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Translation, terminology and style
107
age
of ignorance. 'After this', wrote
Valla,
'Papias and others more
unlearned, Eberhard de Bethune, Uguccione da Pisa, Catholicon,
Aymo
and
others not worth naming taught ignorance at great cost and sent away the
student
stupider
then
when he came.'
76
These primitive word-lists
that
Valla
denounced, products of the eleventh to the
thirteenth
centuries,
continued to be used in the age
of
printing, but the humanists badly wanted
to replace them, first by recovering Varro, Festus, Nonius Marcellus and the
other classical lexicographers and
then
by compiling their own dictionaries.
The
two most
important
humanist lexicons
of
the fifteenth century, the De
orthographia (1449) of Giovanni Tortelli and the Cornucopiae (1478) of
Niccolo
Perotti, were primarily of literary interest, but they did advance
Europe's general command of Latin, which progressed even further with
the work of the Estiennes in the next century. Tortelli's work, devoted to
the spelling of Greek words in Latin and equipped with long historical
articles on Greek philosophers, schools and divisions
of
philosophy, was the
more significant for philosophical terminology and the new consciousness
of
its Greek origins. The Greek in the medieval lexicons, disfigured by far-
fetched etymological speculations, was a joke to the humanists, who, like
Traversari or Ficino, sometimes compiled their own word-lists out of the
Septuagint or
Julius
Pollux or other sources. They lacked a really useful
Greek
dictionary until the work
of
Varinus Favorinus in 1523. Five decades
later, Henri Estienne completed his Thesaurus linguae Graecae, which is still
consulted. Specialised dictionaries
of
philosophy also first appeared in
print
in the late sixteenth century, inspired, perhaps, by the tabulae keyed to
Aristotle
editions by Marcantonio Zimara. The first of these new
compendia was the
Seminarium
totius philosophiae (1582—5) of Giovanni
Battista Bernardi, followed by a dozen other major Latin dictionaries of
philosophy published in the early eighteenth century.
77
One of the most influential was the Lexicon philosophicum
(1613—15)
of
Rudolphus Goclenius the Elder. The first
part
of the Lexicon devoted 1,143
pages to articles on Latin words,
parts
of words and phrases significant in
76. Prosatori latini 1952, p. 602:
'Post
hunc
Papias
aliique
indoctiores,
Hebrardus,
Hugutio,
Catholicon,
Aymo,
et
ceteri
indigni
qui
nominentur,
magna
mercede
docentes
nihil
scire,
aut
stultiorem
reddentes
discipulum
quam
acceperunt';
Percival
1976, pp.
79—81;
Chomarat
1981, 1, pp.
184-8.
77.
Tortelli
1501, ff. 24
r
, 28
v
,
34,40,
57,64,67
r
,
86
v
,
I26
r
-7
V
;
Perotti
1517;
IJsewijn
1971, pp.
302-3,
310,
314; P. S.
Allen
1914, pp.
36-55;
Grubmtiller
1967, pp.
13-33;
Birkenmajer
1922, p. 168;
Percival
1975. PP- 233, 238;
Chomarat
1981,1, pp.
192-201,
212-14;
Korshin
1974, pp.
306-^7;
Wilamowitz-
Moellendorf
1982, p. 54;
Oliver
1953, PP- 1257-71;
Epictetus
1954, PP- 6,11-15,146;
Rinaldi
1973,
pp.
227-31,259-60;
Cortesi
1979, p. 464; B.
Bischoff
1961, pp. 215-16;
Stinger
1977, p. 19;
Pintaudi
1977, PP-
9~
I
4»
23-9;
Geanakoplos
1962, pp. 121, 154, 220, 286;
Schmitt 1983a,
pp. 56-9, 101-2;
Gerber
1967, pp. 174—7.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
io8
Translation, terminology
and
style
logic,
metaphysics, ethics
and
psychology
and
also
in
subjects (music,
astronomy,
biology,
pharmacy)
now
divorced from philosophy. Entries,
arranged
in two
separate alphabetical series
for
vowels
and
consonants,
varied
in
length from
a
paragraph
to
twenty pages
or
more. Longer articles
were accompanied
by the
bifurcating charts made popular
by the
Ramists.
Goclenius
wrote historical sketches
of
movements, schools
and
ideas
but
dealt only incidentally with biography.
78
The
second
part
of
his work,
a
Lexicon philosophicum graecum, gave most
of
its
362
pages
to an
alphabetical
Greek
glossary,
but in the
last eighty pages
—
very much
in the
spirit
of
humanism
—
Goclenius surveyed neologisms, barbarisms
and
other words
identified
as
obsolete
or not
well
received.
