Gene Adam Brucker

Gene Adam Brucker died on July 9, 2017, in hospice at Bayside Park Center, Emeryville, California. He was 92 years old. Brucker is widely credited with having launched a new approach to the Florentine Renaissance as a leader of a cohort of influential American scholars devoted to studying the society and institutions of a city best known for its artistic monuments and its literary lights. As a committed citizen of the historical profession and his university, he joined a group of younger faculty who, amidst turmoil at the University of California, Berkeley, campus in the 1960s, transformed the Department of History into one of the most renowned in the world.

Gene liked to say that the only certain law of history was its unpredictability. His career is a case in point. He was born in Cropsey, Illinois, on October 15, 1924, and attended a one-room schoolhouse in the depths of the Depression. When his father conceded that he was not suited to farming, he enrolled at the University of Illinois. In his first year, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and in 1944 shipped out to Europe, where he was assigned to a transport equipment depot in Marseille. After VE Day, his unit was in transit to Japan aboard the converted luxury liner SS Lurline when they received news of the bombing of Hiroshima. Returning to the University of Illinois in 1946, Brucker completed his B.A. and an M.A. with a thesis published in 1950 on Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris during the first years of the French Revolution.

Brucker’s mentor at Illinois, Professor Ray Stearns, encouraged him to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, which, against heavy odds, he won for study towards a Bachelor of Letters degree at Wadham College, University of Oxford. A predictable muse of history would have made him a historian of France or England. Instead, he was drawn to the history of Renaissance Italy with a smattering, at best, of Italian and a sympathetic Italophile tutor, Cecilia Mary Ady, who must have been surprised by this eager young colonial. From Oxford, Brucker went to Princeton University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1954 on fourteenth-century Florence, an unusual choice at the time for an American scholar. He worked under the direction of Joseph Strayer and Theodor Mommsen, one of the German refugees whose broad and deep learning transformed the writing of European history in the New World. Fresh from Princeton and new to the West, he came to Berkeley as an acting instructor in 1954 and taught at Berkeley, though courted by other universities, until his retirement in 1991.

In Florentine Society and Politics, 1343-1378 (1962) and The Civic World of Renaissance Florence (1977), Brucker wrote what remains the most detailed account in any language of the ways in which late medieval Florence, a commercial city divided by factional and class strife, became the political, economic, and cultural powerhouse of the Renaissance. Before and after Jacob Burckhardt’s classic nineteenth-century study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the history of the Italian city-states had been written largely from sources in chronicles, historical narratives, and literary works. Brucker explored instead the day-to-day affairs of Florence and the Florentines, drawing on the city’s remarkable archives, which preserved, despite fire and flood, a nearly unmatched historical record. Documents others might have passed over as routine or dry-as-dust he mined with an unerring eye for discovery and the utter concentration demanded by vast series of documents, the mere contemplation of which would have struck terror in other hearts. In his exacting research he never lost sight of major questions about changes over time in class structure, the growth of bureaucracy, religious attitudes, relations between the sexes, oligarchic as opposed to democratic and tyrannical government, factional allegiance, feudalism, family structure, economic prosperity, and social welfare in Florence. He understood that the answers to these questions needed to be constructed from the thousands upon thousands of individual experiences and voices from contemporary documents.

In nine other books, more than 30 articles, and countless book reviews, Brucker extended and, with unstinting generosity, shared his sense of the past and his passion for Florentine history. English readers can sample the Florentine documents he worked with in two books of translations: Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence (1967) and The Society of Renaissance Florence (1971). Brucker also wrote two surveys of Florentine history in which he shared his sense of the past and his passion for Florentine history with scholars, students, and anyone looking for a good Renaissance read. His Renaissance Florence (1969, repr. 1983) describes in detail a world of which only brilliant glimpses are preserved in the frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandaio. Brucker’s Florence in the Golden Age, 1138-1737 (Ital. ed. 1983, English ed. 1984) is a vividly illustrated volume on the broad phases of Florentine history from the high middle ages down to the Enlightenment.

Gene’s most popular book should have been made into a movie. He came to write Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (1986, repr. 2005) through another unforeseen turn of events. Over a casual lunch at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, he happened to tell the company about documents he had found concerning a fifteenth-century love affair gone sour. George Weidenfeld, the British publisher, urged him on the spot to write a book about it. Brucker’s wife Marion egged him on, and, as he would say, the book was a kind of “love offering” for her. It tells the poignant story of an affair between a beautiful young woman and a young patrician of a higher social class. According to her account, the young man gave her a wedding ring after her husband died. According to Giovanni’s account, she was a loose woman, an adulteress, who had begun the affair while her husband was alive, so that there was no valid objection to his marriage with a bride of his own social class. Brucker’s deep knowledge of Florence turns court records into a tale as remarkable for feelings it still arouses as for what it says about life in the Renaissance.

In keeping with the Florentine republican culture he admired, Brucker combined scholarship and unstinting engagement in what he regarded as the “republic of learning.” He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; a Fellow of the Medieval Academy; elected, in 1979, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; president of the Renaissance Society of America, which gave him its lifetime achievement award in 2000; a Fellow and later acting director at Villa I Tatti. Among many other Berkeley appointments, he served as chair of his department (1969 to 1972) and chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate (1984-1986). On his retirement in 1991, he was awarded the Berkeley Citation, given to a select few for their outstanding contributions to the Berkeley campus.

Gene’s students treasured him not only for what they learned from him but for steady concern for their personal lives and careers long after they left Berkeley. Jonathan Dewald, a distinguished historian of early modern France who studied with him in the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrote as news of his death was shared in a long thread of emails, “Probably all of us from those years got a more free-range education than was typical before or since. … [W]hat mattered to me about Gene was … what he showed us about how an academic life ought to be lived. That started with his kindness, openness, and good humor, but it also included his approaches to intellectual life itself. He conveyed absolute commitment to it, at a time when that wasn't always easy to do.” Another former graduate student, Cynthia Polecritti, now at UC Santa Cruz, tells how in Florence, “[H]e told us to keep our windows open in the summer night so that we could hear the nightingales sing.” “If he read the accolades,” his daughter Wendy Brucker wrote, “he would have brushed them off in his usual way and quickly turned the subject to something else…. Those who knew him will nod their heads and those who didn’t will wish they had.”

Fortune smiled again at the end of his life. Gene was a long-standing and long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan, and when he died the Cubs were World Series Champions.

Gene Brucker may be heard in his own voice in the Department of History Project (by The Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office), of which he was a founding sponsor:

http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/brucker_gene.pdf

He is survived by a son, Mark Brucker, two daughters, Francesca Donig and Wendy Brucker, his first wife, Patricia Brucker, and two stepchildren, Matthew and Charlotte Skinner Dobson.

Randolph Starn
William J. Connell
2018