Schmitt C.B. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy
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Rhetoric
and poetics
737
ability
to
tune
his feigned matter 'to the highest key
of
passion' in 'moving'
his readers to 'well-doing'.
Movere
is more powerful
than
docere,
for it
creates the 'desire to be taught', and what greater good can poetry achieve
than
that
'it moveth one to do
that
which it doth teach? For, as Aristotle
saith, it is not
gnosis
but
praxis
must be the fruit. And . .
. praxis
cannot be,
without being moved to practice. . . .'
66
Sidney's
concluding allusion to the
Nicomachean Ethics
exposes an issue
that
is
evident throughout these discussions
of
the ethical function
of
rhetoric
and poetry, namely
that
many of their authors were in effect answering
Plato.
The early humanist defences of poetry, such as
Boccaccio's
De
genealogia
deorum
and Salutati's De
laboribus Herculis,
were addressed more
to countering ecclesiastical disapproval of literature in general. After the
dissemination
of
Plato's works in Latin translation the expulsion
of
the poets
from
the
Republic
became notorious, and generated both further attacks on
poetry in the Platonic mode and abundant defences. The accusations
that
poets
lie,
tell false tales about the gods, practise an imitation at
three
removes
from
reality and render the soul effeminate and corrupt through the
pleasures of verse or song were repeated in severe terms, at times in the
language
of
Catholic
theology at its most forbidding.
67
In defence, writers
could
revive the medieval concept of literature as allegory (a kernel of
virtue beneath a pleasing surface), assert
that
poets do not lie, justify
imitation on the grounds of
truth
to
life
or moral improvement or even
exonerate pleasure. The
delectare
of
Cicero
and Horace was invoked as the
main purpose
of
literature by some critics; others appealed to the authority
of
Aristotle's
Poetics,
which says nothing about
docere,
and therefore must
imply
that
pleasure is the sole end
of
poetry.
68
Another popular argument,
as we have seen, was
that
poetry and rhetoric were the most effective
arts
in
promoting virtue. The negative side of Platonism, then, might be said to
have
had a positive effect, increasing the ethical status
of
poetry and rhetoric
still
further. By analogy with Cato's definition
of
the orator as a good man
skilled
in speaking,
69
the theory arose
that
the poet had first to be a good
man, an idea
that
stretches from Strabo's
Geography
(1.2.5)
to Milton. As
Aulo
Parrasio formulated it in his commentary on Horace's
Arspoetica,
'it is
essential
that
the poet
himself
be a wise man,
that
he understand what things
are proper to a good man'.
70
66.
Sidney 1965, pp. no, 112. 67. Weinberg 1961, 1, pp.
255-9,
2
$7, 291,
313-14,
346.
68.
See Weinberg 1961, 1, pp. 25-6, 59, 316, 326, 410, 506, 559, 580,
11,
pp. 639-40, 665, 933.
69.
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria
xn.1-2:
'vir bonus dicendi peritus'.
70.
Parrasio 1531, f. 3
r_v
: 'Ante omnia oportet ipsum poetam esse sapientem, quae boni uiri sint
intelligat.
Quod non faciet, nisi ipse sit bonus, nisi omnibus abundet uirtutibus . . .'. Cited by
Weinberg
1961, 1, p. 97; see also pp. 27, 257, 266; Spingarn 1908, pp. 53-5.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
738 Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
But
Platonism had more positive things to offer Renaissance literary
theory. One was the concept of 'Ideas', which was
turned
from
that
of
'metaphysical substances existing outside the world
of
sensory appearances
as
well
as outside the human intellect' into 'notions or conceptions residing
in the mind of man'.
71
Ironically enough, the conversion of the Platonic
idea from its negative role as a judgement on the inferiority of artistic
activity
to a heightened description of the
artist's
possession of 'a glorious
prototype
of
beauty' in his own mind, a beauty
that
cannot be realised in the
finished work yet
will
permeate it with 'a beauty
that
is more
than
a mere
copy
of reality', was the work of
a
rhetorician, Cicero
(Orator
ii.7ff.).
The
importance
that
this concept came to have in later sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century art and literary theory is due in great
part
to Florentine
Neoplatonism. From this school, too, came the other influential Platonic
concept,
thefurorpoeticus,
as expounded in
Ion
(533—4) and
Phaedrus
(244ff.).