79
Valla
would have admired
his
identifying
acceptibilitas
as
'scholastic'
and his
recommending
a
five-word
periphrasis
for the
unclzssicalpossibilitas,
but not
his comment
on the
equally
dubious activitas:
'I
tolerate these things
in
philosophical disputations
because
the
philosophers have their
own
diction (Xi^is)' Such pragmatic
concessions
to
specialist jargon compromised
the
philological ideal,
but
they also sustained terminological growth without surrendering
all
claims
to normative
and
prescriptive judgement. When Goclenius recommended
a list
of
alternatives
for the
neologism a/jie&SSiKos,
he
noted
that
'all these
are
Ciceronian'.
80
'
Amethodic'
has
not
survived,
but its
cousin, 'method', made
a
brilliant if
erratic
career
in
early modern philosophy. Plato
and
Aristotle used
fie&oSos
in technical applications, which
Cicero
understood
but
preferred
to
render
with
a
Latin periphrasis,
via et
ratio. Medieval Latin versions
of
Aristotle
sometimes transliterated fxed'oSos, sometimes (see above, pp.
89—90)
avoided
it,
but
medieval instances
of the
transliteration
did not
carry
the
technical
weight
of the
Greek word, which continued
to be
expressed
by
Latin
phrases like
via
doctrinae. Thus, when humanist
translators
shunned
the
transliteration (above, pp. 89—90), their respect
for
Ciceronian precedent had
been reinforced
by the
technical poverty
of
medieval occurrences
of the
term.
In
passages
of
the Politics where William
of
Moerbeke wrote methodus
in Latin, Bruni resorted
to six
unrelated words
—
doctrina, labor, disciplina,
praecedens,
materia
and
tractatus
—
and
Lambin rang
the
changes
on
institutio,
disputatio
and
docendi ratio. Ironically,
the
very success
of the
humanists
in
making Greek familiar
to
European philosophy broke down this resistance,
78.
Goclenius 1613, pp. 87-9, 106-8, 124,
132-3,
144-6, 170-89, 283, 334-8, 344-5, 386-9.
79.
Goclenius 1615, pp. 282-362.
80. Goclenius
1615,
p. 285: 'ego ista tolero in disputationibus philosophicis cum sua sit \e£is philosophi';
ibid.,
pp. 287-8, 325.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Translation, terminology
and
style
109
even
as it
continued
to be
expressed
by
recalcitrants like Mario
Nizolio.
Perotti,
who
defined methodus more
in the
manner
of
John
of
Salisbury
than
of
Plato,
at
least recognised
the
word,
and
Guillaume Bude's fuller
description found
its way
into Henri Estienne's Thesaurus.
After
mid-
century
it
entered
the
English vernacular
in
technical philosophical senses.
Goclenius
defined
it as 'any
system
of
teaching
... or the
order
of
a whole
art
. . .
whereby
the
parts
of the art are
explained'.
81
Goclenius
codified other, lesser known
terms
of
philosophical interest
—
'theory', 'criterion', 'phenomenon'
-
which emerged from
the
fuller
humanist consciousness
of
Greek
and
managed eventually
to
overcome
the
absence
or
weakness
of
precedent
in
classical
and
medieval Latin.
82
Victorious
neologisms named
the
divisions
of
philosophy. Tortelli recog-
nised metaphysica,
a
common medieval word unknown
to the
Latin auctores,
while
Quintilian
had
used dialectice, which gained ground over logica
in the
fifteenth century because
Valla
liked
it.
Cosmologia, ontologia, psychologia
and their vernacular derivatives first appeared
in the
early modern period,
while
'aesthetics'
and
'epistemology' were more
distant
echoes
of
human-
ism
in the
eighteenth
and
nineteenth centuries.
83
Philosophical schools
and
controversial positions were also named
in the
Renaissance
or
because
of
it.
We
owe
'scepticism'
to
Traversari's translation
of
Diogenes Laertius.
Classical
Latin referred only indirectly
to
atheism with
the
transliterations
atheos
or
atheus, epithets
of
the poet Diagoras
and
of
Theodorus
of
Cyrene;
atheos
was
still
the
lemma
for the
article
in
which Goclenius discussed
atheismus although vernacular analogues
of
problematic reference were
known
in the
sixteenth century. Atheus appeared rarely
in
Renaissance Latin
and almost always
as a
personal designation
for a
notorious unbeliever
in
God's
existence.
Impius,
impietas
and
various paraphrases normally rendered
other uses
of
a&eos
and its
cognates,
as
when they referred pejoratively
to
polytheism from
a
monotheist point
of
view
—
or the
reverse.
