Protean Face Renaissance

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THE PROTEAN FACEOF RENAISSANCE HUMANISMBy LAURO MARTINES

John Locke held that children of the poor could be put to workbefore the age of four.' At the time this view would not have b eenconsidered extreme. The chronic need for wages in early-modemEurope made the physical labor of children an everyday matter. AsPiero Camporesi argues, in labor-intensive, subsistence-wage socie-ties, where famine and h unger were so embedded in consciousnessthat people fantasized strange breads and occasionally hallucinatedon rotten grain, it is no wonder that the poor relied upon themanual labor of their children.^ The Italian humanist AntonioIvani obseived in the 1460s that "to get enough food for theirstomachs is almost their only concern ."' And when we speak of thepoor of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, we mean somefifty pe rcent of the urban and rural populations, as currently repre-sented by dem ographers and econom ic historians.What I propose must be self-evident: that the educational pro-gram of the humanists necessarily excluded the large majority ofpeople. Apart from the fact that children could not be in both fieldand classroom at the same time, most early-modem Europeanscould never accumulate the surpluses or saving^s required to dress


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And if by some chance the gifted child of a tenant farmer or urbanlaborer happened to be schooled in Latin by the local priest orparson, and then went far beyond this to a full humanistic education, he would enter into a new world, another life, and be foreverlost as a representative of his native part o ft h e popu lation .

Christianity could claim to be universally beneficial in scope because it offered something to all people, even to converts fromIslam or Judaism. But how could hum anism make any such claim inthat hungry world? With its ten to twelve years of full-time studywith its emphasis on Latin and then Greek, on classical poetryrhetoric, history, and moral philosophy, and with its resolute avoidance of any skill that might at once be utilitarian (aside perhapsfrom teaching), what could humanism ofTer to most sectors of thepopulation? The answer is, damned little. And what now strikes usas obvious, when the question is so bluntly put, must have been althe more obvious to the contemporaries of Renaissance humanistsBut let us be fair: the humanists never asserted that the intensivestudy of the classical languages and literatures aimed to benefit orillumine the multitudes of people in their everyday pursuits. Such aclaim w ould have b een mad. What they did claim was that the studiahumanitatis could both seive and benefit the society at large. Morespecifically, they meant that by presenting the wealth and scope ofthe classical experience, as observed in classical literature, to thosewho rule and lead society, humanists were educating an elite ofm en to gov em m ore wisely and to stand in the public eye as m odelsof political and m oral rectitude.

In the proposal to lead the leaders, to educate the ruling class forthe good of the whole community, there was humbug and mystifi-cation. For even getting little princes, aristocrats, and merchantoligarchs at the age of, say, six or seven and schooling them in theclassics for th e ne xt ten years, was it likely that our hum anists wouldthus be able to change the world? Leonardo Bnini, Vittodno daFeltre, Guarino G uarini, Erasmus, Jo hn Colet, and others to so m e


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message of Christianity had not, in more recent times, alreadymade European princes and oligarchies more just or more hu-mane, was the ancient world going to do this, with its lesson ofurbanity and hedonism?

In "The Social Worid of the Florentine Humanists,"^ I estab-lished that the humanist movement in Florence had close ties withthe Floren tine ruling class, with its political ideals, with th e swank ofpublic office, with the marriage and investment customs of theupper


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ism had a variety offices: a kind of militant, mercan tile, republicaface at Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century; an aristocratic and rather staid republican face at Venice; a clerical, curiaand monarchical face in Rome; a princely face at Milan where, aservitor to the Visconti and Sforza dynasties, humanism lent itvoice to autocracy and political expansionism; and finally a feudaface at Naples,-''' where it both served the kingdom's warrior magnates and praised the Aragonese monarchy to the heavens. 1 wouleven add to this the face of small-town humanism, smartly attesteat Arezzo, where a line of schoolmasters and strong local pride nurtured the study of the classical langruages, so much so that the townexported humanist teachers to Florence and other centers.** If wneeded additional proof of humanism's adaptability, it wouldsuffice to point to its recruitment, in the profoundly contentiousixteenth century, by both Protestants and Catholics, but also bthose, like Erasmus, who sought to .stand outside either camp, andlater on even by skeptics such as Montaigne.

