Humanism and Secularization from Petrarch to Valla (review)

In this book, Riccardo Fubini deals with one of the most significant questions regarding Italian Renaissance humanism and its ramifications: how, and to what extent, did the intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism contribute to the secularization of western culture? This is an important, densely argued, and deeply learned book. Fubini's approach represents the best in a postwar Italian historicist tradition, overtly diachronic in approach, in which the historian is compelled to make judgments about the past. Throughout the book, in fact, Fubini engages in a subtle polemic, likely to escape readers not familiar with the field. He writes that he does not wish to reduce humanist polemics against scholastic forms of thought and discourse "to a mere difference of opinion among disciplines and methods of teaching" (p. 5) and elsewhere that he is not proposing "a paradigm of humanism" (p. 7). In setting out this method, Fubini is in effect eschewing another very dominant mode of thinking about Renaissance intellectual history, associated with Paul Oskar Kristeller, synchronic in style, where the historian attempts to draw an overall cultural map of a period and resists making overt value judgments, in an effort to be as all-inclusive as possible and to make clear the multifaceted manifestations of Renaissance intellectual life. If it is simplistically objected to Fubini's method that his version of "humanism" does not account for all those intellectuals in the early modern world who were interested in some vague way in the five studia humanitatis, one might reply that this was not his intention.

Instead, Fubini is making a very specific, precise argument: that certain humanists in the first half of the fifteenth century, associated with or highly influenced by the cultural politics of the city of Florence and marked by a closeness to the papal court, evolved a style of thought that was essentially secular, if not always overtly so; he is thinking primarily of Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Lorenzo Valla, though others come into play. In their thought, one can discern a kind of cultural relativism tied to a new sense of history, a skepticism regarding institutionally entrenched intellectual traditions, and a moral philosophy that takes lived human experience as its ultimate criterion for judgment, rather than abstract theological pronouncements. This style of thought, rooted in enthymematic persuasion, not apodeictic proof, was tied intimately to the social places in which these humanists found themselves, for, as Fubini writes, this intellectual movement "has to do with an avant-garde culture, establishing itself outside a definite institutional base, conscious of its separate existence and marked by a refusal of age-old scholastic and ecclesiastical traditions" (p. 44). This is not to say that the humanists in whom Fubini is interested were anti-religious as such, since, as Fubini explains, "a pure and simple restoration of the ancient culture was unimaginable for a humanist of the fifteenth century without taking Christian and ecclesiastical traditions into account" (p. 44). In other words, what distinguishes these thinkers is their attempt to create an identity for a new sort of intellectual movement, necessarily related to, but distinct from, the traditional social and intellectual spaces created by the Church. It was precisely because the Church and its intellectual expression, growing out of late medieval university culture, were so important in that era that humanists often found themselves, not so much openly dissenting from official doctrines, but discussing them in such radically different and then unusual ways that a certain form of dissent proved inevitable.A short review such as this cannot do justice to this provocative and interesting book. Its virtues lie not only in Fubini's learning, which is prodigious, but also in his analytical method, which is context-sensitive, intertextual, and sparklingly alive with intellectual agility. Fubini continually gets behind the...