In Ficino's reformulation in the
Theologia
platonica,
book xm, poets are
second only to philosophers 'among those who separate themselves from
the body during
life',
acting as
vehicles
for God to speak through, singing in
their madness 'many admirable things which afterwards, when their fury
has lessened, they do not
well
understand
themselves'.
72
Although Ficino
was
largely responsible for the dissemination
of
this idea,
another important
intermediate was Horace's Ars
poetica,
with its accounts of Orpheus as 'the
holy
prophet of the gods' and the early poets as inspired teachers of
morality: 'honour and fame
fell
to bards and their songs, as divine'.
73
The
problem
that
this concept poses is its contradiction between a theory of
divine inspiration and one of rhetorical invention, with all its stress on
planning and craftsmanship. For this reason, while the vatic idea had some
influence,
as in Girolamo Fraccheta's
Dialogo
delfurorepoetico
(1581),
and in
Pontus
de
Tyard's
Solitaire premier, ou, prose des muses, et de la
fureur
poetique
(1562),
which has the full Neoplatonic theory
of
divine fury as the means by
which
the soul can regain its place in heaven, it was also opposed by critics
who
held to a
belief
in poetry as an art, with techniques to be mastered, and
as a form
of
knowledge.
Ronsard took up the vatic idea in his Ode
a
Michel
de
VHospital
in less extreme form, but it had vanished from French poetics by
71.
Panofsky 1968, p.6.
72.
Ficino
1964-70,11,
p. 203 (xin.3): 'quod multa furentes canunt et ilia quidem mirabilia, quae paulo
post defervescente furore ipsimet non satis intelligunt, quasi non ipsi pronuntiaverint, sed Deus per
eos
ceu tubas clamaverit'. See also Kristeller
1953a,
pp. 333-4.
73.
Horace, Ars poetica
391-401:
'Silvestris homines sacer interpresque deorum caedibus et victu foedo
deterruit Orpheus ... sic honor et nomen divinis vatibus atque carminibus venit'. Cf. also
Ovid,
Fasti
vi.5-6:
'Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus
illo.
Impetus
ille
sacrae semina mentis habet.'
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Rhetoric
and
poetics
739
1610.
74
Significantly, perhaps,
his
espousal
of
Platonic theory
did not
prevent Ronsard from continuing
as the
most meticulous corrector
and
reviser
of
his
own
poetry.
Although
the
main classical exemplars
for
Renaissance poetics
and
rhetoric were Aristotle,
Cicero,
Quintilian
and
Horace, some critics based
themselves
on
Plato. Notable among these
is
Francesco Patrizi
da
Cherso,
author
of
a number
of
original philosophical works. Patrizi was professor of
Platonic philosophy
at the
University
of
Ferrara,
and
then
at
Rome.
He
published
Discorso della diversità
dei
furori
poetici
(1553);
Parere
in
difesa
delV
Ariosto
(1585),
rejecting
the
Aristotelian criteria
of
a contemporary attack
on
Ariosto;
Della historia
and
Della retorica
(1562),
consisting of ten
dialogues each;
and ten
dialogues
Della poetica,
of
which
the
first two,
La
deca
istoriale
and La
deca disputata,
were published in 1586, the others
remaining
in
manuscript until recently. Much
of
Patrizi's work
is
polemical,
directed especially against Aristotle, whom
he
wished
to
have
removed from
the
university curriculum.
As he was an
ardent
Platonist
(drawing on Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean and other esoteric sources),
it
is
no surprise
that
Patrizi attacked rhetoric.
But he did so not in
terms
of the
Gorgias,
but
rather
because
he
believed
that
the
search
for
rhetorical
ornament
had
corrupted
the
original Adamic language, which
had
direct
access
to
things.
His
concept
of a
'retorica celeste'
is
connected
to
Neoplatonic ideas
of a
correspondence between
the
structure
of
human
discourse and
that
of
the cosmos, and
it
is significant
that
he
aligned himself
with
the
occultist Giulio Camillo,
who
wished
to
link rhetoric with
alchemy.
