The GreaT
humanisTs
An IntroductIon
Jonathan arnold
INRODUCION
R
enaissance humanism has shaped the way we think and what wedo: our education, the cultural world we inhabit, the literaturewe read, the plays we watch, the music we listen to, our religion,politics and philosophy; the very language we speak. To hear the poetryof Milton, Spenser or Shakespeare, or to read the prose of Erasmus,More or the words of a Tyndale Bible, for instance, is to encounterlanguage that has been shaped by the humanist ideas and assumptionsthat have permeated the Western world. Thus, humanism is a phenom-enon that transformed the study of literature in Renaissance Europeand has left its imprint on society today. The
studia humanitatis
, adiscipline embracing grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy andhistory, involved the study of classical literature and languages, philol-ogy and the art of debate. It gave birth to a new age of eloquence, inwhich education and literature, as well as the way in which philosophyand theology were expressed, changed forever. Humanism revolution-ized European culture by means of relating to its classical literary past.The term
humanitas
is still employed in almost every university in theworld in the form of the word ‘humanities’.This book is not about the secular humanism of the twenty-firstcentury, it is about Renaissance humanism in a broad sense, Christianand civic. This work, for the general reader and student alike, offers anintroduction to humanism, from its birth to the Reformation, by meansof examining some of its key figures as well as those closely related tohumanism through their work as philosophers. It attempts to createa picture of the movement and its influence in pre-Reformation andReformation Europe by juxtaposing a series of inter-related sketches of scholars, priests, theologians and philosophers, now known as human-ists, active in the Renaissance and early modern periods. The aim isnot only to provide an overview of intellectual thought in Europe at the
2THE GREAT HUMANISTStime, but also to offer the reader individual portraits of the key human-ists involved which can be read as free-standing chapters, or used forreference. After a definition of humanism, this introduction will givea brief summary of the rise of humanism in Europe and survey someof the important scholarship written about it, before providing a brief justification of those humanists included, and those omitted, and anoutline of the book.
What is Humanism?
Any attempt to give a working definition of humanism is always a pre-carious venture, but it must be done. In fact, the term ‘humanism’ is nota term from the Renaissance at all, but was developed in the nineteenthcentury from the Latin
humanitas
, as used by Cicero (106–43 B.C.)in classical times and those
humanista
, of the fifteenth century, whostudied and taught the
humanae litterae
(liberal arts) in universities.As James Hankins has observed, it was Georg Voigt who first used theword ‘humanism’ to refer to the Renaissance study of classical textsand languages. In the same century, a philosophical sense of humanismwas developed in the work of Ludwig Fauerbach (1804–1872), leadingeventually to the common understanding of the term ‘humanism’ inmodern society as a secular philosophy of humankind. However, anynotion of Renaissance humanism as a ‘philosophy of man’ was largelydiscredited by Paul Kristeller (1905–99), who cogently argued thatRenaissance humanism is best seen as a ‘movement, rooted in the medi-eval rhetorical tradition, to revive the language and literature of classi-cal antiquity. Humanists were not philosophers, but men and women of letters’.
1
As for the origins of humanism, we have to look to the
Trecento
and
Quattrocento
in Italy, as it was here that humanism emerged throughthe thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the works of Italian schol-ars such as the Paduan Lovato dei Lovati (
c
. 1240–1309), Geremia daMontagnone (1255–1321), Rolando da Piazzola (d. 1325) and AlbertinoMussato (1261–1329).
2
Most of the early humanists were lawyersand, of the Paduans, Mussato became the most widely renowned. Thehumanist Paduans were basically secular and civic in their outlook, notleast Mussato, whose writings demonstrated no special religious inter-est until he converted to Christianity late in life (1328–9).
3
The term ‘humanist’ (in the Latin
humanista
or Italian
umani-sta
) was used in the fifteenth century. However, as Lewis Spitz pointsout, the term did not travel outside of Italy until the early sixteenthcentury, appearing in Germany (in the Latin text of the
EpistolaeObscurorum Virorum
)
in 1515.
4
The term made its way also to France
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The Great Humanists
In The Great Humanists, Jonathan Arnold explores the finest intellects of late-Renaissance Europe, providing an essential guide to the most important scholars, priests, theologians and philosophers of the period, now collectively known as the Christian Humanists.
Read the introduction here.
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