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Charles G. Nauert
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Introduction
The last thing readers want from the authors of history books is arcane
historiographical debates among contending schools of interpretation.
Yet in the case of Renaissance humanism, any serious reader needs some
knowledge of where we have been since 1860, when the Swiss historian
Jakob Burckhardt put forward what long remained the dominant con-
cepts of the key terms, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘humanism’, in his masterpiece
of cultural history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Although
few specialists today would give unqualified endorsement to his descrip-
tion of the age, it was profoundly appealing to his contemporaries, and it
still has much to offer.
Burckhardt’s book quickly captured the imagination of educated
readers because it was a subtle and learned synthesis of opinions about
the Renaissance that had been accumulating for centuries and had grown
powerful during the Age of the Enlightenment (Ferguson 1948). Burck-
hardt seemed to confirm a story that had already become prevalent but
had never before been given such a powerful and coherent presentation.
This story, or historical myth, was the product of the secular intellectuals
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the
origins of their own beliefs and values. According to this story, after the
collapse of ancient civilization in the fifth century AD, a thousand years of
darkness and barbarism ensued, with the Christian church acting simul-
taneously to preserve some few shreds of ancient civilization and to sup-
press any intellectual or religious revivals that might weaken the
stranglehold that the higher clergy and the warrior aristocracy held over
the minds as well as the bodies of ordinary people. Eventually, however, a
revival of commerce and urban life (the reasons for which were rarely
explained) laid the foundations for a rediscovery of ancient literature and
simultaneously for a secular, even anti-religious, set of values. These
values, which constituted a new and distinctly modern philosophy of life,
glorified the individual and the attractions of earthly life; and they were
strongly reinforced by the rediscovered pagan literature of Antiquity. The
new secular, individualistic values were inherently incompatible with
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2 Humanism and the culture of Renaissance Europe
Christian belief. This worldly philosophy of life came to be called
‘humanism’, and it reflected a comprehensive rebirth (i.e., a renaissance)
of high civilization that drew its main ideas and inspiration from ancient
times. Those who had been brought up in this humanistic philosophy
overthrew the social and economic restraints of feudal, pre-capitalist
Europe, broke the power of the clergy, and discarded ethical restraints on
politics. They laid the foundations for the modern absolute, secular state
and even for the remarkable growth of natural science at the end of the
Renaissance. In short, they ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the
modern world. This is a rather straightforward story. It is especially
attractive to secular-minded intellectuals who still often call themselves
‘humanists’. It dominated prevailing views of Renaissance humanism
from the publication of Burckhardt’s book until well into the twentieth
century. It has only one major flaw: both in its general thrust and in virtu-
ally every detail, it is untrue.
The preceding account of Renaissance humanism contains just enough
half-truths to make it plausible. Rather oddly, the author who created it,
Jakob Burckhardt, was no uncritical admirer of the materialistic, power-
hungry bourgeois culture of his time. His masterpiece is far more subtle
than the preceding simplified account would indicate. Virtually every
work on the Renaissance for two generations accepted its conclusions
without serious question. But the twentieth century witnessed a growing
reaction against ‘Burckhardtian’ orthodoxy, partly because fresh research
challenged specific points but also because the bloody and violent history
of the twentieth century made it hard to accept the liberal, optimistic faith
in progress that Burckhardt’s book seemed to imply.
The attack on Burckhardt’s Renaissance
Of particular importance in the twentieth-century reaction against
Burckhardt was the growth of scholarship on medieval history, which
made the conventional view of a dark and barbarous Middle Ages increas-
ingly hard for well-informed historians to swallow. The stark contrast
between a culturally ‘dark’ Middle Ages and an enlightened, ‘modern’
Renaissance melted away as medievalists discovered squarely in the
Middle Ages all the essential traits supposedly typical of the later period,
and also discovered within the Renaissance many traditional elements
that seemed to prove that the Middle Ages lived on into the Renaissance.
Medievalists found renaissances (that is, periods of classical revival) in
‘their’ period also – in Carolingian France, Anglo-Saxon England,
Ottonian Germany – though not, perhaps significantly, in any century of
Italy’s Middle Ages. One of these medieval revivals, the ‘twelfth-century
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Introduction 3
Renaissance’, has established itself firmly in the historical vocabulary. The
great American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins made that concept
canonical with his The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). Haskins
argued that the term ‘renaissance’, in the sense of emergence of high
culture, including significant enthusiasm for classical Latin literature, was
an obvious characteristic of the twelfth century and that this cultural
renewal is the direct ancestor of all subsequent European civilization.