In seeking a prominent presence, and therefore in adapting tothe ruling classes of its world, how could humanism really make aplea for the classical education of women? It happens that a fewwomen managed to acquire one, but they were educated, in astriking number of cases, by their own fathers (who occasionallylike Sir Thomas More, advised their daughters to disguise theilearning), or they were the daughters of princes and erudite aristocrats, hence rare creatures indeed and favored by exceptional circumstances.' The Venetian humanist patrician Francesco Barbaroin 1416 expressed the wish that women be trained only in practicahousehold matters;" the humanist educator Maffeo Vegio in 146called for the adolescent girl to be reared "on sacred teachings, tolead a regular, chaste, and religious life and to devote all her tim


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to female labors."^ Th us hum anism gave refuge to m ost of thepolitical and social prejudices of its day, and these were unequivo-cally androcentric, or "^hallocentric." Inevitably, therefore, certainlearned womenLaura Cereta, for instance, and Isotta Nogarolawere jee re d at by contem pora ries or eve n, as in N ogarola's case,accused o f incest, prom iscuity, an d "filthy lust."'" H ere too thebiases of the age are evident in the image of woman as the vessel ofvirtue or as the receptacle o f disgusting carnality.Let us now close in on our humanists and consider a range of

particulars, with a view to pin ning dow n the shifts and changeabilityin their program.The foct that some of them were brilliant social climbers, espe-cially in the early history of humanism, should be well enoughknown by now to require no rehearsing here. Bruni, Poggio Brac-ciolini, Francesco Filelfo, Lorenzo Valla, Guarino, Vittorino, Tom-maso Parentucelli, Angelo Poliziano, and Giovanni Pontano, borninto the middle classes or into professional families, climbed, bytheir studies, publications, or teaching, to distinguished and lucra-tive positions at princely courts or in government, where they be-came the familiars of princes, influential noblemen, and oligarchs.They put their latinity and classical learning at the service of thepeninsu la's ruling elites by com po sing enc om ia, flattering histories,state letters, biographies, defenses, orations, and dedications. Allwere foreigners" in that they achieved their most clamorous suc-

cesses not in their native towns but rather in neighboring or moredistant cities, where, to begin with, they would have been regardedas outsiders or noncitizens. Such advancement in that parochialfifteenth-century world must be seen as an astonishing achieve-ment. This profitable use of the skills of the new eruditionmuchmore than of its presumed ideological contentidentifies the in-strumental side o f hum anism . As lon g as there was room at the top ,whatever humanism might do for princes and urban oligarchies,for the servitors it won honors and employment. In sixteenth-cen-


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then seen in primary and secondary schools," the determinedteaching of grammar, classical history, and literature procured therise of many a man to bench, high pulpit, and govemmentmenoften come from the new gentry and on-the-make yeomanry. Butwhen opportunity constricted and movement upward eased off, asin England by the early seventeenth century or in Italy with itscrushing war costs after 1500, then the cachet of classical learningcould be rendered more difficult to attain, chiefly by raising feesand requirements, in order more easily to exclude the sociallyunwanted. These restrictions, however, issued from the society it-self, not from the educational core of humanism.

This point brings me back to the question of historical forces asan influence on humanism. In their remarkable essay "The Schoolof Cuarino," An thony Grafton and Lisajardine argue that the rou-tines of study there, em ploy ing a capital emp hasis on mem orizationby rote and on predigested study aids, produced "obedience anddocility"character traits much to the liking of autocratic Renais-sance rulers.'^ The re is m uc h to be said for this analysis of Guar-ino 's school at Ferrara. But I shou ld like to add what seem s to me tohave been more decisive, namely the authoritarian, hierarchical,and patriarchal structures of that princely city, where corporal pun-ishment was common. These structures themselves sufficed to turnout obedient and docile personalities, whatever the methods ofinstruction, and particularly in a setting where the children ofprinces and noblemen were the chief concerns of the school. Thiswas no place for the inculcation of individual initiative. Again, weare talking about the world around the pedagogical commitment tothe Latin and Greek classics, although, to be sure, the rote memori-zation of predigested m aterial could easily be tu m ed to he lp under-write the society's authoritarian values.

