Renaissance Humanism
1350 – 1600
Go back to the sources, read them in the original, and find out what they actually said before a thousand years of commentary explained it.
- Active
- 1350 – 1600
- Where
- Florence, Rome, and then northern Europe
- Status
- extinct as a movement
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Ad fontes — to the sources. A text should be read in its original language, in a reliable edition, in its historical context, and eloquence is not decoration but part of how thought works.
What it held
Humanism is a curriculum before it is a philosophy: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, the studia humanitatis, set against the scholastic focus on logic and metaphysics. The humanists' complaint was that scholasticism argued brilliantly in bad Latin about texts it had never read properly.
The method was philological and its results were devastating. Valla demonstrated in 1440 that the Donation of Constantine — the document underpinning papal temporal power — was a forgery, on linguistic grounds: it used words that did not exist in the fourth century. He was working for the King of Naples at the time, which is not incidental, and the analysis holds regardless.
Erasmus applied the same method to the New Testament, producing a Greek edition that showed the Vulgate mistranslated key passages. He intended reform and got the Reformation, which he then declined to join.
Pico's oration on human dignity is the movement's most quoted text: human beings have no fixed nature and must make themselves, which is either the founding statement of modern self-fashioning or a very good piece of rhetoric, and probably both.
How it argued
Philology, textual criticism, the recovery and editing of manuscripts, and the deliberate cultivation of style as inseparable from thought.
What it was arguing against
Scholastic Latin, scholastic method, and the practice of reading ancient texts through accumulated commentary rather than directly.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether humanism is a philosophy at all or a literary and educational programme — Kristeller argued the latter and largely won.
Common misconceptions
That humanism means secularism. Nearly every humanist was a Christian, several were clergy, and Erasmus and More are among the most devout figures of the age. The modern sense of the word is a nineteenth-century development.
How it began
Petrarch finding a lost cache of Cicero's letters and being scandalised by the man they revealed, which is a very humanist way to begin: the ancients as people rather than authorities.
What became of it
Absorbed into the ordinary practice of scholarship. Its methods stopped being a movement by becoming the standard.
Lasting influence
The Reformation, through the biblical philology. Modern textual criticism and classical scholarship. The idea that education should form a person rather than train a specialist.
Why it still matters
Philology as a tool for testing authority is exactly what Valla did to the papacy, and it is still how forged documents are exposed.
Put another way
A restorer removing varnish, and an argument about what was underneath.
Where to start
The Praise of Folly. It is funny, short, and it shows what the movement was against.
The surprising bit
Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine was written in 1440 and not printed until 1517 — when Ulrich von Hutten published it, and Luther read it, and it did rather more damage than it might have done in 1440.
In their own words
We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, that thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
In my judgement, the Donation is a forgery.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Early Scholasticism
- Influenced
- Hermeticism, Cartesianism
The verdict
A programme about how to read that turned out to be a programme about who has authority.