HUMANISM

Humanism in the present era signifies an ideological doctrine that places human beings, as opposed to God, at the center of the universe. Although a focus on human nature and human life can be traced back ultimately to ancient Greek thought, humanism in the modern sense, with its anthropocentric belief in the boundless potentiality of unfettered human reason and its secular conviction that human destiny is entirely in human hands, has its roots in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. This philosophical orientation should not be confused with the intellectual movement known as Renaissance humanism. Unlike its contemporary namesake, Renaissance humanism was not specifically concerned with promoting and exalting human values. It was, instead, a hugely influential cultural and educational program dedicated to the revival of the classical ideal of cultivated and civilized learning, referred to in Latin as humanitas and in Greek as paideia. For humanists of the Renaissance and their successors, the only way to achieve this ideal was through the studia humanitatis, the study of Graeco-Roman civilization through its literature, history, philosophy, and surviving artifacts. The zeal for recovering and reviving antiquity reached its height from 1300 to 1650. Recent scholarship has, however, highlighted earlier periods in which brief bursts of enthusiasm for ancient learning can be identified.

Humanism in the Middle Ages

An intensified interest in the classical legacy, leading to a general cultural revival, occurred in the Islamic world during the tenth century. In contrast to Western Europe, where the Latin heritage was always supreme, Arab scholars, both Christian and Muslim, were concerned exclusively with Greek erudition. Moreover, their interest was entirely in the scientific and philosophical patrimony of ancient Greece, leaving aside its literary and historical works. During this period a large number of texts by Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen were translated into Arabic, sometimes via Syriac intermediaries. The philological efforts that went into this enterprise bore fruit in the achievements of thinkers such as Avicenna (980–1037) who were able to build up their own philosophical, scientific, and medical systems by drawing on the Greek material newly available to them.

Two epochs during the Western European Middle Ages witnessed revivals of ancient learning that have been seen as foreshadowing the humanism of the Renaissance. The first, associated with the reign of Charlemagne, occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries. In this period a small group of scholars, most notably Lupus of Ferrières (c. 805–862), studied, edited, and copied texts by Cicero, Valerius Maximus, and Aulus Gellius, among other Latin authors. It was partly thanks to their philological interests and skills that these works survived and were transmitted to later generations. Another Carolingian intellectual, John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810–c. 877), used his knowledge of Greek, a rare accomplishment in the Middle Ages, to gain access to Neoplatonic sources, which played a significant role in his highly original philosophical and theological writings.

The second period of medieval humanist activity took place in the twelfth century. A coterie of scholars, mainly located in northern France, began to study writings from classical antiquity with a new intensity and sense of purpose. They explored a wider range of Latin texts than their Carolingian predecessors, including late ancient translations of Greek works, such as Chalcidius's partial version of and commentary on Plato's Timaeus, dating from the fourth century, and the Aristotelian translations and commentaries of Boethius (c. 480–c. 524). They pursued predominantly scientific and philosophical interests, though less single-mindedly than the Arab scholars of the tenth century, and with a considerable emphasis on the Roman as well as the Greek tradition. The outlook of John of Salisbury (c. 1115–1180), an Englishman educated in Chartres and Paris, reflects the characteristic strains of humanism in this era. His knowledge of Latin literature, much of it culled from medieval florilegia, or anthologies, rather than through direct acquaintance with the ancient texts, was impressively broad though often shallow and perforce patchy. He wrote in a fluent and accomplished Latin style though without any attempt to imitate classical authors; and though he peppered his treatises with quotations and anecdotes from ancient literature, these snippets were deployed solely for his own purposes with no concern for their original context and import. Other twelfth-century scholars engaged in cosmological speculation and provoked accusations of heresy by employing Platonic concepts to investigate the relationship between God and the created universe.

From Medieval to Renaissance Humanism

Another product of twelfth-century France was the development of a new approach to Latin grammar based on a philosophical and logical analysis of syntax rather than on the careful study of Roman authors. Codified in two enormously influential manuals, Alexander of Villedieu's Doctrinale (1199) and Evrard of Béthune's Graecismus (1216), both written in verse for easy memorization, this unclassical method of teaching grammar quickly spread to Italy where it remained the staple of elementary education in Latin until the end of the fifteenth century. Equally successful was Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a verse textbook on rhetoric written between 1208 and 1213. Devoid of classical examples, it provided rules for obtaining an abstract eloquence unrelated to the prose of ancient Roman authors. This technique fitted in well with the ars dictaminis, a simplified method of composing public letters that had been widely adopted in Italy for the training of notaries, lawyers, and chancery officials. Their need for a practical, efficient, and uncluttered form of Latin expression led to a rejection of Roman models.

