Impact of Humanism on Western Europe During the Renaissance, The

A. Goodman, Angus Mackay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317870227
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

An up-to-date synthesis of the spread and impact of humanism in Europe. A team of Renaissance scholars of international reputation including Peter Burke, Sydney Anglo, George Holmes and Geoffrey Elton, offers the student, academic and general reader an up-to-date synthesis of our current understanding of the spread and impact of humanism in Europe. Taken together, these essays throw a new and searching light on the Renaissance as a European phenomenon.

1 The Spread of Italian Humanism

Peter Burke

DOI: 10.4324/9781315836225-1

I

The aim of this chapter is to offer a general and comparative account of one of the most famous episodes, or movements, in the intellectual history of Western (and, indeed, East-Central) Europe – the discovery, by scholars and writers, of Italian humanism, and the rediscovery, thanks in large part to the Italian humanists, of the culture of the classical Greek and Roman world.

As is so often the case with key terms in intellectual history, ‘humanism’ does not lend itself to precise definition, nor is it easy to say exactly what is meant by its ‘spread’.

The problem with ‘humanism’, a term coined by the Germans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and first used in English (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) by Matthew Arnold, is that it is commonly employed in two very different ways, one of them precise and narrow and the other rather wide and vague. Humanism in the wide sense is associated with the belief in the dignity of man, and, more generally, with human or secular (as opposed to other-worldly) values. In North-Western Europe, as in the Italy of Giannozzo Manetti and Pico della Mirandola, the dignity of man was the subject of treatises, notably the Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre by Fernán Pérez de Oliva (published in 1546, after the death of the author) and the Excellence et dignité de l’homme by Pierre Boaystuau (published in 1558). However, the ideas expressed in these treatises are relatively traditional and conventional and would scarcely justify the employment of a phrase such as ‘the humanist movement’.

Reacting against the wider definition popular at the beginning of the century, historians tend nowadays to use the term ‘humanism’ in a rather narrow sense, to refer to the men known in fifteenth-century Italy as humanistae, in other words the teachers of the studia humanitatis or ‘humanity’ (as opposed to divinity), generally defined to include grammar, rhetoric, ethics, poetry and history. In English, French and Spanish the word ‘humanist’ was occasionally employed in the sixteenth century, for example in the Vocabulario del humanista published in 1569 by a Spanish university teacher, Lorenzo Palmireno.

This precision has its price. Restricting the term ‘humanist’ to the professional university teachers of the Renaissance involves excluding some individuals who were very much concerned with the recovery of classical culture; the lawyer Thomas More, for example, the patrician Willibald Pirckheimer, the country gentleman Michel de Montaigne, and, above all, Erasmus, who occasionally took tutoring jobs but did not make teaching his profession, risking poverty for the sake of independence. There seems therefore to be a good case for a middle-of-the-road definition of humanism, neither too wide nor too narrow to be useful, as the movement to recover, interpret and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome; while a humanist is someone actively involved in the movement, whether a professional teacher, churchman, royal councillor, or whatever.

The terms ‘spread’, ‘diffusion’, ‘impact’ or indeed ‘reception’ also raise problems. Like much of the historian’s vocabulary, they are of course metaphors, dead or at any rate sleeping, and sometimes inappropriate for the tasks they are required to perform. The mechanical image of ‘impact’, the hydraulic metaphor of ‘flow’ (humanism spreading like an oil slick), or even the more human images of ‘borrowing’, passing something from hand to hand (‘reception’) or handing it down (‘tradition’) are too crude to cope with the process of cultural change.

Even in the case of material objects, from the axe-heads and pots studied by archaeologists to Renaissance manuscripts or statuettes, it is necessary to investigate demand as well as supply, to examine such problems as selective borrowing (‘filtering’), unevenly-distributed receptiveness, and the changes in the use, and hence the meaning of objects in the course of their passage from one socio-cultural environment to another.¹ As for ideas, they have the habit of changing while in transit, or, more exactly, of being re-interpreted by the borrowers and adapted to local situations, so that the message received may well differ very considerably from the message originally transmitted. It is for this reason that historians of the reception of the Renaissance may have something to learn from what is known among students of literature as ‘Reception Theory’, which emphasises the creative role played by receivers and the need to keep an eye on their ‘horizon of expectations’.²

¹ One of the few serious studies of these problems is the work of a Swedish geographer: T. Hägerstrand, Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process (Eng. trans. Chicago, 1967). ² J. H. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (English trans., Manchester, 1982)

The moral of this discussion is that an essay on the spread of Italian humanism abroad, or, to vary the metaphor, its ‘dissemination’ (Italian seeds transplanted into new environments with varying results), must necessarily deal not only with the routes or channels of diffusion and the institutions which encouraged or hindered it, but also with the ways in which what we call Italian humanism was perceived in other parts of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and with the extent to which and the manner in which it was assimilated by different individuals or groups in different parts of Europe, translated into local idioms.³ To discuss these questions is the task of the present chapter. The ideas of Tuscan humanists were subject to similar processes of adaptation as they spread through Italy, from Venice to Palermo, but this problem will not be considered here, any more than the equally important problem of Italian responses to ideas, books and individuals from other parts of Europe.

³ Brief general discussions of the theme include P. O. Kristeller, ‘The European Diffusion of Italian Humanism’ (1962), reprinted in his Renaissance Thought II (New York, 1965), pp. 20–68 and R. Weiss, The Spread of Italian Humanism (1964).

II

With these problems in mind, it may still be helpful to start this survey in the time-honoured manner by considering the importance of the most direct and personal means of diffusing humanism_ travel to and from Italy. Appendix I lists some Italian scholars who were active abroad from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth. Given the difficulty of defining humanism, let alone the gaps in the evidence, such a list can make no pretence to completeness or indeed to objectivity. It may, however, provide a useful general impression of the geography and chronology of the Italian humanist diaspora. On the geographical side, it does at least show the misleading implications of the customary contrasts between the Italian and ‘Northern’ Renaissances, since Italian teachers can be found not only in France, the Empire, the Netherlands and Britain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Contributors
• Introduction
• Denys Hay and his publications on the Renaissance
• 1. The Spread of Italian Humanism Peter Burke
• 2. Humanism and Reform Movements Peter Matheson
• 3. Humanism and Political Thought Richard Tuck
• 4. Humanism and the Court Arts Sydney Anglo
• 5. Humanism, Magic and Science Anthony Grafton
• 6. Humanism in Italy George Holmes
• 7. Humanism in the Low Countries James K. Cameron
• 8. Humanism in France Jean-Claude Margolin
• 9. Humanism in Germany Lewis W. Spitz
• 10. Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula Jeremy N. H. Lawrance
• 11. Humanism in England Geoffrey Elton
• Index