book about Puritan thought in North America. The title of the book was the autobio- I'm giving it to you in English rather than the Italian, The Autobiography of a Young America. It was a study of Puritan thought, especially Puritan historical thought in the 17th century up to about 1776 and thereabouts, he was absolutely fascinated with puritan thought, that should ring a bell with you. You remember the holy pretense.

JOHN TORTORICE: Yes.

PAUL GRENDLER: I don't know how Mosse and Spini got together, but they knew each 00:39:00other. I don't know how or why, but one of the reasons is that Spini appreciated and understood Mosse's Holy Pretense and I think that's how they got together and Spini praised the book. Actually, I'll add one other thing to this before, getting on to Spini as a teacher. Because it's kind of interesting. He wrote the book on colonial America, the Puritans all that, in Italian, it was never translated into English. But there was a rave review of it in the American Historical Review. I found out this later and eventually I came I met Winton Solberg who was a Colonial American historian at the University of Illinois. Probably the only American historian of the colonial period who read Italian and he did the review in the American Historical Review of Spini's book. He said it was a superb book, so that's probably how Spini and Mosse got together. He substituted for Mosse, and he's a very brilliant lecturer and I was his assistant as well. Why? Because I was the only student in the department, who knew anything about Italy. I think I graded papers for Spini. I looked up references for him because he was doing a textbook on Modern Europe, in Italian. I checked references for him. I would mail things going the post office. But my most important job was to help Spini through the maze of a North American University, I'd meet him in the morning at his office after he'd been at home for a couple days and his mailbox would be full of pieces of paper and he said Paul what do I do with this? And so we'd go through the pieces of paper and I explain this one came from the dean, but you can throw away, or this one is an invitation to speak from a student group. And I explained what the student group was and that sort of thing, and he was very grateful and he really did want to talk to students and he met with a fair number of groups and so forth. He even wrote a little book after his year in Madison in Italian called America in 1962. Which had some interesting things to say and it's sort of hinted at the restlessness of young people from, this is 1962 or thereabouts. Anyway, Spini gave me the thesis topic of, the topic on Anton Francesco Doni. I should explain when I came back from Italy after the summer hitchhiking around Europe. In 00:42:00addition to my Graduate Studies and TAship, I also started beginning Italian courses. And I took an Italian course that summer, that, that fall I did I did about three-and-a-half to four years of Italian courses. Well, I knew I had to improve my Italian. This is my last two years at Wisconsin and fortunately I already had a couple semesters of Italian, making some progress in the seminar paper I did for Spini was my first crack at trying to understand Doni, and he was very charitable in my work. What else would you like to know?

JOHN TORTORICE: Well before we move on from from Spini, I once, he said once that when he was in Madison, he recalled the fierce winds and the huge steaks but yes.

PAUL GRENDLER: Oh, I want to say a couple other things about Spini which might interest you. Gian Napoleone Orsini taught in Madison in the Comparative Lit Department, I think it was and I had a course with him on the Italian Renaissance. I'm talking Renaissance Literature. And again, he was very generous with me and my wife Marcella because we were just sort of beginning, at least I was just beginning Italian. Spini and Orsini got together. They were both from Italy, Orsini was older. He left after the second World War, he was totally disgusted with the Italian scene in some way fashion or other, and he was very distinguished. He wrote a very big book on Benedetto Croce and he wrote a number of other books. And what I learned indirectly from both Orsini and Spini at one time or another, is that they were both in the opposition to Fascism. Not the armed opposition, carrying guns, etc. but in the opposition behind the scenes in the late 1930s, and in the 1940s except they didn't know each other at the time and they did different things, I mean Orsini was a courier carrying messages back and forth from Rome to Milan. Somehow he had reason to go back and forth and Spini was in Florence. And after, when they'd talk about their experiences except of course, the both of them told me that they disagreed in politics, Italian politics Spini was on the left. He was socialist, and Orsini, I think 00:45:00was a bit bit more conservative. So they didn't agree in politics, but they did agree on a lot of other things. I think. So, it must have been, kind of interesting to them to get together. Sorry.

JOHN TORTORICE: Yes, so you received your doctorate in 1964, who was on your committee, besides Professor Mosse.

