research paper on renaissance humanism

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Humanism

Introduction, general overviews.

• Reference Resources
• Bibliographies
• Classicizing Latin Style
• Humanistic Studies
• Philosophy and the Civic Life
• Assessments of the Baron Thesis
• Florentine Humanism
• Roman Humanism
• Venetian Humanism
• Humanism in the Italian States
• German Humanism
• French and Spanish Humanism
• English Humanist Texts
• Humanism and Religion
• Biblical Humanism
• Humanism as Rhetoric
• Cicero and Imitation
• Humanist Historiography
• Consolatory Literature
• The Transmission of Greek and Latin Learning
• Pedagogical Humanism and Humanists
• Lorenzo Valla
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
• Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Platonism
• Filelfo, Perotti, and Sadoleto
• Battles and Influence
• Humanism and the Protestant Reformation

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Humanism by Paul Grendler LAST REVIEWED: 27 June 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 27 June 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0002

Humanism was the major intellectual movement of the Renaissance. In the opinion of the majority of scholars, it began in late-14th-century Italy, came to maturity in the 15th century, and spread to the rest of Europe after the middle of that century. Humanism then became the dominant intellectual movement in Europe in the 16th century. Proponents of humanism believed that a body of learning, humanistic studies ( studia humanitatis ), consisting of the study and imitation of the classical culture of ancient Rome and Greece, would produce a cultural rebirth after what they saw as the decadent and “barbarous” learning of the Middle Ages. It was a self-fulfilling faith. Under the influence and inspiration of the classics, humanists developed a new rhetoric and new learning. Some scholars also argue that humanism articulated new moral and civic perspectives and values offering guidance in life. Humanism transcended the differences between the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, as leaders of both religious movements studied and used the ancient Latin and Greek classics. Because of the vast importance and broad scope of humanism, it is not surprising that scholars have studied it intensively and view it in different ways. This article provides a sampling of some of the best and most influential scholarship on the subject and demonstrates the broad impact of humanism in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Because humanism is a vast topic, overviews are few. Nauert 2006 is brief but has the advantage of presenting a single viewpoint, while Rabil 1988 is large and has many authors.

Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe . 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Excellent and concise one-volume survey of humanism across Europe. A good starting point both for students and scholars.

Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy . 3 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

Forty-one essays by recognized authorities, each with bibliography, about humanism across Europe and specific themes. Vol. 1 deals with the foundations of humanism and humanism in Italy; Vol. 2, with the rest of Europe; and Vol. 3, with humanism and the disciplines, the professions, arts, and science. A good starting point for advanced students and scholars lacking knowledge in particular fields of study.

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7 Humanism and the Renaissance

Department of History, University at Albany, SUNY

• Published: 09 July 2020
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Both the Renaissance and humanism have anachronistically taken on meanings today that betray their historical reality. Emerging from the peculiar lay professional culture of medieval Italy, humanism joined in the Renaissance with other elements of medieval Italian culture to dominate the educated world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The Renaissance humanists constituted, in the words of Paul Oskar Kristeller, “a characteristic phase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western culture.” Renaissance humanism created not an ideology or philosophy, but a dynamic set of educated interests and methods dominated by rhetorical and literary interests and focused on imitation of classical eloquence and literature. The humanists would in time powerfully reshape European learning, education, and, ultimately, self-conception. A non-trivial residue of Renaissance humanism is our understanding of the disciplines that make up the humanities and that we view as essential to educated culture.

Renaissance Humanism transformed Western culture profoundly and permanently. Almost every aspect of intellectual life today reflects either obviously or in some remote way the effects of that transformation. The irony is that Renaissance Humanism was not at all what we call Humanism today. Furthermore, what today is popularly viewed as the Renaissance suffers from the misconception that it was the start of modern times instead of what it really was, the final phase of the Middle Ages. One might even say that, at least culturally, the Renaissance was the concluding, Italian phase of the Middle Ages. 1

The Renaissance

We can start with the latter issue. In 1860 the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) crystalized the modern conventional view with the publication of his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay , wherein he announced that the Italians of the Renaissance were the “firstborn sons of modern Europe.” 2 Burckhardt wrote at an auspicious moment. Talk of the glorious achievements of Renaissance Italy had long been a staple of educated literature. Indeed, such talk can be traced as far back as to the Renaissance itself; 3 but it had been building up almost to a crescendo in the half-century preceding Burckhardt’s book. 4 Ironically, though he despised Hegelianism as a philosophy of history, 5 Burckhardt foisted on the popular imagination what might well be viewed as a Hegelian construct, since he believed that he had captured and could dissect for his readers the “spirit” of an age. Both he and Hegel, however, were simply operating in their own fashion from a common Romantic conceit (think William Hazlitt’s book of 1825: The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits ). Burckhardt taught that the tyrants of the city states, willfully breaking the bounds of law and tradition, led the way for the Italians of the Renaissance to liberate themselves from a medieval cast of mind and create the modern spirit of individualism, amorality, irreligiosity, and scientific realism. 6 Burckhardt’s synthesis became the dominant view of the Renaissance for an audience prepared to receive it, and it remained so for the next hundred years. In creating his construct Burckhardt ignored much that is central to any civilization, such as economy and technology, quite apart from also being wrong on every major point of his synthesis. 7 What is especially bizarre is that Burckhardt located the origins of the Renaissance spirit in the thirteenth century with the rise of the tyrants. But by almost every definition then and now the thirteenth century, as the century of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Crusades, was an archetypical medieval century. Indeed, one medievalist famously published a book with the title The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries . 8 The fact is that there is no clear demarcation point separating medieval and Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance was simply the flowering of medieval Italian culture and the diffusion of these mature Italian cultural forms in art, architecture, language, literature, education, and learning (not to speak of a myriad other developments in fields such as business and diplomacy), over the rest of Europe from the later fifteenth century onward, pushing aside what had hitherto been dominant medieval French influences.

If we take manuscript production as a proxy for medieval educational and intellectual activity, then Eltjo Buringh’s study provides dramatic statistical documentation. 9 Although we should take these statistics with a grain of salt, based as they are on catalogues of varying quality, they are telling. According to Buringh, 10 during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Italy’s manuscript production remained slightly less than half of that of France’s as both increased productivity by about 160 percent from one century to the next. But in the fourteenth century Italy’s productivity increased by a staggering 350 percent compared to a 10 percent rise in France, outstripping France’s total productivity by more than 70 percent; and in the fifteenth century Italy’s productivity increased yet another 62 percent while France’s remained 16 percent less than Italy’s. These figure document the reversal of fortune of Italy and France in the fourteenth century.

Humanism, Humanist, Humanities

The history of Renaissance Humanism is an excellent, indeed, a paradigmatic instance of this development. Humanism today usually stands as a synonym for humanitarianism or, alternatively, for some sort of definition of what it means to be human. 11 When combined with an adjective, it can take on a polemical edge, such as Secular Humanism versus Christian Humanism. Given the ideological significance it has assumed, it has even led to formulations that subvert and/or transcend traditional “Humanism,” such as posthumanism and transhumanism. 12 Renaissance Humanism had none of these meanings.

