Renaissance Humanism and the Ambiguities of Modernity: Introduction

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Notes

1. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1983); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1985). One should read these against the backdrop of the rich critical assessments of modernity arising from Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), as well as from the post-structuralist expositions of the repetitive and non-progressive elements that comprise modern discursive patterns.

2. Hans Baron’s view is presented in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in the Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), and In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). An early formulation of Eugenio Garin’s interpretation appears in his Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965). It was subsequently elaborated and revised in various publications, including La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano: Ricerche e documenti (Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, 1961) and Medioevo e Rinascimento: Studi e ricerche, 3d ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1981). See also Garin’s theoretical and autobiographical reflections in his La filosofia come sapere storico con un saggio autobiografico (Roma: Laterza, 1990). The differences between the two approaches mainly arise from Baron’s insistence that adherence to republicanism—by those he dubbed civic humanists—played a crucial role in the elaboration of humanist thought. For the present discussion these differences are inconsequential.

3. See Garin, Italian Humanism, 15. Garin’s insight has been further developed in discussions of the emergence of modern conceptions of authorship in the period. See especially David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).

4. Paul Oskar Kristeller’s interpretation is synthetically formulated in several articles. The most well-known—and probably the most cited texts in the field—are “The Humanist Movement” and “Humanism and Scholasticism,” in Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 21–32 and 85–105, respectively.

5. Angelo Mazzocco speculates that Kristeller actually took the notion of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from his American colleagues. See his “Introduction,” in Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, ed. Angelo Mazzocco (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 15.

6. The result of Kristeller’s intellectual endeavor is ironic, insofar as his own notion of Western history is distinctly Whiggish. In the last paragraph of “The Humanist Movement” (32), for example, he expresses his view that science and philosophy form the core of Western civilization the crucial periods of which are thus classical Greece and the seventeenth century.

7. One notable exception is the history of political thought which was deeply influenced by Baron’s interpretation of the break between humanist and medieval political discourses. See William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1968); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

8. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Again, the irony of Kristeller’s position is highlighted. Kristeller was strongly, intellectually as well as emotionally, attached to the classical education of his youth, and was convinced that the maladies of the contemporary world did not result from liberal education but from its abandonment. These are indeed the focal themes of his autobiographical sketch “A Life of Learning,” at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-gOHyBTP2HAJ:https://www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/OP/Haskins/1990_PaulOskarKristeller.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=il&client=firefox-a.

9. Mark Jurdjevic, “Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Present and Future of Italian Renaissance Intellectual History,” Past and Present 195 (2007): 241–68. The studies that are relevant to our discussion include Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla, trans. Martha King (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); James Hankins, “Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2003). It is perhaps indicative that in his “Introduction,” Mazzocco is somewhat apologetic about Kristeller’s interpretation of humanism, arguing that “a close reading” reveals that Kristeller’s interpretive framework is less limited than appears at first sight (14–16).

10. In fact there is a tension at the heart of Kristeller’s interpretation between this theoretical premise and his historical findings that humanism had a pervasive influence on all aspects of culture, including science and philosophy. Kristeller is thus unable to theoretically account for his assertions in “The Humanist Movement” that some humanists “were able to add genuine wisdom to their eloquence” (29), that the adoption of the humanist “taste for elegance, neatness, and clarity of style” was “not always or entirely a mere external feature” in the works of contemporary philosophers and scientist (30), and that generally humanism “had important philosophical implications and consequences” (31). For a fuller discussion of Kristeller’s interpretation, see Hanan Yoran, Between Utopia and Dystopia: Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Humanist Republic of Letters (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 18–21.

11. The most celebrated examples are Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958); Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1964). At this point one may mention Ernst Cassirer’s encounter as rector of the University of Hamburg with the Warburg Library in 1919, which led him to change his view of the role of scientific rationality in Western culture. Cassirer first expressed his new understanding in his The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1963): originally published as Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927); and later in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, intro. Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965); originally published as Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1923–29). Still later he ends his Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945) with the Babylonian myth of the battle between Marduk and the serpent Tiamat. In vanquishing the monster, Marduk created the different orders of the universe out of its severed limbs, thus leaving a component of a chaotic power of destruction in a precarious balance at the very heart of the well-arranged cosmos.

12. See, for example, Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1985); Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature, and Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

13. And so Alberti is portrayed in Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).