75
Other occult ideas in his work include the claim
that
the poet has
the power, through harmony
and
rhythm,
to
operate directly
on the
human soul
and to put it in
tune
with cosmic harmony;
the
idea
that
poetic
fury reaches
men via the
planets;
and a
belief
in
numerology. This
mathematical interest appears
in a
bizarre
way in
book
VII
of La
deca
ammirabile,
where
he
lists
five
elements
of the
credible
and
incredible
in
literature
and
states
that
the
poet must draw
on
both lists, giving twenty-
five
possible permutations. These, permuted with the
three
types
of
subject-
matter
for poetry (divine,
natural,
human),
give
225 possible combinations,
which
can be
permuted further according
to
eight traditional logical
categories (cause, effect, essence, action, passion, potency, knowledge
and
will)
to
give
33,600
forms
of
poetry.
76
Where other critics
of
Neoplatonic
74.
Weinberg
1961,1,
pp. 322-3 and index
5.v.
furor; Castor
1964,
pp.
26-41;
Renaissance Eloquence 1983,
p.
383
(Gordon).
75.
Testi umanistici sulla retorica 1953,
PP- 32-6;
Bolzoni
1974.
76.
Bolzoni
1980,
pp.
124-6.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
740
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
cast, such as Giordano Bruno, were rejecting the validity of rules, Patrizi
seems to revel in categorisation, classification and permutation.
The
main ideas in Patrizi's poetics are anti-Aristotelian. Where Aristotle
had defined imitation as the
true
activity of the poet, Patrizi, defying the
linguistic evidence and the laws
of
argument, claimed
that
every use
of
the
term
mimesis
in Aristotle has a different meaning, and hence
that
the concept
had no validity. He protests
that
Aristotle confused the terminology for epic
poetry, because his knowledge
of
Greek
was
defective;
he rejects the need for
unity of plot, and indeed the whole concept of plot. This thorough-going
negation of the
Poetics
finally
gives
rise to Patrizi's major positive idea,
directed against the concept of poetry as imitating the real and the
credible, as expounded by recent Aristotelians like Castelvetro and
Mazzoni.
Where they
state
that
poets should derive the marvellous from the
credible, Patrizi argues
that
the poet is 'the maker
of
the marvellous', so
that
poetry should be based on the incredible, for only this can produce the
marvellous.
77
Patrizi elevates the marvellous as an aesthetic category until it
becomes both a unifying idea for all levels of poetry and the criterion by
which
any poem can be evaluated.
All
poetic genres are subordinated to this
goal,
the final book
of
La
deca
ammirabile
investigating the ways in which the
marvellous can be produced in the reader's mind. While this can be seen as
an exercise in
psychology,
it also seems remarkably like a
return
to rhetoric
in its concern with the effects
of
the work
of
art on the audience. As with his
retention, despite himself, of the Aristotelian concepts of action, character
and passion, the direction and result of Patrizi's polemics were much
affected
by their targets. His negation
of
Aristotle
drove him into a position
determined by Aristotle, in inversion. Whether
that
was the direction he
might have taken on his own may be disputed, as
is
his status, no Renaissance
critic having received such divergent evaluations.
78
Finally, he seems to
draw less on Platonism
than
on his own idiosyncratic amalgam of later
traditions.
RHETORIC
AND
LITERATURE
Despite its amorphous and polysemic
nature
rhetoric (which here includes
poetics) was essentially a practical art, and in one sense can only be fully
77.
F. Patrizi [da Cherso]
1969-71,11,
p. 284, refers to 'il poeta' as 'il facitore del mirabile in verso'; see
also p. 307: 'E sia stabilita per ferma conclusione che la poesia habbia per oggetto lo incredibile,
perche questo e il vero fondamento del maraviglioso, che dee essere cosi principale oggetto d'ogni
poesia . . .'.
78.
The evaluation of Weinberg 1961, 1, pp. 64-5,
600-2,
11,
pp. 765-86 is scathing; Bolzoni 1980 is
uncritical; Hathaway 1962, pp. 9-20, 72-4, 88-91, 413-20, 423-6, 433-4, 455-7 is favourable.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Rhetoric
and poetics
741
evaluated by its fruits, in written and spoken language. The influence of
rhetoric on Renaissance
literature
is so vast
that
only a brief outline can be
attempted here, beginning with its role in education. The new scheme of
the
studia humanitatis,
evolved in the fifteenth century, liberated rhetoric
from
its connection with dialectic and the
quadrivium,
and gave it much
more prominence in university and school curricula. Studies of education
throughout Europe all paint the same picture, with local variations: a more
intensive study of the classical authorities, from the higher forms at school
throughout the university course, with a great stress on practical mastery.
