A discussion of Renaissance humanism must begin with Burckhardt, whose The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has set the terms of debate and analysis from the time of its publication in 1860 up to the most recent scholarship. Burckhardt’s interpretation of humanism was not particularly novel, but he stated his views with powerful simplicity and systematic logic. No scholar can now accept Burckhardt’s thesis as a whole, but it must be conceded that he raised the crucial historical issues concerning humanism.
For Burckhardt, the Renaissance was not fundamentally about the revival of Antiquity: ‘the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival’, which had ‘been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up the whole period’. In Burckhardt’s view, instead, the ‘characteristic stamp’ of the Renaissance was a new spirit of individualism. What was reborn in Italy from the mid-thirteenth to the early sixteenth century was not classicism but rather man himself.
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness — that which was turned within as that which was turned without — lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, part, family or corporation — only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.
With typical consistency, Burckhardt painted a portrait of the humanists in which the colours and contours of his subjects were not academic or scholarly but anthropological: superficially the humanists might have been ‘mediators between their own age and a venerated antiquity’, but their essential definition was human and personal: ‘malicious self-conceit’, ‘abominable profligacy’, ‘irreligion’, ‘licentious excess’. It was not their devotion to Antiquity which in the sixteenth century resulted in their fall from grace, according to Burckhardt, but rather they were ‘the most striking examples and victims of an unbridled subjectivity’.
Burckhardt thus powerfully articulated several fundamental problems about Renaissance humanism which ever since have preoccupied scholarship. Was humanism essentially concerned with reviving the culture of classical Antiquity, or did it represent something more fundamental — a change in the very nature of man, in his view of himself, or at least a new philosophy of man? And what was the relation of humanism to the preceding historical period, to the Middle Ages? Did it represent a decisive break from previous cultural traditions, or is it more appropriate to speak of continuity and evolution rather than of revolution?
Burckhardt’s thesis dominated the interpretation of humanism for at least half a century after the publication of The civilization. His definition of humanism and the Renaissance in human, not in scholarly or literary, terms was adopted by influential figures such as Symonds, Villari, Goetz, Taine and Muntz. Burckhardt had posited a political explanation of the origins of Renaissance individualism, which in his view was the product of the egoistic and amoral political world of the Italian city-states; this particular facet of the Burckhardtian synthesis was soon challenged by a succession of writers, such as Renan, Thode, Gebhart and most eruditely by Burdach, who saw the origins of the Renaissance in the religious world of medieval spirituality. Yet despite their disagreement over the sources of the Renaissance, these early revisionists still carried on with Burckhardt’s anthropological approach to the nature of humanism. Similarly Burckhardtian in conception was much of the so-called ‘revolt of the medievalists’ which gained momentum particularly in the first half of this century; their continued emphasis on the precocious discovery of the world and of man, on a ‘truly Renaissance spirit’, individualism, sensuality, rationalism, realism are all obviously Burckhardtian categories of analysis. Even the attempt to deny to the Renaissance the status of a genuine new historical period, devaluing it instead as the decaying after-life of the Middle Ages — a type of histoire des mentalites most famous in the writings of Huizinga — is still painting with a Burckhardtian brush. Despite all this revisionism, moreover, it is important to remember that Burckhardt has continued to have his unabashed champions well into the twentieth century, not least two of the most famous German refugees in modern American academic life — Ernst Cassirer and Hans Baron. Individualism is a central theme of Cassirer’s study of the philosophy of humanism; moreover, his emphasis on the inter-relation of the elements of a culture and an historical period — ‘society, state, religion, church, art, science’ — is pre-eminently Burckhardtian in conception. It might seem paradoxical to connect Baron, who of course highlighted the republican strand of humanism, with Burckhardt, who saw despotism as the determining political influence in Renaissance Italy; nevertheless, Baron’s preoccupation with a sharp contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (‘a fundamental transformation in Weltanschauung), with the emergence of modern secular and lay values, with the decline of medieval concepts such as Guelphism and Empire, not to mention his denigration of pure classicism and his attempts to link together the various strands of cultural history (political and historical thought, artistic realism, positive valuation of wealth) — all these features of his interpretation of early Italian humanism are solidly within the Burckhardtian tradition.
However, it is particularly in the Italian scholarly tradition — most notably in the field of the history of philosophy — that Burckhardt has continued to enjoy the most powerful resonance. This is in one sense ironic, since Renaissance philosophy was egregiously ignored in The civilization. Yet Burckhardt had declared that ‘Every period of civilization which forms a complete and consistent whole manifests itself not only in political life, in religion, art and science, but also sets its characteristic stamp on social life’, and it has been irrefutably demonstrated by Gombrich that Burckhardt derived this concept of the spirit of the age from the idealist historical philosophy of Hegel. Bertrando Spaventa introduced Hegelian idealism into Italian philosophical circles in the 1860s, and his approach was a determining influence on the two giants of Italian philosophy in the early twentieth century — Croce and Gentile. Croce gave little detailed attention to humanism, although his support for a Hegelian literary historian such as De Sanctis and his implicit criticisms of a proCatholic revisionist such as Toffanin added weight to the Burckhardtian tradition in Italy. It was above all Gentile who developed an Hegelian/idealist interpretation of Renaissance humanism in Italy: the Middle Ages had devalued man and life in this world; Italian humanism, by contrast, restored the dignity of man, the potential of the human mind and the value of earthly existence. Gentile thus effectively bolstered the Burckhardtian view of Renaissance Italians as ‘the first born among the sons of modern Europe’. This Burckhardtian/Hegelian approach continues to find powerful support in contemporary Italian philosophical circles. Indeed, the leading Italian post-war Renaissance scholar, Eugenio Garin, was Gentile’s protege; it is not surprising that he has emphasised a coherent outlook in Renaissance humanism, which he sees as a new philosophy of man, in sharp contrast to medieval devaluation of humanity. It also comes as no surprise that Garin has embraced many of Baron’s views, including his ‘civic humanism’; indeed,Garin finds Burckhardt himself particularly sympathetic:
Humanism consisted in a renewed confidence in man and his possibilities and in an appreciation of man’s activity in every possible sense ... Burckhardt’s old and vigorous conception which linked the reaffirmation of man with the reaffirmation of the world, the reaffirmation of the spirit with the reaffirmation of nature, ought to be connected without fear of rhetoric to the old notion that the Renaissance succeeded in bringing about a new harmony. This ideal of the harmony and the measure of a complete man runs . . . through those centuries.
It is also ironic that the most effective and powerful challenge to the Burckhardtian approach to the Renaissance and humanism has come from another of Gentile’s proteges from the 1930s. It is no exaggeration to say that Paul Oskar Kristeller has revolutionised the study and interpretation of Renaissance humanism in the last fifty years. This is not only because of his now completed vast, six-volume catalogue of unpublished humanist manuscript collections, Iter italicum, a work which has rightly concentrated scholarly attention on the study of unpublished primary sources in intellectual history, but also because of his fundamental repudiation of Burckhardt’s thesis that Renaissance humanism represented a new philosophy of man. In the single most influential article on Renaissance humanism written this century, Kristeller refuted the interpretation of ‘humanism as the new philosophy of the Renaissance, which arose in opposition to scholasticism, the old philosophy of the Middle Ages’, declaring ‘that the Italian humanists on the whole were neither good nor bad philosophers, but no philosophers at all’. Instead, he saw Renaissance humanism as a literary movement, focusing on grammatical and rhetorical studies; the excursions of humanists into the realm of philosophy were often erratic, amateurish and superficial. Humanism could not have replaced scholasticism as the new philosophy of the Renaissance for the simple reason that scholasticism and Aristotelian philosophy continued to thrive in Italy until the mid-seventeenth century. Because humanism was not a philosophical movement, it could not, for Kristeller, represent a new vision of man:
If we think or hear of such a topic as ‘renaissance concepts of man,’ we are immediately reminded of a view of the Renaissance period that is widespread and has often been repeated: the Renaissance, according to this view, had a special interest in, and concern with, man and his problems. Very often, and in my view mistakenly, this notion is associated with the phenomenon called Renaissance humanism, and in stressing the difference which distinguishes the Renaissance from the period preceding it, it has been pointedly asserted that the thought of the Renaissance was man-centered, whereas medieval thought was God-centered.
For Kristeller, the essential focus of Renaissance humanism was precisely what Burckhardt had rejected: the revival of Antiquity. In undermining one foundation stone of the Burckhardtian edifice — the anthropological definition of humanism — Kristeller did not ignore the other central tenet of Burckhardt’s thesis; besides stressing the importance of humanism’s new classicism, Kristeller also emphasised its great debt to the Middle Ages: to the French medieval grammatical tradition of classical studies, to the Byzantine heritage of Greek scholarship and, above all, to the Italian medieval rhetorical tradition of ars dictaminis.
