Renaissance humanism is a worldview centered on the nature and importance of humanity that emerged from the study of classical antiquity.
Renaissance humanists sought to create a citizenry able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity, and thus capable of engaging in the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions. Humanism, while set up by a small elite who had access to books and education, was intended as a cultural movement to influence all of society. It was a program to revive the cultural heritage, literary legacy, and moral philosophy of the Greco-Roman civilization.
It first began in Italy and then spread across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term humanist () referred to teachers and students of the humanities, known as the , which included the study of Latin and Greek literatures, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. It was not until the 19th century that this began to be called humanism instead of the original humanities, and later by the retronym Renaissance humanism to distinguish it from later humanist developments.The term la rinascita (rebirth) first appeared, however, in its broad sense in Giorgio Vasari's Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori Italiani (The Lives of the Artists, 1550, revised 1568) Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Harper and Row, 1960. "The term umanista was used in fifteenth-century Italian academic slang to describe a teacher or student of classical literature and the arts associated with it, including that of rhetoric. The English equivalent 'humanist' makes its appearance in the late sixteenth century with a similar meaning. Only in the nineteenth century, however, and probably for the first time in Germany in 1809, is the attribute transformed into a substantive: humanism, standing for devotion to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and the humane values that may be derived from them" Nicholas Mann "The Origins of Humanism", Cambridge Companion to Humanism, Jill Kraye, editor [Cambridge University Press, 1996], p. 1–2). The term "Middle Ages" for the preceding period separating classical antiquity from its "rebirth" first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas. For humanities as the original term for Renaissance humanism, see James Fieser, Samuel Enoch Stumpf "Philosophy during the Renaissance", Philosophy: A Historical Survey with Essential Readings (9th ed.) [McGraw-Hill Education, 2014]
During the Renaissance period most humanists were Christians, so their concern was to "purify and renew Christianity", not to do away with it. Their vision was to return ad fontes ("to the pure sources") to the Gospels, the New Testament and the Church Fathers, bypassing the complexities of medieval Christian theology.
Definition
Very broadly, the project of the Italian Renaissance humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the studia humanitatis: the study of the humanities, "a curriculum focusing on language skills." This project sought to recover the culture of ancient Greece and Rome through its literature and philosophy and to use this classical revival to imbue the ruling classes with the moral attitudes of said ancients—a project James Hankins calls one of "virtue politics."Hankins, James (2019). Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. The Belknap Press of Harvard University. But what this studia humanitatis actually constituted is a subject of much debate. According to one scholar of the movement, Early Italian humanism, which in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages, not merely provided the old Trivium with a new and more ambitious name (Studia humanitatis), but also increased its actual scope, content and significance in the curriculum of the schools and universities and in its own extensive literary production. The studia humanitatis excluded logic, but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy, but also made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member of the whole group.Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 178. See also Kristeller's Renaissance Thought I, "Humanism and Scholasticism In the Italian Renaissance", Byzantion 17 (1944–45), pp. 346–74. Reprinted in Renaissance Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks), 1961.
However, in investigating this definition in his article "The changing concept of the studia humanitatis in the early Renaissance," Benjamin G. Kohl provides an account of the various meanings the term took on over the course of the period. Around the middle of the fourteenth century, when the term first came into use among Italian literati, it was used in reference to a very specific text: as praise of the cultural and moral attitudes expressed in Cicero's Pro Archia poeta (62 BCE). Tuscan humanist Coluccio Salutati popularized the term in the 1370s, using the phrase to refer to culture and learning as a guide to moral life, with a focus on rhetoric and oration. Over the years, he came to use it specifically in literary praise of his contemporaries, but later viewed the studia humanitatis as a means of editing and restoring ancient texts and even understanding scripture and other divine literature. But it was not until the beginning of the quattrocento (15th century) that the studia humanitatis began to be associated with particular academic disciplines, when Pier Paolo Vergerio, in his De ingenuis moribus, stressed the importance of rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy as a means of moral improvement. By the middle of the century, the term was adopted more formally, as it started to be used in Bologna and Padua in reference to university courses that taught these disciplines as well as Latin poetry, before then spreading northward throughout Italy. But the first instance of it as encompassing grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy all together only came when Tommaso Parentucelli wrote to Cosimo de' Medici with recommendations regarding his library collection, saying, "de studiis autem humanitatis quantum ad grammaticam, rhetoricam, historicam et poeticam spectat ac moralem" ("concerning studies of the humanities, insofar as they [consist of] grammar, rhetoric, history and poetry, and also ethics").Sforza, Giovanni (1884). "La patria, la famiglia e la giovinezza di papa Niccolò V". Atti della Reale Accademia Lucchese di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. XXIII: 380. And so, the term studia humanitatis took on a variety of meanings over the centuries, being used differently by humanists across the various Italian city-states as one definition got adopted and spread across the country. Still, it has referred consistently to a mode of learning—formal or not—that results in one's moral edification.
