The remit of this brief article on 'humanism' is defined by the focus of the volume for which it was commissioned: an encyclopaedia of medieval literature in Britain, edited by Sian Echard and Robert Rouse. After a short overview, then, its attention concentrates on England and on English.

When the Renaissance was in its full bloom in Italy, England was just beginning to show awareness of this 'new learning'-humanism. In the mid-1400s English scholars traveled abroad to Italy and collected books, knowledge, and learned the Greek language. Thomas Linacre and John Colet were part of a younger generation that benefited from this previous experience and both men travelled to Italy to continue their scholarly pursuits. Linacre arrived in Florence during the height of humanist scholarship. While there he came under the influence of medical humanists, devoted to the translation of ancient medical texts from Greek into Latin with the hopes that this purified knowledge would improve medical practice and education. John Colet travelled to Italy only six years after Linacre, but during those six years the political, religious, and scholarly atmosphere of Italy had changed a great deal. This affected the type of humanism that Colet experienced. He was a devout Christian and was deeply influenced by the Christian humanism that was being expounded in Florence; this was concerned with returning to the purity of the original church fathers and spreading their message of true faith. In this thesis I examine the different humanist influences that these men came under and how they affected their later efforts to reform England. Linacre and Colet found a way to take the examples and lessons they had experienced in Italy to facilitate a practical application of humanist values onto the English framework through enacting changes to education, medical regulations, translations, and Latin grammars.

2010

A defining term for the Renaissance, " the human " is today a perilous term. But is it still a useful one—or is its intellectual history in early modernity too fraught, too deeply implicated in critiques of anthropocentrism? This essay argues for a reap-praisal of " humanism " as a philosophical tradition and suggests how the history of " the human " in the early modern period already contains its postmodern and posthumanist unraveling. As a humanist's humanist, Spenser plays a key, emblematic role in this history as his careful and sparing use of the term " human " in its various forms points to the idea of humanity as a boundary condition, a description of a limit. The essay concludes with a reflection on the continued importance of humanist modes of reading through an understanding of the text's own agency.

The Journal of English and Germanic …, 2008

The label "vernacular humanism" has increasingly appeared in discussions of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century English literature and culture, and it offers a provocative broadening of the issues currently addressed by "humanism" alone. Applied to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, "humanism" is no longer credibly used in the sense of a Zeitgeist of individualistic, human-centered values and philosophy; instead-largely due to the rigorously nominalist focus of Paul Oskar Kristeller-it now more narrowly refers to the pursuits of scholars and writers who, in mid-fourteenth-century Italy and then fifteenth-and sixteenth-century England and Europe, pursued a new depth of knowledge of Latin (and, later, Greek) writings, sought a new capability for producing classical Latin style, and, often, cultivated a particularly clear and 'Roman' handwriting, all following what they perceived to be the usages of antiquity with more insight and sophistication than previous generations of writers and scholars (although the handwriting was in fact based on Carolingian script). Yet as Kristeller argued in a seminal 1979 essay, the professional roles of such writers-outside of a very few exceptional amateurs like Petrarch-were mostly continuations of medieval traditions, and in fact changes neither in philosophy nor in society generally could be summed up by "humanism." As a grammatical and stylistic fashion, "humanism" after Kristeller serves merely as a starting point for exploring further shifts in intellectual and social history. 1 "Vernacular humanism" offers a way to extend, and complicate, the examination of changes associated with interests in antiquity and ancient writers in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Europe. Vernacular humanism identifies a secondary effect, an indirect extension of the power of classical interests and their social prestige. Thus its properties are necessarily hard to summarize as a general historical configuration. The additional 1.

New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship, 2021

Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy presents a glittering fresco of grandiloquent personalities and cultural dynamism, the colors of which gleam brighter because of their contrast to his briefly sketched medieval dystopia. Burckhardt, of course, did not introduce this dichotomy; it was Petrarch who “created” the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have recognized the artificiality of Petrarchan-Burckhardtian periodization, and medievalists, in particular, have railed against it. Yet in spite of copious evidence for continuities between medieval and Renaissance intellectual life, students, and many scholars, still contrast an ahistorical, otherworldly, clerical intellectual culture of the period before 1300 with a secular, classicizing, and anthropocentric Renaissance agenda. Although specialists would eschew this stark dichotomy, those trained as medievalists continue to focus on scholasticism when they discuss 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th century intellectual life, while those trained as early modernists highlight everything that was (or was claimed to be) novel about the humanists’ program. This chapter argues that a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the emergence of humanism requires, first, that scholars examine the records of schools, courts, and chanceries with the care of researchers like Robert Black and Ronald Witt. Second, it demands that medievalists and early modernists adopt, or at least borrow, each other’s research tools and questions. What are the post-Augustinian, as well as the classical, sources for a humanistic text? How do figures like Marsilio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pietro Pompanazzi evince or disdain a new historical approach? Substantive intellectual changes can only be identified by modern scholars who are equipped to distinguish between the inflammatory rhetoric of eager self-promoters and novel ways of thinking. Recognizing the true importance of humanism within early modern European culture requires better understanding of its continuing interaction with earlier scholarly practices.

Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. M. Sgarbi and T. Katinis

This entry examines the humanist articulation of three key philosophical relations: being and seeming, virtue and fortune, and stasis and mutability. These relations address matters of epistemology (knowing), ethics, and ontol-ogy (reality). Humanists, when grappling with these concerns, resorted to alternative approaches. They identified reality on the basis of the stability of reason, which could ground an objective view of things. In this sense, they became finders of wisdom. Or, as seekers of wisdom, they acknowledged the transience of phenomena, which they confronted in their awareness of illusion and limited vision. If they grounded their role as objective expositors of the truth of things on the traditional concept of the animal rationale, they also celebrated the new force of the homo ludens, the philosopher at play, who participates in the unveiling of reality through masking and seeming, and also intersubjectively, through conversations with others.

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2018

This paper examines a facet in the long history of Italian Renaissance humanism: how later historians of philology understood Renaissance humanists. These later recon-siderations framed the legacies of Italian Renaissance humanism, at times by asking whether the primary contribution of humanism was philosophical or philological. Philologists-especially from nineteenth-century Germany in the generations before Voigt and Burckhardt-wrote about Renaissance humanists by employing prosopog-raphy and bio-bibliographic models. Rather than studying humanists and their works for their own merits, the authors of these histories sought to legitimize their own disciplinary identities by recognizing them as intellectual ancestors. Their writings, in turn, helped lay the foundation for later scholarship on Italian Renaissance humanism and defined, in particular, how later twentieth-century historians of philology and scholarship understood the Italian Renaissance.