Renaissance Humanism

Three of the delegates at the Council of Constance—Cincius Romanus, Poggius Bracciolinus, and Bartholomaeus Politianus—reveal the attitudes of the Renaissance. Although busy with church work, they decided to take time off for a “rescue mission.” Cincius described the escapade to one of his Latin teachers back in Italy:

Cicero, Varro, Livy, and Valerius Flaccus were pagan Latin writers. Even though Cincius and his friends were working for Pope John XXIII, they loved the writings of the ancients, whose Latin was, in their view, “splendid and dignified,” unlike the Latin used in their own time—the Latin of the scholastics and the university masters—which they found debased and faulty. They saw themselves as the resuscitators of ancient language, literature, and culture, and they congratulated themselves on rescuing captive books from the “barbarian” monks of the monastery of St. Gall.

Humanism was a literary and linguistic movement—an attempt to revive classical Latin (and later Greek) as well as the values and sensibilities that came with the language. It began among men and women who, like Cincius, lived in the Italian city-states. The humanists saw parallels between their urban, independent lives and the experiences of the city-states of the ancient world. Humanism was a way to confront the crises—and praise the advances—of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Humanists wrote poetry, history, moral philosophy, and grammar books, all patterned on classical models, especially the writings of Cicero.

That Cincius was employed by the pope yet considered the monks of St. Gall barbarians was no oddity. Most humanists combined sincere Christian piety with a new appreciation of the pagan past. Besides, they needed to work in order to live, and they took employment where they found it. Some humanists worked for the church, others were civil servants, and still others were notaries. A few were rich men who had a taste for literary subjects.

The first humanist, most historians agree, was Francis Petrarch (1304–1374). He was born in Arezzo, a town about fifty miles southeast of Florence. As a boy, he moved around a lot (his father was exiled from Florence), ending up in the region of Avignon, where he received his earliest schooling and fell in love with classical literature. He became a poet, writing in both Italian and Latin. When writing in Italian, he drew on the traditions of the troubadours, dedicating poems of longing to an unattainable and idealized woman named Laura; who she really was, we do not know. When writing in Latin, Petrarch was much influenced by classical poetry.

On the one hand, a boyhood in Avignon made Petrarch sensitive to the failings of the church: he was the writer who coined the phrase “Babylonian captivity” to liken the Avignon papacy to the Bible’s account of the Hebrews’ captivity in Babylonia. On the other hand, he took minor religious orders there, which gave him a modest living. Struggling between what he considered a life of dissipation (he fathered two children out of wedlock) and a religious vocation, he resolved the conflict at last in his book On the Solitary Life, in which he claimed that the solitude needed for reading the classics was akin to the solitude practiced by those who devoted themselves to God. For Petrarch, humanism was a vocation, a calling.

Less famous, but for that reason perhaps more representative of humanists in general, was Lauro Quirini (1420–1475?), the man who (as we saw at the start of this chapter) wrote disparagingly about the Turks as barbarians. Educated at the University of Padua, Quirini eventually got a law degree there. He wrote numerous letters and essays, and corresponded with other humanists. He spent the last half of his life in Crete, where he traded various commodities—alum, cloth, wine, and Greek books.

If Quirini represents the ordinary humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was perhaps the most flamboyant. Born near Ferrara of a noble family, Pico received a humanist education at home before going on to Bologna to study law and to Padua to study philosophy. Soon he was picking up Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. A convinced eclectic (one who selects the best from various doctrines), he thought that Jewish mystical writings supported Christian scriptures, and in 1486 he proposed that he publicly defend at Rome nine hundred theses drawn from diverse sources. The church found some of the theses heretical, however, and banned the whole affair. But Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, which he intended to deliver before his defense, summed up the humanist view: the creative individual, armed only with his (or her) “desires and judgment,” could choose to become a boor or an angel. Humanity’s potential was unlimited.

Christine de Pisan (c. 1365–c. 1430) exemplifies a humanist who chose to fashion herself into a writer and courtier. Born in Venice and educated in France, Christine was married and then soon widowed. Forced to support herself, her mother, and her three young children, she began to write poems inspired by classical models, depending on patrons to admire her work and pay her to write more. Many members of the upper nobility supported her, including Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy, Queen Isabelle of Bavaria, and the English earl of Salisbury.