Others went further and claimed that the Renaissance, the real one, the
one that marked the fundamental transition of Europe from a backward to
an advanced civilization, occurred not in Italy in the later fourteenth
century but in France in the twelfth century. For a time in the late 1940s
and the 1950s, the very idea of a Renaissance came under attack.
Yet the concept and term ‘Renaissance’ have survived, though still con-
tested. The main reason is that whatever terms historians might apply, the
historical realities that Burckhardt described cannot be dismissed with
quibbles about the proper terms to use. A flood of new studies vastly
enriched historians’ understanding of the period. By the 1950s, these
studies had produced new ways of thinking about Renaissance culture,
new ways of defining such fundamental terms as ‘humanism’ and
‘Renaissance’. Books by Myron P. Gilmore (1952) and Denys Hay (1961;
2nd edn 1977) are important early steps in synthesizing this new research.
Many of those who joined in the attack on Burckhardt spent their
energy denying the appropriateness of his terms rather than in discussing
the major traits of the period. No serious scholar now believes that before
the Italian Renaissance, Europe lay sunken in darkness, barbarism, and
superstition for a thousand years. It is true that Petrarch and other
humanists claimed to have restored civilization after a millennium of cul-
tural darkness. This claim may contain profound truths concerning the
Renaissance period. But concerning the Middle Ages, it is patently false,
so false that no one whose opinion counts now holds it.
Thus the beginning of wisdom for anyone who wants to understand the
culture of Renaissance humanism is to realize that the high civilization of
the Renaissance developed out of the high civilization of the Middle Ages
and always retained marks of that origin. The medievalists are at least
partly right: the Renaissance is not the beginning of the cultural dyna-
mism of Western society, but rather a highly significant reorientation of an
advanced civilization already two or three centuries old. As Haskins dem-
onstrated beyond dispute, many of the major authors of ancient Rome
were not only known but well known in the schools of the High Middle
Ages. From the thirteenth century, the curriculum of all universities
was based on the works of Aristotle, one of Antiquity’s greatest philoso-
phers. Humanism was not, as many people have assumed, a worldly rival
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4 Humanism and the culture of Renaissance Europe
philosophy that displaced a pious scholastic philosophy during the
Renaissance. For one thing, humanism was not a philosophy at all (an
issue that will be treated later). In the professional study of philosophy and
natural science, scholasticism (and Aristotle) retained a mastery un-
shaken and almost unchallenged right through the Renaissance centuries,
all the way down to the collapse of Aristotelian science in the time of
Galileo and Descartes. The humanistic culture did not produce a new
philosophy to replace this scholasticism, which continued not only to exist
but also to develop along lines that were intellectually sound and philo-
sophically fruitful.
Yet Burckhardt was right in detecting the emergence of a new culture
and also in identifying at least one of its major sources. Part One of his
book links the new humanistic culture of Italy to a unique set of social,
political, and economic conditions. At first glance, this new culture might
seem to be the simple reflex of the emergence of capitalism, commerce,
and cities in northern Italy from the late eleventh century. But there are
difficulties with the cruder forms of this purely materialistic explanation,
the most obvious one being chronology. Urban growth and commercial
expansion can be traced as early as the eleventh century. Why did the new
culture not attract a large following until almost the end of the fourteenth
century? Since many historians of the period are now convinced that the
1340s witnessed the onset of the new capitalist economy’s first great
depression, it even seems that the new culture did not develop until the
capitalist economy was in a prolonged decline. In any case, there is no
simple connection between the birth of capitalism and the new humanist
culture.
Italy’s unique social character
Yet it is true that Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had
become the most highly developed, the wealthiest, the most urbanized
region of Europe. North of the Alps, the scholastic philosophy, Gothic
art, and vernacular literature of these centuries seem to be clearly asso-
ciated with the clergy and the feudal aristocracy that dominated the
Middle Ages. Italy was not totally free of this older aristocratic and cleri-
cal culture. But Gothic art and architecture never gained full dominance
in Italy, and the scholasticism that developed in Paris first penetrated
Italian universities during the lifetime of the earliest humanists and never
became a prominent element in Italian civilization (at least not until the
conservative Catholic religious reforms of the late sixteenth century).
