Gene Adam Brucker

Gene A. Brucker is the Shepard Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Brucker was one of the leading American scholars of the social and political history of Renaissance Florence. His work demonstrates the transition in Florence from a communal society and communal modes of politics to a patrician oligarchy, from personal and group relationships to the bureaucratic state, from a collective ethos to individualism, and from traditionalism to a new species of flexible realism. He clearly explicated the complex relation between external events and internal changes in Florentine history. Brucker has contributed significantly to the historical debate over Civic Humanism begun by Hans Baron by showing that it arose later and in response to internal changes in the city (as it became an oligarchy) rather than from the external threat from Milan. In 1990-91, he served as President of the Renaissance Society of America. He has been awarded Fulbright, Guggenheim, and ACLS fellowships. In 2000 Brucker received the Paul O. Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America. Publications include two scholarly studies of Florence, 1348-1434; two synthetic books for a general audience; a microhistory, a collection of thirty articles, and a book of translated documents. Recent essays include a general history of Renaissance Italy, and a study of structure and contingency in medieval and Renaissance Italy.