THE PROTEAN FACE

OF RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

By LAURO MARTINES

John Locke held that children of the poor could be put to work
before the age of four.' At the time this view would not have been
considered extreme. The chronic need for wages in early-modem
Europe made the physical labor of children an everyday matter. As
Piero Camporesi argues, in labor-intensive, subsistence-wage socie-
ties, where famine and hunger were so embedded in consciousness
that people fantasized strange breads and occasionally hallucinated
on rotten grain, it is no wonder that the poor relied upon the
manual labor of their children.^ The Italian humanist Antonio
Ivani obseived in the 1460s that "to get enough food for their
stomachs is almost their only concern."' And when we speak of the
poor of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, we mean some
fifty percent of the urban and rural populations, as currently repre-
sented by demographers and economic historians.
What I propose must be self-evident: that the educational pro-
gram of the humanists necessarily excluded the large majority of
people. Apart from the fact that children could not be in both field
and classroom at the same time, most early-modem Europeans
could never accumulate the surpluses or saving^s required to dress
and feed schoolchildren, buy books, and pay teachers or tutors.

• Heniy Richard Fox Bourne, The Ufe tfjohn Lathe, 2 vols. (London. 1876), 2:38S«5. The
claim appears in a well-known memorandum, here reproduced.
' In A Aim Solu^ggio (Bologna: II Mulino, 1980).
' In /{ PniJtnD pedagopco del rinasdmento, ed. Felice Battaglia (Bologna: Sansoni, 1944), p.
161.

105
106 RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

And if by some chance the gifted child of a tenant farmer or urban

laborer happened to be schooled in Latin by the local priest or
parson, and then went far beyond this to a full humanistic educa-
tion, he would enter into a new world, another life, and be forever
lost as a representative of his native part ofthe population.
Christianity could claim to be universally beneficial in scope be-
cause it offered something to all people, even to converts from
Islam or Judaism. But how could humanism make any such claim in
that hungry world? With its ten to twelve years of full-time study,
with its emphasis on Latin and then Greek, on classical poetry,
rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy, and with its resolute avoid-
ance of any skill that might at once be utilitarian (aside perhaps
from teaching), what could humanism ofTer to most sectors of the
population? The answer is, damned little. And what now strikes us
as obvious, when the question is so bluntly put, must have been all
the more obvious to the contemporaries of Renaissance humanists.
But let us be fair: the humanists never asserted that the intensive
study of the classical languages and literatures aimed to benefit or
illumine the multitudes of people in their everyday pursuits. Such a
claim would have been mad. What they did claim was that the studia
humanitatis could both seive and benefit the society at large. More
specifically, they meant that by presenting the wealth and scope of
the classical experience, as observed in classical literature, to those
who rule and lead society, humanists were educating an elite of
men to govem more wisely and to stand in the public eye as models
of political and moral rectitude.
In the proposal to lead the leaders, to educate the ruling class for
the good of the whole community, there was humbug and mystifi-
cation. For even getting little princes, aristocrats, and merchant
oligarchs at the age of, say, six or seven and schooling them in the
classics for the next ten years, was it likely that our humanists would
thus be able to change the world? Leonardo Bnini, Vittodno da
Feltre, Guarino Guarini, Erasmus, John Colet, and others to some
extent thought so; but looking back, we can see that their expecta-
tions were as realistic as the gold of leprechauns. In any case,
learning would also have to move the other way—^humanists would
not only teach but also be taught: any. local or regional ruling class
would make them bend the knee, scurry for jobs and dignities, and
harness their classical learning or their elite program of education
to the sendee of hallowed authority. If the passionate and generous
IAURO MARTINES 107