Social climbers brought their own pressures to bear on the hu-manist curriculum, but so also did Venetian aristocrats, state func-


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Queen Elizabeth I, exploited their preparation in the classics(Burghley in particular) to he lp th em con du ct h igh policy. Walsing-ham urged in a private letter that the study of classical history andthe classical books on the state (by Plato and Aristotle) be applied

to these our dmes and states and see how they may be madeserviceable to our age, or why to be rejected, ihe reasonwhereof well considered shall cause you in process of time toframe better courses both of action and counsel, as well in yourprivate life as in public government, if you shall be called."Here was a claim, indeed a cliche^humanism at the service ofgovern m ent that wen t right back to the early humanists, w ho use dit, as a realistic en ough prescr iption, to h elp them "sell" the classicalsyllabus to the Italian ruling elites.

N or was it history only that the humanists linked to presen t ex pe -rience by representing su ch study as relevant and usefiil to contem -poraries. It was also eloquence, the art of rhetoric, the pursuit ofwhich constituted, they argued, the best education for entry intopublic life: thus Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Vegio, Enea Silvio Pic-colomini, and others. But in fifteenth-century Italy, public life wasthe exclusive business of princes, m ^ n a te s, and en trenc hed oligar-chies, so that yet once more humanists here were speaking directlyto the ruling groups and striving to put the science of rhetoric, allthe mysteries of eloquence, at the disposal of the lords and mastersof Italy. The study of poetry and ethics also served in the samecollaboration, for the truly eloquent man was meant, in the eyes ofmost hiimanists, to combine his oratorical skills with wisdom andexample, both of which were to be gleaned from classical poets andphilosophers, as well as from historians. In this fashion, the core ofthe humanist curriculum was rendered timely and pragmatic by itsties with the needs of the political culture and civic life of theItalian citytates. No wonder that within a single generation, say1390 to 1420, humanism captured the allegiance of the most alert


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the first time, humanists were suddenly elevated to leading university positions at Flor ence, P a\ia, and Bologn a.Like the humanist social climbers, others also brought their requirements to the program of humanism. The Society of Jesus, inthe sev enteenth century, used classical study to he lp prepare Jesuitto go out and mix with the members of their select upper


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the endo rsem ent requireda strong ex tem al legitimation^for thefledgling humanist movement to take off.

I want at this point to draw on a strategy borrowed from currentcritical theory in order to take a shortcut. Speaking of the laterfourteenth century, let us see the Christian religion and the ver-nacular culture as a rich and elaborate system of signification. Thisgreat "text" had in it parts of th e classical cod e the books of theRom an law, as well as som e Cicero, Vergil, Livy, and others; bu t th eRoman poets and prose writers had been transcoded largely inaccordance with the ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity. Around1400, m ost individual expe rience drew its m ean ing and significancefrom this established semiotic order. But noveltypeue JacquesDerridacould enter into this system only from the outside andonly, therefore, through its contact with direct or daily e xperien ce.Our com preh ensive semiotic system, i.e., the culture of the day, wasso closely connected with meaningful experience that the two, cul-ture and experience, were inseparable but not identical. When ac-cordingly, about 1400, urban literati began to introduce more andmore classical books into the established system of signification(books increasingly read in a new key), we may safely assume thatItalian urban expe rien ce was no lon ger deriving sufficient m ean ingand direction from that great established text, the dominant net-work of values. These values were limited both by the conceptualscope of late chivalric and folk culture, as expressed for instance inBoccaccio's Decameron, and by the old ideals of asceticism, crisplysummed up in all the commonplaces that harped on "this blindworld" ('sto cecco mondo), "this vain world," "this vale of tears," and soforth. But it was the experience first of the urban ruling elites thatneeded a new or different kind of "processing," for their literacy,knowing leadership, and profound commitment to worldly politics,status, and the seductions of wealth and travel far surpassed that ofall other gro ups and classes in Italy's bustling cities, ^ s o importantin this connection was the large array of Latin^writing lawyers (no-tat) who were regularly engaged in the high-level administrative