PAUL GRENDLER: Spini, not Spini, excuse me, George Mosse, Gaines Post. Now Gaines Post was the medievalist there at the time, distinguished scholar in medieval law studies, and he was tasked with giving me a course on the Italian Renaissance except he really didn't agree that the Italian Renaissance ever existed. He was very much a student of Charles Homer Haskins, now he literally was. Haskins wrote a infamous or famous book take your choice that said the real Renaissance was the 12th century and he wrote very disparagingly about the Italian Renaissance. He said it never really existed, it just repeated what they did in the 12th century and all that sort of stuff. Gaines Post was really in that school. So he had to give a course on the Italian Renaissance, which I took and frankly he was a terrible lecturer and he didn't really believe in the topic. So he was on the dissertation committee. There was somebody I think from the Philosophy department, by the way, I did a minor, not in history, but in philosophy, which meant the history of philosophy and I did four courses on philosophy. I did a course on medieval philosophy under Julius Weinberg who's well known, of course, on 19th century philosophers, which we read Marx, and the others and Schopenhauer, a course on Hegel and I took a fourth course, I forgot what it was, anyway. I had the bright idea since I'm specializing in the Italian Renaissance. That I'd love to do a reading course in Renaissance philosophy. So I gathered together the texts, which I wanted to read, and I went to Professor Weinberg and said, I'd like to do a course in Renaissance Philosophy as a reading course with you. I knew he should know this material and he said, no, you have to get permission from the chair of the department. I eventually figured out that this was a device to try to avoid reading courses. That's what I figured out. Anyway, I went to the chair and presented the, my request and the books I wanted to read in Renaissance philosophy, and he just sneered at the idea. He said there was no philosophy in the Renaissance. That was a fairly common idea. The idea was that philosophy jumped from the late Middle Ages to Descartes, so, there was no real philosophy in the Middle Ages, I'm sorry, in 00:48:00the Renaissance and he denied my request. So, instead, I think I took the course of Hegel, which was kind of fun, but still, I got my revenge, if you like years later, I contributed to the Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy, a very good volume, which proved I think beyond the dollar, it was 800 pages on what was Renaissance philosophy. So that's just, the point of all this was the Renaissance reading wasn't a very big topic in North America. Medieval history did very well, but Renaissance really was something new, and the people that created the Italian Renaissance studies in North America were the great German Jewish refugee scholars. Mosse was one kind of refugee scholar, but he really wasn't interested in the Renaissance. But the people who created the field were Hans Baron, who never really held a long-term position in American academic, academic life, because he has very serious hearing problem, illness, which caused a loss of hearing used a hearing aid, had problems, but he's wonderful scholar and everybody read his books. He wrote a very famous book called the Crisis of the Early Renaissance in 1955. And he was at the Newberry Library. He also did seminars here in there and so forth. I've actually met him, and then there was Paul Oskar Kristeller at Columbia University who again came from Germany via Italy and was a very distinguished Renaissance philosopher and there was Felix Gilbert who did a book on Machiavelli and Giucciardini. So it's people like [unclear] in art history, these people like this who created the field. And I also used too ask a trick question of my students when I did my upper level, my new senior or third, and fourth year, as they called it, the Toronto course in the Italian Renaissance, which two political figures inadvertently created the field or had a huge influence on Renaissance, Italian Renaissance studies in North America. It's a trick question. And the answers are of course Adolf Hitler and William Fulbright, because the Fulbright act enabled people like me and many others of my generation to go to Italy to study, to write our dissertations. Anyway, that's probably enough about that, but it was..JOHN TORTORICE: That's fascinating.

PAUL GRENDLER: I met Kristeller and Gilbert as well in the course of my career mostly after I finished my studies at Wisconsin, and they were influential on me and everybody else because I read their books, I was influenced by what they thought. Because the first article substantial article I sent to what is now called Renaissance quarterly, Kristeller read it and said it was okay. And that's sort of influence and they were very generous young scholars. Sorry. Go ahead.

JOHN TORTORICE: Did you make use of the Newberry Library? When you were doing your research?

PAUL GRENDLER: Oh, yeah. I went there for my research, for my master's thesis. And later, I, in 1964, the summer, after my first year, of teaching of Pittsburgh. I got a fellowship short-term grant really, to spend the summer of the Newberry libraries in the summer of 1964 before I went off to University of Toronto. And that's when I met Hans [unclear] because I think he, you know, he's on the committee, helped me get the fellowship but yeah oh yeah I did use a Newberry Library. I used it frequently over the years because their collection in my field was really superb.

JOHN TORTORICE: So that, is there anything else you want to say about the Madison years prior to getting your first job?