The first glimmerings of humanism appeared against the background of—and most likely in reaction to—this neglect of the classical tradition in thirteenth-century Italy. The Paduan notary and judge Lovato dei Lovati (c. 1240–1309), usually described as a pre- or protohumanist, broke new ground with his attempt to write Latin verse epistles in the style of Roman poets. Medieval scholars who took an interest in classical literature had not aspired to write Latin in an authentically ancient manner. Lovati, by contrast, made a deliberate (though far from successful) effort to imitate the vocabulary, meter, and tone of the Roman poetry he admired, including the tragedies of Seneca, whose metrics he explained in a brief treatise, and the lyric poems of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, which were hardly known at the time. In his official capacity, however, Lovati continued to write the traditional Latin of the ars dictaminis. His disciple Albertino Mussato (1261–1329) not only composed a Senecan verse tragedy, Ecerinis, but also extended the classicizing reform of Latin to prose by modeling his history of Emperor Henry VII on Livy. Yet he, too, continued to use medieval Latin in public letters and speeches, as did other humanists throughout the fourteenth century.

It was with Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) that the nascent humanist movement came into its own. He became an exemplary figure whose predilections, interests, and activities set the agenda for later generations of humanists. In his own Latin compositions, he emulated both the prose and poetry of Roman authors as well as working out a sophisticated theory of imitation. He collated and edited manuscripts of Livy and applied his philological acumen to the correction of other classical texts. He recovered works that had been effectively lost since antiquity, including Cicero's letters to Atticus. He rejected medieval scholasticism, with its emphasis on Aristotelian logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and favored instead the rhetoric of Cicero and Seneca, which had the power to move hearts and stir emotions. He felt that he was living at the dawn of a new era following a dark age of ignorance and barbarism; and he believed that the moving force behind this large-scale cultural transformation was the gradual recovery of the heritage of classical antiquity through his own efforts and those of like-minded scholars.

Renaissance Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy

There have been attempts by modern scholars to connect the rise of Renaissance humanism with the political circumstances of fifteenth-century Italy. Its origins have been linked to the struggle of republican Florence against the monarchical tyranny of Milan in the early years of the century, or it has been seen as both reflecting and fostering a new spirit of active engagement of the citizenry in communal affairs. This notion of civic humanism has not stood up well in the face of overwhelming evidence showing that humanism flourished in a wide variety of political and social contexts. Similarly, the multiplicity of mutually contradictory views held by humanists on any given subject has undermined persistent efforts to align the movement with a particular ideological bent or philosophical persuasion. The only conviction that humanists demonstrably held in common was their passionate dedication to study of classical antiquity.

Paul Oskar Kristeller's definition of a humanist as a professional teacher of the studia humanitatis therefore corresponds most closely to the historical facts and has consequently won widespread acceptance. The term humanist, or umanista, in fact derives from late fifteenth-century Italian university slang that denoted a teacher or student of the studia humanitatis, just as a legista was someone who taught or studied law. The expression studia humanitatis itself had even longer associations with the movement. Petrarch noted it in his manuscript of Cicero's Pro Archia, a speech he himself discovered in 1333, and his devoted follower Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the first in a long line of humanist chancellors of Florence, began using it in 1369 to describe the study of classical literature. It soon became a frequent refrain, indeed a battle cry, among humanists defending or promoting their own activities.

Although Kristeller's account of the studia humanitatis as consisting of five academic subjects—grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy—has also been widely adopted, it needs further refinement. These subjects may have been at the center of the Italian humanist curriculum during the fifteenth century. Yet their own interests ranged far beyond these fields, extending into all disciplines that relied on the wisdom of the ancients. In the Renaissance this meant almost every branch of learning: medicine, law, science, political thought, music, architecture, and all branches of philosophy. It was on this basis that Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), the most learned classical scholar of the Italian Renaissance, decided that he would no longer lecture at the University of Florence on Latin and Greek literature, the normal subjects for a humanist professor but, instead, give a course on Aristotelian logic. Such an audacious move predictably provoked cries of derision from the philosophers whose academic territory he was invading. He responded to this outrage by maintaining, in his inaugural lecture of 1492, that as an expert on antiquity he was qualified to interpret any ancient text, not just poetry, history, and rhetoric, but also medicine, law, and philosophy. He further demonstrated this point in a dazzling series of philological investigations ranging over a broad spectrum of texts, including the Corpus iuris civilis (the sixth-century codification of Roman law), the scientific writings of Pliny the Elder, and the Greek sources of Latin medical terminology.