The dynamic part of Italy, the north, was dominated not by clerics and
feudal nobles but by wealthy urban merchants; and during the twelfth
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Introduction 5
and thirteenth centuries, the cities of northern Italy in alliance with the
popes broke the military and political power of the German kings, who
called themselves Roman emperors and attempted to control northern
Italy. Instead of developing a strong, centralizing monarchy based on feu-
dalism as France and England did, Italy became a jumble of urban repub-
lics that exercised de facto independence, a point developed at some
length by Burckhardt. Although the people of these urban communes
were sincerely Catholic and were periodically swept by waves of religious
revivalism, the position of the clergy in Italian city life was marginal. The
cities were ruled by wealthy merchants and modest tradesmen and arti-
sans, though from the thirteenth century, more and more of them came
under the control of military despots who offered protection from inter-
nal class conflict and outside invasion.
In such a society, based on individual property and private contract, the
most important educated groups were those who dealt with commercial
and industrial activities. These were the lawyers and the notaries, those
who drew up and interpreted the rules and written agreements that made
trade on a large scale possible. As Italian capitalist society developed,
there was an acute need for men skilled in drafting, recording, and
authenticating contracts and letters. These were the notaries, specialists
who did not need the long and costly education provided by law schools
but who did receive a training in Latin grammar and a style of rhetoric
called ars dictaminis. Such training in letter-writing and drafting legal doc-
uments was often given by apprenticeship, but at major centres of legal
study such as Padua and Bologna, there were professional teachers who
not only taught the conventional legal forms of various kinds of business
documents and the correct type of handwriting for documents of public
record but also provided some instruction in Roman law. At first, the
duties of notaries required little more education than the ability to read
and write. But as the scale and complexity of Italian business transactions
grew and as a growing proportion of Italy’s urban male population
became literate, professional notaries had to differentiate themselves
from the general literate population by acquiring more sophisticated
skills, such as a good mastery of Latin, the language of the law courts, and
the ability to embellish documents and letters with quotations from clas-
sical and Christian authors. In addition, the need for lawyers and notaries
to study, ponder, and apply Roman law predisposed them to develop an
interest not only in the law but also in the language, literature, institu-
tions, and customs of Antiquity. Although humanists of the Renaissance
generally pointed to Petrarch and Boccaccio as the pioneers of the cultu-
ral renewal that they claimed to be leading, they sometimes alluded to
precursors who lived in the closing decades of the thirteenth century. Not
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6 Humanism and the culture of Renaissance Europe
by mere coincidence, these precursors (sometimes now labelled pre-
humanists) were all either lawyers or notaries.
Paduan ‘pre-humanism’
Padua, a university town especially noted for the study of law and medi-
cine, held the earliest known cluster of enthusiasts for the language and
literature of ancient Rome. The central figure was a judge, Lovato dei
Lovati (c. 1240–1309). His few surviving poems show that he had a thor-
ough knowledge of ancient Latin poetry. Lovato energetically defended
ancient poetry against those who preferred modern vernacular verse. He
was active in the discovery and reburial of the supposed remains of the
Trojan Antenor, the mythical founder of Padua. He was also an admirer
of the Roman dramatist Seneca. His study of Seneca’s texts gave him a
clear understanding of the metrical structure of ancient Latin poetry, pro-
ducing the earliest Renaissance treatise on metrics. While his poetic work
shows a strongly classicized Latin diction, his prose works are written in
the prevailing medieval Latin of the legal profession.
Although Lovato was a talented writer and a striking personality who
showed many characteristics of humanism, he remained relatively little
known outside Padua. His younger contemporary Albertino Mussato
(1261–1325), who was a notary by profession, became widely known
throughout Italy; and perhaps for that reason, many more of his writings
survive. Though he sometimes still interprets classical myths and poets in
the allegorical medieval way, his underlying approach to poetry and
history is innovative. His prose style was influenced by the Roman histo-
rian Sallust; and his own historical works were influenced by Sallust,
Caesar, and especially Livy, ancient Rome’s most famous historian. His
poems were also modelled on ancient poets. His admiration for Seneca’s
tragedies reflects the influence of Lovato, whom he regarded as his
master. Mussato used Seneca’s tragedies as a model for the first secular
drama written since Antiquity, the Ecerinis. Significantly for future devel-
opments in Italian humanism, the play was political propaganda encour-
aging Paduan citizens to resist the attempts of the tyrant of Verona to
incorporate Padua into his principality.