The great merit of Kristeller’s interpretation of Renaissance humanism — indeed the key to its lasting appeal — is his philological study of primary sources; unlike some of his German and Italian predecessors and contemporaries, his studies have not been preconditioned by adherence to an anachronistic philosophical school or methodology. Discarding modern meanings whereby ‘almost any kind of concern with human values is called “humanistic”’, Kristeller returned to contemporary usage of the late fifteenth century when the term humanista was invented to designate teacher of the humanities on the analogy of such medieval university labels as legista, jurista, canonista or artista. Although the term humanism was a nineteenth-century coinage, Kristeller connected humanista with a defined group of subjects, the studia humanitatis, which in the late 1430s had been equated by the future Pope Nicholas V, in planning a library for Cosimo de’ Medici, with grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. Moreover, Kristeller cited a number of fifteenth-century texts by Bruni, Ficino, Antonio Benivieni, Alamanno Rinuccini and Pontano (to whom can now be added Salutati, Barzizza and Traversari), not to mention the above library canon, in which it is clear that the studia humanitatis were regarded as a literary programme, focused on grammar and rhetoric and clearly distinguished from philosophical, mathematical, medical, scientific and theological studies. Kristeller finally indicated how the phrase studia humanitatis was revived by fourteenth-century humanists (in fact first by Salutati in 1369) on the basis of Ciceronian usage (in his oration Pro Arcbia to mean a literary or liberal education. All this suggested that humanism was a self-conscious cultural and literary movement which extended back at least to the days of Petrarch’s discovery of ProArchia in 1333.
Subsequent scholarship has continued to confirm the philological accuracy of Kristeller’s definition of humanism. A recent collection of usages of the term studia humanitatis from 1369 to 1425, with selected examples to 1467, substantiates its meaning as a literary and cultural programme, albeit not always precisely spelled out. Here it is perhaps worth pointing out that the ancients too had some difficulty with Cicero’s meaning, to the extent that Gellius offered this gloss on the meaning of humanitas:
Those who have spoken Latin and have used the language correctly do not give to the word humanitas the meaning which it is commonly thought to have, signifying a kind of friendly spirit and good-feeling towards all men without distinction; but they gave to humanitas about the force of the Greek... education and training in the liberal arts ... That it is in this sense that our earlier writers have used the word, and in particular Marcus Varro and Marcus Tullius, almost all the literature shows.
The correct antique meaning of humanism in the sense of paideia, not philanthropy, was universally adopted by fifteenth-century writers when using the phrase studia humanitatis, indicating the philological soundness of Kristeller’s definition, as well as the anachronism inherent in associating humanism with humane values or a new philosophy of man. Moreover, a number of texts in which leading figures such as Bruni and Poggio speak of the studia humanitatis as their particular specialism (‘nostra studia’, ‘nos omnes qui prosequimur studia hec humanitatis’, ‘nostra studia humanitatis’) confirm humanism as a self-conscious movement, with a genuine esprit de corps. Finally, although it has been doubted that the studia humanitatis were associated at first with the five disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, it needs to be pointed out that Petrarch himself identified these as his particular areas of interest. In his list of favourite books, published by Ullman, Petrarch wrote, ‘My specially prized books. To the others I usually resort not as a deserter as a scout.’ Besides the actual titles, this list is significant as indicating how Petrarch defined his particular area of academic specialism. The scholastic, philosophical disciplines are limited to one volume each, and dialectic is given only a grudging place: ‘Tractat(us) (et) n(ichi)l ult(ra)’. The rest of the list falls under the headings ‘Moral(ia)’, ‘Recth(orica)’, ‘ystor(ica)’ (with its usual subsection ‘ex(empl)a’), ‘Poet(ica)’ and ‘Gram(matica)’. It does not need to be emphasised that these are the five divisions of the studia humanitatis as found first in Parentucelli’s canon and then with increasing frequency in the second half of the fifteenth century.
Kristeller’s work with thousands upon thousands of humanist manuscripts has made him wary of generalising on the basis of a few texts, or of highlighting one or several famous humanist texts, in the Burckhardtian or idealist fashion, at the expense of numerous less well-known or even unpublished works.
Renaissance thought, he writes, when seen in its entire range, say, from 1350 to 1600, presents a very complex picture. Different schools and thinkers expressed a great variety of views, on problems related to the conception of man as on others, and it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to reduce all of them to a single common denominator.
Although he himself, writing in 1979, still acknowledged that ‘there is at least a core of truth in the view that Renaissance thought was more “human” and more secular, although not necessarily less religious, than medieval thought and that it was more concerned with human problems’, older as well as recent research has made it impossible to make even this small concession to the Burckhardtian tradition. In the first place, it has been established that the Renaissance emphasis on man was consciously borrowed from classical, biblical, patristic and medieval authors; there was no lack of medieval authors (for example Honorius of Autun, Peter Damian or Hugh of St Victor) who used arguments (such as God’s choice of man for the Incarnation, the creation of man in His likeness or man as the binding force of the universe) later favoured by Renaissance proponents of the dignity of man. Moreover, there was no consensus among Renaissance humanists whether to lament the misery of the human condition or applaud the dignity of man. Famous treatises exalting human dignity by Facio and Manetti have of course been spotlighted, whereas the alternative view, as developed for example in Poggio’s De miseria humanae conditionis, has been passed over in silence. Indeed, human misery versus dignity had been conceived as a type of paragone (rhetorical arguments on both sides of a question) in the classic medieval treatment by Innocent III, who had failed to deliver his promised treatise on the dignity of man to complement his De miseria humane conditionis; in fact, Poggio ‘not only borrowed Innocent’s title but also elaborated many of the themes he had discussed’, highlighting there (as well as in De varietate fortunae) the frailty, the miserable destiny and the stupidity of mankind. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more dismal portrait of the human race than in the youthful Intercoenales, as well as in the more mature Teogenius and Momus written by the so-called ‘universal man of the early Renaissance’, Leon Battista Alberti. Another important fact is that the anti-intellectualism and fideism of much humanist moral philosophy represented a serious limitation of man’s potential. Petrarch’s Secretum taught knowledge alone could not achieve Christian virtue, which could be gained through will and experience only with grace. For Valla in his Collatio Novi Testamenti and Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum, theological understanding was enhanced by philology, but, as he also argues in De libero arbitrio, ultimately human free will and predestination were concepts that had to be accepted as acts of faith. Similarly, in his De vero falsoque bono, Valla makes no effort to sustain the conclusions of religion through rational philosophy; in portraying the after-life, he seeks the help of faith and imagination, not knowledge. Another fact which is frequently overlooked is the relation which would develop between humanism and the Reformation in the early sixteenth century. It would be impossible to go further than Luther and Calvin in denying human potential and dignity; according to the former, for example, ‘If we believe Christ redeemed mankind by his blood, we are forced to admit that man had been entirely lost’, a view strongly supported by the latter: ‘Wherever you turn, you understand you are nothing except squalor, vice, sickness, crime, and so worthy of every kind of loathing; all help, all salvation and dignity must be expected from God.’ The older view that this Reformation anthropology was rejected by Renaissance humanism, speaking through Erasmus, is no longer acceptable; scholarship has demonstrated that countless reformers had been and continued to be humanists, and indeed it was largely by their efforts that the Reformation was able to spread throughout Europe.
As a general definition of humanism, the anthropology of Burckhardt and his innumerable successors must be discarded; indeed, attempts to reduce humanism to some kind of philosophical formula, to attribute to it a universal philosophical content or doctrine, will always fail. Just as scholasticism can never be defined in terms of a given body of propositions or views, so humanism did not represent one overall intellectual theme or perspective. It is often said that humanism implied a new historical consciousness which was lacking in the Middle Ages, and it is true that much revolutionary philological work of the humanists rested on new historical insights about texts, manuscript affiliations and translations. However, it is a fact that many humanists, as chancellors, secretaries or teachers of grammar and rhetoric, did not engage in original or significant philological activity. Moreover, the proposition that the Middle Ages lacked a sense of history, which then characterised the activity of Renaissance humanists, is patently false. In some areas, for example, in ecclesiology, medieval authors had a powerfully developed sense of historical change and periodisation; such a view ignores the graphic historical contrast between the primitive and the contemporary Church drawn by writers such as St Bernard, Ptolemy of Lucca, Dante or Marsilius of Padua. Similarly, it would be hard to find an approach less historical, yet one more powerfully supported by Renaissance humanists, than the ancient theology — the view that a body of mystical doctrines were transmitted to Moses and Hermes Trismegistus and then preserved miraculously unchanged through the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, church fathers and medieval Byzantines to reach the contemporary world of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Europe. These types of generalisation — just like Panofsky’s famous but equally false formula of the union of form and content in the Renaissance (who would seriously argue that clothing classically modelled figures in antique garb was a characteristic of fifteenth-or sixteenth-century art?) — are simply variations on the Hegelian theme of the spirit of the age; no one will ever identify the ‘characteristic stamp’ of the Renaissance, because it exists only in the minds of Hegel, Burckhardt and their followers, not in historical reality. Not even antipathy to scholasticism was entirely characteristic of humanism; the attacks by Petrarch, Bruni, Valla or Erasmus are famous, but it should also be pointed out that Poggio praised and admired Aquinas, and that his successor as Florentine chancellor, Benedetto Accolti, in contrast to the previous generation of humanists, showed a renewed interest in scholasticism and in natural, speculative and metaphysical philosophy, finding many scholastics to praise, while rejecting Cicero, who had been assigned the highest rank among philosophers by his Florentine predecessors; moreover, these views are shared by a number of Accolti’s contemporaries, including Alamanno Rinuccini, Donato Acciaiuoli and Ficino.
