Jill Kraye

The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism

1. The origins of humanism Nicholas Mann 2. Classical scholarship Michael D. Reeve 3. Humanism in script and print in the fifteenth century Martin Davies 4. The humanist reform of Latin and Latin teaching Kristian Jensen 5. Humanist rhetoric and logic Peter Mack 6. Humanists and the Bible Alistair Hamilton 7. Humanism and the origins of modern political thought James Hankins 8. Philologists and philosophers Jill Kraye 9. Artists and humanists Charles Hope and Elizabeth McGrath 10. Vernacular humanism in the sixteenth century Warren Boutcher 11. The new science and the traditions of humanism Anthony Grafton 12. Humanism and Italian literature M. L. McLaughlin 13. Humanism and English literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Clare Carroll 14. Humanism and seventeenth-century English literature Joseph Loewenstein A guide to further reading in English Biographical index.

The Renaissance concept of philosophy

THE ORIGINS OF RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY: SCHOLASTIC THOUGHT AND THE NEEDS OF A NEW CULTURE Any approach to the meaning of philosophy in the Renaissance requires some preliminary qualification and explanation. How far, for instance, is it permissible to speak of a specifically Renaissance philosophy – a philosophy that might be said to reflect the growing complexity of intellectual activity in this particular historical situation? May the term be applied to ways of thinking which, though current in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perpetuate typically medieval thinking? Do the speculative currents which emerged in the mid thirteenth century, above all in Italy, represent continuity or a break with the past? How closely are scholastic natural philosophy and logic connected with the scientific revolution? Was ‘humanist rhetoric’ an obstacle to what might otherwise have been a swift and linear development? The historical significance of many of the issues discussed in this volume cannot be assessed without considering those social factors, which shattered the ideological unanimity of western Christianitas in the thirteenth century, emphasising the difference rather than the similarities between intellectual centres and ushering in new ways of thought. There is little point in trying to define the Renaissance concept of philosophy if no heed is paid to the cultural institutions emerging outside the universities, the social class and status of their members, their aims, their rivalries and their audiences. From the early fourteenth century there was a complex interaction between scholasticism and humanism with the former profiting from the methodological and linguistic advances made by the latter.

Psychology: The intellective soul

Aristotles teaching on the intellective soul ( De anima III.4–5) serves as the starting-point for Renaissance discussions and, therefore, predetermines the questions raised and the answers given. In the Averroist tradition, this was treated as the beginning of the entire third book. Chapter 4 attempts to define the activity of the intellective soul through analogy to sense-perception and by so doing introduces an interdependence between psychological and epistemological theories. In the fifth chapter, distinguishing between the possible and the agent intellect, Aristotle goes beyond the analogy with sense-perception and alludes to the active role of the soul in the process of knowing. This extremely condensed and enigmatic chapter has provoked many different interpretations, ranging from the outright denial of the agent intellect to the postulation of an agent sense as well, in order to maintain the analogy with sense-perception. For those commentators, however, who kept between these two extremes, III.5 provided both the chance and the need for metaphysical speculation on the ontological status of the intellective soul including its relation to the celestial intelligences and the question of its immortality. It was to this last question that particular attention had to be paid, since on the one hand, Aristotle is not explicit about it, and on the other, Christian doctrine required an affirmation. Thus, for the Middle Ages the question was not whether the human soul was immortal but rather how an immortal soul could fit into the ontological structure of the universe. Consequently, the metaphysical point of view gained prominence, until, in fourteenth-century nominalism, metaphysics lost ground and a new approach was possible from the perspectives of natural philosophy and epistemology.

Humanism in script and print in the fifteenth century

There was no humanism without books. They were the prime material on which the movement was founded and the natural medium through which it was transmitted. All humanists were consumers, and usually also producers, of books in manuscript. Many humanists first gained a reputation by seeking out and accumulating books. Humanists early associated themselves with the printing press when it came into being in the mid-fifteenth century and provided authors, editors and market for its products. Some, preeminently Erasmus, so thoroughly harnessed the great power of print that they were able to project themselves on to a European stage. In a less controlled way, this had happened a century and more before with the manuscript diffusion of the works of the early Italian humanists. Throughout the Renaissance, secular and ecclesiastical princes with cultural pretensions built themselves up with libraries as much as any other trappings of civilization. A book was often the vehicle of an alliance between culture and power, in the form of translations or dedications of original works, commissioned or unsolicited. The common bond of humanism, uniting many disparate strands of interest, was the study, absorption and imitation of the classics, and the common style was a classicizing humanistic Latin. What was distinctive about the humanistic book? In the first place, it was a new manner of the preparation and writing of manuscripts: new in that it turned against current practice in these matters, but backward-looking in its attempt to recover classical virtues of clarity and purity.

