Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror, by Patrick Baker

Extract

Renaissance humanism is a tough subject. The mainstream anglophone historiography has long seemed set on emphasising what it is not, and what it is ‘just’: not a philosophy, just a rhetorical movement, an educational programme, and so on. Add to this that the most influential of these historiographical paradigms are of pensionable age, and humanism can be a hard sell to students and fellow scholars alike. The most important recent work has by and large focused on the social context and social role of humanism, and yet there has remained an ideological hole in the middle of the movement. We know a great deal about what humanists did; the movement’s importance is evident in its omnipresence. But is there a there there? Why did humanism (qua humanism) matter, and why should it now?

With the state of the field in mind, it should be clear just how important Patrick Baker’s book is. He diagnoses the problem with this striking comparison: ‘To say that humanists worked in chanceries, wrote classicizing Latin, espoused a certain form of education, convinced elites of the normative value of antiquity—but without saying why they thought any of this was worth doing—would be like minutely describing the Catholic Eucharist without mentioning that the priest considers it “the source and summit of the Christian life”’ (p. 35). And the stakes were nearly as high. For, as Baker argues, though humanism was essentially ‘a linguistic enterprise, its medium Latin, its object eloquence’ (p. 25), its apparent simplicity belies its overwhelming importance: ‘Whereas we tend to view cultural excellence as the product of social stability, economic prosperity, political power, and military might, the humanists believed it to be the premise to these latter conditions … humanism [was] an elixir, a strategy for renewing civilization via the literature that stood as the greatest testament to the possibility of civilization itself’ (p. 5). This vision of humanism is one to which, according to Baker, the humanists themselves subscribed. Acknowledging that humanists wrote quite a lot about themselves, though often in ways intended to praise or blame a particular individual, Baker turns to a genre which Renaissance humanists inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages, but put to their own purposes. In collective biographies or dialogues in the tradition of Cicero’s Brutus, humanists were able to construct the intellectual genealogy of their movement, compare their predecessors and contemporaries, and generally delineate what they saw when they looked in the mirror of Baker’s title; channelling Clifford Geertz, ‘these sources are a humanist reading of humanist experience’ (p. 17). As for the question of who was a humanist (a question that preoccupied Paul Oskar Kristeller, who distinguished these rhetoricians from the philosophers), Baker sees it as a red herring: for the most part, humanists (and later scholars) are in agreement about a clutch of core figures—Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Angelo Poliziano, to name just a few—and disagreement about others, this mainly turning on questions of civic pride (for example, trying to co-opt the tre corone and even scholasticism in Florence) or varying and changing perceptions of the precise stylistic ideal and individuals’ adherence to it.