Kristeller’s definition of humanism as studia humanitatis tells us how humanists themselves described their particular field of learning, but of course the nature of every historical phenomenon is not clearly articulated by contemporaries, if only because for them its essential features were so obvious as to require no explanation. In the case of humanism, any moderately informed researcher can detect the presence of a humanist text simply through its Latin; by attempting to show his readers that he is affiliating himself, however imperfectly, with the Latin style of the ancients as opposed to the moderns (or medievals in modern parlance), a writer is making an implicit declaration of his affinity with the humanist movement. A humanist is thus someone who acts like other humanists; this is how contemporaries would have identified humanism, and such a definition, stripped of historicist paraphernalia, will work equally well for us. To take the limiting case, consider Machiavelli, who, because of his unconventional and hardly humanitarian views, not to mention his exclusively vernacular literary production, has frequently been denied the status of humanist. But by education, beginning scholarly and literary activity, early latinate epistolography and classicised orthography Machiavelli showed all the traits of a humanist, and, by appointing him as successor to other humanist types such as Alessandro Braccesi as second chancellor, his Florentine contemporaries obviously regarded him as a qualified humanist. When in the dedication of The Prince he pointed to his ‘continual reading of the ancients’, he was identifying himself in a way that his contemporaries could never have misunderstood.
The studia humanitatis developed out of medieval traditions of grammar and rhetoric; the activities of the Paduan, Aretine and Bolognese pre-humanists, as well as of Petrarch himself, all have roots in Italian ars dictaminis as well as in the classicism of northern Europe, particularly France. Nevertheless, the mixture of elements was unprecedented: medieval French grammatical studies did not have a preponderant rhetorical emphasis, whereas the ars dictaminis had had little direct connection with the reading and imitation of classical authors. Although the origins of humanism have been intensively investigated, no entirely satisfactory explanation for the change of direction taken by Italian grammatical and rhetorical studies at the end of the thirteenth century has emerged. Various hypotheses have been advanced: for example, almost all the pre-humanists had a legal background which put them in immediate contact with the antique heritage through ancient legal texts and compilations; alternatively, the actual change instigated by the first pre-humanist, Lovato Lovati, has been reduced to the imitation of classical verse, which in turn has been explained by the lack of a medieval Italian tradition of Latin poetry, so that Lovato encountered fewer obstacles in imitating ancient metrical models. All this is enlightening and doubtless provides valuable contexts for this fundamental change of taste; and yet it is impossible in the end to provide a complete historical explanation for the birth of humanism, precisely because this classical literary taste, implying the absolute superiority of ancient models in both grammar and rhetoric, was unprecedented in the Middle Ages. Ultimately, any fundamental change of style in the arts is inexplicable. Context and circumstances can fill in the background of why the Greeks in the fifth century BC made the decisive move from hieratic to naturalistic art; of why Giotto moved beyond the expressionism of Cimabue to genuine illusionism; of why Masaccio turned his back on the International Gothic to found a new monumental gravitas; of why Donatello rediscovered the human anatomy; of why Leonardo invented the High Renaissance style. But in the end we come up against genius and trend setting. Thus it is with Lovato, Mussato and Geri d’Arezzo: their new feeling for ancient literary style was their own creation.
If the ultimate origins of humanism are beyond the realm of historical research, more can be said of its achievements by the end of the fifteenth century. Many humanists were highly skilful or even professional scribes and copyists, and they launched a reform of script which has lasted to the present day. Rejecting the Gothic bookhand which had come to dominate Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they created humanist script, believed to be an imitation of ancient Roman handwriting but in fact based on the script of the Carolingian revival which had been used both north and south of the Alps up to the early thirteenth century. The humanists also reformed cursive writing, distancing themselves from Gothic chancery hands and creating what has come to be known as Italic script. These were great and lasting achievements, but, in terms of their own aim of reviving littera antiqua, they were not fully successful. The humanists’ idea of palaeographic chronology was primitive; their identification of Caroline with ancient Roman script must seem about as quaint as the widely held belief in the fifteenth century that the Florentine Baptistry was the Roman temple of Mars. Moreover, their imitation even of Caroline script was hardly a complete success: the characteristic rotundity of humanist bookhand is an adaptation of the round Gothic script of the fourteenth century; the humanists never realised that the Caroline ‘t’ had been a low letter like the ‘c’, rising above the half-line level only in the course of the thirteenth century; they also never understood that Caroline copyists wrote usually above the first ruled line of the manuscript, not below as in Gothic manuscripts; they also preferred the more square page layout of Gothic manuscripts to the more normal oblong shape of Caroline codices. These are only some of the criteria according to which modern palaeographers distinguish humanist manuscripts from their Caroline precursors, and they demonstrate the limitations of the humanist reform of script; moreover, it must be remembered that Italic script is a hybrid creation, based on Gothic chancery cursive with elements adapted from Caroline writing, the likes of which never existed in the pre-Gothic period, much less in Antiquity.
In their central aspiration, the revival of the Latin language, humanist success was inevitably incomplete. The humanists wished to restore ‘to light the ancient elegance of style which was lost and dead’, but modern scholarship has often been too much influenced by their own claims; in fact, the ‘vocabulary, spelling, syntax of early humanist Latin, and even of certain late Quattrocento authors, have numerous features without parallel in classical Latin, but which are found in medieval Latin’. The fifteenth-century controversy over neologisms demonstrates the extent to which coinages, just as in the Middle Ages, were still taking place; rare words, not really characteristic of classical Latin, were turned into normal usage by fifteenth-century humanists, desperate to widen the restricted classical vocabulary. Especially significant was the humanist failure to distinguish in practice between the language of classical poetry and prose, although certain critics (such as Valla or Cortesi) made theoretical objections to a practice which was founded in medieval habits. In some cases, it is even difficult to determine whether the unclassical practices of the humanists were the result of direct influence of the vernacular or were based on traditional practices, developed in late ancient Latin and compounded in the Middle Ages, particularly by the ars dictaminis. In fact, the concept of Latinity itself inherited from the Middle Ages died only a slow death in the fifteenth century. The medieval view (as stated characteristically by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia) was that there had been two languages in Antiquity, the vernacular and Latin — the former learned and spoken naturally, the latter invented by the great authors as an artifice for their works of literature and philosophy and subsequently acquired at school. This view (upheld by early humanists such as Petrarch and Bruni) was finally challenged in the mid fifteenth century by such figures as Biondo, Alberti, Poggio, Guarino and Filelfo, who maintained that there was only one language in ancient Rome and that the medieval vernaculars developed from Latin as it was corrupted by the barbarian invasions. This dispute had vast importance not only for the birth of vernacular grammar but also for the humanists’ attitude to the revival of Latin. On the one hand, if all languages were natural — Latin as well as the vernacular — then they all had a rational structure; it is no accident that the first grammar of the Italian language by Alberti emerged from this changed view of the history of Latin. On the other hand, as long as it was believed that the ancient Romans were in an analogous position to the moderns, then the revival of Latin was not an insurmountable task: if the Romans had had to learn Latin artificially, there was no reason why the moderns could not do the same. It was only necessary to clear away the corruption caused by the Middle Ages and to arm oneself with all possible purified texts; it is no accident that the most fervent upholder of the traditional, medieval concept of Latinity was Valla, whose Elegantiae were premised on the belief that there had been an ancient vernacular and that true Latin was universal and eternal, only to be rediscovered and purified. However, when it came to be taken for granted by the end of the fifteenth century (for example by Poliziano) that Latin was a natural language, humanists realised that they could never again step into the ancients’ shoes. Many now felt they had to resort to extreme measures, abandoning the eclectic imitation typical of the early Quattrocento, and slavishly following just one model — hence the Ciceronianism prominent at the turn of the sixteenth century. The humanists finally realised that their fundamental goal was an impossibility: as Silvia Rizzo has aphoristically put it, ‘Latin became a dead language only when it was realised that it had been a living language.’
The return to antique rhetoric was a fundamental goal of the Renaissance humanists, and here they faced fewer problems than in the revival of classical Latin; eloquence had had to be learned by the ancient Romans too, who bequeathed to posterity a number of excellent textbooks, including the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s genuine De inventione and Quintilian’s comprehensive Institutiones oratoriae. Rhetoric had been practised during the Middle Ages by means of the ars dictaminis, a debased derivative of the classical art, which itself continued to be studied and taught on a theoretical and academic level, although not put to practical use, by medieval commentators on the two Ciceronian textbooks. The early signs of humanism can be seen in the commentaries by a number of Bolognese dictatores on the Ad Herennium and De inventione at the turn of the fourteenth century. Cicero’s orations had been neglected in the Middle Ages, and the classical emphasis of early humanism was enhanced by the recovery of almost all of Cicero’s orations between the 1330s and the 1420s, as well as of full texts of his other rhetorical works, not to mention Quintilian’s Institutiones, works which had been either unknown, little used or available only in corrupt versions during the Middle Ages. By the early fifteenth century, the humanists had largely turned their backs on the ars dictaminis, reuniting classical rhetorical theory and practice, not only by commenting on the ancient manuals, but also by using them as guides to rhetorical practice, which was also now based on the imitation of the Ciceronian orations — something which had never taken place in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the humanists began to gloss Cicero’s Orations, even before the recovery of Asconius Pedianus’ ancient commentary; here they diverged somewhat from ancient practice, going beyond purely philological annotation to a discussion of rhetorical structure, reflecting their new concern to imitate ancient models.
