Humanism

The classical texts of Greece and Rome were the basis of humanist education, the purpose of which was to teach students to read, write, and speak well in Latin by using classical sources. The earliest of many humanist treatises on education was Pierpaolo Vergerio's (c. 1369–1444) De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus studiis (1403; The character and studies befitting a free-born youth); he is the first to describe in print the studia humanitatis as the best course of study for an emerging non-clerical elite, both in private letters and in public life. Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444) wrote a parallel treatise (as a letter) for girls (De studiis et litteris; [1524, The study of literature]). Grammar for each of them meant a thorough knowledge of Latin, enabling a student to read the historians, rhetoricians, poets, and moral philosophers (Bruni especially includes the church fathers among these) of classical Latin antiquity. Although Vergerio also includes arithmetic and geometry in his curriculum, Bruni eliminates these as well as rhetoric from the education of women, for whom these subjects have no practical use, since all are related to public vocations not open to women. Later humanists not only wrote educational treatises (Maffeo Vegio, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Battista Guarini, Erasmus, and Juan Luis Vives among them) but also produced texts designed to help students master Latin, most notable among these Lorenzo Valla's (1407–1457) Elegantiae linguae latinae (1437, pub. 1471; Elegances of the Latin language) and a number of works by Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536), including De ratione studii ac legendi interpretandique auctores (1511; On the method of study and of reading and interpreting authors), De conscribendis epistolis (1522; On the writing of letters), De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio (1529; A declamation on the subject of liberal education for children), and the Colloquia familiaria (1518–1533; Colloquies).

Under the heading of grammar, the humanist emendations of texts and the development of methods of textual study and their literary and historical critique should also be included. A method for doing so was put forth by Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) in his Miscellaneorum centuria prima (1480; Miscellanies), marking the real beginning of modern methods of textual research. The most famous attack on a forged text was Lorenzo Valla's De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (1440; Falsely believed and fictitious Donation of Constantine), in which he proved on philological and historical grounds that the Donation was an eighth-century forgery.

Rhetoric.

In the Middle Ages, Cicero was known as a philosopher, but his orations and his major theoretical works on oratory were entirely unknown. Petrarch made the earliest discovery of a Ciceronian oration, Pro Archia poeta (In defense of the poet Archias), extolling the value of poetry and literature. Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) discovered ten additional orations of Cicero and a complete copy of Quintilian (which provides the step by step education of an orator), and Cicero's De institutione oratoria (On the education of the orator). In 1421 Gerardo Landriani discovered in Lodi Cicero's other major oratorical treatises: Brutus (his history of rhetoric), Orator (the ideal orator), and De oratore (the ingredients of a great orator). Thus Cicero the orator became known again for the first time in a thousand years.

The Greek tradition was recovered more slowly. George of Trebizond (1396–1473) made the first humanist translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric into Latin. But it was not until the following century that the Greek rhetorical tradition was made as fully available as is now known. Aldus Manutius published Rhetores graeci (1508) comprising ninety manuscripts, and including the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Aeschines, and other Attic orators.

Humanists also wrote treatises on rhetoric and aids to teaching it. George of Trebizond wrote the first comprehensive rhetoric of the Renaissance, Rhetoricorum libri V (1434), in which illustrations from both Greek and Latin traditions were included. In the next century Philipp Melanchthon's (1497–1560) Institutiones rhetoricae (1521; Training in rhetoric) extended the humanistic rhetorical art to Protestant Germany, while Cypriano Soarez's De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone, et Quintiliano deprompti (1562; Three books on the art of rhetoric drawn from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian) circulated in Jesuit schools throughout the world and was continuously reprinted into the eighteenth century. Among the many practical treatises Erasmus wrote to teach rhetoric was De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512, rev. 1514, 1534; Copia of words and ideas), offering many ideas and ways to amplify ideas.

Humanists used their rhetorical models to attack scholastic philosophy and the central position given to logic in it. Valla, in his Disputationes dialecticae (1439), claimed that the logicians had created fictitious abstractions and categories; he did away with the abstractions and most of the categories and made logic a subdivision of invention, one of the five parts of rhetoric. Rodolphus Agricola (Roelof Huysman; 1443 or 1444–1485) studied in Italy and in later years published De inventione dialectica (1479, pub. 1515; On dialectical invention; 47 editions by 1562, all in northern Europe). It is not clear whether he knew Valla's earlier work, but he sought to substitute a logic based on topics for one based on terms, and the probabilities of dialectic and rhetoric for the certitude of the syllogism. Agricola's views were taken up by Johannes Sturm (1507–1589) who propagated them in Paris (1528–1535) and Strasbourg (1538 ff.). While in Paris he taught Petrus Ramus (Pierre de La Ramée; 1515–1572), who attacked Aristotelian logic in his Aristotelicae animadversiones (1543; Aristotelian animadversions) and developed a topics logic following Agricola, emphasizing rules of natural reasoning. He was enormously popular between 1575 and 1600, and in Puritan New England during the seventeenth century.

