The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning by Christopher S. Celenza (review)

In The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza provides a priceless vademecum for the study of Italian humanism. It rolls up in a delectable ball all that has come before: Garin and Kristeller; Burckhardt, Baron, and Martines; Fubini and Vasoli; Hankins, Allen, and the others. It presents in depth and with exquisite clarity the major works of nine leading humanists from Petrarch to Poliziano (plus many others introduced in discursive "parentheses"), culminating with the writer and critic Pietro Bembo, who translates the humanist heritage into a new language of art, a Latinized Tuscan. The lucidity of the explication de textes is matched by the precision with which Celenza profiles his cast of characters, who are presented with full dimensionality in their psychological, social, and cultural contexts: the careerist Poggio, the brawler Valla, the self-made man and Medici servitor Poliziano.

Celenza's work offers more than a series of text summaries and intellectual portraits, although these would be sufficient. It unravels a complex of interlocking themes, with three in particular rising to prominence. The first is the nature of philosophy as it is transformed by the humanists, who energize its study with new translations from the Greek of Aristotle and Plato, reject the metaphysical preoccupations of the university-based professionals, and, as philologists rather than as logicians, crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries, seek a mode of living more than a theory of being. The second is the humanist understanding of Christianity, which is not slighted but affirmed, most notably by Petrarch, Ficino, and Valla, by its integration with the classical tradition on the one hand and philosophy on the other, even as doctrinal technicalities are avoided. The third and predominant theme is that of language, also central to Celenza's earlier volume The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (2004). Celenza explores the departure from the vernacular stream initiated by the "three crowns," Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio (all three of whom wrote also in Latin), through the honing of Latin prose by the Ciceronian whetstone, to the eventual triumph of a reinvented Italian vernacular, disciplined and polished by humanist Latinity, and equipped to reach a national and even international audience for whom the specialized Latin of the humanists was inaccessible. Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Galileo, the inheritors of this language revolution, employed the Latinized Tuscan Bembo crafted, the gift of humanism to the early modern era.

But does the title work? Celenza gives a nod to "vernacular classicism" and the "polyphony" of Florentine culture, which featured a rambunctious Pulci alongside a complaisant Poliziano. But many corners of "the intellectual world of the Italian Renaissance" do not register here: Florence massively dominates, and while some scope is given to Rome, virtually none is given to Venice, Milan, and Naples, let alone Ferrara, Mantua, or Urbino, in which centers humanism thrived; learned women are mentioned, but not one makes it to the index; devotional works, memoirs, and private letters, all vigorous and important genres, are invisible. But though the title overreaches, we may let it pass. It is in the sub-title that we find a better key to Celenza's objective: he is concerned with the "language, philosophy, and the search for meaning." He has searched for the meaning of the humanist episode—the Latin "parenthesis" in Italian history, the long fifteenth century in which intellectuals captivated by classical texts devoured, circulated, and imitated them—and presents it in this volume. Five generations of humanists achieved, in effect, Rome's final conquest of Europe, synthesizing and structuring that continent's civilization as it was about to leap forward on the next five hundred years of unparalleled productivity; and they achieved, as well, the final conquest of Rome by the barbarians, completing the advance begun in the first five centuries of the Christian era, absorbing, appropriating, and exploiting...