All this was far beyond the achievement of the Middle Ages, and yet even in rhetoric the humanists were unable to put the medieval heritage fully behind them. As in the Middle Ages, the Rhetorica ad Herennium remained the most widely used textbook. The humanists added little in the way of new theoretical works, preferring to compose epitomes of the antique art; the only significant new large-scale rhetorical treatise to have been composed by the end of the fifteenth century was George of Trebizond’s Rbetoricorum libri V. More significant was the inability of the humanists to revive classical rhetoric as it had been practised in the days of Cicero. The ancient treatises had divided rhetoric into three genres, judicial, deliberative and epideictic, but in later Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the first two, representing the oratory of the law courts and of public debate, had fallen into disuse, leaving only the rhetoric of praise and blame, as practised for example in speeches at weddings and funerals, university functions or on formal civic occasions. Although the humanists continued to give theoretical attention to judicial and deliberative oratory, the social functions of rhetoric remained unchanged from the early days of the Italian communes in the thirteenth century, with the result that the humanists have bequeathed an exiguous oratorical literature apart from epideixis. Even more notable was the continued humanist emphasis on letter writing, which had been the principal focus of the ars dictaminis. The recovery of Cicero’s letters in the fourteenth century provided new models for epistolography; putting aside the invented or contemporary letters used by the dictatores, the humanists could now let Cicero show the way, not only in epistolary imitation but also in publishing their own letter collections. However, they never succeeded or possibly never even attempted to tip the balance of rhetorical literature again in favour of the oration; the numerous humanist treatises on epistolography written during the fifteenth century show that their over-riding interest was to supplant the ars dictaminis, not to restore to rhetoric its principal classical function of oratory.
History, as one of the five disciplines of the studia humanitatis, was a principal concern of the humanists, who not only assiduously studied the ancient Roman histories but also wrote histories of their own, usually of the post-classical period, where their models were especially Livy and Sallust. The latter had been widely read and even imitated in the Middle Ages, whereas the former had been copied and read but had not served as a model. In this sense, Leonardo Bruni, with his History of the Florentine people, was an innovator, writing the first post-antique history explicitly imitating Livy; similarly Livian was the inspiration of a second great pioneer of humanist historiography, Flavio Biondo, who recounted the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire ab inclinato imperio just as Livy had written of the rise of Rome ab urbe condita. It has sometimes been argued that the achievement of early humanist historians went beyond formal classical imitation to philological research. This is certainly true of sections concerning the foundations of cities and states; Bruni for example subjected his classical sources to critical analysis to prove that Florence had been founded not under Julius Caesar but rather under the Republic. This was a kind of research closely related to the humanists’ philological study of classical texts, and so it is not surprising that they applied their new critical techniques to this aspect of historiography. It has also been maintained that they carried this kind of philological critique of sources over into the main body of their historical works. However, it is doubtful that early humanists adopted new critical working methods for the writing of post-classical history. Not only did Bruni, Biondo and Accolti fail to synthesise or compare the material in their sources; they also invented extensive passages in their histories. They adhered to the time-honoured medieval method of following one main chronicle, whose account was elaborated and embellished with additional material according to the requirements of classical imitation. Bruni’s occasional use of archival documents here seems to have had the same purpose as older chronicles used by Biondo and Accolti: to supplement, not to displace or check, the account of the main chronicle source. History was regarded as a branch of rhetoric, where truth was defined not as absolute fidelity to sources but rather as verisimilitude or probability. The adoption of more critical methods of historiography came much later for humanist historians under the influence of changed attitudes to the rules of history. In the earlier Renaissance, humanist historians followed Cicero’s views, as stated in De oratore, that history required no special theoretical study, but in the wake of the debate at the very end of the fifteenth century over how to achieve a truly classical style, it began to be argued that, in addition to imitation, rules were needed. This idea was immediately applied to history, with a succession of new and lengthy artes historicae emerging from the turn of the sixteenth century. A number of historians, including the Florentine chancellor Bartolomeo Scala, became unsure how to write history in the absence of rules and in this changed critical climate; others, such as Tristano Calco, became highly critical of the achievements of their predecessors and began to rethink historical method afresh. The new artes historicae which emerged discussed not only style but also historical method and truth, often ranking types of historical sources in order of reliability. This new climate affected the historical outlook and method of the greatest humanist historian, Francesco Guicciardini, whose scrupulous research methods could not have been further removed from the rhetorical practices of the early historians such as Bruni or Biondo.
As grammar teachers, one of their principal professional activities, it has been asserted that the ‘humanists of the fifteenth century changed the Latin curriculum, a major academic revolution’, ‘one of the few in the history of Western education, in the relatively short time of about fifty years — 14oo to 145o’. It is true that humanist educators attacked the curriculum of their medieval predecessors; however, the reality is that the changes they effected in the classroom were often far more complex and gradual than is believed by some modern scholars, misled by the humanists’ exaggerated tendency to self-advertisement.
The grammar curriculum in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was divided into two relatively distinct phases: elementary education, which consisted of learning to read and write; and secondary education, in which Latin was learned properly, including both prose composition and the study of literature. As far as elementary education is concerned, the basic textbook in Italian schools both before and after the coming of humanism was a treatise on the parts of speech, attributed to the Roman grammarian Donatus but actually a compilation of material mainly from Priscian, which is conventionally known as Ianua by modern scholars after the first word of its verse introduction. There was complete continuity here between the Middle Ages and humanism, not only in textual but also in methodological terms: from the beginning of the fourteenth century the learning of Ianua was divided into two stages, first reading phonetically without meaning, then re-reading and memorising the text with meaning. Accompanying Ianua as further reading material were a collection of verses preceded by an introduction and collection of moral aphorisms, the Disticha Catonis, a late ancient text which continued in heavy use throughout the sixteenth century and even received a commentary from Erasmus. Learning Ianua meant memorising the basic Latin forms, so that the pupil, having left elementary school, was now in a position to learn Latin syntax, culminating in prose composition and letter writing. This was accomplished through Regulae grammaticales, a generic name for treatises written by medieval grammarians such as Goro d’Arezzo, Filippo di Naddo of Florence or Francesco da Buti of Pisa, just as by humanist teachers such as Guarino Veronese, Gaspare da Verona or Perotti. Again the most prominent feature of this genre of schoolbook, from Filippo di Naddo to Perotti, is continuity: the medieval concept of governance, developed in northern France during the twelfth century, was used without change to teach the relation between the parts of the sentence; mnemonic verses were employed to fix rules in the pupil’s memory; medieval grammatical terminology was omnipresent; completely unclassical syntactical rules of thumb (such as the ubiquitous analysis of grammatical function according to word order (a parte ante and a parte post)) remained in constant use; invented sentences rather than quotations from classical authors continued to provide normal examples of grammatical usage. The claim that humanists such as Guarino pioneered the abbreviated grammar textbook is unfounded, given that such works were already in circulation in the thirteenth (e.g. the Regule of Theobald of Siena) and fourteenth centuries (e.g. the Regule parve of Goro d’Arezzo). Even the supposed new departure of Perotti in ending his treatise with a section on epistolography is in fact traditional practice: many manuscripts of Francesco da Buti’s Regule also end with a treatise on letter writing.
Matching continuity in formal grammar at this school level was continuity in reading matter. For school purposes in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Latin authors were divided into two groups: the auctores minores, a cycle of late ancient and medieval texts, mainly in verse; and the auctores maiores, mainly the Roman poets but also a few prose writers. Despite the harangues against them by the humanists, the minor authors continued to be read at school throughout the fifteenth century in Italy, as is attested by many manuscript copies which either originated or were actively glossed throughout the Quattrocento in Italy; even Pietro Crinito, Poliziano’s disciple, continued to teach Henry of Settimello’s Elegies The most intensively read school text in the fourteenth and fifteenth century was Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy, a work which often stood at the threshold between the minor and major authors. It is true that this text, like the minor authors, suffered a decline with the rise of the printing press at the end of the Quattrocento; nevertheless, manuscript copies, as in the case of the minor authors, continue to show intensive school use until the end of the century.
The Roman classics had been read at school in Italy throughout the Middle Ages, as is clear again from the study of surviving manuscript schoolbooks. However, they were subject to significant changes of fashion and interest, and here the humanists did often play a significant role. The grammar curriculum in twelfth-century Italian schools finished with a study of the poets Vergil, Lucan, Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Horace, Terence and Statius, as well as of prose texts by Cicero and Sallust’s two histories. In the thirteenth century some authors such as Vergil, Persius and Cicero (apart from the suppositions Ad Herennium and the genuine De inventione, which were commented on as part of the study of rhetoric) seem to have dropped out of the curriculum with the rise of new, particularly northern European school texts such as Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Poetria novella, Alexandre de Villedieu’s Doctrinale and Evrard de Bethune’s Graecismus. In the course of the fourteenth century, a number of classical texts, including Seneca’s Tragedies and Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta, first entered the curriculum, possibly under the partial influence of pre-humanists such as Lovato. However, the most significant curricular change was the recovery of Cicero, not to mention Vergil and Persius, for the schoolroom at the turn of the fifteenth century. Cicero’s shorter moral treatises (De amicitia, De senectute, Paradoxa stoicorum and De officiis) had had a place in the twelfth-century Italian curriculum, and after nearly two centuries of neglect they once more became widely studied at school in the fifteenth century. Moreover, Cicero’s letters, unknown in the Middle Ages, now became widely adopted as stylistic models in fifteenth-century Italian schools, although they were never subjected to philological commentary in the schoolroom like other classical texts.
