People Began to Study Classical Thought During the Renaissance to

Revival in the study of classical antiquity

This commodity is about the study of the humanities during the Renaissance. Not to be confused with the broader human-centered philosophy, Humanism.

Renaissance humanism
was a revival in the written report of classical antiquity, at starting time in Italy and so spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term
humanist
(Italian:
umanista) referred to teachers and students of the humanities, known equally the

studia humanitatis
, which included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. Information technology was non until the 19th century that this began to be called
humanism
instead of the original
humanities, and later by the retronym
Renaissance humanism
to distinguish it from later humanist developments.^[ane]
During the Renaissance period most humanists were Christians, so their concern was to “purify and renew Christianity”, non to do away with it. Their vision was to return
ad fontes
(“to the sources”) to the simplicity of the New Testament, bypassing the complexities of medieval theology.^[2]

Nether the influence and inspiration of the classics, humanists developed a new rhetoric and new learning. Some scholars likewise argue that humanism articulated new moral and borough perspectives and values offering guidance in life. Renaissance humanism was a response to what came to exist depicted by later whig historians every bit the “narrow pedantry” associated with medieval scholasticism.^[3]
Humanists sought to create a citizenry able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity and thus capable of engaging in the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions. Humanism, whilst gear up past a small elite who had access to books and instruction, was intended every bit a cultural style to influence all of society. It was a plan to revive the cultural legacy, literary legacy, and moral philosophy of classical antiquity.

There were important centres of humanism in Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino.

Definition

[edit]

Very broadly, the project of the Italian Renaissance humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the
studia humanitatis: the report of the humanities. This project sought to recover the culture of ancient Greece and Rome through its literature and philosophy and to use this classical revival to imbue the ruling classes with the moral attitudes of said ancients—a projection James Hankins calls one of “virtue politics”.^[4]
But what this
studia humanitatis
actually constituted is a subject of much debate. Co-ordinate to ane scholar of the motility,

Early on Italian humanism, which in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages, not only provided the old Trivium with a new and more ambitious name (Studia humanitatis), but also increased its actual scope, content and significance in the curriculum of the schools and universities and in its own all-encompassing literary product. The
studia humanitatis
excluded logic, but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy, just also made verse, one time a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the almost of import member of the whole group.^[five]

However, in investigating this definition in his article “The changing concept of the
studia humanitatis
in the early Renaissance,” Benjamin Yard. Kohl provides an account of the diverse meanings the term took on over the course of the period:^[half-dozen]

Around the middle of the fourteenth century, when the term first came into use among Italian
literati, information technology was used in reference to a very specific text: as praise of the cultural and moral attitudes expressed in Cicero’south
Pro Archia poeta
(62 BCE). Tuscan humanist Coluccio Salutati popularized the term in the 1370s, using the phrase to refer to culture and learning equally a guide to moral life, with a focus on rhetoric and oration. Over the years, he came to use it specifically in literary praise of his contemporaries, only later viewed the
studia humanitatis
as a means of editing and restoring aboriginal texts and even understanding scripture and other divine literature. Simply information technology was not until the beginning of the quattrocento (fifteenth century) that the
studia humanitatis
began to be associated with particular academic disciplines, when Pier Paolo Vergerio, in his
De ingenuis moribus, stressed the importance of rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy as a means of moral improvement. Past the heart of the century, the term was adopted more formally, as it started to exist used in Bologna and Padua in reference to university courses that taught these disciplines likewise every bit Latin poesy, before then spreading northward throughout Italia. But the first instance of it every bit encompassing grammer, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy all together only came when Tommaso Parentucelli wrote to Cosimo de’ Medici with recommendations regarding his library collection, proverb,
“de studiis autem humanitatis quantum advertizement grammaticam, rhetoricam, historicam et poeticam spectat ac moralem”
(“one sees of the study of humanity [the humanities] that it is so much in grammer, rhetoric, history and poetry, and as well in ethics”).^[7]
And and then, the term
studia humanitatis
took on a variety of meanings over the centuries, beingness used differently by humanists across the various Italian city-states every bit 1 definition got adopted and spread beyond the country. Withal, it has referred consistently to a style of learning—formal or not—that results in 1’s moral edification.^[6]

