A call for sobriety: sixteenth-century educationalists and humanist conviviality

Abstract

Michel Jeanneret’s A Feast of Words. Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (1987; English translation published in 1991) highlighted the celebration by Renaissance humanists of food and drink as catalysts of intellectual exchange. The author convincingly argued that Renaissance banquets served as a paradigm for the humanist body of ideas, and thus became an important setting for works of literature and erudition. This article investigates whether the use of banquets in humanist culture is also reflected in the didactic writings of the age. It focuses on the school dialogues of Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) and Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–1540), which proved to be enormously popular and were – according to a 1582 preface – read in “well-nigh every school” in England and continental Europe. The article illustrates how Erasmus and Vives, especially when addressing an audience of young school boys, aimed to organize a controlled satisfaction of bodily appetites, stimulating the interchange of ideas, whilst avoiding gluttony and intoxication, which are as detrimental for intellectual exchange as they are for the individual’s physical and spiritual well-being. The humanists’ condemnation of excess was thus connected with their analysis of the human condition and their preoccupation that every child should realize his or her full potential as a human being. The key element in this was considered to be education, which trained children to rise above their animal instincts and desires, and prepared them to participate in society as responsible adults.

Keywords:

• School dialogues
• Renaissance humanism
• Erasmus
• Vives
• food
• drink

Notes

¹See, e.g., the designated journals Food, Culture and Society (first published in 1997) and The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (first issue 2007) or the recent six-volume set A Cultural History of Food, edited by Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2011).

²Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots. Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: Corti, 1987), translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes as A Feast of Words. Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The quote is found on p. 3.

³Unless otherwise indicated, all texts of Erasmus in this essay are quoted from the critical editions in the Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami series (henceforth: ASD) and the English translations in the University of Toronto Press edition of the Collected Works of Erasmus (henceforth: CWE). In the absence of a modern critical edition of the text, I quote the dialogues of Vives from the first volume of the so-called Mayans-edition: Joannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini Opera omnia ... A Gregorio Majansio, 8 vols. (Valentiae Edetanorum: in officina Benedicti Monfort, 1782-1790; henceforth: Mayans) with slightly modernized spelling and punctuation; and the English translation of the same by Foster Watson, Tudor School-Boy Life: The Dialogues of Juan Luis Vives (London: J. M. Dent & Company, 1908; henceforth: Watson), sometimes with minor changes. Other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

⁴A short overview of “Food in literature and related food genres” is provided by Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport – London: Greenwood Press, 2003), 231–244.

⁵Quoted in Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne. Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life, trad. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 372.

⁶A survey is found in the source collection Alcohol in Western Society from Antiquity to 1800. A Chronological History (Santa Barbara – Denver – Oxford: ABC-Clio Information Services, 1985), edited by Gregory A. Austin.

⁷It is unclear whether Holbein himself was responsible for this particular woodcut. Cf. The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein. With an introduction and notes by James M. Clark (London: Phaidon Press, 1947), 31.

¹⁰“Gulosus ut planta. Gula sive corporee alimonie irrepressa aviditas hunc a primo propriove loco dejicit in tertium plantisque persimilem efficit, que licet totius sensationis et voluptatis probentur expertes, officia tamen alimentationis exercent.” Latin text quoted from the edition by Raymond Klibansky printed in Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Darmstadt: Wissentschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994; reprint of the 1927 edition), 305. A facsimile edition of a collection of Bovelles’ works published in Paris in 1510, where the relevant passage appears on fol. 119v, was printed in 1970 (Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag).

⁸Cf. Erasmus, A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children, ASD I-2, 31: “homines, mihi crede, non nascuntur, sed finguntur” – “man certainly is not born, but made man” (CWE 26, 304).

⁹For Bovelles and his Book of the Wise Man, see especially Joseph M. Victor, Charles de Bovelles 1479–1553. An Intellectual Biography (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1978); Pierre Magnard, “L’idéal du sage dans le De Sapiente de Charles de Bovelles,” in Charles de Bovelles et son cinquième centenaire 1479–1979. Actes du colloque international tenu à Noyon les 14–15–16 septembre 1979 (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1982), 101–108; and Charles de Bovelles, Le livre du sage. Introduction, nouvelle traduction et notes par Pierre Magnard (Paris: J. Vrin, 2010).