As far as the classical authors are concerned, therefore, the picture is complex: neither revolution nor evolution is an adequate description, but continuity does describe the prevalent use of verse grammars from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. No classical grammar was written in verse, but it was found in the Middle Ages that versification was an essential method of prodding the memory of schoolboys. Works such as Doctrinale and Graecismus continued in constant use in Italy throughout the fifteenth century, and when Lorenzo Valla, himself a grammar teacher, wanted to replace the Doctrinale, he began to compose a thoroughly unclassical verse grammar himself. Similarly, there was continuity in methods used to teach the authors in the grammar schools from the Middle Ages to the end of the fifteenth century. Humanist teachers such as Guarino may have declared that their aim was to turn their pupils into better men, but the reality of pedagogic practice was far more mundane: the study of hundreds of manuscript schoolbooks and their glosses in Florentine libraries dating from the twelfth to the end of the fifteenth century has confirmed the view that the overwhelming fare of humanist as well as of medieval grammar schools was simple philology (history, mythology, grammar, simple rhetoric, figures of speech, geography, paraphrase), not moral philosophy.
In fact, if there was a pedagogic revolution in the Italian classroom, it took place not at the turn of the fifteenth but rather of the fourteenth century. It was at this point that the vernacular began to be used extensively as a pedagogic tool to teach Latin, not only to clarify vocabulary but also as a means to teach Latin prose composition; previously pupils had been taught to write in Latin through the medium of Latin, but at the beginning of the fourteenth century, possibly first in Bologna and then in Tuscany, Latin prose composition began to be taught by the use of themata, or passages to translate from the vernacular into Latin. This practice continued throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and was even used by a humanist such as Poliziano to instruct his pupil, the young Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici. A complementary change in the curriculum, which seems to have taken place at the turn of the fourteenth century as well, and which also represented a concession to the growing numbers who wanted to make use of educational skills in a culture increasingly dominated by the vernacular language, was the abbreviation of the Ianua text to allow the minimum treatment of Latin grammar and the maximum amount of practice in reading skills. The text was still taught in Latin, often now by specialist elementary school teachers (doctores puerorum as distinct from doctores grammatics) with knowledge of Latin hardly extending beyond the texts taught, in preparation for abacus or arithmetic schools, where the language of instruction would be the vernacular, and for eventual entry into the world of business and commerce, also exclusively conducted in the vernacular. It hardly needs to be pointed out that this new and significant role for the vernacular and for its culture in education had nothing to do with Italian humanism.
Poetry, in the medieval and Renaissance tradition, primarily meant the study of the ancient poets and so, in terms of the curriculum, was subsumed usuallyunder the discipline of grammar. Some consideration remains due, therefore, to moralia or moral philosophy, the final constituent of the studia humanitatis, which, in a typical humanist assertion, were claimed to ‘perfect and adorn man’; the humanists castigated their scholastic rivals for arid learning and for failing to inspire virtue in mankind and yet there was little novel in the humanist contribution to ethics. Humanist moral philosophy was overwhelmingly based on ancient ethics, much of which had been extensively studied in the Middle Ages. The main sources of Aristotelian moralia were all translated into Latin and received commentaries at universities during the thirteenth century; moreover, Stoic ethics, as expounded by Seneca and Cicero, had been a characteristic ingredient of medieval moral thought. These two traditions provided the core of most humanist moral philosophy too, although in the fifteenth century there was some attempt by humanists to revive philosophical sources weakly represented in the Middle Ages. These included, in the first place, Platonism, which however failed to stimulate a synthesis of ethics, unlike Aristotelianism, partly because Plato’s writings were themselves, unlike Aristotle’s, unsystematic and partly because most Renaissance Platonists, like their ancient, medieval and Byzantine forerunners, were more interested in cosmology and metaphysics than in ethics; even the Platonic doctrines of the contemplative life and the theory of love, ostensibly part of ethics, tended to form the backdrop to spiritualism, mysticism and metaphysical speculation in the hands of fifteenth-century Platonists. In the Middle Ages, Epicureanism had been even less known and understood than Platonism, although it had been handled with surprising subtlety by Abelard and Aquinas, and the sympathetic treatment of Epicurus by Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius gradually came to the attention of humanists. His ethics, which propounded intellectual pleasure as the goal of life, convinced Cosma Raimondi and even appealed to Filelfo, but his unfavourable treatment at the hands of Cicero prejudiced most humanists; even LorenzoValla, who preferred Epicureanism to Stoicism, in theend conventionally advocated Christian morality above all other systems.
Humanist political thought, strictly speaking a division of moral philosophy, has particularly preoccupied modern scholarship. According to Baron’s theory of ‘civic humanism’, Bruni and his followers initiated the republican strain of thought which became a feature of some — though by no means all — Renaissance political thought. However, it is now clear that a fully developed republican ideology existed in the Italian communes long before Bruni, whose political ideas were only one phase of a long tradition, inaugurated by the growth of the communes and their struggle against the Empire and tyranny. The early communes produced such outspoken republicans as the author of the Fetdes Romans, Rolandino of Padua and Brunetto Latini, and the translation and assimilation of Aristotle’s Politics encouraged republican overtones in the political thought of Aquinas and Marsilius and inspired the militant and categorical republicanism of Ptolemy of Lucca. The classical texts at the disposal of medieval civic republicans had been limited largely to Aristotle, Sallust and Cicero’s De officiis, a text which probably underwent a decline of influence in the course of the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries, as attested by sharply falling manuscript circulation of the Ciceronian moral treatises possibly caused by the rise of Aristotelian scholasticism. Bruni’s original contribution to republicanism was to restore its Ciceronian foundations — a process which had already been begun by his mentor Salutati, who had directly cited De officiis when advocating political equality. Followers of ‘civic humanism’ have also overstated Bruni’s commitment to the merits of the active over the contemplative life. It is true that he went further than many of his predecessors in championing active citizenship, but like previous thinkers he did not see the question in black and white terms, as is clear from one of his most significant assessments of the problem, the Isagogicon moralis disciplinae, where he states: ‘Each of these ways of life has its own qualities worthy of praise and commendation.’ This kind of qualified judgement has its source in the tenth book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics, an analysis which Bruni approached even more closely at the end of his life in a letter of 1441; Bruni’s vacillations and qualifications echo the complex analysis of the problem found in the writings of his mentor, Salutati, as well as in the thought of Aquinas, who actually went very far in justifying the active life. Bruni has claim to some originality in the energy with which he puts the arguments for the active life, but the overall pattern of his political thought on this question is a development of Aristotelian thinking, along the lines already established by Aquinas and Salutati.
The contrast between Middle Ages and Renaissance — the cornerstone of the Baronian school — is particularly out of place in studying the political thought of the Italian communes, whose actual history showed notable continuity between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; more fruitful has been the approach which attempts to relate the political ideas of humanism to the ambitions of particular regimes, political groupings and diplomatic needs, regardless of meta-historical concepts. It is clear, for example, that an emphasis on both equality and elitism are simultaneous features of the political thought of Salutati in the years after the defeat of the anti-oligarchic regime in Florence in 1382. It would be easy to accuse the Florentine chancellor here of inconsistency and insincerity, but this would ignore the close connection of Salutati’s political ideas with the facts of Florentine political life. After 1382, in fact, the Florentine constitution was able to accommodate the ambitions of the wider political class to hold public office and yet at the same time enable a restricted oligarchy to retain a tight grip over real political power. This balance was achieved by qualifying ever-larger numbers of citizens for the highest public offices, while giving preferential treatment to the oligarchs through the use of constitutional manipulations such as the borsellino and the accoppiatori. Such practices not only account for Salutati’s emphasis simultaneously on democracy and elitism, but also explain Bruni’s definition of political liberty as the equal hope of winning office in his Oratio for Nanni Strozzi of 1428, a view which reflected the realities of the Florentine political world between 1382 and 1434, when ‘many were elected to offices but few to government’. Similarly, Salutati’s advocacy of monarchy as the best form of government in De tyrannd was interpreted by Baron as ‘political quietism’, reflecting his allegedly residual medieval and conservative belief in world empire as opposed to the truly Renaissance republicanism of his pupil, Bruni, whose views in the Laudatio Florentinae urbis were supposedly more in tune with the needs of Florentine liberty in the struggle against Milanese tyranny. However, it is now clear that in fact Salutati’s monarchism was more closely related to Florentine diplomatic interests than Bruni’s generic republicanism; Salutati was actually upholding the inviolate imperial majesty of Florence’s ally, the Emperor-Elect Rupert of the Palatinate, whose dignity had been debased by the sale of the imperial duchy of Milan to Florence’s enemy, Giangaleazzo Visconti. A less schematic approach explains Italian political thought much more sensitively than Baron’s formula of a conflict between Florentine liberty and Milanese tyranny, when in historical fact both were imperial powers involved in a struggle to establish their respective territorial empires by extinguishing the political liberty of their neighbours.