One of the most puzzling characteristics of the Italian cultural situation
is that Florence, the city associated with the later flowering of humanistic
culture, played a modest and largely derivative role in this pre-humanist
movement. A few individuals had personal connections to classicizing
Paduan lawyers and notaries, but in general Florence at the end of the thir-
teenth century was not a highly learned place. It was not a university town,
and, with the exception of the convents of the mendicant orders, there
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Introduction 7
seem to have been few libraries of classical texts. Yet the city was growing
and prospering immensely in the late thirteenth century, and it contained
a large population of lawyers and notaries, the group most active in the
early classical culture of Padua. Conventional scholarship associates the
first great Florentine literary and intellectual figure, Dante Alighieri
(1265–1321), with medieval rather than Renaissance culture. The most
important Florentine precursor of Dante was a notary, Brunetto Latini,
who was broadly learned, but in a manner that links him to the encyclo-
paedic tradition of the Middle Ages. Indeed, Latini spent several years of
exile in France and wrote his major book in French. The prospering mer-
chant class of Florence was developing an intellectual life dominated by its
own needs and interests, not those dominant among university professors
and clergymen. Yet it was not cut off from medieval scholasticism. Dante
claims to have attended ‘the schools of the religious and the disputations
of the philosophers’ during the 1290s, probably meaning that he attended
lectures on theology at the Dominican and Franciscan friaries. The librar-
ies of these two flourishing convents were the only places where Dante
could have gained access to the broad range of books, both ancient and
medieval, reflected in his poetic and prose works.
Yet while the unusual erudition of Latini and Dante seems to reflect
predominantly medieval culture, the fact that both were laymen and both
were chiefly concerned with practical moral and political questions rather
than abstract, speculative ones (such as logic, metaphysics, and theology)
demonstrates that the new social reality of late medieval Italy was produc-
ing new cultural initiatives. What these Florentine intellectuals lacked
was a clear conception of a far-reaching cultural renewal to be brought
about by assimilation and reinterpretation of classical literature and by
conscious repudiation of the values of medieval civilization. These new
directions were the discovery of yet another Florentine, Francesco
Petrarca (or Petrarch). It may be significant that Petrarch was a
Florentine who never resided in Florence, the son of a political exile who
became a functionary at the papal court in Avignon. Thus Petrarch grew
up not in Italy but in southern France. And surely it fits the emergent
pattern of the early classical revival that though he never practised law, he
received a university education in Roman law. With him, a new cultural
ideal, the ideal of humanism, emerged in Italy. That emergence is the
subject of the following chapter.
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1 The birth of humanist culture
Both the classical enthusiasms of Paduan lawyers and notaries and the lit-
erary works of Florentines like Brunetto Latini and Dante show that
about 1300 the prosperous educated laymen in the Italian cities were
groping their way towards a new culture distinct from both the chivalric
culture of the medieval nobility and the scholastic culture of the clergy.
This was a natural response to the conditions of their life. Since the nine-
teenth century, historians have labelled this new culture ‘humanism’,
though that abstract term was coined by a German scholar in 1808 and
appears nowhere in the writings of the Renaissance itself. The term that
did exist then was ‘humanistic studies’ (studia humanitatis), used to desig-
nate a cluster of academic subjects much favoured by humanists. By the
first half of the fifteenth century, the term ‘humanist’ (in Latin, humanista)
had come into use, originally as student slang used to designate masters
who taught those particular academic subjects: grammar, rhetoric,
poetry, history, and moral philosophy. ‘Humanism’, the bundle of sub-
jects taught by ‘humanists’ in the Latin grammar schools and university
faculties of liberal arts, made no claim to embrace the totality of human
learning, nor even all of the traditional seven ‘liberal arts’ (embracing the
trivium, or grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and the quadrivium, or arith-
metic, geometry, astronomy, and music) that in theory were studied by all
who received the bachelor and master of arts degrees from a university.
The studia humanitatis did not include the subjects taught in the three
higher faculties of medieval universities: law, medicine, and theology.
To our own era, which has cast aside most of its classical heritage, it may
seem odd that an educational and literary movement that embraced only
grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy could have
become quite literally epoch-making. Since the eighteenth century, efforts
have been made to equate humanism with something broader and more
obviously significant, the rise of a new philosophy that was generally
defined as a glorification of human nature and an exaltation of this-worldly
goals in place of the otherworldly values that supposedly dominated life in
the Middle Ages. But this way of thinking about humanism ran up against
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The birth of humanist culture 9
irrefutable evidence that leading humanists (beginning with Petrarch
himself) were still deeply moved by otherworldly religious values.