¹²Vives, Morning Greetings, Watson, 7–8 & Mayans I, 286: “Pater: Hic tuus Ruscio est belua an homo? Puer: Belua, ut credo. Pater: Quid tu habes cur sis homo, non ille? Tu edis, bibis, dormis, ambulas, cursitas, lusitas: haec ille omnia. Puer: Atqui ego sum homo. Pater: Quomodo id cognoscis? Quid tu nunc habes plus quam canis? Sed hoc interest, quod ille non potest homo fieri: tu potes, si vis. Puer: Obsecro mi pater, effice id primo quoque tempore. Pater: Fiet, si eas quo eunt beluae, redeunt homines. Puer: Ibo pater multo libentissime. Sed ubi id est? Pater: In ludo litterario.” For the role of education in becoming human, see also Vives’ dialogue Escorting to School, Watson, 10 & Mayans I, 287: “Father: I bring you this boy of mine for you to make of him a man from the beast. Philoponus [i.e. the teacher]: This shall be my earnest endeavour. He shall become a man from a beast, a fruitful and good creature out of a useless one.” – “Pater: Hunc filiolum meum ad te adduco, ut ex belua hominem facias. Philoponus: Dabo in eam rem operam sedulam. Fiet, revertetur ex pecude homo, ex nequam frugi et bonus.”

¹¹E.g. Erasmus, A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children, ASD I-2, 24: “non sit homo, qui literarum expers est” – “a man without education has no humanity at all” (CWE 26, 298).

¹³For the influence of On Good Manners of Boys, see, for instance, the introduction in CWE 25, lvii–lviii; Jeanneret, A Feast of Words, 40–43; and Dilwyn Knox, “Erasmus’ De Civilitate and the Religious Origins of Civility in Protestant Europe,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 86 (1995): 7–55.

¹⁴First published in 1939 as Über den Prozess der Zivilization. I have used Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1: The History of Manners, trad. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), where the quote is found on p. 54. For more recent studies (of more limited scope) offering a critical evaluation of Elias’ analysis, see Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and John Gillingham, “From civilitas to civility: Codes of manners in medieval and early modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series), 12 (2002): 267–289.

¹⁵Cf. Franz Bierlaire, “Erasme, la table et les manières de table,” in Pratiques et discours alimentaires à la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin – Robert Sauzet (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1982), 147–160.

¹⁶Cf. Erasmus, On Good Manners of Boys: “In conviviis adsit hilaritas, absit petulantia” – “At banquets there should be joviality but no wantonness” (CWE 25, 280). In the absence of a modern critical edition of the Latin text, I quote from Joannes Clericus (ed.), Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia in decem tomos distincta, 10 vols. (Lugduni Batavorum: Petrus Vander Aa, 1703–1706; facsimile printed in 1961 by Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, Hildesheim), I, 1038.

¹⁷See for this aspect also Erasmus’ letter to Haio Cammingha (d. 1558), in which he explains that banqueters should show constraint and pay more attention to conversation than to what comes on the table, edited as nr. 2073 in P. S. Allen (ed.), Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 12 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–1958).

¹⁸See, amongst many other studies of Renaissance education, Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Erasmian Education and the Convivium religiosum,” Studies in Philology 69-2 (1972): 131–149; Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially 8–24; and Anthony Grafton – Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

¹⁹See, especially, the still valuable works by Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660. Their Curriculum and Practice (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1968, reprint of the 1908 edition) and T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 volumes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944).

²⁰Dedicatory epistle of the Opuscula aliquot (1514) by Erasmus to John de Neve: “ut habeas quod tuis praelegi cures alumnis, quos nulla neque litterarum neque morum barbarie sinis infici” (Allen 298) – “to give you something to read with those pupils of yours whom you guard from any taint of barbarism in education or in character” (CWE 3, 4). See for this use of Terence also Knox, “Erasmus’ De Civilitate and the Religious Origins of Civility in Protestant Europe,” 17.

²¹For the genre of colloquia scholastica, see L. Massebieau, Les colloques scolaires du seizième siècle et leurs auteurs (1480–1570) (Genève: Slatkine reprints, 1968, reprint of the 1878 edition); Peter Mack, “The Dialogue in English Education of the Sixteenth Century,” in Le Dialogue au temps de la Renaissance, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (Paris: Jean Touzot, 1984), 189–209; Jozef IJsewijn and Dirk Sacré, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies. Part II: Literary, Linguistic, Philological and Editorial Questions (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1998), 229–231 (with bibliography); and Nicola McLelland, “Dialogue and German Language Learning in the Renaissance,” in Printed Voices. The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue, ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée (Toronto – Buffalo – London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 206–225.

