Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism (review)

This collection of thirteen independent essays is suggestively grouped into three parts and prefaced by Professor Mazzocco's introduction to the history of the "great consult" over the nature, provenance, originality, and essential values of Renaissance humanism, beginning with Georg Voigt and Burckhardt and the responses they engendered, then moving on to "the revolt of the medievalists" to conclude with Baron, Garin, and Kristeller. His decision to end with this trinity of preeminent interpreters stems from his conviction that they still largely determine the parameters of humanist study. However, Baron and Garin are not much referenced here, while one hears Kristeller's circumspect voice in essay after essay.

Ronald Witt commences with the Kristellerian view that Italian humanists were the heirs to the medieval dictatores and worked principally either as teachers of rhetoric and grammar, or as notaries and lawyers in princely and communal chanceries, while gradually adopting new classicizing ideals. But in the unique case of republican Padua an "intimate connection" arose in the thirteenth century among lay teachers of grammar, the notariate, and participation in communal government; and this accounts for the "precocious" appearance of humanism in that city (25–26). A contrasting situation pertained in Bologna, where the grammarians were "politically marginalized" as academics and usually did not occupy notarial positions or participate in government (35). Hence they lacked their Paduan counterparts' "sense of urgency" in looking to ancient Rome as a model for organizing and stabilizing civic life.

Robert Black insists once again on the continuity of grammatical instruction and the texts used in the schools from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, even as he acknowledges "the collapse" of classically-based secondary education in Italy in the early thirteenth century. He attributes this to the rise of "the new Parisian logical school of grammar" (47) and to the pressure that the newly powerful law and medical faculties exerted upon the grammar schools to "streamline" their curricula so that budding lawyers and doctors could be trained in Latin more expeditiously (49). He also points to the class conflict that led the arriviste notaries and lawyers to embrace humanistic Latin, even as their aristocracy continued to embrace the vernacular.

Paul Grendler's essay is arresting, partly because of its assault on Black (and others) and its championship of Voigt (and Fubini), and partly because of its insistence on three differentiae distinguishing the Italian humanists from their medieval predecessors: that they admired a range of newly discovered Latin texts, especially those of Cicero; that they launched an avalanche of criticism of all kinds: on medieval Latin, on derivative medical texts, on Pliny's botanical errors, and so on; and that they penetrated the school system, becoming the Latin schoolmasters of Europe, as well as variously occupying university professorships of grammar and rhetoric, even as they failed to reform the great law texts (though many of them were lawyers) or to have a major impact on theology in Italy (Reformation Germany was another matter). Part 1 concludes with Massimo Miglio's review of curial humanism, the formation of the papal library, and the signal role of Nicholas V in its reconstruction; and with Giuseppe Mazzotta's suggestive account of the role played by encyclopedias in the shaping of humanism.

In part 2 Ricardo Fubini looks at the relationship of humanism, "a vast and multifaceted cultural movement," (127) with traditional Scholasticism and its concern with handing down (traditio), via its unity of method, a "heritage of truths" (130). Focusing on Petrarch and Valla, he reminds us that Petrarch came to know and to challenge not the speculative Scholasticism prevalent in Paris, but, rather, the "compiling Scholasticism" sponsored by the papal court at Avignon; and that Petrarch famously rejected the whole culture of compilations because it obscured the immediacy of the text. James Hankins has a perceptive essay on the effort in the Renaissance to comprehend ancient religious wisdom, including "the reductive universalism of the Stoics" (141), to incorporate...