It has been necessary to emphasise the limits of humanist achievements in order to dispel the notion - rooted in Burckhardt and ultimately in Hegel - that humanism somehow represented a new period in intellectual history. The fact is that change in the central disciplines of the studia humanitatis was irregular and uneven, alternately limited or facilitated by many distinct inherent traditions and differing external circumstances. Indeed, just because the humanists fell short of effecting intellectual revolutions in grammar, rhetoric, history and moral/political philosophy does not mean that in other areas they did not achieve a more decisive break with the medieval past. In Latin scholarship, the fifteenth-century humanists, with their discovery or rediscovery of texts either seldom read or completely unknown in the Middle Ages, virtually completed the corpus of the Latin classics such as is known today; as far as scholarship of Tacitus, Lucretius, Catullus, Propertius or Cicero’s letters is concerned, therefore, humanism represented a decisive break with the Middle Ages. Similarly, the notion of the public library was a creation of the Renaissance. Before the invention of printing, humanists such as Petrarch became acutely aware that the process of preservation and dissemination through copying inevitably implied textual deterioration; the foundation of public libraries in Florence, Rome, Venice, Urbino and Cesena during the fifteenth century was therefore intended to provide scholars with authoritative versions in order to counteract the further corruption of texts. The procedures of textual criticism were vastly improved by the humanists. Few medieval scholars went beyond collation of manuscripts to secure a superior text, but the humanists now engaged in sometimes successful and even inspired conjectural emendation. Moreover, Poliziano inaugurated the ranking of manuscripts according to age, and his efforts perhaps even anticipate modern stemmatics; in this sense, the humanists were the remote ancestors of modern classical philologists. Another important new contribution was antiquarianism; in the Middle Ages, classical artefacts had been prized mainly because they were precious, not because they were ancient. Petrarch, in contrast, began to collect ancient objects because they evoked for him the lost world of classical Antiquity; his antiquarian efforts remained largely romantic, but his humanist successors Poggio and Biondo actually did begin the critical study of ancient remains, providing the distant foundations of modern archaeology.
Without doubt, however, the greatest single achievement of the fifteenth-century humanists was the revival of Greek, an endeavour with few precedents in the western Middle Ages. There had been no tradition of Greek scholarship in the medieval west, few Greek manuscripts in western libraries, no place in the school or university curriculum for the Greek language. The Latin translations from the Greek were limited to a few authors and to a restricted range of disciplines; with rare exceptions, leading medieval scholars had no Greek. The precedent for the humanists’ Greek revival came from Byzantium, where the study of classical Greek language and literature had continued throughout the Middle Ages. Although Petrarch and Boccaccio had engaged Greek teachers, the renewal really began only with Chrysoloras, called to teach Greek in Florence at the end of the fourteenth century; his pupils formed the first extensive circle of western Greek scholars since Antiquity, inaugurating the study of Greek as a major activity both of education and scholarship. Most important here were the copying and dissemination of Greek manuscripts in the west and, above all, the translation of the classics of Greek literature, philosophy and science into Latin, including the retranslation in a less literal manner of authors such as Aristotle who had been available in the Middle Ages. It remains the greatest achievement of Renaissance humanism that almost all classical Greek literature became available to the west, both in editions of the original texts and in Latin translations.
The most original aspect of humanist Greek scholarship in the fifteenth century was undertaken by Valla with his philological study of the New Testament; indeed, to subject the Bible itself to critical textual analysis was a genuine innovation in western history, without precedent either in Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Valla compared the Vulgate with the Greek text, bringing to bear all the philological knowledge of the ancient languages accumulated by the humanists — a revolutionary step as Jerome’s translation had been revered as divinely inspired and authoritative for more than a millennium. Erasmus regarded himself as the continuator of Valla’s work, which also profoundly influenced Luther’s interpretation and general approach to the Scriptures, and yet in his own century Valla’s biblical criticism remained an aberration, unpublished and without impact until Erasmus’s edition of 1505. In fact, despite its vast importance for future history, the Greek revival remained in the fifteenth century a limited enterprise. Many important humanists never learned Greek, a language which very few were capable of writing proficiently (Filelfo’s letters and Poliziano’s verse were exceptional). Many Greek authors were hardly appreciated or known, even in Latin translation, and it is almost bizarre that a spurious text such as the pseudonymous letters of Phalaris was far more widely circulated in translation than Homer. The taste for Greek literature in the fifteenth century tended to be Hellenistic, rather than classical, which is not really surprising, in view of the fact that the Roman authors with which humanists were most familiar had been the direct heirs not of classical, but rather of Hellenistic Greece. Despite the Greek revival, Antiquity in the fifteenth century on balance still meant largely Roman Antiquity.
In one way, the humanist movement, as developed by Petrarch and many of his successors, represented, in negative terms a narrowing, more positively a deepening, of knowledge. This can be seen, for example, in Petrarch’s list of favourite books. Petrarch’s interests are almost exclusively in the studia humanitatis; the ancient and medieval heritage in science, philosophy (apart from ethics) and theology are virtually put to one side. Even his favourite, Augustine, author of more than a hundred works of theology and philosophy, is represented by a mere four titles — The city of God, The confessions and two devotional works, demonstrating a notable deviation from the medieval view of Augustine as a philosophical and theological authority and suggesting that he had become a figure of more personal and moral inspiration. On the other hand, the classical works listed constituted a specialist collection, including works and authors (e.g. De oratore, Cicero’s orations, Livy) far removed from the mainstays of the medieval literary canon; indeed, Petrarch’s library was later to include many recondite works almost unknown in the Middle Ages.
Of course, not all humanists shared Petrarch’s distaste for metaphysics and speculative philosophy; his most notable immediate successor, Salutati, had a wide knowledge of scholastic philosophy, including the latest trends in nominalism and Scotism. Although a number of other humanists, such as Manetti, devoted many years, after their grounding in the studia humanitatis, to the study of philosophy and theology, it is clear that there was no intrinsic connection between the humanist and scholastic disciplines; attempts to connect Petrarch’s or Valla’s emphasis on will rather than intellect with developments in late medieval nominalism showing similar tendencies have revealed only links of the most generic nature, demonstrating at best that such voluntaristic colourings were a common currency in much late medieval thought from mysticism, pietism and devotionalism to nominalism and humanism. Nevertheless, the philosophical and speculative poverty of the studia humanitatis worried a number of fifteenth-century humanists. Alamanno Rinuccini, for example, criticised the generation of humanists before the 1450s for taking no more than a small sip from the cup of philosophy, thinking it was more than enough to have dabbled in ethics. The most powerful (and amusing) assertion of this view came from Giovanni Pico in his famous letter to Ermolao Barbaro of 1485, when he ridiculed humanism as mere playing with words, in contrast to the sublime study of philosophy.
Salutati’s formulation of the studia humanitatis as a prelude to the studia divinitatis was repeated in so many words by Pico in his famous Oration, a text only incidentally and initially concerned with the dignity of man; in fact its actual purpose was to underpin the traditional hierarchy of learning from grammar and rhetoric to dialectic and philosophy and finally to theology (the subject of Pico’s 900 theses which the oration was meant to justify) as the queen of the sciences. If the overall shape of knowledge remained so traditional in the fifteenth century, then it was inevitable that the programme of learning envisaged in the studia humanitatis would eventually come to be regarded as incomplete. It is against this background that the great Platonic revival of the fifteenth century must be considered. Attempts have been made to see this landmark in the history of thought in political terms, particularly with reference to Florence, where the new emphasis on the contemplative life propounded by Platonists such as Landino and Ficino have been related to growing Medicean hegemony and to the narrowing possibilities for real political participation; however, this thesis has now been decisively refuted by the simple fact, overlooked by scholars keen to invert Baron’s ‘civic humanism’, that the turn to speculative philosophy in Florence actually began in the mid-1450s, a time when Medicean control in Florence was near to collapse. Another equally unsuccessful explanation has focused on the lectures of Argyropoulos, who, having begun teaching in Florence in the mid-1450s, supposedly championed Plato over Aristotle; many scholars have subscribed to this thesis, first propounded by Garin, evidently without a close reading of Argyropoulos’s actual writings, where it is clear that he was an Aristotelian who regarded Plato as a crude forerunner of his greater pupil. Nevertheless, the role of Argyropoulos was decisive for the origins of a philosophical culture in Florence, if not for Platonism itself. The Byzantine learned tradition, of which he was a notable product, extended beyond rhetoric, grammar and literature to philosophy, science, mathematics and theology; there were almost no Byzantine scholars without developed interests in some of these areas. When Argyropoulos came to Florence, it was natural for him to range beyond the narrow limits of studia humanitatis and to criticise humanists such as Bruni for their ignorance of philosophy, for their insistence that philosophy and eloquence were necessarily linked and for their disdain of speculation. Some seeds of this favourable attitude to speculative philosophy may have been sewn at the University of Florence by Marsuppini, who seems to have himself ranged more widely than usual in his lectures in the humanities, and there are other important preliminary figures such as the scholastics Lorenzo Pisano and Niccolo Tignosi, Ficino’s teacher; moreover, the undoubted growing elitism of Florentine society in the later fifteenth century provided a receptive clientele for Ficino’s ‘special esoteric form of Christianity’. Nevertheless, the seeds of the new philosophical culture of later Medicean Florence, with the essential critical attitude to humanism which underlay Ficino’s and Pico’s Platonism, must have come from Argyropoulos and the Byzantine tradition which he represented.