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allow citizens to see beyon d Christianity and beyond the imm ediateworld, not in order to replace Christianity^by no means^forthere was nothing rebarbative here apart from asceticism. Mostimportant, seeing beyond Christianity enabled the humanists toconjure up an alternative image which, by its radical alterity andotherness, would serve to corroborate and vitalize the complexityand value, the worldly value, of present-day experience.We can see n ow why the hum anists were able to m ou nt a success-ful challenge to the educational establishment and why they wereable to encode more and more of the classical syllabus into thesemiotic network of late-medieval culture. With their optimistictone and pursuit of a great, pre-Christian civilization, they offered avision of indisputable otherness (classical Rome and Greece), andthis foil provided at once a contrast to and a flattering validation o furban, upper-class experience. Republican magnates at Florence,

Ve nice's hum anist patricians, Lombard princes and their courtiers,the legal intelligentsia, top-level administratorsall could look tothe ruling elites o f the an cien t world and say, "they were rather likeus different, no t Christians, yet like us." T o this exten t, the n,Italian municipal experience was released from its moorings in thetraditional system of signification, with all its ascetic, late


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fame and gloryhad to verge on being self-validating, and preciselyhere is where the image of antiquity as entertained by the human-ists came critically into play. For their new sense of a commonhumanity, transcending time and religion and making them partyto a history that stretched from Homer to Constantine, endowedthe agents and products of the new learning with the will to seesome aspects of worldly experience as valid in their own right andrequiring no Christian seal of approval. As far as we can tell, all ofour humanists were believing and perhaps practicing Christians,but their study of, and admiration for, the world of pagan antiquityencouraged them to consider letters, profits, and politics as enter-prises that could rightly go on without a necessary grounding inreligion, or at least, in the case of profits, without a religion ofasceticism. Secularization, as a trend aided and abetted by classicallearning, is the face of modernity in the humanist movement, evenif it applied only to the educated men of the upper classes, thosemost able to ims^ine themselves in the literary and archaeologicalremains of the ancient world.

Early Renaissance humanism was an educational program, aclutch of linguistic and rhetorical skills, a self-image found in antiq-uity, and a rich body of learning, with m an and the world as its pole-stars. However, classical learning and philological expertise couldbe yoked at any moment into the service of Christianity, beginningwith biblical inquiry as early as Valla's In Navum Testamentum Adnotortiones, written in 1449 but not published until 1505, when it wasissued by Erasmus. Subsequently, humanism was to have bothCatholic and Protestant strains, and would finally develop ties withskepticism, deism, and philosopical materialism. The many faces ofhumanism thus came forth from verbal skills and a very generalvision, into which cou ld be cast first on e con tent an d th en anotheror even conflicting ideologies. Which of its faces humanism wouldput on de pe nd ed entirely on the nee ds and structures of the imm e-diate world around, but in a labor-intensive society, the high cost of


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val and Renaissance culture. The consequences of this historic tran-scoding can be instantly perceived in two of Niccolo Machiavelli'sworks. The Prince a n d The Discourses on the Decades of Livy. Hi s c o n -ception of power and public life here pivots on modes of politicalaction that city-state Italians had known and practiced over thecourse of nearly two centuries, since the fourteenth century. Theypracticed power politics, they assessed politics entirely in opportun-istic and self-interested terms, they fought continually for supremeauthority in their communes, they eliminated enemies at will, theyknew in practice that politics had its own rules, and they employedwhole panoplies of political stratagems. Yet the most determinedanalysis of tyranny in the fourteenth century, De Tyranno, the workof the great jurist Bartolus o f Sassoferrato, is a strict legal andjuridical inquiry, not a treatment in discursive political terms. Thelanguage of political discourse in fourteenth-century Italy, even inthe lucubrations of cold-eyed chroniclers, was still too greatlyinflected by a religious and moral vocabulary. In detached talkabout conflict in public life, speech and perception were not yetsecular or sharp enough to peel away the accumulations of direreligious censure, leaving only the forces of interest, expedience,political reason ing, and "natural" conflict. Not until the fifteenthcentury, in the writings, for instance, of Bruni and of humanists inthe pay of Francesco Sforza, do we get a more fully secular view ofpolitics and history;''' and this, I argue, arose from the intermin-gling of urban political experience and the worldly semiotics ofRoman classical history. Urban politics found an ally, a recogniz-able mirror ims^e, in the politics of ancient Rome, and in return,the realism and disenchantment of Roman historiansLivy, Sal-lust, Suetonius, and Tacitussharpened and highlighted fifteenth-century political experience. Thus after 1512, in exile and out offavor with the Medici, Machiavelli entered into a greatly enricheddiscourse when he mingled a humanistic education with his four-