message of Christianity had not, in more recent times, already

made European princes and oligarchies more just or more hu-
mane, was the ancient world going to do this, with its lesson of
urbanity and hedonism?
In "The Social Worid of the Florentine Humanists,"^ I estab-
lished that the humanist movement in Florence had close ties with
the Florentine ruling class, with its political ideals, with the swank of
public office, with the marriage and investment customs of the
upper<lass families, with friendship networks, and with the fashion-
ing of a humanist public image. The costs of education were not
overlooked. The inquiry sought to fit the phenomenon of human-
ism into the Florentine urban saucer of compact social and political
animation. The fortunes and success of humanism cannot be
understood without taking into account the input and encourage-
ment of the Florentine upper class; and this class, in fostering the
humanist program, necessarily tailored the lessons of the ancient
world to its own ambitions or self-imagery. Wherever the educa-
tional messj^e of humanism won the day in Italy—^whether in Mi-
lan, Rome, or Venice—thereby making classical studies foremost in
the schooling of boys up to the age of sixteen or seventeen, there
humanism was collaborating with local ruling groups.
Humanism in itself had no strict or narrow political ideology. But
it did not exist in itself. Consequently, it spoke up for princely rule
or for republican government; and it could plump for absolute
power under kingship or, instead, favor republican states based
upon an educated urban nobility and haute bourgeoisie. What it did
not and could not do was to promote political views that were in any
sense democratic. Humanism was too much a creature of its times,
and nowhere in the early-modern European worid could it have
found a setting both democratic and sustaining enough to tum its
vision of study into a cultural program for the common man, not to
speak of the common woman. In short, in its essence—^its concep-
tion of education—humanism was not buUishly conservative, for it
could be used to help accomplish diverse ends, but neither could it
stand above its times and be more enlightened. In the world as it
was, humanism had to represent itself as conservative, in some
places even archly so.
Although bounded by the limits of its age. Renaissance human-

* Ph.D. diss.. Harvard University, I960.

108 RKNAISSANCE HUMANISM

ism had a variety offices: a kind of militant, mercantile, republican

face at Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century; an aristo-
cratic and rather staid republican face at Venice; a clerical, curial,
and monarchical face in Rome; a princely face at Milan where, as
servitor to the Visconti and Sforza dynasties, humanism lent its
voice to autocracy and political expansionism; and finally a feudal
face at Naples,-''' where it both served the kingdom's warrior mag-
nates and praised the Aragonese monarchy to the heavens. 1 would
even add to this the face of small-town humanism, smartly attested
at Arezzo, where a line of schoolmasters and strong local pride nur-
tured the study of the classical langruages, so much so that the town
exported humanist teachers to Florence and other centers.** If we
needed additional proof of humanism's adaptability, it would
suffice to point to its recruitment, in the profoundly contentious
sixteenth century, by both Protestants and Catholics, but also by
those, like Erasmus, who sought to .stand outside either camp, and
later on even by skeptics such as Montaigne.
In seeking a prominent presence, and therefore in adapting to
the ruling classes of its world, how could humanism really make a
plea for the classical education of women? It happens that a few
women managed to acquire one, but they were educated, in a
striking number of cases, by their own fathers (who occasionally,
like Sir Thomas More, advised their daughters to disguise their
learning), or they were the daughters of princes and erudite aristo-
crats, hence rare creatures indeed and favored by exceptional cir-
cumstances.' The Venetian humanist patrician Francesco Barbaro
in 1416 expressed the wish that women be trained only in practical
household matters;" the humanist educator Maffeo Vegio in 1460
called for the adolescent girl to be reared "on sacred teachings, to
lead a regular, chaste, and religious life and to devote all her time

''Jerry H. Bentley, PoUlics and CuUurr m Renaissance Naples (Princeton: Princeton L'niversin-
Press, 1987), pp. 26&«8.
" Robert Black. "Humanism and Education in Renaissance Arezzo." / Taiti Studies: Essays in
Ihe Renmssana, vol. 2 (Florence: Villa I TatU, 1987), pp. 171-237.
~ Margaret L. King, "Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renais-
sance," in Albert Rabil, Jr., ed. Renaissanee Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legfuy. .S vols.
(Philadelphia: Univeraily of Pennsjrhania Press, 1988), 1:434-53.
" See his De n uxaria ("On Wifely Duties"), trans. Benjamin G. Kohl, in Benjamin G. Kohl
and Ronald G. Witt, eds.. The Earthly RepmUic: Italian Humanists on Gouemmenl and SoriOy
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 18»-228.
LAURO MARTINES 109