Fifteenth-century humanism was overwhelmingly an Italian phenomenon, but it has long been recognised that the Renaissance began to cross the Alps well before the turn of the sixteenth century. Patriotic scholars earlier this century were keen to find indigenous roots for northern humanism, but their attempts were largely in vain. Recent research, for example, has demonstrated that the Dutch devotio moderna was a devotional, not an educational, movement, which only coincidentally shared a distaste for scholastic theology with some (but not all) Italian humanists. Moreover, humanism, like scholasticism, had its roots in the earlier medieval study of the liberal arts; while in Italy this ultimately led to a more intensive study of the classical Latin authors beginning at the end of the thirteenth century, in northern Europe the tendency was to direct the grammatical/rhetorical aspects of the curriculum as much as possible to the eventual study of logic, philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, the Latin classics were never completely abandoned in the north, and there were moments - for example among a few English friars at Oxford and Cambridge in the second quarter of the fourteenth century - of more intensive classical study. However, these English mendicants, whose interest in the classics was mainly directed towards preaching, shared none of the Italian humanists’ rejection of medieval learning, and the same can be said of a number of classically minded French clergy of the fourteenth century.
Humanism was imported from Italy to the north. At first there were a few native scholars who, although influenced by Italian humanists, did not quite manage to establish the movement firmly across the Alps. Such, for example, were Jean de Montreuil, secretary of the French king and friend of Bruni and Niccoli, or the earlier imperial chancellor, Johannes von Neumarkt, correspondent of Petrarch’s. In fifteenth-century England, the brief residence of Poggio led to no lasting results, while the great patron, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who engaged Italian secretaries, collected a huge library of classical and humanist texts and numbered Italian humanists among his correspondents, nevertheless failed to establish an indigenous English humanist movement: in the mid-fifteenth century, English humanism was limited to men such as Tiptoft, Grey, Flemyng or Free, all of whom acquired their humanist inclinations while studying in Italy and who never managed to establish a solid institutional basis at home.
In the fifteenth century, humanism made its greatest inroads north of the Alps in the Germanic regions of the continent. An early figure of note was Peter Luder, another Guarino pupil, who taught the studia humanitatis at Heidelberg, Ulm, Erfurt and Leipzig. Much more significant was Rudolf Agricola, who spent more than a decade in Italy, mainly in Pavia and Ferrara; his treatise on dialectic, albeit uninfluential until its publication in the early sixteenth century, became a landmark in the humanist reform of logic, emphasising probability and persuasion rather than certainty, and placing Cicero and Quintilian above Aristotle as authorities. Particularly important for the establishment of the movement in Germany and the Netherlands was the foundation of humanist grammar schools, the most renowned of which was St Lebwin’s in Deventer, headed by Alexander Hegius, whose pupils included the German mystical humanist Mutianus Rufus and Erasmus himself. Hegius was an archetypal transitional figure: he used the traditional medieval verse grammar, the Doctrinale, but possibly also introduced the study of Greek and criticised the use of medieval, logically orientated speculative grammar in favour of the simplified grammatical methods current in Italy.
By the close of the fifteenth century, there were humanists — some indigenous, some Italian trained — throughout Germany. A number were conservative, such as Jakob Wimpfeling, an outspoken nationalist, who, like Hegius, called for a simplification of grammar and supported the teaching of some pagan authors such as Cicero and Vergil, while banning others, including Ovid and Catullus; after some dithering, Wimpheling upheld the value of scholastic learning. A figure of greater significance, albeit strictly conservative in religion, was Johann Reuchlin, who made three long visits to Italy, where he came into contact with Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino, Pico and Ermolao Barbaro; well before the end of the century, following the path of his idol Pico, he began to study Hebrew, of which he published the first usable grammar in 1506, so becoming the first northern scholar of the three ancient languages. From Ficino and Pico he adopted the Ancient Theology, and he also took up the latter’s view that the Cabala embodied a hidden wisdom revealed directly by God to Moses; his own cabalistic works provided an essential link between Florentine occultism and later developments in northern Europe. More iconoclastic than either Wimpfeling or Reuchlin was Conrad Celtis, an outstanding Latin poet, who on an Italian trip met Battista, son of Guarino, Ficino and Pomponio Leto; on his return he founded humanist societies or academies, possibly inspired by the example of Florentine and Roman academies, in various German cities including Ingolstadt, Heidelberg and Vienna. Equally important was the patronage he gained while teaching poetry in Vienna at the close of the century, from the emperor, Maximilian. A fervent German patriot, Celtis published a student edition of Tacitus’ Germania in 1500, which helped to link humanism with frustrated German nationalism.
By the end of the century humanism was fairly well rooted in Germany, with numerous local groups, humanist schools and a firm, if subordinate, position in the university curriculum, not to mention several outstanding indigenous representatives. The movement’s progress in France was more marginal. In the fifteenth century, the Parisian colleges of Navarre and Montaigu remained strictly conservative. An Italian humanist, Gregorio Tifernate, had been appointed to a professorship of Greek in the mid-fifteenth century, and the scholastic philosopher Guillaume Fichet had lectured on classical authors, as well as establishing France’s first printing press, whose output included a number of classical and humanist texts, as well as work by Fichet himself. But it was not until Robert Gaguin that France had its first genuine humanist. After several Italian visits, not only did he gather round himself a modest classical academy, but he also published vernacular versions of Livy and Caesar as well as his own history of Frankish origins in 1498. Particularly significant was his encouragement of the youthful Erasmus, whose first two publications appeared in works by Gaguin. Another important late fifteenth-century development was a scheme to replace medieval translations of Aristotle with those by Italian humanists. The great personality here was Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples. Inspired by Ermolao Barbaro, he aimed to paraphrase essential ideas from Aristotle’s metaphysics and natural philosophy, deliberately leaving to one side the accumulated tradition of scholastic commentary. After several Italian visits on which he met both Ficino and Pico, Lefevre took up Platonism and Hermeticism; significant for French national sympathies was his publica tion of the late ancient neoplatonic mystic, Dionysius the Areopagite, erroneously identified with a convert of St Paul’s and also with France’s patron saint, Denis. Despite these important inroads, nevertheless, it is clear that by the end of the century humanism had made greater progress in the Netherlands or Germany than in France, where there is little convincing evidence of influence on grammar school education.
The picture is not dissimilar in the rest of western Europe. Spanish humanism produced only one figure of note in the fifteenth century, Antonio de Nebrija, educated at Bologna and the author of perhaps the most successful humanist Latin grammar, a work which soon achieved a notable circulation throughout Europe, including Italy. In England, the claims for humanism have tended to be exaggerated, mainly owing to the misunderstood affiliations of John Colet. Recent research has demonstrated that, although he visited Italy and admired the Florentine Platonists, his educational reforms demonstrated antipathy to most classical literature, which had little place in his curriculum for St Paul’s school, which was only given a genuine humanist direction by its first high master, William Lily. Other figures of some note were Thomas Linacre, a physician who had studied with Demetrius Chalcondyles and Poliziano, whose other pupil, William Grocyn, gave the first established lectures in Greek at Oxford before the end of the century. Particularly significant for future developments was Erasmus’s brief stay in England in 1499. Recent research has suggested that the English universities, although dominated of course by the traditional scholastic syllabus, allowed greater scope for the development of humanism than had previously been assumed. At Oxford, Cornelio Vitelli, a minor Italian humanist, taught grammar at New College in the 1480s, while also tutoring privately in Greek; Magdalen College school, founded before the end of the century, also stressed from the start the reading of classical authors. Greater early progress was made at Cambridge; Lorenzo Traversagni taught rhetoric and moral philosophy there between 1472 and 1482, while another Italian humanist, Auberino, taught classical authors, together with John Fisher, later bishop of Rochester. Most notable was a statute of 1488, reinforced in 1495, establishing a public lectureship at Cambridge on ‘humanity’.
While the achievements of ultramontane humanists in the fifteenth century are thus limited, their Italian counterparts had certainly accomplished great things; nevertheless, in its core areas humanism preserved many traditional features and showed marked continuity with medieval learning. Many of its genuine innovations, such as textual criticism or the revival of Greek, were esoteric pursuits, not even practised and certainly not mastered by the majority of humanists. The query remains, therefore, why humanism was so successful as a cultural movement: if it shared so much in common with medieval learning, what was the secret of its undoubted appeal not only in Italy but eventually throughout Europe? This fundamental question is never asked, much less answered, by Kristeller; pointing to the continuity and development of traditional Aristotelian studies throughout the Renaissance, as well as emphasising humanism’s literary rather than philosophical focus, provides only a negative response: humanism’s success could not have been due to its alleged appeal as the new philosophy of the Renaissance, because in fact it offered no genuine philosophical alternative to scholasticism. Hanna Gray goes further and asks why the humanists ‘failed to recognize, indeed disclaimed, continuity with medieval practice’, questioning why they should have been so highly valued by their ‘particular age’. Her answer focuses on ‘the subjective consciousness of novelty’: the humanists succeeded because they were convinced, and were able to convince the world at large, that their studies — particularly the pursuit of eloquence — offered a surer path than scholasticism to virtue and the good life. Gombrich similarly stresses the subjective appeal of humanism, its one-upmanship: like a fashion, it succeeded by giving its adherents a sense of superiority.