Philosophy and humanistic disciplines: The theory of history

‘What is history?’ has been a controversial question from antiquity down to the present, but it was never more vigorously discussed than in the Renaissance (‘Che cosa sia storia?’ asked Dionigi Atanagi in 1559; eight years later Giovanni Viperano, ‘Quid sit historia?’ and still a quarter-century after that Tommaso Campanella, ‘Quid historia sit?’). Then, as before and since, answers ranged widely – from simple happenings ( res gestae ) to Gods ‘grand design’, from a lowly ‘art’ to an elaborate ‘science’, from a vague ‘sense’ to the ‘most certain philosophy’ ( certissima philosophia , in the phrase of Andrea Alciato) and indeed to a position, according to Jean Bodin, ‘above all sciences’. ‘History’ could be objective or subjective, could refer to the past or merely to the memory thereof, to ancient testimony or modern reconstruction; but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it rose grandly in the scale of western learning. Through the classical revival it became a liberal art and a literary genre; through the Reformation it became a surrogate for the tradition of ‘true religion’; through Counter-Reformation controversy it became a highly organised science. In various ways history became a dominant mode of expression and argument in the later sixteenth century, and its significance for the contacts with philosophy increased accordingly.

The Humanist as Moral Philosopher: Marc-Antoine Muret’s 1585 Edition of Seneca

Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great historian of Renaissance humanism, never tired of reiterating his belief that the studia humanitatis stood for ‘a clearly defined cycle of scholarly disciplines, namely grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy’. In his considered and highly influential view, the intellectual programme of humanism included only ‘one philosophical discipline, that is, morals’. This pronouncement needs a good deal of refinement in light of the interest displayed by humanists, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, in logic, physics, cosmology and all the other philosophical fields on which the ancient thinkers they revered had written. Nonetheless, it remains true that, within the broader range of philosophical texts they increasingly came to see as within their remit, humanists never lost their predilection for moral philosophy. In order to understand the role which they played in this discipline, it is necessary to make a detailed examination of how, in studying and interpreting ancient works of moral philosophy, their humanist skills and preoccupations meshed with more philosophical concerns. To the extent that such investigations have been undertaken, they have focused, not unreasonably, on humanist editions, translations and commentaries of the two greatest moral thinkers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle. Seneca, the chief Roman representative of Stoic moral philosophy, has not so far received much attention in this context, even though three of the most important humanists of the early modern period produced editions of his philosophical works: Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469–1536), Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–1585) and Justus Lipsius (1547– 1606). I have chosen to concentrate here on the French humanist Muret.

Ficino in the Firing Line: A Renaissance Neoplatonist and His Critics

In this chapter, the author reassesses the evidence that has been presented previously and follows up some additional clues that have been overlooked. The sources usually cited are the Asclepius and the so-called Definitions Asclepii , the final section of the Pimander , which Ludovico Lazzarelli had published in Latin translation. Copernicuss celebrated invocation to the sun in the first book of De revolutionibus proves that he was imbued with contemporary Neoplatonic ideals, Marsilio Ficinos or not. The Ficinos Timaeus commentary would in any case be an obvious work to consult for an astronomer like Copernicus in search of alternatives to Aristotelian cosmology. Of the classical, medieval, Byzantine and Renaissance sources discussing the doctrine, the Timaeus commentary, as found in Ficinos Latin Plato, is in fact, with the exception of the Suda mentioned, the only one for which there is bibliographical evidence that Copernicus might have consulted it. Keywords: Aristotelian cosmology; bibliographical evidence; biographical evidence; Copernicus; Marsilio Ficinos cosmology; Marsilio Ficinos Metaphysics ; Marsilio Ficinos Timaeus commentary