Renaissance humanism
From Freepedia
Renaissance humanism was a literary movement with a focus on human dignity and potential. Humanists placed a heavy emphasis on the study of primary sources, or the original texts, rather than the study of the interpretations of others. This is reflected in their motto of ad fontes, or "to the sources." Humanist education, called the studia humanista or studia humanitatis (study of humanity), concentrated on the study of the liberal arts: Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history.
Early 15th-century humanists were interested in classical Latin and not in medieval Latin, which was a different and simpler language with many neologisms. Petrarch, sometimes called the father of Renaissance humanism in Italy, called the Latin of the Middle Ages "barbarous," and preferred pure classical Latin, such as that used by Cicero and Virgil. This interest in this classical literature led to the scouring of monastic libraries across Europe for lost texts. One such hunt by Poggio Bracciolini, who was credited with the discovery of the complete works of fifteen different authors, turned up Vitruvius' work on art and architecture, allowing for the completion of the Duomo of Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi.
Humanism offered the necessary intellectual and philological tools for the first dispassionate analysis of texts. An early triumph of textual criticism by Lorenzo Valla revealed the Donation of Constantine to be an early medieval forgery produced in the Curia. This textual criticism began to create real political controversy when Erasmus began to apply it to biblical texts, in his Novum Instrumentum.
Humanism can be separated into two fields of expression, which are highly compatible. Social or civic humanism, rose out of the republican ideology of Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It sought to create citizens capable of participating in the civic life of their community by placing central emphasis on human autonomy. Leonardo Bruni's Panegyric is one expression of this philosophy. The emancipated and literate upper bourgeoisie of the independent Italian communes adapted 14th-century Burgundian aristocratic culture and manners to an intensely patriotic civic life centered on extended families. Humanism was a pervasive cultural mode, not merely the product of a handful of geniuses, like Giotto or Leon Battista Alberti.
As Neo-Platonism replaced the Aristotelianism of Saint Thomas Aquinas, attempts were made to join the great works of Antiquity with Christian values in a syncretic Christian humanism, such as those by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Ethics was taught independent of theology, and the authority of the Church was tacitly transferred to the reasoning logic of the educated individual. Thus humanists constantly skirted the dangers of being branded as heretics. Humanism was not necessarily anti-Papal: the greatest of the humanist popes is probably Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pius II.
Kristeller, Siegel and Haskins argue that Renaissance humanism was just an educational programme — humanists could hold a variety of views, not all of them republican. F.W. Kent argues that the philological interests and pedantry were not ideological but reflected a desire to live the republican ideal to the full — this leads to a particular view of the city’s place in the world. For example, Niccolò Niccoli ate only off antique tableware and his use of Latin was obsessive, yet contemporaries agreed he was a crucial figure in persuading Florentines that the classical arts were important, that they had an urgent primacy over the modern age. As Ernest Gombrich once said in his 1967 Essays presented to Rudolf Wittkower on his sixty-fifth birthday, the Renaissance had its origins not so much in the discovery of Man as in the discovery of diphthongs.