Origin

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In the last years of the 13th century and in the first decades of the 14th century, the cultural climate was changing in some European regions. The rediscovery, study, and renewed interest in authors who had been forgotten, and in the classical world that they represented, inspired a flourishing render to linguistic, stylistic and literary models of antiquity. At that place emerged a consciousness of the demand for a cultural renewal, which sometimes also meant a detachment from contemporary culture. Manuscripts and inscriptions were in high demand and graphic models were also imitated. This “return to the ancients” was the chief component of and so-called “pre-humanism”, which developed particularly in Tuscany, in the Veneto region, and at the papal court of Avignon, through the action of figures such as Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato in Padua, Landolfo Colonna in Avignon, Ferreto de’ Ferreti in Vicenza, Convenevole from Prato in Tuscany and so in Avignon, and many others.^[eight]

By the 14th century some of the first humanists were great collectors of antique manuscripts, including Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, and Poggio Bracciolini. Of the four, Petrarch was dubbed the “Father of Humanism,” every bit he was the ane who first encouraged the written report of pagan civilizations and the teaching of classical virtues as a means of preserving Christianity.^[iv]
He also had a very impressive library, of which many manuscripts did not survive.^{[
citation needed
]}
Many worked for the Catholic Church and were in holy orders, like Petrarch, while others were lawyers and chancellors of Italian cities, and thus had admission to volume copying workshops, such every bit Petrarch’southward disciple Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence.

In Italy, the humanist educational plan won rapid acceptance and, past the mid-15th century, many of the upper classes had received humanist educations, possibly in addition to traditional scholastic ones. Some of the highest officials of the Cosmic Church were humanists with the resources to amass important libraries. Such was Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, a catechumen to the Catholic Church building from Greek Orthodoxy, who was considered for the papacy, and was one of the near learned scholars of his time. At that place were several 15th-century and early 16th-century humanist Popes^[9]
one of whom, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), was a prolific author and wrote a treatise on
The Education of Boys.^[10]
These subjects came to exist known as the humanities, and the movement which they inspired is shown as humanism.

The migration waves of Byzantine Greek scholars and émigrés in the period following the Crusader sacking of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 was a very welcome add-on to the Latin texts scholars like Petrarch had establish in monastic libraries^[xi]
for the revival of Greek literature and science via their greater familiarity with ancient Greek works.^[12]
[13]
They included Gemistus Pletho, George of Trebizond, Theodorus Gaza, and John Argyropoulos.

The Italian humanism spread due north to France, Germany, the Low Countries, Poland-Republic of lithuania, Hungary and England with the adoption of large-scale printing after 1500, and it became associated with the Reformation. In French republic, pre-eminent humanist Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) practical the philological methods of Italian humanism to the report of antique coinage and to legal history, composing a detailed commentary on Justinian’s Lawmaking. Budé was a royal absolutist (and not a republican similar the early on Italian
umanisti) who was active in civic life, serving every bit a diplomat for François I and helping to found the Collège des Lecteurs Royaux (later on the Collège de France). Meanwhile, Marguerite de Navarre, the sis of François I, was a poet, novelist, and religious mystic^[xiv]
who gathered effectually her and protected a circumvolve of vernacular poets and writers, including Clément Marot, Pierre de Ronsard, and François Rabelais.

Paganism and Christianity in the Renaissance

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Many humanists were churchmen, most notably Pope Pius II, Sixtus IV, and Leo X,^[15]
[16]
and at that place was often patronage of humanists by senior church figures.^[17]
Much humanist endeavour went into improving the understanding and translations of Biblical and early Christian texts, both earlier and after the Reformation, which was profoundly influenced by the work of non-Italian, Northern European figures such equally Erasmus, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, William Grocyn, and Swedish Catholic Archbishop in exile Olaus Magnus.

Description

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The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
describes the rationalism of ancient writings as having tremendous impact on Renaissance scholars:

Here, one felt no weight of the supernatural pressing on the homo mind, enervating homage and allegiance. Humanity—with all its singled-out capabilities, talents, worries, bug, possibilities—was the center of involvement. It has been said that medieval thinkers philosophised on their knees, simply, bolstered past the new studies, they dared to stand and to rise to full stature.^[18]

In 1417, for example, Poggio Bracciolini discovered the manuscript of Lucretius,
De rerum natura, which had been lost for centuries and which contained an explanation of Epicurean doctrine, though at the time this was not commented on much by Renaissance scholars, who confined themselves to remarks about Lucretius’s grammar and syntax.