PAUL GRENDLER: Yeah, I will say one thing. This is not, It speaks very well of Mosse, and the way we looked at him and the care that he took for his students. I met my future wife, Marcella McMahon in the Calvinism seminar of Mosse. And I got the Fulbright probably because Spini and Mosse wrote letters my behalf. Now Marcella had her first two years of study at Madison, which she got her Master's Degree funded by the Woodrow Wilson fellowships. And she was promised a teaching assistantship when she would come back, now we got married in the summer of 1962. And I had the Fulbright and we went off to Italy in September of 1962. We spent a year 1962-63 in Italy which I research my dissertation on Anton Francesco Doni and Marcella was there as well. And she helped me at times and so 00:54:00forth. We both wanted to come back to Madison me to finish writing my dissertation for the year 1963-64. And Marcella for her third year of residence. But, and they gave me offered me an assistant, a TA ship, but they wouldn't give Marcella a TAship. And the reason was because we were married, we were supposed to live together on one, teaching assistantship, which, by the way didn't didn't pay very much. And I'd already borrowed money so the two of us could go to Italy for my Fulbright year, I think about a thousand dollars. I don't know what, the Fulbright paid, but it was enough for one person but not enough for two, would you have developed the very bad habit of eating three meals a day. So I wrote to Mosse from Italy saying basically help. I explained the situation and said, can you give me some help? Can you get me a job for the first year while I finish my dissertation and he came through and I got my teaching, the job as a lecturer without my dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh. He really was very thoughtful. He never said anything about the policy, as I understood in any way, in the department of history, but he went out of his way to help somebody, one of his students get a job at the University of Pittsburgh for one year. And I think the fact that Samuel Hayes who was then the chair at Pittsburgh, who Mosse knew from Iowa, was a chair at Pittsburgh, and Cy Drescher was teaching at Pittsburgh, probably helped as well. So Mosse was very, very helpful. I mean, our nick name for people like him. Our being graduate students was we call him a good provider. He was known. As a graduate director, who worked his tail off, to help his students get jobs. He really did, you know, something he really appreciated.

JOHN TORTORICE: You know, he once told me that he's basically stopped taking graduate students in 1972 because he couldn't do what he did for you and so many others that is, he couldn't place them. And he felt that to put students through such a rigorous, rigorous, education and not have something at the end for them to really. So he stopped in 72. He took a few more after that, but it was a very different time in the sixties in the humanities, wasn't it?

PAUL GRENDLER: I mean, I don't want to put it in loose terms, but practically everybody who got a PhD got a job at that time. And that sounds wonderful. I 00:57:00mean it wasn't that we were so great. We weren't but there were so many positions because universities were so expanding. This is true in Canada as well, I'll talk about that a bit later, I'll go on to 1967-68, if you like.

JOHN TORTORICE: Sure. Yes, that would be great.