79
Students would be taught the definitions of the main figures of rhetoric,
would
identify them in the margins of their books or would find them
already identified by some helpful editor, such as
Angel
Day in his
English
Secretorie
(1586). They would be taught to compose themes or orations
according
to the four or six-part models; would be exercised in the
three
genres;
would identify phrases and topoi; would commit all this informa-
tion to memory, and be ready to apply it in their daily exercises, weekly
disputations or annual examinations. Rhetorical processes were absorbed
into their intellectual metabolism.
All
textbooks were geared to producing proficiency
of
expression.
One
of
the most popular, with over 200 printings, was Erasmus' De
duplici copia
rerum
ac verborum commentarii duo,
first published in
1512
with a dedication to
John
Colet and St Paul's School, and constantly enlarged until 1534. This
handbook to acquiring the
'abundant'
or copious style discusses, first,
abundance
of
expression,
then
abundance
of
subject-matter. Under the first
head it itemises how to achieve variety by using the tropes of rhetoric, by
varying
sentence construction, by manipulating grammar and above all by
using synonymous phrases. It is essentially a guide to acquiring a larger
vocabulary,
an outline
of
the many different ways in which the same thing
can
be said, and although devoted to Latin, it left its mark on many writers.
It is systematic, but unlike the
standard
pattern
of
rhetoric books resembles
rather
a dictionary or thesaurus. Erasmus also produced two great
collections,
one of proverbs, the
Adagia
or
Adagiorum chiliades
(1508;
enlarged until
1533),
one of comparisons or
Parabolae sive similia (1514;
revised
until
1522),
together with books on letter-writing and preaching,
and a polemical work called
Ciceronianus
(1528). This is a contribution to
the controversy over Ciceronianism,
that
fashion for imitating the style of
Cicero
which led to absurd excesses, such as disciples taking a vow not to
read any other writer for
five
years, or using only words legitimised by
79.
Vickers 1981, pp.
116-24;
1982.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
742 Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
Cicero.
Erasmus satirises the extremists, especially those who try to write
about Christianity while limiting themselves to pagan Latin, but the
controversy raised in an acute form an issue
that
had been troublesome since
the beginnings of humanism, imitation. The confusion
of
imitation in the
sense of Aristotelian
mimesis
with this secondary sense
of
imitating other -
especially
classical
-
authors
provoked an extensive discussion
of
such issues
as the
nature
of
style,
originality and authority,
giving
rise to the quarrel of
the ancients and moderns. Since the rhetorical training recommended by
Erasmus and other pedagogues was based on the thorough study and
absorption of classical
literature
and philosophy, the issue was bound to
become
controversial; yet it tended to revolve always around the same
poles.
Perhaps the most perceptive comment is
that
of
Vives,
who
recommends the imitation of models as the best way to develop
individuality
(De
tradendis disciplinis,
book iv, cap. 4).
When
sixteenth-century writers studied the
five
stages of composition
they soon discovered
that
the one accorded most
attention
by rhetoric
books
was
elocutio.
Quintilian's emphasis on this as the most
important
part
of
the
arts
of language was taken to
heart
by many writers and teachers.
Credit
for this shift
of
direction has sometimes been
given
to Petrus Ramus,
who
tidied up the twin
arts
by assigning
inventio
and
dispositio
to
logic,
leaving
rhetoric the
three
remaining stages. Yet long before Ramus
inventio
was
neglected or transferred to dialectic, and
elocutio
came to be seen as the
essential domain of rhetoric.
80
In his
Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1519;
revised
until 1542) Melanchthon accepts the distinction
that
dialectic
'presents the bare
matter,
while rhetoric adds, so to speak the vesture of
words',
since 'it shows what is especially proper to rhetoric itself, namely,
style,
the very word from which rhetoric gets its name'. The
true
distinction
is
that
'the end or purpose
of
dialectic
is to teach, but the function
of
rhetoric
is
to move and stimulate minds and
thus
to affect a person'.
81
Melanchthon
refers here to the passage in Quintilian, already cited,
that
was to have the
greatest
effect
on German rhetoric, on the poets of the Pléiade, on French
manuals of
poetics
(which
give
most space to
elocutio)
and on many Italian
critics
of the sixteenth century, for whom poetics was essentially equated
with
elocutio.
Rhetoricians of
all
schools declared
that
elocutio
was the most
80. H.J. Lange 1974, pp. 35~4i-
81.