to female labors."^ Thus humanism gave refuge to most of the

political and social prejudices of its day, and these were unequivo-
cally androcentric, or "^hallocentric." Inevitably, therefore, certain
learned women—Laura Cereta, for instance, and Isotta Nogarola—
were jeered at by contemporaries or even, as in Nogarola's case,
accused of incest, promiscuity, and "filthy lust."'" Here too the
biases of the age are evident in the image of woman as the vessel of
virtue or as the receptacle of disgusting carnality.
Let us now close in on our humanists and consider a range of
particulars, with a view to pinning down the shifts and changeability
in their program.
The foct that some of them were brilliant social climbers, espe-
cially in the early history of humanism, should be well enough
known 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, born
into the middle classes or into professional families, climbed, by
their 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 the
peninsula's ruling elites by composing encomia, flattering histories,
state letters, biographies, defenses, orations, and dedications. All
were foreigners" in that they achieved their most clamorous suc-
cesses not in their native towns but rather in neighboring or more
distant cities, where, to begin with, they would have been regarded
as outsiders or noncitizens. Such advancement in that parochial
fifteenth-century world must be seen as an astonishing achieve-
ment. This profitable use of the skills of the new erudition—much
more than of its presumed ideological content—identifies the in-
strumental side of humanism. As long 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-
tury England, as a feature in the so-called educational revolution

" Cited by Charles de La Ronciere. Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance," in
Geoiges Dub>-, ed., A Histaiy ttf Private IJji, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univenity Press,
1988), 2:282.
'"King, 1:442-43.
110 RKNAISSANCE HUMANISM

then seen in primary and secondary schools," the determined

teaching of grammar, classical history, and literature procured the
rise of many a man to bench, high pulpit, and govemment—men
often come from the new gentry and on-the-make yeomanry. But
when opportunity constricted and movement upward eased off, as
in England by the early seventeenth century or in Italy with its
crushing war costs after 1500, then the cachet of classical learning
could be rendered more difficult to attain, chiefly by raising fees
and requirements, in order more easily to exclude the socially
unwanted. 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 as
an influence on humanism. In their remarkable essay "The School
of Cuarino," Anthony Grafton and Lisajardine argue that the rou-
tines of study there, employing a capital emphasis on memorization
by rote and on predigested study aids, produced "obedience and
docility"—character traits much to the liking of autocratic Renais-
sance rulers.'^ There is much to be said for this analysis of Guar-
ino's school at Ferrara. But I should like to add what seems to me to
have 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 turn
out obedient and docile personalities, whatever the methods of
instruction, and particularly in a setting where the children of
princes and noblemen were the chief concerns of the school. This
was no place for the inculcation of individual initiative. Again, we
are talking about the world around the pedagogical commitment to
the Latin and Greek classics, although, to be sure, the rote memori-
zation of predigested material could easily be tumed to help 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-
tionaries, courtiers, lawyers, monks, Jesuits, and posh merchants.
We can only speculate about the ways in which William Cecil (Lord
Burghley) and Sir Francis Walsingham, two great functionaries of

" Lawrence Stone, T h e Educational Revolution in England, 1560-1640,' Past and Ptamt.
28 (1964): 41-80; and Joan Simon, EAuntion and SocUtf in Tudor En^and (Cambridge:
Cambridge Universiiy Press, 1966).
" In I'rDm Humanism lo Ihe Humanities: Education and the IJbmUArts in Mj/lcmlA- and .'Sxleenlh-
Cenlufy Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 1-28.
LAURO MARTINES 111

Queen Elizabeth I, exploited their preparation in the classics

(Burghley in particular) to help them conduct high policy. Walsing-
ham urged in a private letter that the study of classical history and
the classical books on the state (by Plato and Aristotle) be applied

to these our dmes and states and see how they may be made
serviceable to our age, or why to be rejected, ihe reason
whereof well considered shall cause you in process of time to
frame better courses both of action and counsel, as well in your
private life as in public government, if you shall be called."