Only in 1564 did French commentator Denys Lambin (1519–72) denote in the preface to the work that “he regarded Lucretius’s Gluttonous ideas every bit ‘fanciful, absurd, and opposed to Christianity’.” Lambin’s preface remained standard until the nineteenth century.^[19]
Epicurus’s unacceptable doctrine that pleasance was the highest good “ensured the unpopularity of his philosophy”.^[20]
Lorenzo Valla, still, puts a defence of epicureanism in the mouth of one of the interlocutors of one of his dialogues.

Epicureanism

[edit]

Charles Trinkhaus regards Valla’s “epicureanism” every bit a ploy, non seriously meant past Valla, simply designed to refute Stoicism, which he regarded together with epicureanism every bit every bit inferior to Christianity.^[21]
Valla’s defense, or accommodation, of Epicureanism was later taken up in
The Epicurean
by Erasmus, the “Prince of humanists:”

If people who alive agreeably are Epicureans, none are more truly Epicurean than the righteous and godly. And if it is names that carp united states, no one amend deserves the proper name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of the Christian philosophy Christ, for in Greek
epikouros
means “helper”. He lone, when the law of Nature was all but blotted out past sins, when the police of Moses incited to lists rather than cured them, when Satan ruled in the world unchallenged, brought timely aid to perishing humanity. Completely mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish way nearly Christ’s having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon u.s. to follow a dismal mode of life. On the opposite, he alone shows the most enjoyable life of all and the i most full of true pleasure.^[22]

This passage exemplifies the style in which the humanists saw pagan classical works, such as the philosophy of Epicurus, equally being in harmony with their interpretation of Christianity.

Neo-Platonism

[edit]

Renaissance Neo-Platonists such every bit Marsilio Ficino (whose translations of Plato’s works into Latin were nevertheless used into the 19th century) attempted to reconcile Platonism with Christianity, co-ordinate to the suggestions of early on Church Fathers Lactantius and Saint Augustine. In this spirit, Pico della Mirandola attempted to construct a syncretism of religions and philosophies with Christianity, but his work did not win favor with the church authorities, who rejected it considering of his views on magic.^[23]

Evolution and reception

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Widespread view

[edit]

Historian Steven Kreis expresses a widespread view (derived from the 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt), when he writes that:

The period from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth worked in favor of the general emancipation of the individual. The metropolis-states of northern Italian republic had come into contact with the diverse customs of the East, and gradually permitted expression in matters of sense of taste and dress. The writings of Dante, and particularly the doctrines of Petrarch and humanists like Machiavelli, emphasized the virtues of intellectual freedom and individual expression. In the essays of Montaigne the individualistic view of life received perhaps the most persuasive and eloquent argument in the history of literature and philosophy.^[24]

Two noteworthy trends in Renaissance humanism were Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism, which through the works of figures like Nicholas of Kues, Giordano Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, Campanella and Pico della Mirandola sometimes came close to constituting a new religion itself. Of these two, Hermeticism has had groovy continuing influence in Western idea, while the former by and large dissipated as an intellectual tendency, leading to movements in Western esotericism such as Theosophy and New Age thinking.^[25]
The “Yates thesis” of Frances Yates holds that earlier falling out of favour, esoteric Renaissance thought introduced several concepts that were useful for the development of scientific method, though this remains a matter of controversy.

Sixteenth century and beyond

[edit]

Though humanists continued to apply their scholarship in the service of the church building into the centre of the sixteenth century and beyond, the sharply confrontational religious atmosphere following the Reformation resulted in the Counter-Reformation that sought to silence challenges to Catholic theology,^[26]
with similar efforts among the Protestant denominations. However, a number of humanists joined the Reformation movement and took over leadership functions, for example, Philipp Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Luther, Henry 8, John Calvin, and William Tyndale.

With the Counter-Reformation initiated past the Quango of Trent (1545–1563), positions hardened and a strict Catholic orthodoxy based on scholastic philosophy was imposed. Some humanists, even moderate Catholics such as Erasmus, risked being declared heretics for their perceived criticism of the church building. In 1514 he left for Basel and worked at the University of Basel for several years.^[27]

The historian of the Renaissance Sir John Hale cautions against likewise directly a linkage between Renaissance humanism and modern uses of the term humanism: “Renaissance humanism must exist kept gratuitous from any hint of either ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘humanism’ in its mod sense of rational, non-religious approach to life … the word ‘humanism’ volition mislead … if it is seen in opposition to a Christianity its students in the main wished to supplement, not contradict, through their patient excavation of the sources of ancient God-inspired wisdom.”^[28]

Historiography

[edit]

The Baron Thesis

[edit]

