On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, their Professions, and their Beards

Douglas Biow's work shows how some sixteenth-century Italian men found ways to signal their individuality and stand out from the crowd. The crowd in question was not an amorphous mass of humanity" it was always a specific group with which the person concerned wished to be identified. Such men, therefore, were not the wholly autonomous individuals theorised a century and a half ago by Jacob Burckhardt, because of their need for a corporate identity, nor were they the culturally determined self-fashioners of the New Historicists, because of their ability to improvise a distinctive personal stance within that corporate identity.