Here was a claim, indeed a cliche—^humanism at the service of

government—that went right back to the early humanists, who used
it, as a realistic enough prescription, to help them "sell" the classical
syllabus to the Italian ruling elites.
Nor was it history only that the humanists linked to present expe-
rience by representing such study as relevant and usefiil to contem-
poraries. It was also eloquence, the art of rhetoric, the pursuit of
which constituted, they argued, the best education for entry into
public life: thus Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Vegio, Enea Silvio Pic-
colomini, and others. But in fifteenth-century Italy, public life was
the exclusive business of princes, m^nates, and entrenched oligar-
chies, so that yet once more humanists here were speaking directly
to the ruling groups and striving to put the science of rhetoric, all
the mysteries of eloquence, at the disposal of the lords and masters
of Italy. The study of poetry and ethics also served in the same
collaboration, for the truly eloquent man was meant, in the eyes of
most hiimanists, to combine his oratorical skills with wisdom and
example, both of which were to be gleaned from classical poets and
philosophers, as well as from historians. In this fashion, the core of
the humanist curriculum was rendered timely and pragmatic by its
ties with the needs of the political culture and civic life of the
Italian city«tates. No wonder that within a single generation, say
1390 to 1420, humanism captured the allegiance of the most alert
and forward-looking members of the urban ruling classes. And for

" In Joanna Martindale, ed., En^ish Humanism: Wyatt to Coaley (London: Cnxrni Helm,
1985) p. 35. The humanist linking of letters with public life also turns out. in &ct, to have
had medieval roots. See C. Stephen Jaeger, "dathedral Schools and Humanist Learning, 950-
1150,' Deutsche Vlerle^issdaift fir IMeraturmsseiaihafi iiiuf Gasttsffsdudtlt, 61 (1987): 569-
616.
112 RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

the first time, humanists were suddenly elevated to leading univer-

sity positions—at Florence, Pa\ia, and Bologna.
Like the humanist social climbers, others also brought their re-
quirements to the program of humanism. The Society of Jesus, in
the seventeenth century, used classical study to help prepare Jesuits
to go out and mix with the members of their select upper<lass
constituencies, with an eye to fortifying Rome and Roman Ciatholi-
cism. But long before this, eminent courtiers, in their office as
advisors to princes, had found an ideal preparation in humanism.
The recipe is set forth in Baldassare Castiglione's celebrated 1528
dialogue, // libro del cortegiano (The Courtier). In addition to recom-
mending training in warfare, music, and art, this work calls for the
study of classical history and literature as the fonts of urbane and
worldly knowledge, a knowledge to be spliced in turn with the
lessons of contemporary experience. The aim was to fashion not a
technocrat or narrow specialist but a fully rounded man. In finan-
cial terms, however, he was meant to live on the lai^e income from
his considerable estates. If, then, Jesuits and courtiers found a use-
ful mooring in the classics, can we imagine that some of Italy's
merchants and bankers did not? Of this sort were Palla Strozzi,
Cosimo de'Medici, Agnolo Pandolfini, and even Matteo Palmieri,'*
rich burghers and oligarchs who conducted embassies to popes and
princes and who were closely associated with the humanist move-
ment in Florence. What had humanism to offer them, apart from
the political and moral lessons of antiquity as applied to the experi-
ence of politics and civil life in the fifteenth century? It also offered
them, I allege, some special excitement, some shock of recognition,
produced by the reading of those classical orators and historians
whose picture of the world reflected in part their own.
It is well known that the protohumanists of the late thirteenth
century (e.g., Brunetto Latini, Lovato Lovati, and Albertino Mus-
sato) were reading Cicero, Seneca, and other classical Latin writers
with much interest and care. Yet they had no large enough body of
citizens around them sufficiently primed and committed to support
their enthusiasm for ancient letters. By the end of the fourteenth
century, however, there was such a body of citizens, and this was all