PAUL GRENDLER: That was my last year at at Wisconsin. And that was a very different year. After I'd been Toronto for three years. I applied for a fellowship to The Institute for Research in the Humanities. I was in the process of turning my thesis into a book and I thought there would be a good place to do it. And so I went to, I got the fellowship and I was at the Institute for Research in Humanities in the academic year, 1967-68. And that was a pretty exciting year to use an understatement that was when the demonstrations against the Vietnam War really got started and the demonstrations against Dow Chemical, you know, that the building to which the Dow Chemical people came was very close to the old Observatory. And so we saw the students going there, and also the old Observatory, which was where the Institute for Research in the Humanities was, was on the route that students took, I think to the Ag building were Harvey Goldberg was lecturing. So I saw the students going. I, in my study saw all the students going back and forth to Harvey Goldman's lecture. Anyway, I was there. It was a very exciting year, partly because the student demonstrations, partly, because of the people who were at the institute at that time. And this really speaks to the quality of humanities departments at Wisconsin at that time. The prominent members of the Institute were Kenneth Setton who was the director who is a very distinguished medievalist. He later went on to [unclear] study. And then there was Friedrich or Fritz Solmsen, who was a famous classicist, again, someone who'd come from Germany and Emmett Bennett was there, again a classicist. He's one of the people who deciphered Linear B, that was the ancient Mycenaean script. It was so complicated. I think he also worked in the second world war decoding Japanese, even though he didn't know any Japanese and [unclear] in French was there as well. They didn't all show up every day, but Solmsen and Bennett and Setton were there every day. And we would have bagged 01:00:00lunches together. I was alone that year because Marcella my wife was then in Florence researching her dissertation. I actually flew there for a long Christmas break and came back and so forth. But anyway, it was, it was fun. It was really rubbing elbows with or languages with some pretty distinguished people. For example, at one point, Setton, who prided himself as being a good linguist, and he was started speaking Latin at our bag lunches, and he'd go around asking people questions in Latin and this was easy for. Solmsen and Bennett to respond. It was not easy for me and the couple of young scholars from from the University of Wisconsin who had years off with him, but we practically try to keep up with them and I managed to stammer out, some Latin and I decided I need to do something about this. So I took the, I immediately enrolled in a correspondence course in Cicero to try to keep up with these guys. The other exciting thing was, of course, these were the demonstrations. And at that time, I had a friend in the department of history Bill O'Neill, William L. O'Neill. Who later went on to Rutgers and became a pretty distinguished historian of 20th century American history. Bill was a friend because we shared an office at Pittsburgh in 1963-64 and now he was at Madison in the Department of History and he got his degree at Berkeley in 1963 and of course, the student demonstrations began at Berkeley before they came to Madison and other campuses. And Bill would sort of fill me in on what had happened at Berkeley, and sort of predict what was going to happen maybe that Madison as, well. I remember there was one very climactic, meaning of the entire faculty after the Dow chemical demonstrations, in which the entire faculty met to discuss what to do. And I think it had to do with what policies the administration should follow and a kind of referendum on the Dean, I don't remember all the details. I just remember that the whole faculty was there. I think we met in one of those big auditoriums and Bill said why don't you come along? So I did, even though I wasn't a member of the faculty and Mosse spoke and other people spoke. And it really sort of was memorizing, memorizing, mesmerizing to understand how these distinguished scholars Mosse and the others understood what was going on, Mosse understood very well. He gave us 01:03:00a statement and said, you know, this is, you can't deny this is because the war isn't going to end unless the war ends of something to that effect. Bill O'Neill also said something else that struck me at the tme, you know, he was a member of the department. I wasn't a member of the department. Although I was invited to the department lunches, which they met periodically for the whole department, but then the untenured would leave and so forth and that's when I left what Bill said of the time was at that time, there were three leaders on the department of History, Merrill Jensen, Merle Curti, and Mosse. They basically said if those three agreed on a policy usually the department would do it. That's all I can really tell you about how the department operated at that time.

JOHN TORTORICE: That's fascinating. So you, well, let's move on to your career. You've spent, you spent most of your career teaching at Toronto.

PAUL GRENDLER: The summer of 1964, while I was at Pittsburgh, I was applying for other positions because the Pittsburgh position was only one year. I knew that, I was substituting for somebody who was on leave and I got fortunate and I got the position at Toronto. Oh that reminds me. I defended my dissertation on a July day in 1964. It was scheduled in advance. It was the day after Goldwater gave his famous speech at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco saying, what was his first statement? Can you can you...