Hans Baron (1900-1988) was the inventor of the now ubiquitous term “civic humanism.” Starting time coined in the 1920s and based largely on his studies of Leonardo Bruni, Businesswoman’s “thesis” proposed the existence of a central strain of humanism, peculiarly in Florence and Venice, dedicated to republicanism. As argued in his
chef-d’œuvre,
The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, the German language historian thought that civic humanism originated in around 1402, afterward the bully struggles between Florence and Visconti-led Milan in the 1390s. He considered Petrarch’southward humanism to exist a rhetorical, superficial projection, and viewed this new strand to be one that abased the feudal and supposedly “otherworldly” (i.due east., divine) ideology of the Eye Ages in favour of putting the republican state and its freedom at the forefront of the “civic humanist” project.^[29]
Already controversial at the time of
The Crisis‘ publication, the “Baron Thesis” has been met with even more criticism over the years. Even in the 1960s, historians Philip Jones and Peter Herde^[30]
found Baron’s praise of “republican” humanists naive, arguing that republics were far less liberty-driven than Baron had believed, and were practically as undemocratic as monarchies. James Hankins adds that the disparity in political values betwixt the humanists employed by oligarchies and those employed by princes was not particularly notable, every bit all of Baron’s civic ideals were exemplified by humanists serving various types of government. In so arguing, he asserts that a “political reform program is central to the humanist motion founded by Petrarch. But it is not a ‘republican’ project in Baron’south sense of republic; it is not an ideological product associated with a particular regime blazon.”^[4]

Garin and Kristeller

[edit]

Two renowned Renaissance scholars, Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller collaborated with one some other throughout their careers. But while the two historians were on good terms, they fundamentally disagreed on the nature of Renaissance humanism. Kristeller affirmed that Renaissance humanism used to exist viewed just as a project of Classical revival, one that led to peachy increase in Classical scholarship. But he argued that this theory “fails to explain the ideal of eloquence persistently set forth in the writings of the humanists,” asserting that “their classical learning was incidental to” their beingness “professional person rhetoricians.”^[31]
Similarly, he considered their influence on philosophy and particular figures’ philosophical output to be incidental to their humanism, viewing grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and ethics to be the humanists’ main concerns. Garin, on the other hand, viewed philosophy itself equally being ever-evolving, each form of philosophy being inextricable from the practices of the thinkers of its menses. He thus considered the Italian humanists’ pause from Scholasticism and newfound freedom to be perfectly in line with this broader sense of philosophy.^[32]

During the period in which they argued over these differing views, in that location was a broader cultural conversation happening regarding Humanism: one revolving around Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. In 1946, Sartre published a work called
“L’existentialisme est un humanisme,” in which he outlined his conception of existentialism as revolving around the belief that “existence
comes before
essence“; that human “first of all exists, encounters himself, surges upwards in the earth – and defines himself afterwards,” making himself and giving himself purpose.^[33]
Heidegger, in a response to this work of Sartre’s, declared: “For this is humanism: meditating and caring, that human beings be man and not inhumane, “inhuman”, that is, outside their essence.”^[34]
He likewise discussed a refuse in the concept of humanism, pronouncing that it had been dominated past metaphysics and substantially discounting it every bit philosophy. He besides explicitly criticized Italian Renaissance humanism in the letter.^[35]
While this discourse was taking place outside the realm of Renaissance Studies (for more on the development of the term “humanism,” see Humanism), this groundwork fence was not irrelevant to Kristeller and Garin’s ongoing disagreement. Kristeller—who had at ane point studied under Heidegger^[36]—likewise discounted (Renaissance) humanism as philosophy, and Garin’due south
Der italienische Humanismus
was published alongside Heidegger’s response to Sartre—a motility that Rubini describes equally an attempt “to phase a pre-emptive confrontation betwixt historical humanism and philosophical neo-humanisms.”^[37]
Garin also conceived of the Renaissance humanists as occupying the same kind of “characteristic angst the existentialists attributed to men who had suddenly become conscious of their radical freedom,” farther weaving philosophy with Renaissance humanism.^[32]

Hankins summarizes the Kristeller five. Garin fence quite well, attesting to Kristeller’south conception of professional person philosophers as being very formal and method-focused.^[32]
Renaissance humanists, on the other paw, he viewed to exist professional rhetoricians who, using their classically-inspired
paideia
or
institutio, did improve fields such equally philosophy, but without the do of philosophy existence their master goal or function.^[31]
Garin, instead, wanted his “humanist-philosophers to be organic intellectuals,” not constituting a rigid school of thought, simply having a shared outlook on life and educational activity that broke with the medieval traditions that came before them.^[32]

