‘humanism’

‘humanism’ is the term conventionally used to describe a set of moral and literary values and techniques chiefly associated with the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th cents. It embraced enthusiasm for the Greek and Latin classics; preference for rhetoric over logic as the means to persuade; the belief that good literary education would produce better people; and optimism about mankind's dignity and worth.

Renaissance ‘humanism’ originated in Italy. It was through literary and church contacts with Italy that humanism spread to England in the first half of the 15th cent. At first, some English patrons employed Italian secretaries and scribes to prepare for them manuscripts of ancient and more recent texts. Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), youngest brother of Henry V, employed such writers as Tito Livio Frulovisi, Antonio Beccaria, Lionardo Bruni, and Pier Candido Decembrio to prepare texts for him.

By c. 1500 the teaching of rhetoric, poetry, and those classical writers neglected in the Middle Ages had become appreciated at both Oxford and Cambridge universities. William Grocyn (c. 1449–1519) introduced Greek studies to Oxford on his return from Italy in 1491. The royal physician and Oxford academic Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524) wrote works on Latin composition and also encouraged good medical practice. In 1511–14 John Fisher recruited the famous Netherlands humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536) to teach Greek at Cambridge.

The apogee of English humanism as a conscious movement was reached in the first four decades of the 16th cent. John Colet (1467–1519) learned Greek in Italy and taught at Oxford from c. 1497; as dean of St Paul's from 1504 he refounded St Paul's School with a curriculum based on the new classical learning. Thomas More (1478–1535), unusually for humanists a lay lawyer rather than an ecclesiastic, cultivated the friendship of Erasmus and produced the most bewildering literary fantasy of the movement, Utopia (1516). Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546) in The Book Named the Governor produced an English equivalent of the many treatises on education and politics current in Europe at the time.

By the mid‐16th cent. it becomes impossible to speak of ‘humanism’ as a distinct entity, because its influence was spread so widely. Renaissance techniques for learning classical languages and editing classical texts became generally accepted. The belief that exposure to vast quantities of Greek and Latin literature, combined with vigorous physical exercise, would produce healthy, moral young men survived in the public school system until about a generation ago.