In the Renaissance itself, humanism was never defined as a philosophy
or taught as an academic subject. All serious study of philosophy through-
out the Renaissance was founded on one or another of the rival forms of
medieval Aristotelianism – scholasticism. Although humanist scholarship
eventually diffused knowledge about other ancient philosophical tradi-
tions besides the Peripatetic or Aristotelian, only Aristotelian philosophy
was taught in the schools. This scholastic philosophy remained dominant
until the rise of the new physical science in the seventeenth century
demolished the credibility of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Outside the
academy, Platonism or Stoicism or some other ancient system may have
been a philosophical rival to scholasticism for certain individuals. But
humanism never was, because it was not any kind of philosophy at all.
Among twentieth-century scholars, Paul Oskar Kristeller led the opposi-
tion to all attempts to define humanism as a philosophical rival to scholas-
ticism. Aside from his awareness of the actual origins and contemporary
meaning of the term studia humanitatis, one of his principal motives seems
to have been historiographical. The kind of windy, undocumented
blather about ‘humanist philosophy’ that dominated discussions of the
Renaissance in the nineteenth century cannot stand up against any
serious study either of medieval civilization or of the writings of the
leading humanists themselves. It is true that from the time of Petrarch,
humanists frequently attacked scholasticism; but this was largely an out-
growth of educational and curricular disputes, not of philosophy strictly
speaking. Humanists objected to the narrow, trade-school approach that
dominated scholastic education. They also denounced the scholastics’
reluctance to incorporate some fairly limited curricular changes that the
humanists demanded. Sometimes they attacked scholasticism (as
Petrarch did) because it seemed too materialistic and rationalistic, too
subversive of religious faith. They did not present their age with a com-
prehensive new philosophy, because they had none to offer. There is no
identifiable set of philosophical doctrines that all humanists held and that
could possibly be used to define them as a distinct philosophical school.
Most of their writings had nothing to do with philosophy. Kristeller con-
cludes, ‘the Italian humanists on the whole were neither good nor bad
philosophers, but no philosophers at all’.
On its own terms, this position is unassailable. But it leaves modern
students with the problem of explaining why humanism seemed so
important, both to contemporaries and to later historians. Perhaps to the
graduate of nineteenth-century classical schools, the humanists’ effort to
attain a purer, more classical Latin style and a broader knowledge of
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10 Humanism and the culture of Renaissance Europe
ancient Latin and Greek literature may have seemed epoch-making; but
to the present generation, which has virtually renounced study of Greek
and Latin, why should such achievements seem important? It is a fair
question, made all the fairer because a significant part of the ancient Latin
literature that survives today was known, read, studied, and even loved
throughout the Middle Ages.
The question of how thoroughly lost the ‘lost’ classical books really
were is worth pondering. In the case of Greek texts, which in general were
far less known than Latin books in the Middle Ages, the works of Aristotle
were of interest to the medieval Arabs; and in the late twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries, when the intellectual life of Christian Europe
reached a level where Aristotle seemed relevant to its concerns, nearly all
of his works were made available in Latin translation within the lifetime of
one generation.
Also worth pondering is the historical fact, widely known but seldom
reflected upon, that from the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth
Crusade in 1204 down to 1261, that city and many other centres of med-
ieval Greek culture were ruled by puppet princes installed by Venice and
other Italian cities. A steady stream of Italian merchants and administra-
tors went east and lived for many years in the Byzantine capital. Western
churchmen flocked to the east to persuade or compel the Greeks to accept
religious union with Rome. Yet none of this thirteenth-century contact
seems to have aroused much interest in ancient Greek language and liter-
ature. In the case of both Latin and Greek, perhaps what is the important
and overlooked point is not the availability of ancient books (which were
always potentially present) but the change in outlook that made acquisi-
tion of those books and mastery of a difficult language worth the trouble.
A change of mentality
Western Europeans could have recovered Greek language and literature in
the thirteenth century as easily as in the fifteenth, but they did not seize
the opportunity. The scarce Latin manuscripts that humanists of the early
fifteenth century took pride in ‘rediscovering’ were all available during
the high-medieval period, but they were not ‘discovered’ – that is, few
readers knew of their existence. In the case of both classical Latin and
Greek, something had changed between the early thirteenth century and
the early fifteenth century. This change was a change of mentality, of
values, that made the tedious mastery of the classical languages and
diffusion of classical texts seem worth the effort.
Historians of culture have often assumed that the Renaissance recovery
of ancient languages and literatures was somehow easy because Italy as
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