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baros, Poliziano, Pontano, or later on Erasmus, More, Colet,Lefevre d'Etaples, Melanchthon, and so on. But numerous sourcesreveal more humble scholars and Latinists, who hired themselvesout as schoolteachers and private tutors, even in small towns, andwho occasionally had trouble collecting their fees, as we hear fromVegio.'^ T he m arch ioness of M antua, Isabella d'Este, rather mis-treated a you ng scholar, Niccolo Panizzato, wh om she h ad enticedto Mantua in 1492 to tutor her in classical literature. "But nosooner had he arrived in Mantua than he was dismissed becauseIsabella decided that she was, after all, too busy to resume herstudies. The young man was bitterly disappointed."" Did suchmenmodest tutors and teachersmake up the undenvorld orbackside of humanism? The implied shadows here touch on rela-tions betw een ruling group s an d hum anists, on an aspect that o ftenmust have mad e for strain and acrimony in the tangent inequa lities,for the class of patrons and employers always had the upper hand,except in the face of teacher shortages. Huppert's fascinating analy-sis of sixteenth-century French schools shows that many scholarstrained in "the style of Paris" (humanism) achieved some financialsecurity in the new lay schools of Bordeaux, Lyon, Grenoble, andother lesser towns. Here too, however, there were stipendiary tiers:yearly payment of about eighty pounds (Uvres) for the seniorteacher or principal (the on e with the best hum anistic e du catio n),and from fifty down to twenty-five pounds for those with a lesserpreparation in Greek or in the more literary and rhetorical aspectsof the humanistic program.'^

We will no t adequately understand the history of hum anism untilwe also study the lives of the throngs of teachers and tutors whocomposed its underworld, for matters concerning teaching meth-ods, fees, assigned texts, self-identities, and any transfer of alle-giance to the classical syllabus would be found in the contactbetween small-time humanist teachers and their upper-class em-ployers. How did these teachers see themselves? Did they identify


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selves? Were they regarded and treated as servants by their employ-ers? Did they seek to marry up? Were they mere grammarians andteachers, with no lively interest in the classical literary legacy, or didthey collect books and nourish attitudes shaped in part by years ofreading Cicero, Vergil, Livy, and perhaps Martial or Catullus? Howitinerant or how stay-at-home were they?These questions call for an anthropology of Renaissance human-

ism, for a study of th e everyday life of humanists, including all theirrituals. We shall nee d to know ab out their marrij^es, their habits ofprayer, and their relations with neighbors, parish priests, and localreligious confraternities. What names did they give to their chil-dren and who held these to baptism? Did our obscure teachers andtutors, in their eating habits or modes of dress, ever seek modelstaken from antiquity? Answers to these questions would tell us whathumanism and the classical world meant in their daily lives, apartfrom merely providing a means of subsistence.T he social climbers am on g the early humanists (e.g., Bruni, Pog-gio, and Valla) injected an element of haughtiness into their con-ception of classical study. This is particularly evident in their af-fected scorn for the immediate marketability of two branches oflearning, law and medicine. They maintained that these fosteredmoney grubbing and that their own mission demanded greater

intellectual scope and served "noble" ends, such as education orthe civil community. As new men on the make, born into a societyin which old money always loomed as an ideal, they had to seem tobe above lucre. But not all their claims were complacent nonsense.Montaigne and Walsingham, some 150 years later, could still fullyappreciate the study of classical literature and history as the bestpreparation for boQi public and private life, and this tells us thatthe early humanist agenda already accommodated broad civic andsocially oriented views.


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Pop e, and James Joyce? In a celebrated exaggeration, T. S. Eliotonce observed that "Shakespeare acquired more essential historyfrom Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Mu-seum."'^ He was suggesting that classical literature is lodged in theliterature of Europe as influence, guide, and rival, and that writershave continually helped themselves to its offerings. European litera-ture would not have been nearly so rich, nearly so eloquent andsubtle, without the input of the classical tradition. Western litera-ture and historical writing are virtually inconceivable without thelegacy of humanism. Nor can we imagine English, French, or, say,American literature without the impact of the Bible. And in thesweep of time from Titian to Jacques-Louis David, what abo ut thehistory of narrative painting without the input of classical mythol-ogy and classical history, or European architecture without Vitni-vius and Palladio? My point needs no laboring. Our cultural iden-tity com pe ls u s to de fen d the history of hum anism , for all its conniv^ance with ruling elites, political scoundrels, and the devil.