²²I am fully aware that, in order to do complete justice to these texts, one should take into account the interaction of different voices and pay more attention to the different personas used by Erasmus and Vives in their dialogues (see, e.g., Peter Burke, “The Renaissance Dialogue,” Renaissance Studies 3–1 (1989): 1–12, at pp. 1–2). However, such an analysis goes beyond the scope of this contribution, and I maintain that it is still fair to conclude that the characters prescribing moderation in the dialogues express the “true opinion” of their creators.

²³Lawrence V. Ryan, “Art and Artifice in Erasmus’ Convivium Profanum,” Renaissance Quarterly 31–1 (1978): 1–16, at p. 2. See also CWE 39, xxxix–xl.

²⁴See the introduction in CWE 39, especially xxxi-xxxix, and Franz Bierlaire, Érasme et ses colloques: le livre d’une vie (Genève: Droz, 1977). For a general study of Erasmus’ Colloquies, see Franz Bierlaire, Les Colloques d’Érasme: réforme des études, réforme des moeurs et réforme de l’Église au XVIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1978). For the inclusion in the Index of Prohibited Books, see J. M. De Bujanda (dir.), Index des livres interdits, 11 vols. (Sherbrooke – Genève: Centre d’Études de la Renaissance – Librairie Droz, 1985–2002).

²⁵This set of colloquies is discussed as a whole in Lawrence V. Ryan, “Erasmi Convivia: The Banquet Colloquies of Erasmus,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 8 (1977): 201–215.

²⁶For example in the dialogue entitled Rash Vows, where Erasmus indicates that foolish promises are made under the influence of alcohol.

²⁷Erasmus, The Usefulness of the Colloquies, CWE 40, 1102 & ASD I-3, 745–746: “In Convivio poetico doceo, cuiusmodi debeat esse convivium inter studiosos, parcum sed festivum et hilare, conditum literatis fabulis, sine rixis, sine obtrectatione, sine turpiloquio”.

²⁸Enrique González González – Víctor Gutiérrez Rodríguez (ed.), Los diálogos de Vives y la imprenta. Fortuna de un manual escolar renacentista (1539–1994) (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1999). General studies of Vives’ school dialogues are found in Francisco Calero, Los diálogos (Linguae Latinae Exercitatio) de Juan Luis Vives (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 1994) and Dirk Sacré, “Exercitatio Linguae Latinae (1538–1539). Les colloques scolaires de Vivès,” in Il sapere delle parole: Studi sul dialogo latino e italiano del Rinascimento, ed. Walter Geerts – Annick Paternoster – Franco Pignatti (Roma: Bulzoni, 2001), 7–22.

²⁹Knox, “Erasmus’ De Civilitate and the Religious Origins of Civility in Protestant Europe,” 12. The complaint about Erasmus’ Colloquies, which I quote from Knox, is made by the German educationalist Johannes Sturm (1507–1589). Nineteenth-century critics, such as Karl Georg von Raumer (1783–1865), were equally surprised that a book as “immoral” as Erasmus’ could be used for the edification of children (cf. Elias, The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1: The History of Manners, 169–174).

³⁰Vives, Dedication, Mayans I, 280: “Latinae linguae permagnae sunt et ad loquendum et ad recte sentiendum utilitates ... tibi Principi puero visum est dicare, quum propter patris tui benevolentiam erga me summam, tum quod in animo tuo ad rectos mores formando, optime de Hispania, hoc est, patria mea merebor, cuius salus sita est in tua probitate ac sapientia.”

³⁵Vives, The Banquet, Watson, 143 & Mayans I, 356: “Simonides: Vah, pisces cum carnibus in eadem mensa? Mare miscetur terrae: hoc vetant medici. Scopas: Immo hoc placet medicis. Simonides: Credo, quia illis utile. Scopas: Cur ergo vetant medici? Simonides: Erravi, a medicina prohiberi dictum oportuit, non a medicis.”

³¹Respectively in the dialogues entitled Morning Greetings and Journey on Horseback.

³²For example in the dialogue School Meals, in which diners are advised to wash their hands and faces before and after and to use clean napkins during the meal.