Melanchthon 1968, p. 83: 'Verum hoc interesse dicunt, quod dialéctica res
nudas
proponit.
Rhetorica vero addit elocutionem quasi vestitum. Hoc discrimen . . . ego tamen non repudio, quia
.
. . ostendit, quid rhetorica máxime proprium habeat, videlicet elocutionem, a qua ipsum
rhetorices nomen factum est'; p. 85: 'dialecticae finis est docere, rhetoricae autem permovere atque
impeliere ánimos, et ad adfectum aliquem traducere'.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Rhetoric
and poetics
743
important
part
of rhetoric: George of Trebizond did so;
82
in England
Sherry, Puttenham and Webbe did so; while Soarez in his influential De
arte
rhetorica
gives
most space to
elocutio,
his
third
book being longer
than
the
others since containing 'rules for expression it is more serviceable'.
83
Vives'
De
ratione
dicendi
(1533)
devotes itself entirely to
elocutio,
less to the
prescriptive
than
to the descriptive side, so becoming a manual on stylistics
for
the reader
—
a shift from orator to reader also made by Melanchthon.
Although
often misunderstood and despised by nineteenth-century and
more recent historians, the doctrine of
elocutio
was an integral
part
of
Renaissance rhetoric because it governed the final stage of composition,
with
its crucial power over the
will
and feelings. As Soarez put it, quoting
Cicero,
the orator has
three
aims:
'proof
is
a
matter
of
necessity; charm, of
pleasure; and persuasion, the essence
of
victory'.
84
The two
hundred
or so
figures and tropes were sometimes described as 'the
ornaments
of
rhetoric',
a
term
frequently misunderstood in the modern sense of a decoration not
functional to the overall aim. Yet
ornamentum
signified 'equipment or
accoutrements';
85
the
ornaments
were associated with
amplificatio,
not in
the medieval sense of expanding discourse but in the classical-Renaissance
sense of making it more intense and
effective;
and the whole system of
ornatus
was
'part
of
the emotional effect to be achieved by words'.
86
Study
of
classical
and Renaissance rhetoricians
will
show
that
they had a coherent
rationale for the figures of speech as being functional, persuasive, not
decorative. So Henry Peacham, in revising his
Garden
of
Rhetoric
in 1593,
adds many 'cautions' concerning the choice of figures, which should express
important
ideas more forcefully, and George Puttenham states the principle
most clearly: 'a figure is ever used to a purpose, either of beautie or of
efficacie'.
87
This awareness of the range of persuasive and mimetic effects
that
can be achieved through a knowledge
of
rhetoric accounts for the great
profusion of figures and tropes in so many of the major poets and
dramatists.
If
elocutio
influenced the detail of language, larger literary forms drew
directly from rhetoric. The
structure
of Sir Philip Sidney's
Apology
for
Poetry
follows
the seven
parts
of
a
classical oration, as defined by Thomas
82.
See
Dyck
1969, pp.
66-112;
Gordon 1970, pp. 42-4; Weinberg
1961,1,
pp. 109,
152,11,
pp. 804-5;
Monfasani
1976, pp. 282, 332; Plett 1975, pp. 77-9, 105.
83.
Soarez 1955, p. 266 (lib. in, cap. 1): 'Haec cum ita sint, merito tertius hie liber, qui elocutionis
precepta continet, ut duobus superioribus utilior est, sic etiam erit aliquanto longior.'
84. Ibid., pp. 265-6: 'Sed probare necessitatis est, delectare suavitatis, flectere vero victoriae.'
85.
Ong 1958a, p. 277. 86. Renaissance Eloquence 1983, p. 236
(Dyck).
87.
Puttenham 1936, p. 202;
Vickers
1970, pp.
83-121.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
744
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
Wilson's
Arte ofRhetorique.
The technique
of
rhetorical debate, in
utramque
partem,
where participants were aligned on opposite sides, was enormously
influential on medieval
literature
and was given a new lease of
life
by
humanist education. Its marks are
visible
in much Tudor drama, and it
is
one
of
the main sources for the mock-encomium, a genre
that
produced some
notable examples in the Renaissance, such as Erasmus'
Moriae encomium
(1511),
Agrippa's
De incertitudine et
vanitate
scientiarum et artium declamatio
88
and
John
Jewel's
Oratio
contra rhetoricam
(c.
1548).