Fifteenth-century Italian humanists contributed to the studia humanitatis, broadly construed, in a number of ways. In the first place, they uncovered manuscripts of classical Latin texts that had been virtually unknown throughout the Middle Ages. In the wake of Petrarch's discovery of Cicero's letters to Atticus and Pro Archia, Salutati turned up a copy of his familiar letters while a humanist of the next generation, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), found more unknown speeches of Cicero. Poggio's energetic hunt through monastic libraries in northern Europe also produced a complete copy of Quintilian's Education of the Orator, previously circulating in fragmentary form, and a masterpiece of Roman poetry, Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. Other important works unearthed by Italian humanists include the histories of Tacitus and the Brutus of Cicero.

When humanists found new works, or more accurate copies of ones that were already known to them, they ensured their further survival and diffusion, before the invention of printing, by copying and circulating them in manuscript. One of the innovations introduced by Italian humanists was to replace the crabbed and illegible gothic handwriting used in the late Middle Ages with an elegant and readable script that they believed was modeled on ancient Roman letter forms but that, in reality, dated from the Carolingian era. They also devised a cursive script, which is the ancestor of our italic character. In addition to copying texts, humanists also attempted to correct the errors that had inevitably crept into those texts through centuries of scribal transmission. They did this by comparing readings in different manuscripts or by making conjectural emendations—techniques that classicists still use today though with far greater methodological sophistication.

The next stage in dealing with the text of an ancient author was to explain and interpret it, often for the benefit of students. A large number of humanist commentaries on classical works grew out of university lectures. At a lower level, humanists also made their living as schoolteachers, equipping youngsters with the basic tools of Latin literacy that would enable them to gain access to the literary monuments of antiquity. Humanists such as Pier Paolo Vergerio (1370–1444) and Battista Guarino (1434–1503) wrote treatises touting the novelty of their teaching methods and boasting that the classical education they provided would inculcate a love of virtue and nobility in their young charges. Such extravagant claims no doubt assisted humanists to corner the educational market in the Renaissance. As is now known, however, the textbooks used in elementary Latin training changed relatively little from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. Moreover, the pedagogical techniques employed by humanists, which emphasized rote memorization and focused on grammatical, historical, and literary minutiae, were ill-suited to produce moral improvement. At the later stages of schooling, humanists made a greater impact, giving Virgil and Cicero a more prominent place in the curriculum than they had previously enjoyed and downgrading late ancient authors such as Boethius.

Fifteenth-century Italian humanists continued the classicizing reform of Latin style initiated by Lovati, Mussato, and Petrarch. By the early decades Cicero had become the accepted model for prose writers though it was not until the end of the century that a slavish and exclusive imitation of Cicero came into fashion. As an aid to writing correct classical Latin, Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) compiled his Elegantiae, a catalogue of subtle linguistic distinctions, fine shades of meaning, and nuances of usage, based on his exhaustive knowledge of the entire Roman literary canon. In a bravura display of humanist historical scholarship, Valla deployed this same knowledge to discredit the "Donation of Constantine," a document underwriting papal claims to temporal sovereignty, as a crude medieval forgery. He also believed, like Poliziano, that his superior command of Latin permitted him to interpret the Corpus iuris civilis more accurately than the legal scholars of his day.

Valla not only had an unrivaled mastery of classical Latin, he also knew ancient Greek well enough to translate the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. His expertise in both languages also allowed him to point out errors in the Vulgate, the standard Latin version of the New Testament, by comparing it with the Greek original. The revival of the study of Greek, which was well on its way by Valla's time, was one of the most important achievements of humanism. Very few medieval scholars had any acquaintance with Greek; and even though the works of some authors, including Aristotle, had been translated into Latin, the bulk of Greek philosophy, science, history, and literature was unknown in Western Europe. Beginning with Petrarch, humanists recognized the importance of recovering the Greek as well as the Latin heritage of antiquity. By traveling to Greece or studying with Byzantine émigrés in Italy, they learned the language and started to apply the techniques of editing and interpretation that had been developed for Latin texts to Greek ones. Greek, nonetheless, remained the preserve of a minority of humanists who served the larger intellectual community by translating a large body of texts into Latin. The writings of the Greek Church Fathers, many of them translated by Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), general of the Camaldulensian Order, formed an important element in this corpus.

Humanists were not concerned solely with texts. The material remains of antiquity, which were especially plentiful in Italy, were also of great interest to them. They visited architectural ruins and avidly collected Roman coins, inscriptions, and sculptures. Humanist historians, such as Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), subjected these artifacts to critical scrutiny and used them to supplement written records. This aspect of humanism laid the groundwork on which the disciplines of archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphy were later constructed.

