4.2 Religion and Philosophy
Humanism
Humanism was the educational and intellectual program of the Renaissance. Grounded in Latin and Greek literature, it developed first in Italy in the middle of the fourteenth century and then spread to the rest of Europe by the late fifteenth century. This program, called the studia humanitatis, or the humanities, was thought to teach citizens the morals necessary to lead an active, virtuous life, which its proponents contrasted with the contemplative life of ascetic monks and scholars. As a product of the Italian city-state republics, humanism was a system born in the city and made for the citizen. Although scholars in earlier centuries had embraced classical learning, humanists rediscovered many lost texts, read them with a critical and secular eye, and, through them, forged a new mentality that shaped Italian and European society from from approximately the mid-14th to the mid-17th centuries.
Origins
Although humanist ideas had circulated in Italy since the late twelfth century, their main proponent was the Florentine poet, Francesco Petrarch. Born into an exiled family, Petrarch grew up in the French city of Avignon and attended law school in Bologna. Inspired by his love of antiquity and the Latin writings of Cicero, Petrarch rejected the legal profession to pursue the life of a poet and collector of ancient texts. He spent much of his free time hunting for lost and neglected works of classical authors and twice found major caches of Cicero’s writing, most notably an unknown collection of Cicero’s letters, the Epistolae ad Atticum, in the chapter library of the Verona Cathedral in 1345. He copied the manuscript in the library and soon circulated it among his friends and associates. By the fifteenth century, through the efforts of Petrarch and his followers, Cicero’s taut, philosophical style of writing became the standard in Latin prose.
Through these letters and other ancient texts, Petrarch was able to enter the Roman world so distant to him. Petrarch was the first scholar to recognize the cultural gap between his own age and Cicero’s. Of course, previous scholars throughout the middle ages made use of classical literature, but they read these texts through strict religious lenses and saw themselves inhabiting the same culture as Julius Caesar and emperor Augustus. It was just a world grown old and ruined by time. Petrarch, with his historical consciousness, recognized that he and his fellow Italians were living in a world starkly different from their Roman ancestors with a different set of values. Petrarch advocated reading Cicero and other Roman authors as a means of finding models for eloquence and exemplary comportment.
To highlight this cultural gap between ancient Rome and fourteenth-century Italy, Petrarch envisioned a new way of conceptualizing the past. He portrayed antiquity as a golden age, replete with virtuous men, great deeds, and good morals. It was the period from the fall of Rome right u