As a term, Humanism is of modern coinage. 13 In 1808, the Protestant educator Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer published a defense of the traditional educational system based on the teaching of Latin and Greek ( die Humanieren ), which he called Humanismus against a reform movement demanding a modern, utilitarian curriculum that went under the name of Philanthropinismus . 14 Niethammer insisted that the humanities, die Humanieren , cultivated the humanity, die Humanität , of students, 15 and in doing so, he gave his defense of the humanities an implicit philosophical coloration characteristic of modern conceptions, 16 but alien to the non-philosophical approach of Italian humanists four hundred years earlier. 17

The plural noun with a definite article “the humanities” translates the Latin studia humanitatis , a phrase the Renaissance humanists picked up from Cicero and Aulus Gellius, the latter of whom explained that humanities did not mean philanthropia , i.e., humanitarianism, as the vulgus thought, but rather paideia , i.e., education in basic disciplines. 18 The humanists started using the phrase studia humanitatis towards the end of the fourteenth century referring to a set of disciplines in which they themselves specialized and which by the early fifteenth century were generally recognized as comprising five subjects: rhetoric, grammar, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. 19 Four of the subjects had been mainstays of education in one way or another since antiquity; but this was not the case for history, a literary genre in antiquity, never a separate school subject. Nor did history have a place in the medieval system of the seven liberal arts or in the scientific and professional curriculum of the medieval universities. But to imitate the classics, the humanists had to understand their world. Hence history for the first time became an essential component of education.

The humanists initially did not have a distinctive term for themselves, but in the latter part of the fifteenth century Italian university slang came up with (h)umanista for the teacher of the studia humanitatis . 20 Thus in the Renaissance “humanist” had strictly a disciplinary meaning.

The Thirteenth-Century Intellectual Revolution

The Italian humanists were not an isolated phenomenon, but a component of a vast transformation of Italian intellectual culture in the thirteenth century building up to an amazing fourteenth century flowering. 21 For instance, Italian literature did not emerge until the thirteenth century, several hundred years after France’s. Yet, in the fourteenth century Italy produced Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio. Furthermore, in the thirteenth century the brilliant scientific culture of scholasticism that developed in late twelfth-century Paris began to penetrate Italy. By the fourteenth century and through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Italy produced scholastics who were some of the most innovative and daring intellectuals of the age, such as Pietro d’Abano (d. 1316), Paul of Venice (d. 1429), and Pietro Pompanazzi (d. 1525). The humanists did not displace medieval scholasticism. Rather they competed against it as an expanding disciplinary rival, the scientific-professional culture of Italian scholasticism. Northern cultural importations did not take over Italy as much as become grafted to deeply rooted Italian traditions and were transformed in the process. If we throw into the mix not only Humanism, but also literature, art, and architecture, the result was that whereas Italy had been a cultural debtor in the thirteenth century, by the fifteenth century onward it had become a cultural creditor for all of Europe, bringing about, as has been said, the Italian, final phase of the Middle Ages.

The famous “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” was very much a French affair. 22 Although one might make a case for the vitality of classical studies in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, 23 there can be no doubt that France exponentially surpassed all other areas in the production of manuscripts of classical texts, especially in the second half of the twelfth century. Using Munk Olsen’s inventory of classical manuscripts from the ninth to the twelfth century, Gian Carlo Alessio and Claudia Villa have calculated that France produced half of the twelfth-century classical manuscripts as compared to 18 percent for Italy; and if we focus on the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, then France produced a stupendous 64 percent of the total. 24 In the course of the thirteenth century, however, as is generally recognized, classical studies fell off a cliff in France. 25 But what happened in Italy has become a disputed question. Giuseppe Toffanin famously called the Italian thirteenth century “the Century without Rome” ( il secolo senza Roma ), 26 and more recently Robert Black has vigorously argued for a collapse of Italian classical studies in the thirteenth century. 27 Some great scholars have argued the contrary. 28 I believe that they are right. The statistics support them. If we take the catalogue of almost 3,000 medieval manuscripts of classical texts in the Vatican Library to be an exceptionally good representative sample of European production (in comparison, Munk Olsen’s inventory of manuscripts up to 1200 lists a little more than 3,000 manuscripts), 29 we see that whereas French production fell off drastically in the thirteenth century, the number of Italian classical manuscripts dipped only modestly before surging dramatically in the fourteenth and of course even more explosively in the fifteenth. 30

Ars Dictaminis

Italian Humanism emerged out of the disciplinary interests of a peculiarly Italian phenomenon, an outsized population (when compared to the demographics of northern Europe) of educated laymen functioning as notaries, teachers, and jurists oriented to public persuasion and connected to the medieval rhetorical tradition of the ars dictaminis . 31 First formalized in a textbook by Alberico of Montecassino ca. 1080, 32   dictamen , the art of letter writing, constituted the most professional and longest lasting element of medieval rhetoric. 33 As Paul Oskar Kristeller first argued seventy-five years ago, “the Italian humanists on the whole were neither good nor bad philosophers, but no philosophers at all.” 34 Rather, as he later explained, “Renaissance Humanism must be understood as a characteristic phase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western culture.” 35 More specifically, the humanists “were the professional successors of the medieval Italian dictatores , and inherited from them the various patterns of epistolography and public oratory, all more or less determined by the customs and practical needs of later medieval society.” 36

Classical rhetoric had five parts (invention, stylistics, organization, delivery, and memory) and was in antiquity the universal basis of advanced education. The ars dictaminis incorporated only one of these parts, stylistics, in its instruction on epistolography. 37 To be sure, rhetoric was a component in the curriculum of the seven liberal arts in the French cathedral schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but in the thirteenth century it was displaced by logic as the core subject in the philosophical and scientific “arts” curriculum of the University of Paris and the other northern universities. In the urban, commercial world of Italy, however, ars dictaminis became a core subject in the arts curriculum of the Italian universities, especially after the establishment of the notariat ( ars notariae ) as a career track in the first decades of the thirteenth century. 38 Louis Paetow, who argued for the collapse of classical studies in the thirteenth century, scornfully called the ars dictaminis the business course of the medieval universities. I fully agree. 39 But before one can indulge in cultural interests such as classical studies, one must be able to provide for one’s self and family. In the clerical culture of northern Europe, graduates first of the humanistic cathedral schools and then of the scientific arts faculty of the universities could hope for ecclesiastical appointments. This was not an option for the lay notaries or even normally for teachers of grammar. So how and why did some participants of Italy’s vocational culture of the ars dictaminis turn to classical studies in the thirteenth century and bring back to prominence the classical studies that had once been the hallmark of the twelfth-century French cathedral schools? The answer was the maturation of the grammatical-notarial profession as it evolved to keep pace with the intellectual development of other sectors of Italian lay life. It evolved especially in three ways, two of which led to dead ends, and one to the transcending of its narrow vocational culture and the emergence of Renaissance Humanism.