These kinds of interpretations are the inevitable response to the ‘revolt of the medievalists’ — whose ranks Kristeller must to some extent join: if humanism was not objectively so different from medieval learning, then its appeal must have been subjective. There is doubtless much to recommend this approach, and yet it could hardly be the whole story. Humanism swept Italian society in the Quattrocento, to be followed by overwhelming success throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. It became impossible to get a job as a schoolmaster, private tutor or public servant without humanist credentials. Hard-headed Florentine businessmen paid large sums of money to humanist teachers to educate their children, to booksellers to fill their libraries with classical and humanist texts, to dealers and agents to adorn their palaces with enormously expensive antiquities. Was this no more than just fashion, and indeed a fashion which was to last for centuries? Surely they must have expected something more tangible than just virtue or one-upmanship for all the money, effort and time spent.
One solution to this problem focuses on the ‘civic’ world of late fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Italy, suggesting that humanism’s success was due to its practical political lessons. Scholasticism, it is argued, offered only intellectual knowledge; humanism, in contrast, taught men how to make hard political and moral decisions in the real world. Humanism appealed because Italian citizens found its lessons to be of greater practical use than those offered by the scholastics. This view not only accepts literally the humanists’ own claims for their wares, but also is far removed from the realities of Italian political life. In fact, humanist treatises, like their Ciceronian or Senecan models, offered few, if any, lessons in political reality; their moral platitudes and banalities could hardly have helped any Italian politician faced with decisions about war or peace, alliances, factional conflict, taxation or government of subject territories. This kind of interpretation in fact depicts the ideal political world ‘of republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist’, so scathingly ridiculed by Machiavelli in chapter 15 of The Prince. Evidently misleading has been the discovery that some debates of the Florentine deliberative council, the Pratica, contained more elaborate speeches, more citations from classical authors and more references to history in the 1410s; however, these changes coincided with new chancery personnel in Florence, and may have represented bureaucratic elaboration, known to have occurred at other times in the fifteenth century, rather than an actual different style of debating. More importantly, the records in the Florentine archives demonstrate that humanist moralising hardly concerns the speakers; at issue instead were the real problems of political life and even survival. Humanism appealed far beyond republican Florence or Venice: to suggest that in a time of growing elitism and loss of political liberty there was still scope for significant civic participation in the vestigial communal institutions of Milan, Mantua, Ferrara or in the host of subject cities such as Padua, Vicenza, Arezzo or Pisa is inappropriate; subjects in such cities were only too aware of the fact that they had lost their liberty and any kind of meaningfully active political life. Humanist educators promised to teach morals and create worthy citizens; the fact that they made no attempt to live up to these claims in the actual classroom must fundamentally undermine the thesis that humanism succeeded because of the practical benefits offered to society. No republican or ‘civic’ interpretation can adequately explain humanism’s triumph for the simple reason that in the age of humanism civic and republican life were rapidly becoming anachronisms.
One historian has written that ‘the acceptability of the new culture as the common currency of elite society rather than as the hobby of a few eccentrics depended on the conclusion by hard-headed Florentine oligarchs that humanistic studies were useful to a ruling class’. The truth of this statement depends on the definition of the word ‘useful’. If useful means teaching practical or even relatively more practical lessons for everyday political and social life, then it is patently false. If, however, ‘useful’ means fulfilling the interests of the ruling class, then we have at last arrived at the reason for humanism’s success. For centuries Italy had been a snobbish, elitist society; even the Florentines, who stopped short of establishing a constitutionally privileged and exclusive aristocracy as in Venice, had never allowed rapid and extreme fluctuations of wealth, characteristic of the medieval Italian economy, to level the gradations of the social hierarchy. Traditionally, a classical education meant nothing to the Italian upper classes. What they wanted for their children was enough literacy and numeracy to carry on the family business, to maintain and improve the family’s patrimony: for them, in Alberti’s words, ‘it is enough to know how to write your name, and to know how to add up how much money you are owed’. It was along these lines that one patrician Florentine, Bernardo Manetti, provided for the education of his son:
At a young age, he sent him, according to the custom of the city, to learn to read and write. When, in a brief time, the boy had mastered the learning necessary to become a merchant, his father took him away from elementary school and sent him to arithmetic [abacus] school, where in a few months he similarly learned enough to work as a merchant. At the age of ten he went into a bank.
Another Florentine, a member of an ancient Florentine family of illustrious feudal descent, Messer Andrea de’ Pazzi, gave his son Piero little encouragement to pursue his education:
Being the son of Messer Andrea and a young man of handsome appearance, devoted to the delights and pleasures of the world, Piero gave little thought to the study of Latin letters: indeed, his father was a merchant and like those who have little education themselves, he had scant regard for learning nor did he think that his son would show much inclination in that direction.
Similar were the views of one famous humanist’s father, a man who was, ‘in accordance with the custom of the city, more given to earning than to learning’, and who therefore refused to sanction his son’s classical studies.
The Italian (and European) idea of a gentleman, however, was redefined by the circle of patricians who had originally gathered round Salutati and who became even more influential after his death. For such men as Palla Strozzi, Niccolo Niccoli, Roberto Rossi, Antonio Corbinelli and Agnolo Pandolfini, classical learning was an essential ingredient of gentility, a necessary qualification for membership of the social elite — a view which they derived from the study of the ancients themselves. The classical texts which provide the most compelling portrait of the ideal Roman gentleman - Cicero’s Orator and De oratore and Quintilian’s Institutiones - were either studied for the first time or with renewed vigour at the turn of the fifteenth century; from such sources the Florentine avant-garde was confirmed in its view that no one should command a high social position, no one could rightfully call himself a gentleman, no one was qualified to rule, without a classical education. Such ideas were the core of the first and most influential of all humanist educational treatises, Vergerio’s De ingenuis moribus, written c. 1402 in the wake of the author’s stay in Florence and of his association with Salutati’s circle as a pupil of Chrysoloras. Vergerio’s work aimed to guide the education of society’s leaders, whether citizens, princes or courtiers; it established classical learning as an essential qualification to merit or retain political power and social leadership. This new humanist ideal of education could be associated with any leader or elite, republican or monarchical, and therefore was adaptable throughout Italy and ultimately throughout Europe. The greatest humanist teacher, Guarino, who frequented Chrysoloras’s lessons too, later teaching in Florence from 1410 to 1414, was also soon advertising the humanist claims to educate society’s rulers, as in this letter to apodesta of Bologna in 1419:
I understand that when civil disorder recently aroused the people of Bologna to armed conflict you showed the bravery and eloquence of a soldier as well as you had previously meted out a judge’s just sentence ... You therefore owe no small thanks to the Muses with whom you have been on intimate terms since your boyhood, and by whom you were brought up. They taught you how to carry out your tasks in society. Hence you are living proof that the Muses rule not only musical instruments but also public affairs.
The crucial change from the traditional medieval to the Renaissance ideal of education is revealed with great clarity by Alberti:
And who does not know that the first thing useful for children are Latin letters? And this is so important that someone unlettered, however much a gentleman, will be considered nothing but a country bumpkin. And I should like to see young noblemen with a book in hand more frequently than with a hawk ... If there is anything which goes beautifully with gentility or which gives the greatest distinction to human life or adds grace, authority and name to a family, it is surely letters, without which no one can be reputed to possess gentility.
Humanism succeeded because it persuaded Italian and ultimately European society that without its lessons no one was fit to rule or lead. The common misconception about this educational revolution is that it involved a change in substance, in curriculum, as well as in ideology. A change in the practical benefits of education never could nor did occur; better Latinity could never mean superior morality or greater political expertise. A change in curriculum only developed very gradually, slowly in the fifteenth century and then more quickly in the sixteenth. But the change in ideology was rapid and decisive.
What then was the appeal to the upper classes of this humanist educational programme? Italian society, since the rise of the communes, if not before, was always in flux; in an economy where wealth and prominence depended not just on land but also so much on commercial and industrial fortunes, on local as well as far-flung international and overseas trading adventures, families and individuals rose and fell with amazing rapidity. In this world, society was always on the look out for better definitions of social and political acceptability. This was particularly true in communal Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when traditional definitions of nobility had been devalued by association with mercenaries and with politically ostracised groups such as the Florentine magnates. Humanism’s particular definition had the best of all possible seals of approval — it was endorsed by the ancients. The crucial texts by Cicero and Quintilian had been little known in the Middle Ages; moreover, Cicero’s moral philosophical works in general had suffered a serious decline during the preceding century and a half. It is here that the subjectivity stressed by Gombrich or Gray comes into play. It did not matter that the equation between Latinity, virtue, social leadership and political power did not really add up. It suited everyone — humanists as well as the social elite. Nor could anyone say that a humanist education was empty, for its products emerged as outstanding Latin and ultimately Greek scholars. No one questioned the equation between a classical education and moral and political virtue: if it was good enough for Antiquity, it was surely good enough for the Renaissance.