³³See the dialogues The Dining-room and Drunkenness.

³⁴Vives, The Banquet, Mayans I, 357: “Frigida enim oportet esse in convivio postrema, quae pondere suo cibos ad imum ventriculum detrudant et vapores caput impetentes cohibeant”– “it behoves us to have colder food at the end of a meal, which by its weight may thrust down the other food to the bottom of the stomach, and may restrain the vapours from escaping to the head” (Watson, 145).

³⁸Vives, The Banquet, Watson, 140 & Mayans, I, 354: “Polaemon: Peius agunt qui iniiciunt calcem, sulphur, mel, alumen et alia dictu tetriora, quibus nihil est corporibus perniciosius, in quos publice deberet animadverti, ut in latrones aut sicarios: inde sunt enim incredibilia morborum genera et potissimum arthretica. Crito: Ex conspiratione cum medicis id agunt, ut utrique rem augeant.”

³⁶Vives, The Banquet, Mayans I, 352: “Ego condono illis [fructibus] nocumentum propter oblectamentum” – “I forgive fruits their harmfulness on account of their pleasantness of taste” (Watson, 137).

³⁷Vives, Students’ Chatter, Mayans I, 303: “Graculus: Scilicet non solum vinum exhilarat, sed vini mentio et recordatio. Nugo: Vinosos utique: mea nihil refert, qui aquam bibo. Graculus: Nunquam facies bonum carmen.” – Graculus: “For not only does the drinking of wine cheer people up, but also the mention and recollection of wine.” Nugo: “At any rate for wine-drinkers. It matters nothing to me, for I drink water.” Graculus: “Then you will never write a good poem.” (Watson, 42)

⁴⁰Vives, The Precepts of Education, Watson, 240 & Mayans I, 407: “Cibum et potum metiendum naturali desiderio famis aut sitis, non gulositate aut pecuina libidine infarciendi corporis. Quid potest dici tetrius, quam hominem ea ingerere in suum corpus edendo et bibendo, quae exuant illum humana conditione, transferant in belluinam aut etiam in stipitem?”. See also Vives, Drunkenness, Mayans I, 364: “Abstemius: Siti iam exstincta, nulla superest voluptas, quae tota sita est in satisfaciendo desideriis naturalibus: ita ut tormenti sit genus sine siti bibere, aut sine fame edere. Tricongius: Putas nos, Abstemi, ad voluptatem potare, aut quod sit iucundum? Abstemius: Tanto ergo estis peiores bestiis, quae aviditatibus naturalibus aguntur; vos neque illuc ducit ratio et retrahit natura.” – Abstemius: “If thirst has been quenched, no pleasure remains. For this consists only in the satisfaction of natural needs. So it is a kind of torment to go on drinking when there is no thirst, or to eat when there is no hunger.” Tricongius: “Don’t you think, then, Abstemius, that we drink for pleasure or because it is pleasant?” Abstemius: “Then you are so much worse than beasts, who are controlled by natural desires, whilst reason does not govern you, nor nature exercise a control over you.” (Watson, 157).

³⁹Vives, The Banquet, Watson, 141 & Mayans I, 355: “nimium incrassant spiritus et reddunt obesum corpus”.

⁴¹Elias, The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1: The History of Manners, 171.

⁴²Cf. Elias, The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1: The History of Manners, 60-84; Dilwyn Knox, “Disciplina: The Monastic and Clerical Origins of European Civility,” in Renaissance Society and Culture. Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr., ed. John Monfasani – Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica Press, 1991), 107-135; and idem, “Erasmus’ De Civilitate and the Religious Origins of Civility in Protestant Europe,” passim.

⁴³Vives, The Banquet, Watson, 149 & Mayans I, 359–360: “Democritus: Referimus hinc domum gravata corpora, referimus animos obrutos ac demersos cibis et potionibus, ut nullo hominis officio rite possimus fungi. Tu ipse iudicato, ecquam tibi gratiam debemus. Scopas: Haeccine est gratia, quam habetis? Sic rependitis prandium tam opiparum? Polaemon: Ita plane, quod enim maius beneficium quam ut fias sapientior? Tu nos domum remittis plane bruta, nos te domi tuae volumus hominem relinquere, ut scias consulere tuae ac alienae valetudini et secundum naturae desideria vivere, non iuxta corruptas ab stultitia opiniones. Vale, et sape.”