In the rise of scholarship of the sort that underpins the verym ode of knowledge presented at this conference, humanistic learn-ing was decisive and fundam ental. I refer to the following fifteenth-century lines of development: a new emphasis on the careful colla-tion of manuscripts, on the more accurate delineation of historicalcontexts, on the search for ascertainable facts, on getting the valuesof words and phrases right, and on the secularity of history. I wouldalso note the new disciplines that came forth from classical studyarchaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and topography. The im-plied philological know-how, or keen historical sense, of the mosttalented of the early humanists has often been noted. Let it besingled out here as one of the essential skills or sensitivities in theirpreparedness. Their heightened sense of history, how ever, was notsomething they had picked up from the classics in some simplefashion, otherwise the prehumanists of the thirteenth centurywould have attained the same degree of perspicacity. Rather, thenew historical sense was more allied to the bold secularism offifteenth-century politics and thereby to a more stimulating con-


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guages, literature, history, and moral philosophy could not possiblyresult in a cramped or specialized preparation. And the slant, more-over, was public and social. If in the later fifteenth century, inresponse to the autocratic rise of the Medici family, humanism atFlorence drew away self-protectively from politics, the like did notnecessarily happen elsewherenot at Venice, for instance, in thesixteenth century, nor in the provincial humanist schools of Renais-sance France, where boys were regularly sent to be prepared forcareers in public life.The humanist emphasis on effective writing and public speakingwas a boon for the ruling classes. It was also an emphasis on them eans of m oving or m otivating p eople , which involved the ability toappeal to different social groups and even to cut across the bounda-ries of class. Something in this stance was open and generous.Humanism produced students with wider frames of reference be-cause o f its stress on a com m on (classical) literature for the e du -cated and therefore on a richer semiotics of Christian culture and agreater storehouse of meanings. The prevailing social structuresno t hum anism exclud ed the lower classes and the vast majority ofwomen from this cultural fund, but soon enough the classical andthe vernacular traditions would be drawn together in the work ofmost leading poets, playwrights, and essayists.

What does this picture of the humanist enterprise portend forour times? It certainly does not hail the blinkered, continuing studyof Latin and Greek, though there is no obvious reason to rule thisout. As I see it, hum anism 's lesson for us lies along two different butconnected routes. The first route is the enduring quest for a visionof othe rne ss, a vision o f ideals and values different from ours, in theface of which we may entertain a benignly competitive rivalry, notin order to confirm our own complacencies but rather to identifyand question them. This encounter requires the study of foreignlanguages and cultures, including computer languages, now made


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university seen as trade school, and no doubt the institution hasmajor responsibilities along this line. But the university is also themost serious of all our intellectual forumsour place of primaryand open debate. In this role, it is both conscience and disinter-ested guide, more disinterested and impartial than any business,church, or political party. Consequently, the university also has thesocial and moral obligation to consider the more complete life, thelarger cultural consciousness, and even the political alertness ofstudents. For students are no t just potential produ cers and consum -ers. They are also citizensgregarious, inquisitive, and hopeful,whose experience often will include confusion or disenchantment.For this reason, they shall also need to dream and to be able toimag ine alternate worlds w he n in the com pany of grim realities. Inthe hum an ne ed to be both m ore knowing and mo re imaginative isthe sanction for any program of contemporary humanism. The cur-riculum would include literature, languages, history, and theory.Let me finally add, however, that the campaign against specializa-tion should begin with the education of humanists and social scien-tists w ho are training for places at the university. For the teaching ofliterature, history, or social-science units may terminate with theconveying to others of a body of restricted subject matter. But theintellectual obligation to understand that matter is primary, andthis requires the ability to relate it to larger wholesto culture, tothe society, and to the flow of currents and countercurrents in thesea of ideas.

University of California, Los Angeles


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