The first trend was the continual development of the ars dictaminis (or ars dictandi ) in a classical, Ciceronian direction. 40 In the early twelfth century, dictatores began to produce ever more up-to-date treatises, 41 and by the end of the century they had become so receptive to the classicizing and ornate style emanating from France that the flamboyant University of Bologna dictator Boncompagno of Sassoferrato (d. ca . 1241) declared war on this new trend and published in 1235 what he called (anticipating modern commercial advertisement) The Absolutely Latest Rhetoric ( Rhetorica Novissima ) that did away with classical flummery. 42 However, as commentators have pointed out, Boncompagno himself was well read in the classics. 43 Moreover, already in Bologna a prominent classicizing dictator , Bene da Firenze (d. ca . 1240), opposed him. By mid-century onward illustrious dictamen masters such as Guido Fava (d. ca . 1250) and Jacques de Dinant (d. 1296?) 44 confirmed this classicizing orientation that was continued by Giovanni di Bonandrea (d. 1321) in the next century. But as James Banker has pointed out, new treatises on dictamen are not to be found at Bologna from the mid-fourteenth century onward. 45 Manuscripts of the art continued to be copied all over Europe into the sixteenth century, 46 but in Italy medieval dictamen seems to have reached its developmental limit in the first half of the fourteenth century as the classicizing impulse of the grammarians and dictatores transferred instead to direct instruction and commentary on classical rhetorical texts. 47

A closely related second trend had a similar destiny without the classical element. The dictatores produced a significant literature on spoken eloquence answering the political and civic needs of the contemporary Italian cities. 48 In fact, Guido Fava’s collections of sample vernacular letters and secular speeches ( Gemma Purpurea and Parlamenta et Epistole ) in the mid-thirteenth century are the earliest extant examples of literary Italian prose. But already in the 1220s, the anonymous Oculus Pastoralis already offered a collection of sample speeches for use by the chief official ( podestà ) of the Italian cities. 49 The judge and communal official Albertano of Brescia (d. ca . 1251) delineated the different contemporary forms of public oratory in his moralizing and immensely popular Book on the Doctrine of Speaking and Remaining Silent ( Liber de doctrina dicendi et   tacendi ). 50 In the second half of century, Jacques de Dinant wrote a speech manual, the Ars Arengandi , and another Bolognese dictator , Matteo de’ Libri (d. 1275/76), published a large collection of model aringhe , or vernacular secular speeches. 51 But these sorts of speech manual seems to have stopped being produced by dictatores even earlier than had been artes dictaminis . Though secular speeches continued to be collected for the purpose of imitation, such as those of the notorious Roman conspirator Stefano Porcari (d. 1453), 52 new speech manuals by Italian dictatores apparently ceased to be produced after the thirteenth century.

On the other hand, a third trend that started in the thirteenth century and that reached critical mass at the turn of fourteenth century would be transformative, namely, the ever-increasing classical interests of grammarians, notaries, jurists, and teachers connected with medieval Italian rhetorical tradition. We have already seen the influence of the classicizing French form of dictamen upon Italian instruction. Indeed, Italy seemed to have experienced a French cultural invasion in the thirteenth century, reinforcing the notion of Italy as a French cultural debtor. 53 The new, more practical grammars of Alexander of Villedieu ( Doctrinale ) and Évrard of Béthune ( Graecismus ), swept the field and generated multiple Italian imitators. 54 Hardly less influential was Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s manual on poetic composition, the Poetria Nova . 55 In the thirteenth century, the introduction of French scholasticism transformed the Italian arts faculties by making scientific scholasticism a necessary component of medical education, while French literature exercised a massive influence on Italian literature. 56 Indeed, Provençal poets became quite the fad in Northern Italy. 57

So we ought not be surprised that Dante’s mentor, the notary Brunetto Latini, who would become chancellor of Florence, translated into Italian and commented on Cicero’s rhetoric, the De Inventione , in addition to incorporating a long discussion of it into his encyclopedia, the Tresor , 58 and translating into Italian three orations of Cicero as well as the speeches of Caesar and Cato in Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae (from the French Fet des Romains ). 59 It is also not surprising that by the early fourteenth century the Bolognese dictator Giovanni di Buonandrea was lecturing on the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium and establishing such lectures as a regular feature of rhetorical instruction for the rest of the Renaissance. And in the very year that Giovanni di Buonandrea died, 1321, the University of Bologna hired another dictator , Giovanni del Virgilio, to lecture on the major classical poets. 60 At the same time, at the start of fourteenth century, Dante, who corresponded with Giovanni del Virgilio, chided earlier vernacular poets for their ignorance of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus, and Orosius. 61 Boncompagno da Signa may have railed against the classicizers, but his student, the Paduan teacher of grammar and rhetoric Rolandino de’ Passaggeri (1200–1276) would write a history of the Trevisan March replete with classical quotations references. Already in the first half of the thirteenth century, the previously mentioned Albertano of Brescia showed considerable classical knowledge in his writings. 62 At mid-century a certain dictator , Ventura of Bergamo, wrote a commentary on the poet Persius; 63 and at the end of the century, the jurist, Lovato dei Lovati in Padua (1241–1309), tried to figure out the rules of the meter of Seneca’s poetry and also to write in a more classical style. 64 His disciple, the notary Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), who was in contact with Dante’s correspondent Giovanni del Virgilio, wrote a commentary on Seneca’s tragedies, 65 and in 1315 was crowned poet laureate at the University of Padua for his secular tragedy Ecerinis , and other poetry, the first time such an honor had been bestowed since antiquity. 66 Contemporaneously, yet another northern jurist, Geri of Arezzo (c. 1270–1338), demonstrated considerable classical knowledge while attempting to write a more classical Latin. As Roberto Weiss commented: “With Geri, one may say, we have in fact have arrived at Humanism.” 67 The same could and has been rightly said about Lovato dei Lovati. 68 All the while contemporaries had embarked one of the most glorious and characteristic enterprises of Renaissance Humanism, namely, the recovery of lost classical texts, in this case, bringing to light from the Chapter library of Verona the poems of Catullus and Ausonius, and the De re rustica of Varro and the Epistolae ad Atticum of Cicero. 69 In short, Renaissance Humanism was well under way in Italy before its first great representative, Francis Petrarch, came on the scene.

Francis Petrarch

Born in Arezzo, Francis Petrarch (1304–1374), grew up in southern France, where his family had settled after his father, a notary and political exile from Florence, found employment at the papal court in Avignon, Petrarch returned to Italy in 1320 to study law at Bologna at the very time that Giovanni di Virgilio was lecturing on the Latin poets. 70 He never did get a law degree, but he did become the greatest Italian poet of the age and the first great humanist of the Renaissance. His Italian writings had great success in the Renaissance and continue to be read today. 71 But they are not our remit here. Rather, we need to see how and why his Latin writings and studies helped to change the direction of Western culture. We can start with the list of favorite books he drew up around 1333. 72 He put them into four categories: rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry, and grammar, to which he added a book on dialectics and three on astrology. It hardly needs to be said that virtually every book was by a classical author. In fact, he gave Cicero his own separate listing of books. For good reason B. L. Ullman has remarked, “if Petrarch was the father of Humanism, Cicero was its grandfather.” 73 But what is especially interesting about the list is that it aligns nearly perfectly with the five subjects with what after his death would be called the studia humanitatis . The only subject missing is history. Petrarch, however, made his interest in history very clear not only by his writings, but just as much so by the diploma he wrote for himself on the occasion of being crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341, wherein he is called poeta et historicus and authorized to teach these subjects. 74 In 1362, when bestowing a palazzo upon him, the government of Venice called him, “moral philosopher and poet,” 75 thus conceding the authority in ethics of the first great humanist.