" On these and others of their sort, see Christian Bee, CuUum e sodtid a Fmmt nell'eld dtlla
Rmascmua (Rome: Salemo editrice, 1981), pp. 132-244; and Martines, The Soaal World itfthe
Fbumline Humanists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 303-.50.
LAURO MARTINES 113

the endorsement required—a strong extemal legitimation—^for the

fledgling humanist movement to take off.
I want at this point to draw on a strategy borrowed from current
critical theory in order to take a shortcut. Speaking of the later
fourteenth century, let us see the Christian religion and the ver-
nacular culture as a rich and elaborate system of signification. This
great "text" had in it parts of the classical code—the books of the
Roman law, as well as some Cicero, Vergil, Livy, and others; but the
Roman poets and prose writers had been transcoded largely in
accordance with the ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity. Around
1400, most individual experience drew its meaning and significance
from this established semiotic order. But novelty—peue Jacques
Derrida—could enter into this system only from the outside and
only, therefore, through its contact with direct or daily experience.
Our comprehensive semiotic system, i.e., the culture of the day, was
so 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 and
more classical books into the established system of signification
(books increasingly read in a new key), we may safely assume that
Italian urban experience was no longer deriving sufficient meaning
and direction from that great established text, the dominant net-
work of values. These values were limited both by the conceptual
scope of late chivalric and folk culture, as expressed for instance in
Boccaccio's Decameron, and by the old ideals of asceticism, crisply
summed up in all the commonplaces that harped on "this blind
world" ('sto cecco mondo), "this vain world," "this vale of tears," and so
forth. But it was the experience first of the urban ruling elites that
needed 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 of
all other groups and classes in Italy's bustling cities, ^ s o important
in this connection was the large array of Latin^writing lawyers (no-
tat) who were regularly engaged in the high-level administrative
work of day-to-day government. Among these men, as among the
political leaders, asceticism was no longer enough, and neither
were the ludic values of Boccaccio's world—^rustic humor, folk wis-
dom, burgher cunning, or the chivalric emphasis on the duet of
love and generous deed. The ideological perimeters of this late-
medieval society encompassed no views with enough amplitude to
114 RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

allow citizens to see beyond Christianity and beyond the immediate

world, not in order to replace Christianity—^by no means—^for
there was nothing rebarbative here apart from asceticism. Most
important, seeing beyond Christianity enabled the humanists to
conjure up an alternative image which, by its radical alterity and
otherness, would serve to corroborate and vitalize the complexity
and value, the worldly value, of present-day experience.
We can see now why the humanists were able to mount a success-
ful challenge to the educational establishment and why they were
able to encode more and more of the classical syllabus into the
semiotic network of late-medieval culture. With their optimistic
tone and pursuit of a great, pre-Christian civilization, they offered a
vision of indisputable otherness (classical Rome and Greece), and
this foil provided at once a contrast to and a flattering validation of
urban, upper-class experience. Republican magnates at Florence,
Venice's humanist patricians, Lombard princes and their courtiers,
the legal intelligentsia, top-level administrators—all could look to
the ruling elites of the ancient world and say, "they were rather like
us—different, not Christians, yet like us." To this extent, then,
Italian municipal experience was released from its moorings in the
traditional system of signification, with all its ascetic, late<hivalric,
burgher-provincial, and folk-oriented signs. The new humanist vi-
sion was grander, more historical, more given to comparisons. The
trend was secular. And those strong elements of positive worldliness
in urban experience, hitherto denied sufRcient worth and reso-
nance by the old culture's semiotics, could now be drawn out, ex-
amined, and approved by educated men, because they were finding
equivalents in the urbanity and materialism of classical antiquity.
Evidently, then, Jakob Burckhardt's emphasis on the secularism
of the Renaissance in Italy was not mistaken. This feature, however,
must Brst be pinned to the municipal experience of the peninsula's
ruling groups, an experience now buoyed and culturally legiti-
mated by their exciting encounter with the Latin and Greek clas-
sics. The force of this sharpened worldly experience would then
naturally find its way into the art and architecture of the early
Renaissance. This process of secularization, of a deepening worldli-
ness, depended upon the capacity to take some of the positive value
assigned to the experience of the world and to disengage it from all
Christian signifiers. In other words, some part of experience—such
as the unfettered quest for political power or the quest for personal
LAURO MARTINES 115

fame and glory—had to verge on being self-validating, and precisely

here is where the image of antiquity as entertained by the human-
ists came critically into play. For their new sense of a common
humanity, transcending time and religion and making them party
to a history that stretched from Homer to Constantine, endowed
the agents and products of the new learning with the will to see
some aspects of worldly experience as valid in their own right and
requiring no Christian seal of approval. As far as we can tell, all of
our humanists were believing and perhaps practicing Christians,
but their study of, and admiration for, the world of pagan antiquity
encouraged them to consider letters, profits, and politics as enter-
prises that could rightly go on without a necessary grounding in
religion, or at least, in the case of profits, without a religion of
asceticism. Secularization, as a trend aided and abetted by classical
learning, is the face of modernity in the humanist movement, even
if it applied only to the educated men of the upper classes, those
most able to ims^ine themselves in the literary and archaeological
remains of the ancient world.