84
Some
terms
seem
to
have grown
out
of
a more complex interaction
of
Greek
with Latin.
There
is no
speculatio
or
speculativus
in
ancient Latin, where
a
speculator
is a
spy
or
lookout,
but
Perotti associated
the
adjective with theorice as
the
part
of
81.
Goclenius 1613, p. 683:
'omnis
docendi ratio . . . sive ordo totius artis . . . quo partes artis
explicantur'; Perotti
1517,
p. 691; N. W. Gilbert 1960, pp. xxii-xxiii, 6,
39-66;
L.Jardine 1974a, pp.
26-47, 51, 54-5.
82. Goclenius 1613, pp. 491-2; Goclenius 1615, pp.
101-2,
255-6; Micraelius 1662, sigs.
T2
V
~3,
Qqq4
r
;
Eucken
1879, pp.
16-17,
27, 105.
83. Quintilian,
11.17.42;
Tortelli 1501, ff. 63
r
, 68
v
, i26
v
; Perotti 1517, p. 200; Goclenius 1613, p. 707;
Ashworth 1974a, p. 22; Michaud-Quantin 1969; Lapointe 1973, pp. 138-47; Eucken 1879, pp. 75,
133-4,
188; Maclntyre 1967.
84. Tortelli 1501, f. 42
v
; Goclenius 1615, p. 3; Bianca 1980b; Febvre 1947, pp. 124-42, 440.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
no
Translation, terminology and style
an ars not involving action, and the Lexicon philosophicum of Johannes
Micraelius
likewise defined the noun by reference to ftewpia.
85
In natural
philosophy, the weightiest known result of such cross-breeding involved
the Latin
momentum
and the Greek
/007777,
both terms of wide reference.
Classical
usage
of
momentum
might have helped medieval translators
of
/007777
('weight', 'critical increment of weight') in Aristotle's Physics because
part
of
that
usage was physical, referring to weight and the exertion
of
weight
or
force.
But during the Middle
Ages
temporal meanings of
momentum
('moment of time') had crowded out reference to weight as a cause of
movement (moveo), so medieval versions made little use
of
the word. After
Renaissance lexicographers (Perotti, Nizolio) had recovered the full range
of
momentum
from the Latin of the Romans, Argyropulos and other
translators
of
the Physics had
a
new term for rendering
/007777,
and its future in
natural philosophy was to be great. The full effects of
momentum
freshly
understood would be felt first in the vernacular
momento
of
Galileo,
as the
stato of Machiavelli helped fix the new meaning of 'state' — an abstract
political
entity unlike the more concrete and personal statusprincipis or
status
regni of the Middle
Ages.
86
In the Latin De motu, Galileo also distinguished
experientia as a general and epistemologically limited source
of
information
from zpericulum, a specific and purposeful testing
of
a particular claim about
the
world.
Jacopo Zabarella once used the term experimentum to mean a sort
of
thought experiment
—
something between Galileo's periculum and the
experientia which had often connoted exceptional or occult experience in
medieval
texts. Neither Galileo nor Zabarella, however, succeeded in
making a clear and strong distinction between 'experience' and 'experi-
ment' or in connecting either term with a fully developed sense of
'empirical' method. Fuller expression of these ideas, as of many other
concepts of philosophical importance, awaited linguistic and intellectual-
historical developments begun but not completed in the Renaissance.
87
85.
Perotti
1517, p. 619;
Micraelius
1662, pp.
1277-8.
86.
Perotti
1517, p. 936;
Goclenius
1613, pp. 707, 1081;
Galluzzi
1979, pp. 3-21,
89—98,
106—12;
Hexter
1973, pp.
154-5,
l6
7;
Skinner
1978, 11, pp.
352-8.
87.
Tortelli
1501, f. 76
v
;
Perotti
1517, p. 916;
Eucken
1879, pp. 25, 32;
Schmitt
1981, § vm.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
IV
HUMANISM
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
5
THE
MEANING
OF
HUMANISM
Humanism was one of the most pervasive
traits
of the Renaissance, and it
affected
more or less deeply all aspects
of
the culture
of
the time including its
thought and philosophy.
Humanism has been described and interpreted in many different
ways,
and its meaning has been the subject of much controversy, just as has been
the concept of the Renaissance itself.
1
Whereas the term 'humanism' in
current discourse often denotes an emphasis on human values unrelated to
any intellectual or cultural traditions, Renaissance humanism was under-
stood and studied by most historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries as
that
broad concern with the study and imitation of classical
antiquity which was characteristic
of
the period and found its expression in
scholarship and education and in many other areas, including the
arts
and
sciences.