Petrarch established the disciplinary template for Renaissance humanists, but he himself was an occupational outlier. While the majority of Renaissance humanists earned their daily bread as notaries, teachers, secretaries, and government functionaries, Petrarch lived as a beneficed clergyman in minor orders who also became a celebrity client of a series of city-state tyrants. Returning to Provence from Bologna in 1326, he eventually entered the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, and by 1334 he had his first canonry (Lombez) and eventually combined it with three more (Pisa, Parma, and Padua). Once he took up permanent residence in Italy in 1353, he enjoyed the patronage first of the Visconti signore of Milan and then of the Carrara signore of Padua, having earlier lived for a while in Parma as the client of its signore .

Petrarch ticked every box of the studia humanitatis . In grammar, he was an ardent classicizer, adoring Cicero, though later humanists deprecated his style. 76 So immersed was Petrarch in his classical authors that he fantastically corresponded with them. 77 He discovered works of Cicero (the oration de Archia and three letter collections) and did yeoman’s work on the text of Livy, Quintilian, and Vitruvius. His letter collections were the first such among the humanists. 78 In rhetoric, he wrote notable invectives (especially against the proponents of scholasticism) and delivered a number of orations in the service of his patrons. 79 In poetry, his early fame rested on his Latin epic Africa (on Scipio Africanus), to which one should add his Latin eclogues and metric epistles. In history he wrote On Illustrious Men and On Things Worth Remembering . His writings in moral philosophy ( Remedies for Good and Bad Fortune , The Solitary Life , Religious Leisure , and My Secret ) enjoyed wide diffusion.

The Establishment of Humanism in Fifteenth-Century

Petrarch owned his success as much to the growing contemporary appetite for all things classical as to his own genius. A generation after his death, a devote admirer and graduate of the dictaminal school of Bologna, Coluccio Salutati(1331–1406), gathered around himself when he became chancellor of Florence a circle of brilliant young men who would go on in conjunction with young talents elsewhere to establish Humanism as a powerful force. 80

Coluccio Salutati and His Circle

Salutati himself was famous in his own time as a propagandist for the Republic of Florence, demonstrating the practical value of the new learning. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) was the youngest of the group. Around 1400 he created a new script, antiqua , based on Carolingian minuscule, which, once adopted by the earliest printed books and called “Roman,” became the universal font for Western languages. A fellow member of the Salutati circle, Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437), developed a cursive version of antiqua that became our “Italic” once the rest of Europe saw it in editions published by the most famous of Italian printers, Aldo Manuzio of Venice (d. 1515). 81 Later, in 1415–17, while at the Council of Costanza, Poggio made an incredible number of finds, including unknown orations of Cicero, Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura , and Vitruvius’ De Architectura . Poggio put in high gear the Renaissance search for lost classical texts. By 1650, more than 95 percent of extant classical texts had been discovered. With his dialogues, invectives, letters, and history of Florence, Poggio easily conformed to Petrarch’s template for humanist production, but the member of the Salutati circle who took the prize as the most popular of the fifteenth-century humanists was Leonardo Bruni ( ca . 1370–1444).

If one consults the cumulative index of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s inventory of Renaissance humanist manuscripts, the Iter Italicum , one will discover that the entry for Bruni exceeds all others by far. 82 There are several reasons for this dominance. First of all, Bruni was so successful in creating a fluent “classical” Latin style that his prose became one of the preeminent models for others to imitate. Second, he was the first great Renaissance translator of Greek texts. Petrarch had wanted to learn Greek, but failed. At the urging of his young disciples, Salutati persuaded the Florentine government to hire from Constantinople the learned Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek from 1397 to 1400. Bruni profited the most from Chrysoloras’s tuition. His translations of five Platonic dialogues made Plato widely available in Latin for the first time in Western history. 83 In the next generation in Florence Marsilio Ficino translated all of Plato and established Platonism as one the great Renaissance philosophic movements. Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , Politics , and Economics became bestsellers as other humanists would go on to translate all of Aristotle’s writings to replace the medieval versions, whose barbarism, they insisted, had distorted the true Aristotle. 84 But of all of Bruni’s writings, those that have enjoyed the most resonance in recent times are the ones that he wrote before and after he became chancellor of Florence promoting the Florentine republic because they are seen, justifiably or not, as creating the ideology of civic Humanism. 85

Educators and Scholars

The two most fundamental aspects of the victory of Renaissance Humanism was its conquest of pre-university education and its concomitant success in changing the consciousness of educated Western society. The humanist program for pre-university education was especially set by two humanists who ran schools for the children of city-state princes and their courts: Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446) for the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua and Guarino Veronese (1374–1460) for the Este rulers in Ferrara. These schools aimed to educate the ruling elite of society rather than professionals and functionaries. They provided a full curriculum, including Greek and mathematics in addition to Latin literature and history. Indeed, Vittorino da Feltre was especially known for his interest in mathematics. Other humanists, such as Pier Paolo Vergerio, Battista Guarini, and Leonardo Bruni wrote tracts advocating this curriculum, i.e., the humanist paideia . 86 In time, their advocacy succeeded. In the fifteenth century, throughout Italy private school humanist teachers of Latin grammar and literature swept the field of medieval grammars and texts. But only in the sixteenth century, with the success of the Jesuit colleges and Protestant academies did the full humanist curriculum come to reign supreme over primary and secondary education and set the template for education at these levels until today.

Although Humanism did not take over the universities (indeed, the Renaissance witnessed a final golden age of scholasticism), humanists did gain prominence teaching literature, history, and sometimes moral philosophy at the universities. 87 And in the sixteenth century, with the success of the logical handbooks first by George of Trebizond (d. ca . 1475), then by Rudolf Agricola (d. 1485), and most of all by Peter Ramus (d. 1572), a form of humanist logic came to dominate in parts of Europe what had traditionally been a basic discipline of scholasticism.

Broader and more profound was the humanist reshaping of Western consciousness emanating initially from a technical expertise peculiar to the humanists, philology. Desirous of recovering classical Latinity, the humanists became acutely conscious of the differences between classical and medieval Latin. But that consciousness could not but lead to a sense of anachronism and, in turn, to a heightened sensitivity to changes over time not only in language but also in culture and society. 88 The humanists began the revolted against their medieval predecessors, and the logical conclusion of that revolt was that in the later seventeenth century, as the Renaissance ended, the textbook writer Christopher Cellarius could confidently divide history into ancient, medieval, and modern. 89 Renaissance humanists produced a plethora of histories, but their most critical work was in philology rather than history. The Western historical sense, exemplified by its sensitivity to anachronisms, can be seen in the first great philologist of the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457). 90 A client first of King Alfonso the Magnanimous in Naples and then of Pope Nicholas V in Rome, Valla first made his mark in 1440 by proving that the document by which the emperor Constantine purportedly gave the Western Empire to the pope (“the Donation of Constantine”) was a forgery. He would go on to write two other works of revolutionary import. The first was his The Fine Points of the Latin Language , which dissected so extraordinarily well the nuances of classical diction that it was still being reprinted in the nineteenth century. He also published Annotations on the New Testament comparing the original Greek of the Bible to the standard Latin version, the Vulgate, and pointing out the large number of places where Latin seemingly fails to capture or even distort the Greek text. This work would have enormous resonance in the sixteenth century as it inspired Erasmus of Rotterdam to publish in 1516, on the eve of the Reformation, an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament along with a new Latin translation. Finally, at the very end of his life, Valla rejected on scholarly grounds the most influential forgery of the Middle Ages, the collection of works by a sixth-century Christian Neoplatonist attributed to the follower of Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite.