JOHN TORTORICE: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

PAUL GRENDLER: Right, right. Anyway, I'd been up practically all night watching the convention and so did everybody else on my committee? And I'm pretty sure that probably helped me in my defense because there were a couple of cracks that had more to do with Goldwater and current times in the 16th century. So I think we were all a bit hungover if you don't mind expression. Anyway, I passed. The University of Toronto. Toronto was undergoing a vast expansion before the 1960s it was a relatively small University, which taught Canadian history. Maybe one or two courses in American history. English history, of course, and medieval history. But they decided to expand and this was under a conservative government, which realized it was necessary for the good of Ontario for the 01:06:00economy, for the students for everybody. So they're in the midst of a vast expansion up to that point. All the professors in the department either gotten their degrees from the University of Toronto or from Oxford or one or two had gotten their degrees from Harvard. But the pipeline from Oxford had dried up and there weren't enough Harvardians to go around. So they had to do get people from United States. Places like Wisconsin and Berkeley and Ohio State and so far, my predecessor was an English scholar who went back to England after a year or two at Toronto, and decided to stay in England. So, they need an Italian Renaissance historian. I applied for the job, and I got the position. And what I basically did is teach in the Toronto equivalent of the Western Civ course, I lectured from on the periods in 1500 to the present something like that. I taught an upper level or another course team taught on early modern Europe from 1400-1815 and I did a course on the Italian Renaissance and frequently I did a course of my own choosing. I did a course on the history of censorship. Which is an outgrowth of a book that I did and that was a fun course. That was for what we call third and fourth year students, in American University, was junior and seniors. And, of course, I did a graduate seminar and took students in the Italian Renaissance. It was a very good department and had some very good friends in it. They had, it was very large department that time. The largest part was Canadian history of course, small American history, department, a very large European history starting the Middle Ages onwards and there was a good friend of mine, a colleague, who did Spanish history, and another colleague who really was supposed to a Frenchist but with also did Portuguese history and was fluent in Portuguese. And we used to get together and discuss things like what was going on in Italy, you know, this is a period of all sorts of things, demonstrations and outbreaks and the red brigades and so forth in Italy in the 1970s and was a period in which Spain, almost reverted to Fascism in 1975. And then there was Portugal. So we discussed these things, we had sort of a little club. It was also a period in which the University of Toronto press or rather, the people doing Renaissance studies. Mostly outside the history department 01:09:00embarked on something called the collected works of Erasmus, which is a gigantic enterprise, which is now public something like seventy five volumes of Erasmus' works in translation, and I was part of that. So it was a very exciting period. My graduate course was in Italian Renaissance studies. And the idea is that they hired all these young people being from the United States in order to make Toronto, a really important graduate center study in history for the country of Canada. And I had six students who finished their degrees in Italian Renaissance history under my direction. and at one point, four of them, taught Italian Renaissance, in English, Canadian universities. And one of them eventually took my position when I took early retirement in 1998, and I had a couple of American students and one of them now teaches in John Carroll University and the other was an American Jesuit. Who now teaches in the Jesuit university it's called [unclear] University in Rome. One of the reasons, he's also the vice Rector. One of the reasons is, he's very good at languages. He speaks English, fluent Italian, and fluent Spanish, which is ideal for the kind of studies he does. They all ended up being publishing scholars, some much more than others. This is really the product of their determination and their intelligence and their hard work. But I tried to help and I learned from Mosse basically, once a good student comes up with the dissertation topic, you help, but you get out of their way and then you try to help find them jobs and that I learned from Mosse and as I said it had more to do with them than with me, but they managed to do it. It got very difficult later on and I used to have a speech that I would tell students when they came to me and said, I want to study Italian Renaissance and graduate level. I said I would say to them yes, that's fine that's wonderful do it, if that's what you really want to do for the next four or five years more than anything else in your life, but don't count on any job in the academic world afterwards because it's just terrible if you still want to do it, okay. Know what you're getting into. And a couple of them did get into it, and did find jobs before it was difficult. So, I greatly understand more, what Mosse did.

JOHN TORTORICE: I think it now, it's very difficult as you know, it's really unfortunate. Well, let's get on to your research interests and what you've published in and the kind of larger questions that you explored in your research, over your lifetime.