Early Renaissance humanism was an educational program, a

clutch of linguistic and rhetorical skills, a self-image found in antiq-
uity, and a rich body of learning, with man and the world as its pole-
stars. However, classical learning and philological expertise could
be yoked at any moment into the service of Christianity, beginning
with biblical inquiry as early as Valla's In Navum Testamentum Adnotor
tiones, written in 1449 but not published until 1505, when it was
issued by Erasmus. Subsequently, humanism was to have both
Catholic and Protestant strains, and would finally develop ties with
skepticism, deism, and philosopical materialism. The many faces of
humanism thus came forth from verbal skills and a very general
vision, into which could be cast first one content and then another
or even conflicting ideologies. Which of its faces humanism would
put on depended entirely on the needs and structures of the imme-
diate world around, but in a labor-intensive society, the high cost of
a first-class education always compelled the proponents of classical
study to cater in particular to the professional and upper classes.
If we think of culture as an elaborate semiotic system, a realm of
cultural poetics, the achievement of the humanists was in their
introduction of more and more of the classical library into the
commanding parts of that great system of signification, late-medie-
lltt RKNAISSANCE HUMANISM

val and Renaissance culture. The consequences of this historic tran-

scoding can be instantly perceived in two of Niccolo Machiavelli's
works. The Prince and The Discourses on the Decades of Livy. His con-
ception of power and public life here pivots on modes of political
action that city-state Italians had known and practiced over the
course of nearly two centuries, since the fourteenth century. They
practiced power politics, they assessed politics entirely in opportun-
istic and self-interested terms, they fought continually for supreme
authority in their communes, they eliminated enemies at will, they
knew in practice that politics had its own rules, and they employed
whole panoplies of political stratagems. Yet the most determined
analysis of tyranny in the fourteenth century, De Tyranno, the work
of the great jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato, is a strict legal and
juridical inquiry, not a treatment in discursive political terms. The
language of political discourse in fourteenth-century Italy, even in
the lucubrations of cold-eyed chroniclers, was still too greatly
inflected by a religious and moral vocabulary. In detached talk
about conflict in public life, speech and perception were not yet
secular or sharp enough to peel away the accumulations of dire
religious censure, leaving only the forces of interest, expedience,
political reasoning, and "natural" conflict. Not until the fifteenth
century, in the writings, for instance, of Bruni and of humanists in
the pay of Francesco Sforza, do we get a more fully secular view of
politics and history;''' and this, I argue, arose from the intermin-
gling of urban political experience and the worldly semiotics of
Roman 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 historians—Livy, Sal-
lust, Suetonius, and Tacitus—sharpened and highlighted fifteenth-
century political experience. Thus after 1512, in exile and out of
favor with the Medici, Machiavelli entered into a greatly enriched
discourse when he mingled a humanistic education with his four-
teen years in the commotion of public office in his writings on the
nature of political power, political constituencies, and matters of
health, sickness, and corruption in the body politic.
In reflecting on the fortunes of humanism, we tend, when zoom-
ing in on faces, to pick out the celebrities—Bruni, Valla, the Bar-