History.

Latin historians were known during the Middle Ages, but humanists began the scholarly study of their texts by annotating and emending manuscripts of the classical Roman historians (notably Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Caesar, Sallust, and Velleius Paterculus), and once printing became established in the late 1460s the Roman historians were among the most popular texts printed. The Greek historians were less known, but between 1400 and 1450 many Greek manuscripts were brought from Constantinople to Italy, and a cadre of humanists trained in Greek began to translate them. Plutarch's Lives were particularly popular as comparative biographies, and Polybius's discussion of the various forms of constitutions attracted much interest. Humanists began at once to translate these texts into Latin. Niccolò Perotti translated Polybius 1–5, and Valla translated Herodotus and Thucydides.

Erasmus published editions of a number of the church fathers and the first Greek edition of the New Testament (1516, expanded and republished in 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535) placing in a parallel column his own translation of it into Latin, and adding annotations as well. In separate volumes he published paraphrases. Martin Luther (1483–1546) used Erasmus's first edition in his lectures on Romans in 1516. Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) founded the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1499 (opened 1508) to promote study of the biblical languages. His first large project was publication of the Bible in its original languages, which was accomplished between 1513 and 1517 in six volumes, though a delay until 1520 in gaining papal approval prevented publication of the New Testament; hence Erasmus's Greek Bible was the first to appear.

Humanists were prolific writers of history. They regarded it as a branch of moral philosophy ("moral philosophy taught by example"), but over time the lessons they drew became increasingly complex. Bruni's history of Florence, modeled on Livy, was one of the earliest and most famous humanist histories, extolling the liberty and virtue of Florence, triumphant over Milanese attempts to conquer the city. By the end of the century, histories of Florence by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), written in Italian rather than in Latin, were much more grim in evaluations of human character, behavior, and judgment—and much more fully grounded in documentary evidence. Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) wrote the first history of medieval Italy, making use of archaeological information; but a history covering much the same period by Carlo Sigonio (ca. 1522–1584) a century later used archives to make a great advance in detail and precision over what Biondo was able to achieve.

Historical writing developed in important ways also in France. Paolo Emilio (d. 1529), who returned from Italy to France with Charles VIII in 1498, abandoned the medieval chronicle tradition. Guillaume Budé (1467–1530) wrote the first extensive humanist study of Justinian's Digest. In the next generation Jacques Cujas (1522–1590) introduced the mos gallicus docendi, the French or historical method of teaching Roman law based on the awareness that the law was specific to a given society, changed over time, and was not universal. The mos italicus, to which the French method was opposed, sought to clarify the universal principles exemplified in the law and continued to be practiced in Italy. Cujas inspired a group of historians to study the French past in the same way; Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553–1617) went further and tried to incorporate the histories of the various European states into one history, a "universal" or "perfect" history.

Poetry and poetics.

Humanists wrote a great deal of Latin poetry, virtually all of which faded into obscurity with the rise of the vernaculars. Petrarch's Italian lyric poetry and the sonnet form he created, however, exercised enormous influence on Renaissance Italian, French, and English poets. In the sixteenth century Ariosto and Tasso, who created the most influential narrative poems in Italian (see below) were trained as humanists and wrote poetry in Latin as well as Italian, but self-consciously turned against Latin and, in Ariosto's case, became critical of humanist education.

Humanist texts on literary theory, on the other hand, exercised great influence. Aristotle's Poetics was published in a new Latin translation from Greek in 1498; the Greek text was published in 1508. After a lag of a generation humanists began to write commentaries on it, most notably Ludovico Castelvetro (Poetica di Aristotele vulgarizzata; 1570). But they also wrote treatises on their own poetics, most famously Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1561; Seven books on the art of poetry) and Francesco Patrizi, Della poetica (1586; On the art of poetry). Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1583, pub. 1595) was much influenced by the Italian tradition and skillfully blended Horace and Aristotle. These works led to various literary debates, among them the importance of Aristotle's unities of time, place, and plot. Ludovico Ariosto's (1474–1533) Orlando furioso (1516, 1532) did not honor them, while Torquato Tasso's (1544–1595) later Gerusalemme liberata (1581) was regarded as having done so, setting off a debate in favor of one or the other.

