David A. Lines

Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: the University of Bologna and the Beginnings of Specialization

In the Italian universities, there was traditionally a strong alliance between natural philosophy and medicine, which however was all to the advantage of the latter; its teachers were better regarded and better paid than others in the faculty of Arts and Medicine, and this led to career paths that sought out the teaching of medicine as soon as possible. This article examines a reversal of this trend observable in sixteenth-century Bologna and some other Italian universities (Pisa and Padua), leading to careers concentrating on natural philosophy and on the interpretation of Aristotelian works. It appears that financial incentives were part of the context leading to specialization in philosophy. An appendix listing the careers of nearly 200 teachers of natural philosophy in Bologna between 1340 and 1600 illustrates the developments.

Beyond Latin in Renaissance philosophy: A plea for new critical perspectives

In 2001, Harvard University Press launched “The I Tatti Renaissance Library” (ITRL). Affiliated to Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in Florence and under the general editorship of James Hankins (Professor of History at Harvard), this series was meant to “[make] available to a broad readership the major literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific works of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin”. It is an admirable library, which at latest count consisted of some 67 volumes, and is modelled on the highly successful Loeb series, which has made the works of antiquity familiar to so many generations of Anglophone readers. It is also, in part, the English-language riposte to Eugenio Garin’s Prosatori latini del Quattrocento (first published in 1952), which included introductions, texts, and facing-page translations of authors such as Coluccio Salutati, Giannozzo Manetti, and Giovanni Pontano. Prosatori latini enjoyed a remarkable success, particularly among Italian readers, and influenced generations of both students and scholars of Italian humanism. Garin provided a strong impetus for subsequent editions and translations, many of which nowadays display a considerable level of philological refinement, despite the incomplete state of numerous Edizioni Nazionali initiatives undertaken by Italian scholars. The importance of such achievements was recently underlined by Christopher Celenza in his much-discussed book The Lost Italian Renaissance. The book’s subtitle, with its reference to “Latin’s Legacy”, anticipated one of Celenza’s main points: he argued (both spiritedly and, I think, persuasively) that many of the works of the Italian Renaissance risk being overlooked and ignored. Among the factors that he identified was the relative paucity of English translations, a decline in the knowledge of the classical languages and the rise of new historical approaches (particularly social and cultural history) with their attacks on the perceived elitisim of Renaissance culture. Intentionally or not, Celenza’s book emphasized Latin sources as it focused on the need to consider an intellectual history consisting of the “long fifteenth century”. These examples illustrate a historiographical trend in Renaissance Studies, and in intellectual history in particular, that has done much to highlight how fundamental it is to study the Latin culture of the Renaissance. Without such a sensibility, Latin sources risk being ignored. Students and scholars who choose to overlook the literature, histories, diaries, court records, lives of saints, advice books, medical treatises, and philosophical or religious tracts written in Latin will have only a partial and skewed picture of the period. For intellectual historians, examining writings in the period’s lingua franca of learning makes possible comparative studies of longue durée across Europe and across multiple contexts – not only in universities and schools of the religious orders, but also in humanist circles and more rarely in Academies. An awareness of Latin

Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas and Jean Buridan on Aristotle’s Ethics

Like their medieval predecessors, Renaissance writers could look to a vast number of works from antiquity which were either connected with or bordered on moral philosophy. Many of the authors who were used remained the same as those cited in Geremia da Montagnone’s Compendium moralium notabilium, probably written shortly before 1310: Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Statius and others. At the same time, a significant change was provided by the rediscovery or renewed study of several works from antiquity. For example, Marsilio Ficino’s translations (1484, 1496) gave the Latin West, for the first time, access to the complete Platonic corpus. 2 Furthermore, the increasing availability of authors such as Lucretius, Epictetus and Plutarch would have important consequences for the development of moral thought. Nor were Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s Letters and philological work on Livy’s Decades irrelevant, especially in the area of political philosophy. Despite the expansion of the canon, however, the works which had dominated the late medieval study of moral philosophy were not abandoned. Indeed, it would be wrong to suppose that the ‘new’ works and other favourite humanist authors supplanted the traditional practice of discussing virtue with constant reference to the Scriptures or to Aristotle or to both. The facile distinction between a Bibleand Aristotle-loving scholasticism, on the one hand, and a Platoand Cicero-loving humanism, on the other, is now generally regarded, by serious scholars, as little more than a crude caricature. Not only did leading humanists such as Jacques