•" Gary Ianziti, Humamstic HisUniopaphy under the Sfimas: PbUtics and Pn^mganda in Fipeenth-
mUury Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988).
LAURO MARTINES 117

baros, Poliziano, Pontano, or later on Erasmus, More, Colet,

Lefevre d'Etaples, Melanchthon, and so on. But numerous sources
reveal more humble scholars and Latinists, who hired themselves
out as schoolteachers and private tutors, even in small towns, and
who occasionally had trouble collecting their fees, as we hear from
Vegio.'^ The marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d'Este, rather mis-
treated a young scholar, Niccolo Panizzato, whom she had enticed
to Mantua in 1492 to tutor her in classical literature. "But no
sooner had he arrived in Mantua than he was dismissed because
Isabella decided that she was, after all, too busy to resume her
studies. The young man was bitterly disappointed."" Did such
men—modest tutors and teachers—make up the undenvorld or
backside of humanism? The implied shadows here touch on rela-
tions between ruling groups and humanists, on an aspect that often
must have made for strain and acrimony in the tangent inequalities,
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 scholars
trained in "the style of Paris" (humanism) achieved some financial
security in the new lay schools of Bordeaux, Lyon, Grenoble, and
other lesser towns. Here too, however, there were stipendiary tiers:
yearly payment of about eighty pounds (Uvres) for the senior
teacher or principal (the one with the best humanistic education),
and from fifty down to twenty-five pounds for those with a lesser
preparation in Greek or in the more literary and rhetorical aspects
of the humanistic program.'^
We will not adequately understand the history of humanism until
we also study the lives of the throngs of teachers and tutors who
composed 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 contact
between small-time humanist teachers and their upper-class em-
ployers. How did these teachers see themselves? Did they identify
with the celebrities? How did they dress, mix, and comport them-

'" Cited in Lauro Martines. POwer and ImapnaUm: dfySUUes m Rmaissance lUitf (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. 1979). p. 207; see also Paul F. Grendler, Scliootuigm Renausanu luUf: Ultmcy
€md Leammg, 1300-1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). pp. 15-21.
" Martines, Power and /moffnaHon, p. 228.
'" Geoifre Huppen. PubUeSehoob in Rmaissanee Fnmu (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1984), pp. 5 ( » 2 .
118 RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

selves? Were they regarded and treated as servants by their employ-

ers? Did they seek to marry up? Were they mere grammarians and
teachers, with no lively interest in the classical literary legacy, or did
they collect books and nourish attitudes shaped in part by years of
reading Cicero, Vergil, Livy, and perhaps Martial or Catullus? How
itinerant or how stay-at-home were they?
These questions call for an anthropology of Renaissance human-
ism, for a study of the everyday life of^ humanists, including all their
rituals. We shall need to know about their marrij^es, their habits of
prayer, and their relations with neighbors, parish priests, and local
religious confraternities. What names did they give to their chil-
dren and who held these to baptism? Did our obscure teachers and
tutors, in their eating habits or modes of dress, ever seek models
taken from antiquity? Answers to these questions would tell us what
humanism and the classical world meant in their daily lives, apart
from merely providing a means of subsistence.
The social climbers among 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 of
learning, law and medicine. They maintained that these fostered
money grubbing and that their own mission demanded greater
intellectual scope and served "noble" ends, such as education or
the civil community. As new men on the make, born into a society
in which old money always loomed as an ideal, they had to seem to
be above lucre. But not all their claims were complacent nonsense.
Montaigne and Walsingham, some 150 years later, could still fully
appreciate the study of classical literature and history as the best
preparation for boQi public and private life, and this tells us that
the early humanist agenda already accommodated broad civic and
socially oriented views.
How rich or ample was the educational program of humanism?
Worded in this rather quantitative fashion, the question is wrongly
put and cannot be answered. Let us take a different route.
The European literary canon can do perhaps without Ben Jon-
son (though I personally would deplore this), one of the most
classical of all English poets, but what would the canon be without
William Shakespeare's Roman plays, without Jean-Baptiste Racine's
Andromaque and Phedre, or even without the classical erudition that
courses through the works ofJohn Milton, John Dryden, Alexander
IAURO MARTINES 119

