Renaissance humanism

An important element in Renaissance scholarship was the cultural movement and world-view known as humanism.

The studia humanista taught by the umanista—grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy—was prevalent in schools and universities during the Renaissance. Ethics was taught rather than theology. There was a great interest in classical Latin, but interest in Greek only revived in the late 15th century.

Early 15th-century humanists were interested in classical Latin and not in mediaeval Latin, which was a different and simpler language with many neologisms. Renaissance scholars perceived ‘Gothic’ Latin as barbarous—they wanted to return to ‘Ciceronian’ Latin. Theirs was a highly pedantic approach to philology—they were technical and professional students of language—it was a radical departure aiming to understand the language and its structure on its own terms, to penetrate the truth of the ancient texts. They were textual scholars seeking the original text and in many cases saved the original texts from obscurity.

The humanists were also owners of a particular philosophical and ideological movement, which Baron calls ‘civic humanism’, particularly appropriate to the republican ideology of Florence. Leonardo Bruni’s Panegyric is a great expression of this philosophy.

Kristeller, Siegel and Hankins argue that it was just an educational programme—humanists could hold a variety of views, not all of them republican. F.W. Kent argues that the philological interests and pedantry were not ideological but reflected a desire to live the republican ideal to the full—this leads to a particular view of the city’s place in the world. For example, Niccolò Niccoli ate only off antique tableware and his use of Latin was obsessive, yet contemporaries agreed he was a crucial figure in persuading Florentines that the classical arts were important, that they had an urgent primacy over the modern age.

Gombrich says the Renaissance had its origins not so much in the discovery of Man as in the discovery of diphthongs (1967 Essays presented to Rudolf Wittkower on his sixty-fifth birthday).