Moral philosophy.

Humanists were not "school" philosophers, but they recovered many texts that belonged to various schools, including most of Plato, Greek Stoicism (Epictetus), Epicureanism (Lucretius), and Skepticism (Sextus Empiricus). Platonism became a strong presence through the Platonic "Academy" in Florence under Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who translated Plato and Platonists (including Plotinus) into Latin, making them available in that language for the first time in more than a thousand years. The translation of Sextus Empiricus into Latin (1563) was the major source behind Michel de Montaigne's (1533–1592) pyrrhonian stance in his "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (1575).

Humanists used these and other texts to reflect on moral issues. Is happiness, the supreme good, achievable in this life? Petrarch said no and criticized Aristotle for having believed otherwise; many humanists agreed with him, as did Valla in his De voluptate (1434; On pleasure), in which he argued that while Epicurus was right to argue for the superiority of pleasure over virtue, the supreme pleasure was achievable only through Christian faith in life after death. Ficino, on the other hand, believed enjoyment of God was possible in this life. Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466), one of a dozen or so women humanists in fifteenth-century Italy, wrote a dialogue, together with a Venetian humanist, Ludovico Foscarini, on the relative responsibility of Adam and Eve for the Fall; Nogarola defended Eve, Foscarini Adam.

The relative merits of men and women was another important topic. The starting point for this discussion was Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus (1361; Famous women), portraits of mostly classical (and excluding Christian) women, which provided many of the examples used by Christine de Pizan (1364–c. 1430) in building her city of ladies (Le livre de la cité des dames, 1405; The book of the city of ladies). Thus a humanist text led to a new chapter in the debate about women (the querelle des femmes), new because de Pisan was the first woman to respond directly to male misogynistic treatises. The most important humanist text in this debate, was Baldassare Castiglione's (1478–1529) Il cortegiano (1528; Book of the courtier,), written in Italian, book 3 of which summed up the querelle to that point and influenced later writing in the genre. Several women writers from Venice wrote important texts in Italian on the theme in the seventeenth century: Moderata Fonte (1555–1592), Il merito delle donne (pub. 1600; The worth of women); Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, co' difetti et mancamenti de gli huomini (1600, 2nd ed., 1601; The nobility and excellence of women and the defects and vices of men); and Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), Tirannia paterna (pub. 1654; Paternal tyranny). Marie le Jars de Gournay wrote an important text in French, Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622; Equality of men and women) on the same subject.

The "mirror of princes" literature sought to describe the perfect prince and the education that would produce one; Erasmus's Institutio principis Christiani (1516; Education of a Christian prince) is a notable example. Others sought to describe the perfect courtier or gentleman; the most enduring of these has been Castiglione's Il cortegiano, which portrays both the perfect male (Book 1) and the perfect female (Book 3) courtier; Sir Thomas Elyot's (c. 1490?–1546) Boke Named the Governour (1531) is an English counterpart. Much debated were the relative merits of the contemplative and active life, with most opting for the latter. The relation between intellect and will was also much discussed, the latter being much more strongly supported by humanists skeptical of the power of reason to know and do the good. A related topic was the power of fate and fortune over human life. On none of these issues did humanists speak with a single voice; they explored all sides of questions and took various positions.

In three cases humanist moral philosophical texts achieved greatness: Erasmus's Encomium moriae (1511; Praise of folly; rev. 1512, 1514, 1516), François Rabelais's (c. 1494–1553) Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1556), and Montaigne's Essais (1580, 1588, 1595). The first, written in Latin, is an oration of praise spoken by a goddess, Folly, who praises folly as wise, an oxymoron that becomes transformed in the "Christian fool," whose divine wisdom is folly to all the world. Though unique as a text, its spirit is visible in Rabelais, whose book celebrates the violation of boundaries, and in nothing more than in providing serious commentary and in the next breath undoing all he had just said. The Tiers Livre (1546) does this throughout on the question of marriage and is a central text in the querelle des femmes. Montaigne's Essays is filled with quotations and allusions from classical authors, as if all of humanist scholarship had been poured into him, but it is all employed to explore his own consciousness and distill his experience in a new "essay" form, which he invented.