PAUL GRENDLER: Well. My first book was really an expansion of my dissertation. My dissertation was on Anton Francesco Doni. The book was called critics of the Italian world and involved three authors, Doni, Ortensio Lando, and Nicolb Franco, all of whom were sort of critics of the Italian world of the 16th century. They didn't like humanism. They criticize Catholicism at the time. They didn't like the social structure. And it turned out they wrote book after book in vernacular in Italian rather than in Latin which appealed to a popular audience. In a way, I learned a bit from Mosse, remember in his early years in his later years. He was fascinated by the study of second-rate intellectuals because they really tell you what the people are thinking about or following etc., in the way Doni, Lando, and Franco were the equivalent of the kind of second rate intellectuals in Germany that were part of Mosse's studies. And so I studied them and wrote a book on on them. The reaction was kind of curious. The American reviewers, didn't know what what I was doing. They didn't really understand what I was doing because these people weren't important literary figures. So the Italian literature people didn't understand it. And the people in history said why study these guys? The Italian reviewers understood perfectly well what I was doing it became a pioneering work and now there's a whole industry thanks to the internet and so forth of there are now critical editions of all the works that I scrambled to find copies of in the libraries and sometimes I would buy a copy of 16th century editions. That was the first book. The second book was a study of, the title is, let's see if I can remember it, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540 to 1605. I was absolutely fascinated with the vernacular press, I want to learn more about it. So I started working in the Venetian archive because this was the most important publisher of books in Italy. It was about the biggest publisher in Europe, with 01:15:00the exception of Paris in the 16th century. So I start looking in the archive for references, documents about the press and how they chose authors, and what the relationships with all, I didn't find much, but I did stumble onto the archive, of the Roman Inquisition in Venice, the records were there in Venice, rather than in Rome. And I found them absolutely fascinating. No one had really begun to study these records before. And so I wrote a book on the Inquisition. My question was, how effective was the Inquisition. I'm sorry. The index, the inquisition was really the, the enforcement agent for the index of prohibited books. I really was on the index and the Inquisition, my question was, How effective was it in practice? Then it keep out Lutheran books. Did it wall off Italy from scholarship and learning that was protestant-oriented? or was protestant oriented but didn't really have much to do with religion from the rest of Europe. And my conclusions were that it was a very mixed bag. Sometimes the the index and the inquisition were effective. They did stop a lot of products and books from entering Italy, but it was never totally effective, I mean, this was Italy after all. And at the same time, it did not block off Italy from learning about developments in medicine and law and biology. Everything else, Italian professors did get books that were written by Protestants in northern Europe, they did get them into Italy. So it was really a case study of how in practice the index and inquisition worked. And here, this is really part of what I tried to do my entire life as a scholar. And, again, there's some connection with Mosse. What I tried to do is to start with a question. Why did this happen? Now, what usually happens is they start with a very bad, general question, but as I get better, I start to come up with better questions. I come up with more refined questions getting more getting into the details. The other thing I try to do. Is I try to go to the original sources whether they're printed sources or archival sources as soon as possible. I don't spend a lot of time reading the secondary literature in advance. I do a little bit of it, but I try to get into the original sources as soon as I can. So I'll start with a 01:18:00fresh eye, with a fresh mind. I won't be influenced too much, by whatever is in the secondary literature and then when I know my way around and begin to formulate hypotheses, then I'll go back to read the secondary literature and I usually do it in a hurry, because I now know what I'm looking for and what isn't very useful to me. So I gradually find my thesis or my argument. And when, I keep looking for evidence. And what I find more evidence, that seems to fit my hypothesis. I know I'm on the right track. If I find evidence for that's archival or by somebody what someone's written in the time, and it doesn't fit. I have to go back and adjust my hypothesis or maybe discard it. Eventually I get to the point where I'm pretty sure of what I know when I have to write it up in a way that everyone else can understand. There's some then some of Mosse in what I do. I think I think Mosse also approached scholarship in terms of questions. You know his work better than I do. You can probably correct me if I'm wrong on this. I think of something like that. Mosse also had a great sense of curiosity and imagination. Mine doesn't begin to compare with his but I try to have some curiosity and some imagination. Nothing. Nothing compared to his. But I think that also matters. Ah. My second book. The English language audience people Scholars of America, Canada and England liked it very much, the Italians hated it. Why? Because at that time, appeared in 1977. Italian scholarship was very much dominated by Marxism and anti-clericalism. And there was very much the ideal that the counter-reformation really shut down Italy. It walled-off Italy from becoming modern that it really shut down. Is the cause of all of modern Italy's ails in the modern world ever since, now there's some truth to that, but it's vastly exaggerated. So they didn't dislike my book because it didn't prove that thesis, in fact, it sort of said the opposite, but it was very mixed bag. I'm happy to say, oh, when I did the book on the Venetian press, what I wanted to do