Under the influence and inspiration of the classics, Renaissance humanists developed a new rhetoric and new learning. Some scholars also argue that humanism articulated new moral and civic perspectives, and values offering guidance in life to all citizens. Renaissance humanism was a response to what came to be depicted by later whig historians as the "narrow pedantry" associated with medieval scholasticism.Craig W. Kallendorf, introduction to Humanist Educational Treatises, edited and translated by Craig W. Kallendorf (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2002) p. vii.
History
In the last years of the 13th century and in the first decades of the 14th century, the cultural climate was changing in some European regions. The rediscovery, study, and renewed interest in authors who had been forgotten, and in the classical world that they represented, inspired a flourishing return to linguistic, stylistic and literary models of antiquity. There emerged a consciousness of the need for a cultural renewal, which sometimes also meant a detachment from contemporary culture. Manuscripts and inscriptions were in high demand and graphic models were also imitated. This "return to the ancients" was the main component of so-called "pre-humanism", which developed particularly in Tuscany, in the Veneto region, and at the papal court of Avignon, through the activity of figures such as Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato in Padua, Landolfo Colonna in Avignon, Ferreto de' Ferreti in Vicenza, Convenevole from Prato in Tuscany and then in Avignon, and many others.
By the 14th century some of the first humanists were great collectors of antique manuscripts, including Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, and Poggio Bracciolini. Of the four, Petrarch was dubbed the "Father of Humanism," as he was the one who first encouraged the study of pagan civilizations and the teaching of classical virtues as a means of preserving Christianity. He also had a library, of which many manuscripts did not survive. Many worked for the Catholic Church and were in holy orders, like Petrarch, while others were lawyers and chancellors of Italian cities, and thus had access to book copying workshops, such as Petrarch's disciple Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence.
In Italy, the humanist educational program won rapid acceptance and, by the mid-15th century, many of the upper classes had received humanist educations, possibly in addition to traditional scholastic ones. Some of the highest officials of the Catholic Church were humanists with the resources to amass important libraries. Such was Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, a convert to the Catholic Church from Greek Orthodoxy, who was considered for the papacy, and was one of the most learned scholars of his time. There were several 15th-century and early 16th-century humanist popesThey include Innocent VII, Nicholas V, Pius II, Sixtus IV, Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X. Innocent VII, patron of Leonardo Bruni, is considered the first humanist Pope. See James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, 1990), p. 49; for the others, see their respective entries in Sir John Hale's Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1981). one of whom, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), was a prolific author and wrote a treatise on The Education of Boys.See Humanist Educational Treatises, (2001) pp. 126–259. This volume (pp. 92–125) contains an essay by Leonardo Bruni, entitled "The Study of Literature", on the education of girls. These subjects came to be known as the humanities, and the movement which they inspired is shown as humanism.
The migration waves of Byzantine Greek scholars and émigrés in the period following the Crusader sacking of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 was a very welcome addition to the Latin texts scholars like Petrarch had found in monastic libraries for the revival of Greek literature and science via their greater familiarity with ancient Greek works.Greeks in Italy They included Gemistus Pletho, George of Trebizond, Theodorus Gaza, and John Argyropoulos.
There were important centres of Renaissance humanism in Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Genoa, Livorno, Mantua, Padua, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Siena, Venice, Vicenza, and Urbino.