Pope, and James Joyce? In a celebrated exaggeration, T. S. Eliot

once observed that "Shakespeare acquired more essential history
from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Mu-
seum."'^ He was suggesting that classical literature is lodged in the
literature of Europe as influence, guide, and rival, and that writers
have continually helped themselves to its offerings. European litera-
ture would not have been nearly so rich, nearly so eloquent and
subtle, without the input of the classical tradition. Western litera-
ture and historical writing are virtually inconceivable without the
legacy of humanism. Nor can we imagine English, French, or, say,
American literature without the impact of the Bible. And in the
sweep of time from Titian to Jacques-Louis David, what about the
history 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 compels us to defend the history of humanism, for all its conniv^
ance with ruling elites, political scoundrels, and the devil.
In the rise of scholarship of the sort that underpins the very
mode of knowledge presented at this conference, humanistic learn-
ing was decisive and fundamental. 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 historical
contexts, on the search for ascertainable facts, on getting the values
of words and phrases right, and on the secularity of history. I would
also note the new disciplines that came forth from classical study—
archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and topography. The im-
plied philological know-how, or keen historical sense, of the most
talented of the early humanists has often been noted. Let it be
singled out here as one of the essential skills or sensitivities in their
preparedness. Their heightened sense of history, however, was not
something they had picked up from the classics in some simple
fashion, otherwise the prehumanists of the thirteenth century
would have attained the same degree of perspicacity. Rather, the
new historical sense was more allied to the bold secularism of
fifteenth-century politics and thereby to a more stimulating con-
frontation with the otherness of antiquity.
Whatever we may say about it, humanism was never a narrow
program of cultural reformation. An intensive schooling in lan-

'" The Saend Wood: Essays on Poetij and CriUeam (London: Methuen, 1928), p. 52.
12(1 RENAISSANC;K H U M A N I S M

guages, literature, history, and moral philosophy could not possibly

result in a cramped or specialized preparation. And the slant, more-
over, was public and social. If in the later fifteenth century, in
response to the autocratic rise of the Medici family, humanism at
Florence drew away self-protectively from politics, the like did not
necessarily happen elsewhere—not at Venice, for instance, in the
sixteenth century, nor in the provincial humanist schools of Renais-
sance France, where boys were regularly sent to be prepared for
careers in public life.
The humanist emphasis on effective writing and public speaking
was a boon for the ruling classes. It was also an emphasis on the
means of moving or motivating people, which involved the ability to
appeal 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 of its stress on a common (classical) literature for the edu-
cated and therefore on a richer semiotics of Christian culture and a
greater storehouse of meanings. The prevailing social structures—
not humanism—excluded the lower classes and the vast majority of
women from this cultural fund, but soon enough the classical and
the vernacular traditions would be drawn together in the work of
most leading poets, playwrights, and essayists.
What does this picture of the humanist enterprise portend for
our times? It certainly does not hail the blinkered, continuing study
of Latin and Greek, though there is no obvious reason to rule this
out. As I see it, humanism's lesson for us lies along two different but
connected routes. The first route is the enduring quest for a vision
of otherness, a vision of ideals and values different from ours, in the
face of which we may entertain a benignly competitive rivalry, not
in order to confirm our own complacencies but rather to identify
and question them. This encounter requires the study of foreign
languages and cultures, including computer languages, now made
all the more vital by the collapse of frontiers in a truly interlocking
world economy. Think of the European Economic Community and
of an emerging United States of Europe. Here and in the legacy of
humanism are strong invitations to an engagement with diversity,
and this means with diversity in our own communities as well.
The second route lies in a campaign against specialization and
intellectual provincialism. Most people see a university education as
the surest ticket to a career and economic security. This is the
LAURO MARTINES 121

university seen as trade school, and no doubt the institution has

major responsibilities along this line. But the university is also the
most serious of all our intellectual forums—our place of primary
and 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 the
social and moral obligation to consider the more complete life, the
larger cultural consciousness, and even the political alertness of
students. For students are not just potential producers and consum-
ers. They are also citizens—gregarious, inquisitive, and hopeful,
whose experience often will include confusion or disenchantment.
For this reason, they shall also need to dream and to be able to
imagine alternate worlds when in the company of grim realities. In
the human need to be both more knowing and more imaginative is
the 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 who are training for places at the university. For the teaching of
literature, history, or social-science units may terminate with the
conveying to others of a body of restricted subject matter. But the
intellectual obligation to understand that matter is primary, and
this requires the ability to relate it to larger wholes—to culture, to
the society, and to the flow of currents and countercurrents in the
sea of ideas.

University of California, Los Angeles