The end of the fifteenth century produced another great philologist, Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494). A distinguished poet (in Italian, Latin, and even Greek), Poliziano was remarkably modern, enunciating principles not fully grasped again until the nineteenth century, such as how to trace back the derivation of manuscripts ( eliminatio codicum descriptorum ), rules on rationally emending a text, and the practice of understanding Latin texts by restoring to their Greek models. 91

Humanism immensely enriched, if not transformed, disciplines outside the studia humanitatis , as humanists themselves combined different expertise or, alternatively, non-humanists made use of what they received from humanists. 92 For instance, in philosophy the great German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) profited from humanist translations of Plato, Albinus, and Proclus that he had commissioned. 93 Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) combined humanist expertise and philosophical erudition to translate and comment upon all of Plato. 94 His brilliant younger contemporary, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) did the same in order to attempt a synthesis of all philosophical traditions; 95 and his nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico (1469–1533) took the first step in the skeptical crisis that would lead in the next century to René Descartes’ reorientation of European philosophy. He published in 1520 a critique of Aristotelian science, the Examen Vanitatis , incorporating, as translated by him, large amounts of Sextus Empiricus, the encyclopedic source of classical skepticism. 96 In the mid-Quattrocento, the humanist and mathematician Iacopo of Cremona (d. 1453/54) made a corpus of the writings of Archimedes available for the first time in the Latin West, translating them for Pope Nicholas V. In the next century, Federico Commandino (1509–1575) and his disciple Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617) translated not only Archimedes, but also Apollonius, Pappus, and Hero, bringing about what has been called the “Italian Renaissance of mathematics.” 97

To give another set of examples from a different cultural sector, Humanism helped to transform the religious situation in the hundred years before the Reformation. Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) is a key figure here. He had the plan to transfer into Latin the whole Greek classical and patristic heritage. His favorite humanist, Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) made a new translation of the New Testament from the Greek and the Psalms from the Hebrew. George of Trebizond translated Eusebius of Caesarea, John Chrysostomus, and Cyril of Alexandria. Before and after Nicholas’ pontificate, other humanists translated Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzenus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Origen. 98 These translations started to be printed in the later fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, within the polemical context of the Reformation, we can rightly speak of a Renaissance of patristic studies as the number of translations, commentaries, and intense study only increased. 99

The modes of diffusion were books and people. 100 Italian humanists themselves were not notable proselytizers when they ventured across the Alps. Many transalpine scholars, on the other hand, after a stay in Italy, left as admirers and practitioners of the new learning, For instance, the Dutchman Rudolph Agricola arrived in Ferrara in 1469 to study law, but left in 1479 to become a major force for Humanism in the North. In the sixteenth century, his work De Inventione Dialectica would lead the humanist charge against scholastic logic. Similarly, the Spaniard Antonio de Nebrija came to Italy in 1460 to study theology, but left ten years later to become Spain’s first great humanist. The German Hartmann Schedel spent five years in Padua as a medical student, but returned to Germany in 1466 with an enormous love of things humanistic, creating an exceptional collection of humanistic texts. Indeed, such an impressive number of Italian humanist manuscripts found their way to transalpine Europe that justly Paul Oskar Kristeller speaks of these manuscripts as evidence of Italy’s cultural empire.

Printing also played a major role. Already at the end of the fifteenth century, the circle of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples were printing an ever increasing number of Italian humanist translations and texts. The Aldine press founded by Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515) in Venice may have been the most prestigious press in Europe, and especially for Greek texts, but by the early sixteenth century it was matched and, as time passed, surpassed in the printing of humanistic texts by the presses of Badius Ascensius and Simon de Colines in Paris as well as that of Johann Faber in Basel.

The most startling aspect of the diffusion of Humanism was its rapidity from the late fifteenth century onward, so much so that by the early sixteenth century northern humanists often surpassed Italians in the quality and quantity of their scholarship. Guillame Budé’s 1508 Annotations on the Justinian Code and his 1516 treatise on antique coinage, the De Asse , surpassed anything on these subjects produced in Italy. Niccolò Machiavelli may have written his Prince around 1516, but at the same time the Englishman Thomas More published the no less great and influential Utopia . At the same time, More’s friend, Erasmus of Rotterdam, established himself as the leading humanist in all of Europe not only because of his edition and translation of the New Testament and his patristic editions, but also because of his purely humanistic works, such as the Adages , the Colloquies , and that bestseller, the Praise of Folly . Italy produced notable, influential humanists in the sixteenth century, from Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) and Baldassare Castiglione (1476–1529) to Francesco Robortelli (1516–1567) and Sperone Speroni (1500–1588). But Italy had lost its preeminence in Humanism to the transalpine world as Humanism in turn had conquered all of Europe. 101

Renaissance Humanism has thoroughly imbedded itself into our culture. Yes, few students today read Greek and Latin or master ancient history, 102 but all study vernacular literature and history; most are given foreign language instruction; and most are taught elements of style that harken back to antiquity. Enormous fragments of antiquity continue to suffuse modern culture and consciousness, from myths and literary forms to classic texts and monuments. Many modern authors, artists, and thinkers are only explainable if we understand the classical influences upon them. And with the great success of modern museums and tourism antiquity is more with us in some ways than it could have been in the Renaissance. Yet Renaissance did come to an end.

Renaissance Humanism did not decline in isolation any more than it rose in isolation. Rather, the decline was part of the final phase of the Middle Ages (i.e., the Italian phase) coming to an end in the second half of the seventeenth century. 103 Cartesianism displaced Aristotelianism as the dominant philosophy on the Continent outside the universities, just as at the same time the Scientific Revolution destroyed the validity of Aristotelian physics and science. The universities, while retaining their medieval form and curriculum, suffered a stunning decline in enrollment in the eighteenth century. The vernacular literatures supplanted the classics as the main reading material of the educated elite. Calls for serious reformation of the Latin-based humanistic curriculum grew increasingly louder. Italy itself is a good example of the crisis as its universities eliminated or cut back on the salaries of humanities professors. She continued to produce great humanistic scholars into the eighteenth century, but, tellingly, they were with rare exceptions clergymen. The great lay literary culture that had produced Italian Humanism had ceased to be the main driver of humanistic studies.

See John Monfasani, “The Renaissance as the Concluding Phase of the Middle Ages,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 108 (2006): 165–185 (reprinted as Essay I in Monfasani, Renaissance Humanism, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Variorum, 2015). See also Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Renaissance Medievalisms (Toronto: Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2009 ). It should be noted that the traditional correlative to the Renaissance, the Reformation, was equally medieval, as Troeltsch pointed out long ago; see Monfasani, “Renaissance as the Concluding Phase,” 179–180; and Hans J. Hillerbrand, “Was there a Reformation in the Sixteenth Century?” Church History 72, no. 3 (2003 ): 525–552.

The German title was Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch .

See Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948 ).

See Amedeo Quondam, “Rinascimento e Classicismi,” in Quondam and Marcello Fantoni, eds., Le parole che noi usiamo: Categorie storiografiche e interpretative dell’Europa moderna (Rome: Bulzoni, 2008 ), 33–96, especially 48–74; and the expansion of the theme in Quondam, Rinascimento e classicismi: Forme e metamorfosi della modernità (Bologna: Mulino, 2013 ), esp. 167–217.