was I wanted to use the Inquisition archives in Rome so I but they were closed. So I went to Rome and I sort of asked around in the Vatican library and the Vatican archives and so far. Well, are they open? And of course, they 01:21:00weren't open to scholars. What I was told was you have to get a cardinal to help you get access. Who can make intervention etc for you. Well, unfortunately, I didn't know any Cardinals. Still don't know any Cardinal. So I didn't do it. Eventually under the Pope John Paul II. Not my favorite pope but he did do this. He did open up the archive of the Roman Inquisition, which has a new name and it has been rushed by Scholars, and now all sorts of books, it appear as a result of the scholarship. Now that the Roman Inquisition archives are open and I'm happy to say while not everybody agrees with my book of 1977. A lot of the scholars Italians and others say I had some of the things right, that it would did end up being a kind of a bureaucratic exercise and it wasn't totally effective. And there were exceptions. Anyway, third book. This came about, as a result of the schooling that our son had in years 1970-72. I had two, I had two years off with a bunch of fellowships, including [unclear], and [unclear], so forth. I had two years off and I spent it in Florence at [unclear], which is a Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance studies. Now at that time Peter, our son was aged five, and he spent two years in an Italian School. Doing Prima and Seconda, first and second Elementary School in Italian, his was very good. And my wife's Italian was very good, better than mine. Anyway when I looked at his notebooks and when he told me about what the school is like I realized at the time schooling was different from North American schooling and I came up with an idea what was going like in the Renaissance? This is a new idea because while we knew a lot about theory of Education, humanistic pedagogical treatises. We didn't really know anything about what went on in the classroom. We didn't even know how many classes are were and who the teachers were? Was there public, free education. We knew nothing of this. So I started looking for that sort of information and I'll spare you the details. By that time, I was a really thorough archival historian and I started in Venice and working some of 01:24:00the archives. I started to find information. And I put together a big fat book of about 500 pages which try to explain all this the title is Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300 to 1600. And it tried to answer these questions. I was able to answer some questions, who the teachers were, how many boys went to school, the difference in boys and girls schooling, what they learned in school, what textbooks they studied, all that sort of thing. And that book was a success. It was published in 1989, is translated into Italian. It won a prize and I'm happy to say is still in print, in real print. Now how many years later it's sold over 4,000 copies which is, you know, pretty good these days and it's still in print and it's probably been my best known book. The next book, leaving aside collections of articles, was about Italian Renaissance universities. I think the title is the universities of the Italian Renaissance. And that started in a curious way, it appeared in 2002. I mentioned Paul Oskar Kristeller, one of the great German Jewish refugee scholars, who came in North America and taught at Columbia. Kristeller had the idea of writing a book on Italian Renaissance universities, very early in his career, as early as the 1940s. He was never able to get around to doing it. He finally persuaded one of his students to do the book instead. His name was Charles Schmidt. Who's a very good friend of mine, Charles and I met in Italy in 1962-63, when we were both fulbrighters. And then he later on became a very distinguished scholar of Italian Renaissance universities and Italian Renaissance philosophy and so far and he taught most of his career in England. He persuaded Charles to write the book. Charles had already done some studies on Renaissance universities in the teaching of Science in them and so forth. And the last letter, he wrote to me came from London where he was teaching at the Warburg institute the University of London. He said I'm going to start the book on the universities now, this is April 1986. But first I have to go off to the university of [unclear] and give some lectures. He went there. And he collapsed and died. Probably of a heart attack. He was only 53 and it was a great loss to me, I mourned him. Okay, time 01:27:00went on. This is April 1986. And suddenly in the middle of July one night. I got a telephone call from Kristeller. He never telephoned me again. He never telephoned me before. I don't know if you knew Kristeller, I won't try to imitate him, but he still had a strong German accent and he's very forceful room and he started off by saying "you must write this book on Italian Renaissance universities." I said, huh? What are you talking about? And he said it's a very important book, Charles died. You know the field, you should do it. I said, I only promised to consider it. I was really quite taken aback. But the more I looked at it. The more I thought, why not? Is an important topic. Yep, never been done before. That's true. And also I can rescue Italian Renaissance universities from the medievalists. Most of the history of universities dealt with medieval universities, especially Northern Universities, such as Paris, but Italian universities were different. I knew that already and they were very different in the medievalist kept trying to fit them, in as far at they paid attention to Italian renaissance universities at all into the northern Paris model. Which I didn't think worked. So I agreed to do the book partly in memory of Charles Schmidt. And I finally finished it in 1999. And I dedicated it to Kristeller and Charles Schmidt because Kristeller had also died in 1999 and it appeared in 2002 and it's still in print, still doing well. It's a big fat book. It's never been translated into Italian partly because it's probably too big and I think that's the book which I'm second best known for. If I can mention one other thing I will, I won't mention the other books.

