"The Birth of the Humanist Movement at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century", Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English version), 2013/3 (original) (raw)
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Humanism between Middle Ages and Renaissance
New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship, 2021
Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy presents a glittering fresco of grandiloquent personalities and cultural dynamism, the colors of which gleam brighter because of their contrast to his briefly sketched medieval dystopia. Burckhardt, of course, did not introduce this dichotomy; it was Petrarch who “created” the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have recognized the artificiality of Petrarchan-Burckhardtian periodization, and medievalists, in particular, have railed against it. Yet in spite of copious evidence for continuities between medieval and Renaissance intellectual life, students, and many scholars, still contrast an ahistorical, otherworldly, clerical intellectual culture of the period before 1300 with a secular, classicizing, and anthropocentric Renaissance agenda. Although specialists would eschew this stark dichotomy, those trained as medievalists continue to focus on scholasticism when they discuss 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th century intellectual life, while those trained as early modernists highlight everything that was (or was claimed to be) novel about the humanists’ program. This chapter argues that a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the emergence of humanism requires, first, that scholars examine the records of schools, courts, and chanceries with the care of researchers like Robert Black and Ronald Witt. Second, it demands that medievalists and early modernists adopt, or at least borrow, each other’s research tools and questions. What are the post-Augustinian, as well as the classical, sources for a humanistic text? How do figures like Marsilio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pietro Pompanazzi evince or disdain a new historical approach? Substantive intellectual changes can only be identified by modern scholars who are equipped to distinguish between the inflammatory rhetoric of eager self-promoters and novel ways of thinking. Recognizing the true importance of humanism within early modern European culture requires better understanding of its continuing interaction with earlier scholarly practices.
In his always stimulating The Florentine Enlightenment 1400-50, the historian George Holmes vigorously emphasized the decisive role of a "Florentine-curial axis" in the rise of the humanist movement at the turn of the fifteenth century. 1 Holmes pointed out that many young humanists left Florence for Rome at the end of the Western Schism and found employment in the papal chancery, especially under the pontificate of John XXIII (r. 1410-1415), to the extent that "during this pontificate the papal court became a center of Florentine humanism to rival if not surpass Florence itself." 2 Holmes further argued that this relative "brain drain" not only provided professional and economic opportunities, but was also a sine qua non factor for the prestige and the influence of the new culture of the studia humanitatis. The paradigm sketched by Holmes, tended to de-compartmentalize the history of Florentine humanism, and to temper an enduring campanilismo, by taking into account intellectual relations and circulations beyond the city, articulated with other socio-political contexts, in this case the Roman curia. Our argument is about pushing such a logic further, and showing that it allows us somehow to reverse the point of view: in other words, to leave Florence, in order to observe the global and reticular dynamics of development of the humanistic culture in Europe. Within this, in return, we can re-register the itineraries and activities of the Florentines, at various levels. This effort of realignment leads us, in a first step, to reflect on the fact that Florentine humanism developed at least partly outside Florence, through a decisive movement of emigration. It leads us, moreover, to go beyond a territorialized and, in a sense, regionalized vision of the birth of the humanist movement, to arrive at thinking about the web itself-certainly structured by networks, hubs, and clusters-as a decentralized space of identity creation. 3 Such a perspective aligns with the direction of current historiography that favors a multipolar approach to the development of humanism. In particular, this perspective, while recognizing the prominence of Florence, integrates the city into an
"Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents," The European Legacy 20.5 (2015): 1-17
The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture.
The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence
2014
This book offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years. Florence was the epicenter of the culture produced during the Italian Renaissance, and the humanist movement underlay the style of the city's visual and literary arts. Brian Jeffrey Maxson demonstrates that the Renaissance in Florence was a far more popular movement than is usually assumed, spearheaded by scholars as well as wealthy citizens who dabbled in the reading of ancient texts and modern treatises translated from Latin into the vernacular. Indeed, only a fraction of the humanist club could read and write Latin, but these learned readers were usually the only people in cities like Florence with enough social status to put the ideas of civic humanism into practice. Maxson shows how this network of humanists enabled the launch of a cultural movement that established Florence as the preeminent center of learning in Italy and that spread beyond Italy to the rest of Europe.
Broadening Horizons of Renaissance Humanism from the Antiquity to the New World
Broadening Horizons of Humanism, 2018
It is a commonplace about the Renaissance that it broadened the horizon of Medieval Europeans in more than one direction. It rediscovered the cultural and intellectual heritage of the classical Antiquity, discovered the true structure of the skies, found new geographical horizons, discovered new lands, and forged the birth of the natural sciences. There was a special intellectual group in the hub of all these changes: the humanists. Some of them were primarily scientists, others educators, or artists, but common in them was that their enthusiasm toward the classical heritage often connected with an interest in the new, the unknown, and the futuristic. The paper reflects on the long debate concerning the definition of humanism and the humanists and revisits several case studies which show the combination of philology, historical interest, and the proposition of new ideas-often inspired by a widening horizon resulting from travel.
Florentine Civic Humanism and the Emergence of Modern Ideology
History and Theory, 2007
this article revisits the question of the modernity of the renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans baron's interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists' political republicanism in fifteenth-century Florence. the article's main contention is that humanist political discourse rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. this created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequalities and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself.
'This Sort of Men': the Vernacular and the Humanist Movement in Fifteenth-Century Florence
The humanist movement in recent decades has witnessed a veritable renaissance of scholarly interest. At the forefront of scholarly activity stands the impressive and growing I Tatti Renaissance Library, a series that makes humanist texts available to a wider audience than ever before. While the I Tatti series has focused on original Latin writings, the changing place of vernacular texts within the humanist movement has also not escaped scholarly notice. Scholars have established the importance of vernacular culture to Lorenzo the Magnificent and his circle in latter fifteenth-century Florence in particular, as well as the complex and shifting ways that Neo-Latinists viewed the vernacular as a vehicle for expression throughout the Quattrocento. What has received less attention, however, are the men and women who participated on the fringes of the humanist movement - their social backgrounds, the depth of their learning, and their connections to more learned humanist writers. This article focuses on a sliver of these individuals, the evidence for their humanist interests coming primarily from vernacular texts copied during the second half of the fifteenth century. In terms of chronology, the article largely upholds the traditional view that the vernacular enjoyed a resurgence of interest in Florence after the mid fifteenth century. However, the article challenges two other prevalent assumptions about the humanist movement in Florence, particularly the use of composition in Latin as the sine qua non for Florentine humanists and the lack of socio-economic diversity among their backgrounds.