See John Monfasani, “The Rise and Fall of the Italian Renaissance,” Aevum 89.3 (2015 ):465–481, at 466; and Michael Ann Holly, “Burckhardt and the Ideology of the Past,” History of the Human Sciences 1, no. 1 (1988 ):47–73, who shows that already as a student in Berlin, Burckhardt wanted to write history that presented a picture revealing the “spirit” of an age.

Burckhardt may have been consciously anti-Hegelian, opposing the Italian Renaissance to Hegel’s assertion of the German Reformation as the start of modernity; see Hegel’s The Philosophy of History , Section III (“The Modern Time”), which begins with the Reformation (trans. J. Sibree [New York: Dover, 1956]).

See Monfasani, “The Renaissance as the Concluding Phase,” 166, n. 4; and the chapters in Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 ). Already in 1965 Philip J. Jones had published the epitaph for Burckhardt’s thesis: “In Italy at any rate the ‘Renaissance state’ is a fiction to be banished from the books”; see his “Communes and Despots: The City-State in Late-Medieval Italy,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th ser., 56: 309–338 (reprinted in John E. Law and Bernadette Paton, eds., Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy [Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010], 3–24).

James J. Walsh, New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1907, and reprinted multiple times to 2015.

Eltjo Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden: Brill, 2011 ), 263, 267. I have not used the data for Italy of Uwe Neddermeyer, Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch: Schriftlichkeit und Leseinteresse im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit; quantitative und qualitative Aspekte , 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 1: 288–292, because they seem based on extrapolations of mainly dated manuscripts.

Twelfth Century Production: 197,811 for France, 95,207 for Italy; Thirteenth Century: 510,828 for France, 253,013 for Italy; Fourteenth Century: 564,624 for France, 879,364 for Italy; Fifteenth Century: 1,195,783 for France, 1,423,668 for Italy.

For a sampling of meanings, see Richard Faber, ed., Streit um dem Humanismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003 ); and David Goicoechea, John C. Luik, and Tim Madigan, eds., The Question of Humanism: Challenges and Possibilities (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991 ).

The online Wikipedia entries for both terms provide a representative idea of their use; but see also Joseph Campana, ed., Renaissance Posthumanism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016 ).

The first person to appreciate this was Walter Ruëgg, Cicero und die Humanismus (Zurich: Rheinverlag,1946 ), 2–3, a point incorporated into the revised version of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s classic article, “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” which first appeared in Byzantinion 17 (1944–1945, sed vere 1946): 346–374, and in revised form, first in Kristeller, “Umanesimo e Scolastica nel Rinascimento italiano,” Humanitas 5 (1959): 988–1015, then in Kristeller, Studies in the Renaissance , 4 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956–1996 ), 1: 553–583, and numerous times thereafter (see Thomas Gilbhard, Bibliographia Kristelleriana: A Bibliography of the Publications of Paul Oskar Kristeller , 1929–1999 [Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006 ], 13, no. 73). I shall cite the article henceforth as it is found in Studies in the Renaissance .

Die Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziebungs-Unterrichts unserer Zeit (Jena: Friedrich Fromann, 1808). See Hubert Cancik, “Entrohung und Barmherzigkeit, Herrschaft und Würde. Antike Grundlager von Humanismus,” in Faber, Streit um dem Humanismus , 23–42, at 37–39.

E.g., Streit des Philanthropinismus , 8, 39, 72–74, 91, and so on; he also used alternative descriptions: Bildung des Menschen als Menschen , Menschenbildung , Bildung der Menschheit (161, 183–185, 191, 339 [ Menschenbildung oder der Humanitätsbildung ]). One may wonder if in some fashion Niethammer influenced Matthew Arnold’s famous 1869 defense of the humanities, Culture and Anarchy , since, like Niethammer, Arnold explicitly contrasted our “humanity” with our “animality” (Niethammer’s Animalität ).

Although Cancik (see n. 13) denied any philosophical aspect to Niethammer’s book, Niethammer’s abstractions of humanity and animality imposes a philosophical position since it creates two entities in the human person like the body/soul or body/mind dichotomy.

The earliest English use of the word reported by the Oxford English Dictionary is Coleridge’s, who in 1812 equated it with heresy: “A man who has passed from orthodoxy to the loosest Armenianism, thence to Arianism, and thence to Humanism.”

Aulus Gellius 13: 17.1. Pliny the Younger also used the phrase in Panegyr . 47.3, but this text was not known until later in the Renaissance.

The first great humanist Francis Petrarch (d. 1374) himself never used the phrase. See Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism,” 572–573; Benjamin Kohl, “The Changing Concept of the studia humanitatis in the Early Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 6.2 (1992 ): 185–209.

Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism,” 574; Augusto Campana, “The Origin of the Word ‘Humanist,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946 ): 60–73; J.-L. Charlet, De l’humaniste à l’humanisme par les humanités. Histoire de mots , in Hercules Latinus (Debrecini [Dobrinia], 2006 ), 29–39; and Vito R, Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of ‘Humanism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1985 ): 167–195.

Useful in this regard is Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” in Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–20.

We can get a sense of the dramatic explosion of classical studies in the twelfth century from Birger Munk Olsen, L’étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XI e et XII e siècles , 4 vols. in 6 (Paris: CNRS, 1982–2014 ), who calculated (4, no. 2: 24–30) that of the extant 4,463 instances of classical texts in manuscripts from the ninth to the twelfth century, 2593 occurred in the twelfth century, i.e., almost 50% more than the three previous centuries combined, and almost three times the number surviving from the eleventh century. For a list of the major studies on the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, see Gian Carlo Alessio and Claudia Villa, “Il nuovo fascino degli autori antichi tra i secoli XII e XIV,” in Lo spazio leterario di Roma antica , vol. 3 (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1990 ), 473–511, at 473.

See especially Robert Black, “The Rise and Fall of the Latin Classics: The Evidence of Schoolbook Production in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Italy,” Aevum 91 (2017 ): 411–463, at 416; Robert Black, “The Origins of Humanism” in Angelo Mazzocco, ed., Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 2006 ), 37–71; Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ), 179–191.

“Il nuovo fascino degli autori antichi,” 478–479. Their calculations agree extraordinarily well with Munk Olsen’s conclusion that the greater portion of manuscripts containing commentaries on classical texts were produced from the late twelfth to the early thirteenth centuries; see his I classici nel canone scolastico altomedievale (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1991), 43.

The scholar who first pointed this out was Louis John Paetow, The Arts Course at Medieval Universities with Special Reference to Grammar and Rhetoric (Urbana-Champaign, University Press, 1910 ).

Il secolo senza Roma (il Rinascimento del secolo XIII) (Rome: Zanichelli, 1943).

See n. 23, and his “Renaissance Humanism and Historiography Today,” in Woolfson, Renaissance Historiography , 97–117, at 106–107.

For the major names in the debate see Monfasani, “Rise and Fall,” 467; Black, “Rise and Fall,” 411–412; and Ronald Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundations of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 ), 9–10.

Munk Olsen, Étude des auteurs classiques latins , 3, no.2: vii .