Humanist

[edit]

See also

[edit]

• Renaissance humanism in Northern Europe
• Christian humanism
• Greek scholars in the Renaissance
• Renaissance Latin
• Legal humanists
• New Learning

Notes

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Farther reading

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• Bolgar, R. R.
  The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries: from the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance. Cambridge, 1954.
• Cassirer, Ernst.
  Private and Creation in Renaissance Philosophy. Harper and Row, 1963.
• Cassirer, Ernst (Editor), Paul Oskar Kristeller (Editor), John Herman Randall (Editor).
  The Renaissance Philosophy of Human being. Academy of Chicago Printing, 1969.
• Cassirer, Ernst.
  Platonic Renaissance in England. Gordian, 1970.
• Celenza, Christopher South.
  The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanism, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004 ISBN 978-0-8018-8384-2
• Celenza, Christopher Southward.
  Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. London: Reaktion. 2017
• Celenza, Christopher South.
  The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Significant. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Press. 2018
• Erasmus, Desiderius. “The Epicurean”. In
  Colloquies.
• Garin, Eugenio.
  Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1969.
• Garin, Eugenio.
  Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance.
  Basil Blackwell, 1965.
• Garin, Eugenio.
  History of Italian Philosophy.
  (ii vols.) Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008. ISBN 978-90-420-2321-5
• Grafton, Anthony.
  Bring Out Your Dead: The Past every bit Revelation. Harvard Academy Press, 2004 ISBN 0-674-01597-5
• Grafton, Anthony.
  Worlds Made Past Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Harvard University Press, 2009 ISBN 0-674-03257-viii
• Unhurt, John.
  A Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance. Oxford University Printing, 1981, ISBN 0-500-23333-0.
• Kallendorf, Craig W, editor.
  Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2002.
• Kraye, Jill (Editor).
  The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Kristeller, Paul Oskar.
  Renaissance Thought and Its Sources. Columbia University Press, 1979 ISBN 978-0-231-04513-1
• Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni.
  Oration on the Nobility of Man. In Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, eds.
  Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Academy of Chicago Press, 1969.
• Skinner, Quentin.
  Renaissance Virtues: Visions of Politics: Volume Ii. Cambridge University Press, [2002] 2007.
• Makdisi, George.
  The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian Westward: With Special Reference to Scholasticism, 1990: Edinburgh Academy Press
• McGrath, Alister (2011).
  Christian Theology: An Introduction, 5th edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4443-3514-9
• McManus, Stuart M. “Byzantines in the Florentine Polis: Ideology, Statecraft and Ritual during the Council of Florence”.
  Periodical of the Oxford Academy History Club, 6 (Michaelmas 2008/Hilary 2009).
• Melchert, Norman (2002).
  
  The Swell Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy
  . McGraw Hill. ISBN978-0-19-517510-3.
  
• Nauert, Charles Garfield.
  Humanism and the Civilization of Renaissance Europe (New Approaches to European History).
  Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Plumb, J. H. ed.:
  The Italian Renaissance
  1961, American Heritage, New York, ISBN 0-618-12738-0 (page refs from 1978 Great britain Penguin edn).
• Rossellini, Roberto.
  The Age of the Medici: Office 1,
  Cosimo de’ Medici; Function 2,
  Alberti
  1973. (Film Series). Criterion Drove.
• Symonds, John Addington.The Renaissance in Italy. Seven Volumes. 1875–1886.
• Trinkaus, Charles (1973). “Renaissance Thought of the Dignity of Man”. In Wiener, Philip P (ed.).
  Dictionary of the History of Ideas. ISBN978-0-684-13293-eight
  . Retrieved
  2009-12-02
  .
  
• Trinkaus, Charles.
  The Telescopic of Renaissance Humanism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.
• Wind, Edgar.
  Heathen Mysteries in the Renaissance. New York: W.West. Norton, 1969.
• Witt, Ronald. “In the footsteps of the ancients: the origins of humanism from Lovato to Bruni.” Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2000

External links

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• Renaissance Humanism – World History Encyclopedia
• Humanism ane: An Outline by Albert Rabil, Jr.
• “Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library & Renaissance Culture: Humanism”. The Library of Congress. 2002-07-01
• Paganism in the Renaissance, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Tom Healy, Charles Hope & Evelyn Welch (In Our Time, June 16, 2005)