The modern term 'humanism' has been used in this sense since the
early
nineteenth century and was derived from the term 'humanist' coined
in the late fifteenth century
2
to designate a teacher and student of the
'humanities' or studia humanitatis.
3
The word 'humanity' and its derivatives
were
associated with a 'liberal' education by several Roman writers,
especially
Cicero
and
Gellius.
4
The term was revived by Petrarch, Salutati
and others in the fourteenth century, and by the middle of the fifteenth
century it came to stand for a well-defined
cycle
of studies, called studia
humanitatis, which included grammatica, rhetorica, poetica, historia and
philosophia moralis, as these terms were then understood. Unlike the liberal
arts
of the earlier Middle
Ages,
the humanities did not include
logic
or the
quadrivium
(arithmetica, geometria, astronomia and musicd), and unlike the fine
arts
of the eighteenth century, they did not include the visual arts, music,
dancing or gardening.
5
The humanities also failed to include the disciplines
1.
Kristeller
1979, chs. 1 and 5; The Renaissance: Essays in
Interpretation
1982.
2.
Ruegg
1946. 3.
Kristeller
1979, ch. 5;
Campana
1946.
4.
Cicero,
Pro Archia
1.1-111.4;
Aulus
Gellius,
Noctes Atticae xm.17.1. 5-
Kristeller
1980, ch. 9.
113
HUMANISM
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ii4
Humanism
that
were the
chief
subjects
of
instruction at the universities during the later
Middle
Ages
and throughout the Renaissance, such as theology, jurispru-
dence and medicine, and the philosophical disciplines other
than
ethics, such
as
logic,
natural philosophy and metaphysics. In other words, humanism
does not represent, as often believed, the sum total of Renaissance thought
and learning, but only a well-defined sector
of
it. Humanism has its proper
domain or home territory in the humanities, whereas all other areas of
learning, including philosophy (apart from ethics),
followed
their own
course,
largely determined by their medieval tradition and by their steady
transformation through new observations, problems or theories. These
disciplines
were affected by humanism mainly from the outside and in an
indirect way, though often quite strongly.
PROFESSIONAL
ACTIVITIES
If
we want to understand the role of the humanists and of humanism
during the Renaissance and their impact on learning and philosophy, we
must consider not only the place
of
their subject-matter, the humanities, in
the classifications of the
arts
and sciences and among the subjects taught in
the schools and universities, but also their professional activities and their
literary production. The humanists are best known for their role as
educators, and they actually played an important
part
as theorists, teachers
and
tutors
in reforming secondary education, first in Italy and then in the
rest of Europe.
6
The core of their instruction was the careful study of
classical
Latin, its vocabulary and grammar, metrics and prose style, and to a
lesser extent
of
classical
Greek, and the attentive reading and interpretation
of
the major ancient writers, both Latin and Greek, in prose and in verse.
The
schools of Guarino da Verona in Ferrara and of Vittorino da Feltre in
Mantua attracted students from all over Europe, and their curriculum and
methods were
followed
everywhere, serving as a model for the Protestant
Reformers as
well
as for the Jesuits. The humanistic school, animated by the
idea
that
the study of classical languages and literature provided valuable
information and intellectual discipline as
well
as moral standards and a
civilised
taste for the future rulers, leaders and professionals of its society,
flourished without interruption, though with some significant changes,
until our own century, surviving many religious, political and social
revolutions.
It has but recently been replaced, though not yet completely,
by
other more practical and less demanding forms of education.
6.
Woodward
1897, 1906;
Garin
1957; Pensiero pedagogico 1958; G.
Miiller
1969, 1984.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Humanism
ii5
The
role
of
the humanists in Renaissance universities was not as powerful
as in the secondary schools which they came to dominate completely, but it
was
not as insignificant as is often believed.
7
The
view
expressed quite
recently by authoritative scholars
that
humanism played no role in the
universities
of
the Renaissance is certainly wrong.
8
In the curriculum
of
the
universities, grammar played a minor but persistent role as an elementary
and preliminary subject, but rhetoric and poetry, which involved the
reading of major classical Latin poets and prose writers, including the
historians and the moralists, was a regular subject of teaching at the Italian
universities from the early fourteenth century on, and the teaching
of
Greek
language and
literature
was added with increasing frequency during the
fifteenth century. By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the
chairs of Latin and Greek oratory and poetry had greatly increased in
number and prestige and even in salary, and sometimes were
given
the
more ambitious and fashionable title of'the humanities'. Moreover, if we
study the career
of
individual humanists, we find
that
many of them, great
and small, were professors at various universities, including the Florentine
Studio, or provided advanced instruction with a public salary in cities which
had no regular or complete university, such as
Lucca,
Venice
or Milan.