See Élisabeth Pellegrin et al., Les manuscrits classiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane , 3 vols. in 5 (Paris: CNRS and Vatican City: Biblioteca Vaticana Apostolica, 1975–1991 ). For the application of the data to Italy, see Monfasani, “Rise and Decline.” Black, “Rise and Fall” denies the validity of the data, but, as will be shown in a forthcoming article, his argument is faulty.

For the extraordinary number of notaries in Italy see Monfasani, “Rise and Fall,” 472.

The Breviarium de Dictamine is now available in the critical edition of Filippo Bognini (Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008).

See William D. Patt, “Early Ars Dictaminis as Response to a Changing Society,” Viator 9 (1978 ): 133–155; Ronald G. Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictaminis’ and the Beginning of Humanism: a New Construction of the Problem,” Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982 ): 1–35.

“Humanism and Scholasticism,” 561.

Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Humanist Movement,” in i Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains ( A revised and enlarged edition of “The Classics and Renaissance Thought” ) (New York: Harper Torch, 1961 ), 3–23, at 11.

Ibid., 12–13.

On the ars dictaminis , see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 ), 194–268; Martin Camargo, Ars Dictaminis . Ars Dictandi (Turhout: Brepols, 1991 ); Roland Witt, “Medieval ‘Ars Dictminis’ and the Beginnings of Humanism: a New Construction of the Problem,” Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982 ): 1–35.

See Gianfranco Orlandelli, “Genesi dell’ars notariae” nel secolo XIII,” Studi medievali ser. 3, v. 6, supplemento (1965 ): 329–366’ and Orlandelli, “La scuola di notariato,” in Le sedi della cultura nell’Emilia Romagna: L’età comunale , ed. Girolamo Arnaldi et al., 131–147. (Milan, 1984 ).

As did Helene Wieruszowski, a major opponent of Paetow; see her “Rhetoric and the Classics in Italian Education of the Thirteenth Century,” in Wieruszowski, Politics and Culture in Medieval Spain and Italy (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1971 ), 589–627, at 596.

In general, see Virginia Cox, “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Italy, 1260–1350,” Rhetorica 17, no. 3 (1999 ): 239–287; and John O. Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols), 1995 . But there were other crosscurrents as well; see Benoit Grévin, “Les mystère rhétoriques de l’État médieval: L’écriture du pouvoir en Europe occidentale (XIII e –XV e siècle),” Annales. Histoire. Sciences Sociales 63.2 (2008 ): 271–300.

See F. J. Worstbrock, M. Klaes, and J. Lütten, Repertorium der Artes Dictandi des Mittelalters. Teil I. Von den Anfängen bis um 1200 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1962 ).

The work was intended to be a manual for lawyers; see Terence O. Tunberg, “What is Boncompagno’s ‘Newest Rhetoric,’” Traditio 42 (1986 ): 299–334; Wieruszowski, Politics and Culture , 425–427, 593–597.

A good overview of Boncompagno’s life and work is the introduction of Josef Purkart to his translation of Boncompagno’s Rota Veneris (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975).

See Emil J. Polak, A Textual Study of Jacques de Dinant’s Summa Dictaminis (Geneva, 1975 ); André Wilmart, “L’ ‘Ars arengandi’ de Jacques de Dinant avec un Appendice sur ses ouvrages ‘ De dictamine’,” in Wilmart Analecta Reginensia (Vatican City, 1933 ), 113–151.

“The Ars dictaminis and Rhetorical Textbooks at the Bolognese University in the Fourteenth Century,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 5 (1974): 153–168, at 160.

See Emil J. Polak, Medieval & Renaissance Letter Treatises & Form Letters. A Census of Manuscripts , 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1993–2015 ).

The growing awareness by the late thirteenth century that classical forms and diction could not be shoehorned into medieval rhetorical forms is rightly the conclusion of Ronald Witt, “Brunetto Latini and the Italian Tradition of Ars Dictaminis ,” Stanford Italian Review 3 (1983 ): 5–24.

See Enrico Artifoni, “Sull’eloquenza politica nel Duecento italiano,” Quaderni medievali 18 (1993 ): 57–78.

See Terence O. Tuneberg, Speeches from the Oculus pastoralis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990 ).

See Artifoni, “Sull’eloquenza,” 73–77. The work is now to be read in Albertano da Brescia: Liber de doctrina dicendi et tacendi: la parola del cittadino nell’Italia del Duecento , ed. Paola Navone (Tavamuzze: SISMEL, 1998).

See Matteo dei Libri, Arringhe , ed. Eleonora Vincenti (Milan: Ricciardi Editore, 1975); and Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Matteo de’ Libri, Bolognese Notary of the Thirteenth Century, and his Artes Dictaminis ,” in Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought , 3: 443–485.

See Massimo Miglio, “‘Viva la libertà et populo de Roma’. Oratoria e politica: Stefano Porcari,” in Miglio, Scritture, scrittori e storia . 2 vols. (Vecchiarelli, 1993 ), 2: 59–95. For a sense of the great popularity of model speech collections, see the index entries for anonymous collections in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum , 7 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1963–1997 ) at 6: 212.

As Kristeller argued (“Humanism and Scholasticism,” 555–556, 569–571), the Humanism of the French twelfth century through its commentaries flowed into the Humanism of the Italian Renaissance. See Claudia Villa, “I commenti ai classici fra XII e XV secolo,” in Nicholas Mann and Birger Munk Olsen, eds., Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1997 ), 19–32. A striking example is the extraordinary popularity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the commentary by the mysterious Alanus; see Harry Caplan, “A Mediaeval Commentary on the Rhetorica ad Herennium ,” in Caplan, Of Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Mediaeval Rhetoric , ed. Anne King and Helen North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970 ), 247–270.

See Black, Humanism and Education , 74–98.

See ibid., 342–349; and Majorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010 ).

Giulio Bertoni, Il Duecento , 5th ed. (Milan: Villardi, 1954), 66, comments: “É certo che nella storia dei rapporti e contatti italo-francesci. l’Italia è, possiam dire, sempre, o quasi sempre, la grande debitrice della Francia.”

See Gianfranco Folena, “Tradizione e cultura trobadorica nelle corti e nelle città venete,” Storia della cultura veneta: Dalle origini al Trecento (Vicenza: Pozza, 1976 ), 518–537; Witt, Two Latin Cultures, 354–359; and Witt, “In the Footsteps of the Ancient”: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000 ), 47–52. Witt makes Lovato dei Lovati’s condemnation of the fad for Provençal poetry the start of his own work on classical poetry, though he obviously must have already had a serious interest in classical poetry before being irked by this fad.

Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou tresor , ed. Francis Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 318–390 (Bk. 3, chs. 1–72).

See Brunetto Latini, La rettorica , ed. Cesare Segre (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968; Wieruszowski, Politics and Culture , 617–619; and Ronald Witt, “Brunetto Latini.”

See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Un ‘Ars dictaminis’ di Giovanni del Virgilio,” in Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought , 3: 487–507.

De Vulgari Eloquentia , II, c. 6, ad finem .

See for instance Claudia Villa, “La tradizione delle ‘Ad Lucilium’ e la cultura di Brescia dall’età carolingia ad Albertano,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 12 (1969 ): 10–51.

See Dorothy M. Robothan et al., “A. Persius Flaccus,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. Medieval and Renaissnce Latin Translations and Commentaries , ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller et al., 11 vols. to date (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1958–), 3: 201–312, at 243–244. The commentary is datable to 1253 or 1263.