Renaissance Humanism in Sixteenth-Century Europe

By the turn of the sixteenth century, humanism had begun to spread from Italy to other European countries. The movement took on new contours and colors, reflecting the different cultures into which it was transplanted. Nonetheless, the humanist program that had taken shape in fifteenth-century Italy did not undergo radical changes but continued to develop within the same broad outlines. This process is well illustrated in the writings of the most outstanding and influential humanist of the period, Erasmus (c. 1469–1536). In his educational works the Dutch scholar banished the last vestiges of the medieval tradition of learning Latin and presented a thoroughly humanist pedagogical method firmly based on the study of Roman and Greek authors. Erasmus also brought the humanist reform of Latin style to new heights. With the entire resources of classical Latin at his command, he adopted and promoted a flexible and eclectic approach to prose composition, rejecting the rigid Ciceronianism of his day. Carrying forward the achievements of Valla and Traversari, Erasmus demonstrated the relevance of humanism to Christian as well as pagan antiquity by applying philological techniques to the text of the New Testament and producing numerous critical editions and translations of the Church Fathers.

The inroads that fifteenth-century Italian humanists had made into disciplines such as medicine, philosophy, and law were extended during the sixteenth century by scholars from all over Europe. The Englishman Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524) helped to edit the Greek text of Galen and translated many of his treatises into Latin. The Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) reconstructed the philosophical system of the ancient Stoics, relying on Greek as well as Latin sources, and gave impetus to a popular fad for Stoicism that lasted until the 1660s. The French humanist Guillaume Budé (c. 1467–1540) brought the weight of his vast classical erudition to bear on the elucidation of obscure passages and terms in Roman law. He also wrote learned treatises on Roman coinage and Greek grammar.

Though Latin remained the lingua franca of humanism, facilitating communication among scholars of different nations, a feature of the movement in the sixteenth century was the increase of humanist writings in the vernacular. This phenomenon was not unheard of in the fifteenth century: Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) wrote a humanist treatise on household management in Italian, partly in order to demonstrate that the language was a suitable vehicle for scholarly discourse. Now, however, it proliferated and attained a respectability that it had previously lacked so that even a hard-core humanist such as Budé was prepared to write his treatise on the education of the prince in French. The Prince of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) are just two examples of influential works in the vernacular that were steeped in humanist culture.

The Legacy of Renaissance Humanism

The humanists' aim of reviving and restoring the heritage of classical antiquity was largely achieved by the seventeenth century. Although a few discoveries were yet to be made, almost all ancient Greek and Latin writings known today were available to scholars who could consult them in printed editions, often accompanied by learned commentaries and, in the case of Greek works, Latin translations. It was at this stage, however, that the seismic changes in European culture brought about by the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of modern philosophy made this body of knowledge, so revered by the humanists, increasingly irrelevant to contemporary needs. They continued to develop ever more sophisticated methods of investigating the textual and material remains of antiquity, gradually transforming themselves into the classicists and archaeologists of the present day. By 1809, when the term humanism was first coined by a German philologist to defend the study of Greek and Latin, the movement had become synonymous with the profession of classical scholarship. Although greatly marginalized since its heyday in the Renaissance, humanism continued to exert a significant and widespread cultural influence until well into the twentieth century through the resilient ideal of the classical education.

See also Aristotle; Avicenna; Carolingian Renaissance; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Enlightenment; Erasmus, Desiderius; Galen; Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Corpus; John of Salisbury; Petrarch; Plato; Stoicism.

Bibliography

Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955.

Black, Robert. "Humanism." In The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. VII: c. 1415–c. 1500, edited by Christopher Allmand. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Black, Robert. Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Celenza, Christopher S. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Garin, Eugenio. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance. Translated by Peter Munz. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Gersh, Stephen, and Bert Roest, eds. Medieval and Renaissance Humanism: Rhetoric, Representation and Reform. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

Goodman, Anthony, and Angus MacKay, eds. The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe. London: Longman, 1990.

Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Hankins, James, ed. Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Kallendorf, Craig, ed. and trans. Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Kraye, Jill, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kraye, Jill, and M. W. F. Stone, eds. Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Kraemer, Joel L. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age. Leiden: Brill, 1986.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains. New York: Harper and Row, 1961.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Otten, Willemien. From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism. Leiden: Brill, 2004.

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

Reynolds, L. D. and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Rummel, Erika. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Seigel, Jerrold E. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Trinkaus, Charles. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Renaissance Thought. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. 2nd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Wilson, N. G. From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. London: Duckworth, 1992.

Witt, Ronald G. In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden: Brill, 2000.

Jill Kraye (2005)