Another professional activity frequently practised by the humanists was
that
of acting as chancellors or secretaries.
9
Popes, cardinals and bishops,
emperors, kings, princes and republics as
well
as many prominent patricians
and businessmen needed and employed a large staff of trained people
capable of composing and copying the numerous documents and papers,
letters and speeches
that
constituted an essential
part
of the daily routine of
politics
and administration. As masters of Latin prose composition, the
humanists were eminently equipped to perform these functions, and it is
well
known
that
numerous humanists, famous and obscure, had their
careers, not as teachers or professors, but as chancellors and secretaries. Even
Petrarch occasionally served the princes of Milan and Padua who were his
patrons
as an informal secretary or
orator,
and a long line of distinguished
humanists served the papal Curia, the Florentine Republic, the kings of
Naples,
the dukes of Milan and other princes and republics.
10
Humanist
chancellors appear also at the courts
of
foreign
kings and princes, and it was
7.
Kristeller
1953b,
1956b.
8. R.
Pfeiffer
1976, p. 56.
Contrary
to
PfeifTer's
statement,
the Studio of
Florence
was of
course
a
university.
9.
Martines
1963;
Garin
1961,
part
1, ch. 1.
10. The
list
includes
Coluccio
Salutati,
Leonardo
Bruni,
Poggio
Bracciolini, Antonio
Beccadelli
(Panormita),
Giovanni
Pontano,
P. C.
Decembrio
and
many
others.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
116
Humanism
often
the
Italian humanists
who
pursued
a
career abroad.
11
Many
of the
humanist chancellors both
in
Italy
and
elsewhere were also commissioned
to write
an
official
history
of
the kingdom
or
republic,
for
history was
a
part
of
their training,
and
they also
had
easy access
to the
archives
that
contained
the source material
for
their undertaking. Machiavelli received
a
stipend
from
the
University
of
Pisa
for his
history
of
Florence,
and the
Venetian
Republic
employed
a
whole series
of
official
historiographers.
12
Although
the
chanceries were important centres
of
humanist activities,
they were
not the
only ones,
as is
often assumed. Apart from
the
humanist
teachers mentioned above,
we
must also keep
in
mind
that
many
of the
students trained
in
humanist schools were princes
or
patricians
who in
later
life
were
not
obliged
to
earn
a
living
on the
basis
of
their humanist training,
as were
the
teachers
and
secretaries,
but
were active
as
churchmen
or
statesmen, bankers
or
merchants. Many
of
them were patrons
of
humanist
scholarship
and
literature,
but
some were distinguished
and
productive
scholars
and
writers themselves
in
their leisure time. Pius
II
continued
to
write when
he
was
a
cardinal
and
pope,
and
many humanists happened
to be
bishops,
clerics
or
monks,
or
members
of the
ruling circles
in
Florence
or
Venice.
13
Moreover, after
the
middle
of the
fifteenth century,
we
encounter many professionals, lawyers
and
physicians,
as
well
as
theologians,
who
had
received
a
more
or
less thorough humanist education
in school
or at
university
and who
became humanist scholars
or
writers
in
their spare time,
or
even applied
the
standards
of
humanist scholarship
to
their professional work
and
thus
helped
to
transform traditional
and
medieval
subjects. Finally,
we
should
not
forget another more modest
activity
which provided
a
living
for a
large number
of
humanist scholars,
that
is, the
book trade.
The
manuscript book
had
traditionally served
the
needs
of
monastic
and
cathedral libraries,
or of
ecclesiastical,
princely
and
noble collectors,
and
later
of
university professors
and
students. During
the
fourteenth
and
fifteenth centuries,
there
was a new
demand
for
classical
Latin
texts
and for the
writings
of
contemporary scholars.
We
find many
humanists
who in
their youth
or in
periods
of
unemployment worked
as
copyists
or
calligraphers
and
were employed
by
princely
or
patrician
patrons
who
started
or
expanded their
own
private libraries,
by
successful
11.
Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, served as secretary at the imperial court; Philippus
Callimachus
in Poland; and Polydore Vergil in England.
12.
Among them we find M. A. Sabellico and Pietro Bembo; on humanism and historiography, see
Cochrane
1981; Kelley 1970a.
13.
The last group includes Donato Acciaiuoli, Alamanno Rinuccini and Giannozzo Manetti in
Florence; Francesco and Ermolao Barbaro, Leonardo and Bernardo Giustiniani in Venice.
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