See especially Witt, Two Latin Cultures , 458–466, 485; and Witt, “In the Footseps of the Ancients”: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000 ), 87–116. Witt wrongly makes Lovato the founder rather than the first notable representative of the broad-based movement. There is no evidence that Rolandino of Padua or Geri of Arezzo, let alone Petrarch, were inspired by Lovato, though Petrarch did praise Lovato one time as facillime princeps of the poets of the present age ( Rerum Memorandarum Libri , ed. Giuseppe Billanovich [Florence: Sansoni, 1943], 84).

See Alexander McGregor, “Mussato’s Commentary on Seneca’s Tragedies: New Fragments,” Illinois Classical Studies 5 (1989): 149–162.

See Marino Zabbia, “Mussato, Albertino,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani 77 (2012): 520–524.

Roberto Weiss, Il primo secolo dell’umanesimo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1949 ), 65.

See Weiss, Primo secolo , 13–50 for Geremia da Montagnone; for Catullus see Julia Haig Gaisser, “Catullus,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum , 7: 197–292, at 204; for Varro, Virginia Brown, “Varro, M. Terentius,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum , 4: 452–500, at 456; for Ausonius and Cicero, Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIVe XV , 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1903–14 ), 2: 203–204, 213.

The handiest and soundest biography remains Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961 ).

In contrast to Dante, whose fame remained pretty much an Italian phenomenon in the Renaissance; see John Monfasani, “Italian Humanism and European Culture,” in i Monfasani, Renaissance Humanism, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Farnham, Surrey, 2015 ), Essay II, 7.

B. L. Ullman, “Petrarch’s Favorite Books,” in Ullman, Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955) , 117–137.

See Francis Petrarch, La Collatio Laureationis , ed. Giulio Cesare Maggi (Milan: La Vita Felice, 2012), 99–115.

Ernest H. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years (Cambridge, MA.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939), 37: “philosophum moralem et poetam.”

See, for instance, the comment of Flavio Biondo in his Italy Illuminated , vol. 1: Books I–IV, ed. Jeffrey A. White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 303: “even he [Petrarch] never attained the full flower of Ciceronian eloquence that we see gracing so many men of our own time.”

Gathered together and translated in Mario E. Cosenza, Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910 ). He wrote letters to Cicero (twice), Seneca, Varro, Quintilian, Livy, Asinius Pollus, Horace, Virgil, and Homer.

On humanist letter collections and their popularity, see Cecil Clough, “The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections,” in Clough, ed., Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller (Manchester: University Press, and New York: Alfred F. Zambelli, 1976 ), 33–67.

Listed in Wilkins, Life , 263.

See Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 1983 ); Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’Umanesimo: atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Firenze, 29-31 ottobre 2008 , ed. Concetta Bianca (Rome: Edizioni Storia e Letteratura, 2010 ); and Clémence Revest, “The Birth of the Humanist Movement at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 68 (2013 ): 425–456.

See Stefano Zamponi, “La scrittura umanista,” Archiv für Diplomatik 50 (2004 ): 469–504; and Martin Davies, “Humanism in script and print in the fifteenth century,” in Jill Kraye, Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 47–62.

See n. 52; and James Hankins, Repertorium Brunianum: A Critical Guide to the Writings of Leonardo Bruni , vol. 1 (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1997 ).

He translated the Apology , Crito , Gorgias , Phaedo , Phaedrus , in addition to the Letters and Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium . See James Hankins, Plato in the Renaissance , 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990 ), 1: 29–80.

For Aristotle in the Renaissance see Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 ); Schmitt and F. Edward Cranz, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions , 1501 –1600, 2nd ed. (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1984 ); and Craig Martin, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, & Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014 ).

See James Hankins, ed., Civic Humanism. Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ); and John Monfasani, “The Renaissance and Renaissance Humanism in America Before and After Wallace K. Ferguson’s The Renaissance in Historical Thought : An Historiography Essay,” Rassegna Europea di Letteratura Italiana 48 (2016 ): 71–90.

See Craig W. Kallendorf, Humanist Educational Treatises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 ).

See David A. Lines, Aristole’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance ( ca. 1300–1650): The Universities & the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002 ),

See Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969 ).

See Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought , 75–76.

A reliable guide is Mario Fois, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla nel quadro storico-culturale del suo ambiente (Rome: Libreria Editrice dell’Università Gregoriana, 1969 ). For a different angle and more recent literature see Lodi Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009 ).

See Anthony Grafton, “Quattrocento Humanism and Classical Scholarship,” in Albert Rabil, Jr., ed., Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy , 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988 ), 3: 23–66; and L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literatur , 3rd. ed. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991 ), 143–146, 152–154.

For philosophy see Jill Kraye, “Philologists and Philosophers,” in Kraye, Cambridge Companion , 142–160.

See John Monfasani, “Nicholas of Cusa, the Byzantines and the Greek Language,” in Martin Thurner, ed., Nicholas Cusanus zwischen Deutschland und Italien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002 ) 215–252 (reprinted as Essay VIII in Thurner, Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy [Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004]).

Kraye, “Philologists and Philosophers,” 149–151.

Ibid., 145–146; Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Giovanni Pico and His Sources,” in Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought , 3: 227–304.

See Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle . Revised ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 ).

See Paul Lawrence Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva: Droz, 1975 ).

A good starting point would be Manetti’s De Vita ac Gestis Nicolai Quinti Summi Pontificis , ed. Anna Modigliani (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2005); see also Annet den Haan, Giannozzo Manetti’s New Testament: Translation Theory and Practice in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2016 ).

Humanists can be found enthusiastically supporting opposite sides of the Reformation; see Erka Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 ).

This section summarizes Monfasani, “Italian Humanism and European Culture.”

What happened in rhetoric is emblematic of the supersession of Italy by the North; see Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric , 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 ).

Despite appeals for the restoration of classical education; see, e.g., Robert E. Proctor, Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools , 2nd ed. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998 ).

For what follows, see Monfasani, “Rise and Decline,” 476–480; Monfasani, “The Renaissance as the Concluding Phase,” 176–181.

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Renaissance Humanism

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• Nigel Tubbs  

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Philosophy and rhetoric revive their opposition in the Renaissance as the closed fist of (theological and Aristotelian) orthodoxy and the open palm of (classical rhetorical) humanism. But there are different arenas in which this opposition is played out: in the battle of the books; in the ambivalence inherent in the growth of rational method; in the opposition of dogma and interpretation, of Empire and Church and of speculation and observation; and of course in the opposition between scholasticism and humanism. Again, my interest here is not with a comprehensive historical account of these developments, but rather with the way they illustrate the continuing tension between rhetoric and philosophy, and between freedom and discipline.

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See Ruegg, ‘The Rise of Humanism’, in Ruegg, A History of the University in Europe , vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 442–68.

Nauert, Humanism , p. 19. Against Petrarch’s view, Theodore Mommsen notes that ‘the notion of the mediaeval period as the “Dark Ages” is now destined to pass away for good.’ T. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”, Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages”,’ Speculum , vol. 17, no. 2 (April 1942), pp. 226–7.

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© 2014 Nigel Tubbs

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Tubbs, N. (2014). Renaissance Humanism. In: Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358929_4

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