JOHN TORTORICE: Okay.

PAUL GRENDLER: That's the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. This. The idea came up from Scribner's reference books, which no longer exists. I'm sorry to say they've been gobbled up by one of the conglomerates. Scribner's reference books, produced the dictionary of the Middle Ages in 15 volumes I think. Wonderful work, in the 1970s and they did the dictionary of scientific biography 16 01:30:00volumes, which is still a standard work. And they came up with the idea of doing an encyclopedia of the Renaissance and 1990s. They obviously needed help. So they went to the Renaissance Society of America and ask for them to co-sponsor it, and they asked the RSA board to recommend some Renaissance Scholars, who might be the editors in Chief. And so, the Renaissance Society of America, of which I'd been a former president. Recommended other Scholars, very distinguished people. And at various times when we had to go to New York, we met individually with the people from Scribner's. I did it one time when I was on my way to New York and we had a good meeting in the airport etc. Time past, things I thought were shelved. I forgot all about it, then suddenly they came back in 1995 and said, we're going to do the encyclopedia of the Renaissance, we'd like you to be the editor-in-chief. And I gulped, they said, and the RSA will be the co-sponsor, and it also made some money for the RSA and we always needed money. So I agreed to do it. And it turned out to be a fascinating experience. I worked with with some very professional people with Scribner's, including one of them Steven Wagner, who was a managing editor, who became a very good friend. And my job was to coach a very good board, Advisory Board, which I did do everybody from English literature to economics to what have you? I did do one innovation from previous encyclopedias. I insisted on somebody from Jewish studies in the Renaissance because they were very important. I knew that field a little bit and so I got together a very good board of about 10 to 12 people. Are we started working and we put together a table of contents and got people to contribute. And we ended up with something like six hundred and forty authors in about 1,150 or whatever articles. Strictly limited. I mean the our longest article was about ten thousand words and the smallest was about 500 Words and we tried to cover everything beginning with Petrarch going up through Milton. Basically the the 01:33:00chronological period varied a bit because you have to make adjustments according to the the country, when it's Italy or Germany, or whatever, and American university curriculum. If you're in English literature, the Renaissance goes up to Milton. If you're in French literature, it really stops at about early 17th century, in Italy you stop about 1600 as well. So you have to make those adjustments. We wanted it to be useful to students, to the general public, and to scholars, who are looking for important, useful, beginning information on a topic that is not theirs. That is the scholar of French literature, can go to the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, get a good introductory article on Machiavelli, for example, or vice versa and I think we achieved success in the end, we came up with six volumes. We had some scares and everything else about scholars, who didn't come through, we had to get last-minute replacements and so forth, but it came out at the end of 1999, my copy arrived on Christmas Eve of 1999. And it was a great commercial and critical success. It has sold well over 7,000 complete sets and I don't know how many individual volumes and they'll now sell for over a thousand dollars. And the reviews were excellent. And it one a couple of prizes including the big one which is the medal, I forgot what it's called, the medal for the best Reformation work in a year published in in the United States in any field. And as I said, I got to work with some wonderful Scholars and so forth. I'm really proud of that. It was an adventure. It was an experience and it really kept the development and flourishing of Italian renaissance studies in the United States, that really started really in the 1950s, the great Jewish emigre scholars.

JOHN TORTORICE: Well, I'm going to have to take a look at that those volumes when I'm next at the University libraries in Madison. I assume they're not online...

PAUL GRENDLER: They're not online. I wish they were. But what happened after, Scribner's was bought by another conglomerate which was bought by another conglomerate and everything was cut into pieces, and I think I know who owns the copyright now, but it's never appeared on online. And I think I know why. We had 01:36:00a lot of illustrations in that book in those six volumes. And you had to get permissions and pay money for every single permission, for every single illustration. But it's only for the printed volume, printed volumes. If you're going to put it online and you want it to be Illustrated, I think it has to be Illustrated. I think you have to go back to the firms from which we got the permissions and pay them again. To be very cross about it. I think, and they also have to come back to me because they have to renegotiate the contract with me. And probably with RSA. I think the reason why hasn't been put online is the current owners of the copyrights haven't figured out how they can make money on it. That's what I think, Now, you can't get any information. I tried a couple of times. I don't really know what's happening. I wish it could be online. That's all I can tell you.

JOHN TORTORICE: It's a very difficult onerous process to try to track down all of those. And yes, I could see where that would...

PAUL GRENDLER: Well, the publisher, whoever it is now owns the rights of the individual articles because when you write for an encyclopedia article, it's called, there's a particular term for it, but what it means is, you assign your rights as author to the publisher. Now, you don't do that when you publish a monograph normally, with a, with the university press, but that's what commercial presses do, which means they can do with it, whatever they want to. But the contract also says, they have to come back to me. They have to come back to RSA, and of course they have to pay to get permission to use the same illustrations. That's what I think the holdup is, I don't know this for certain.

JOHN TORTORICE: Well, the whole publishing industry has changed so radically, it's unbelievable.

PAUL GRENDLER: Oh, has it ever.

JOHN TORTORICE: I think we're coming up to the end of our time here. We are running out of tape. But is there anything else you'd like to say before we end?

PAUL GRENDLER: Well, I'd like to say this, I don't do the kind of History Mosse does, but boy, he certainly has had an influence on me. I wouldn't be the historian I now I am, if it were not for him.

JOHN TORTORICE: Well, thank you so much. Professor Grendler. That was extraordinary. Please stay on. I'm going to stop the recording now, but please stay.