Where the
standard
interpretation
of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's dispute with Ermolao
Barbaro has seen it as a straight attack on rhetoric, it can now be read as a
mock
one, parodying extremist logicians.
89
As for the genuine encomium,
since deliberative and judicial oratory as practised in classical antiquity
hardly survived the
fall
of Rome, epideictic became the most
important
genre. Most humanist oratory, sacred or secular, is epideictic, and
Renaissance rhetoricians tended to see the whole
of
literature
in these terms.
In his
Poetices libri
VII Scaliger arranges the literary genres according to the
rank
of being celebrated, from the most noble
—
hymns and paeans to the
gods
(the only form of poetry
that
Plato allowed in his state)
—
down
through odes, which praise brave men, tragedy, comedy and so on.
Similarly
Puttenham, in his
Arte
of
English
Poesie
(1589),
gives
a history and
typology
of the genres as forms of epideictic oratory.
90
All literary genres
were granted this function of praising good and denouncing
evil,
so
important
to the Renaissance ethical theory of literature, even lyric. The
major genre involved was epic, where the didactic-exemplary role ascribed
to the poet resulted in the demand for idealised characters representing
extremes of good and
evil.
In the
hands
of minor writers this demand
produced abstractions
that
may fit into an ethical scheme but are notably
lacking
in human interest.
Luckily,
the prescriptive bent of literary theory came after the main
flowering
of
Renaissance epic. Ariosto wrote before it, even if his critics
managed to force him into this schematic moral frame, and while Tasso
may have succeeded in retrospectively interpreting his own work in these
terms, as a creative writer he transcended them. The influence
of
epideictic
theory was not always beneficial, for if heroic poetry could be seen as a
collection
of positive exempla, an incentive to virtue, tragedy could be
downgraded to a
deterrent
exposure of
vice.
But the focus on praise or
blame meant
that
writers and readers were forced to take up a definite
88. Bowen 1972; Korkowski 1976. 89. Breen 1968, pp. 3-28; Panizza forthcoming.
90. J. C. Scaliger 1561, p. 6; Puttenham 1936 (book 1, chs.
10-16,
19, 20, 23-6.)
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Rhetoric
and poetics
745
attitude
to human behaviour, so
that
poetics and rhetoric did justify their
claim
to answer the question 'how to
live'.
The pressing task for modern
historians is to reconstruct in greater depth the attitudes and mentalities
of
a
culture in which eloquence, conceived as a moral force, was the most
important accomplishment of man.
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21
'What is history?' has been a controversial question from antiquity down to
the present, but it was never more vigorously discussed
than
in the
Renaissance ('Che cosa sia storia?' asked Dionigi Atanagi in 1559; eight
years later Giovanni Viperano, 'Quid sit historia?' and still a
quarter-
century after
that
Tommaso Campanella, 'Quid historia sit?').
1
Then, as
before and since, answers ranged widely
—
from simple happenings (res
gestae)
to God's 'grand design', from a
lowly
'art' to an elaborate 'science',
from a vague 'sense' to the 'most certain philosophy'
(certissima philosophia,
in the
phrase
of
Andrea
Alciato)
and indeed to a position, according to
Jean
Bodin,
'above all sciences'.
2
'History' could be objective or subjective,
could
refer to the past or merely to the memory thereof, to ancient
testimony or modern reconstruction; but in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries it rose grandly in the scale of western learning. Through the
classical
revival it became a liberal art and a literary genre; through the
Reformation it became a surrogate for the tradition of
'true
religion';
through Counter-Reformation controversy it became a highly organised
science.
In various ways history became a dominant mode
of
expression and
argument in the later sixteenth century, and its significance for the contacts
with
philosophy increased accordingly.
HUMANIST
THEMES
History in a modern sense was from the beginning bound up with the
humanist movement and was indeed a charter member of the
studia
humanitatis
(along with grammar, rhetoric, poetry and moral philosophy)
from which
that
movement took its name.
3
Not only was history
1.
Atanagi 1559, p. 66; Viperano 1567; Campanella 1954 (Rationalis philosophiae pars quinta,
historiographiae liber unus). The first two are reproduced in Theoretiker humanistischer
Geschichtsschreibung
1971.
2.
Alciato
1953, pp. 220—4 (Historiae encomium); Bodin 1951 (ist edn
1566),
p. 109.
3.
See Kristeller in this volume.
746
THE
THEORY
OF
HISTORY
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