Although they liked to portray themselves as bringing light to an age of darkness and barbarism, the Renaissance humanists were in fact revolting against a vastly sophisticated intellectual tradition. This was the world of the “schools”: the medieval universities, and above all their faculties of philospophy and theology.
From the end of the 12th century onwards, these faculties had developed a formal curriculum of study of the Bible and the Church Fathers, and of Aristotle and his Greek and Arabic followers. Upon this basis, they built an enormous, elaborate architecture of new natural science, philosophy and theology, including some of the most difficult works ever written in the Western tradition.
The work of the schoolmen was intensely textual. They both wrote an enormous amount—far more than had been written in any of the preceding Christian centuries—and they wrote with constant, detailed reference to each other’s work, and to the canonical texts of their syllabus. A scholastic treatise often includes thousands of detailed references to textual authorities, used both to bolster arguments and as objects of controversy. Authors knew many of their sources by heart, or nearly so, and also developed detailed systems of text division and referencing, to help them in locating citations for their own works and in checking the citations used by others. In its scale, complexity and precision, this engagement with texts surpassed not just all medieval precedents, but even the most scholarly efforts of Greco-Roman antiquity.
The work of the schoolmen was intensely textual.
Scholastic culture was textual, but it was not literary. Its practitioners developed a new form of Latin, which was geared towards the straightforward expression of complex ideas: they sacrificed all elegance and lyricism to this end. The schoolmen were accordingly mostly hostile to poetry and rhetoric. They read ancient sources for their ideas, not their style or language. Hence, despite their incessant use of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, and of Greek and Arabic philosophy, neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Arabic was studied at the universities: the texts were read in clunky, extremely literal Latin translations.
The humanists were thus seeking to restore not literate intellectual life as a whole, but a form thereof which was to give pride of place to literature, rather than technical philosophy, as the noblest form of language-based human endeavour. For this, they turned to the ancients, reviving the study and imitation of the established Latin classics, discovering new Latin texts that lay ignored in old church libraries, and importing from Byzantine Greece both knowledge of the ancient Greek language, and the surviving texts of Greek antiquity—most of which, except for Aristotle, had been unknown in the West for a thousand years.
The humanists were not seeking to restore literate intellectual life as a whole, but to give pride of place to literature.
Of course, this trumpeted revival of classical antiquity extended not only to letters, but to painting, sculpture, architecture and music. In these fields, it produced the Renaissance paintings, statues, buildings and (somewhat later) the “classical” music that are among the most well-known and honoured parts of the patrimony of the West. In contrast, the literary work of Renaissance humanists is today relatively obscure. There are several reasons for this. The humanists wrote largely in Latin, and Latin is now little read. Here the humanists were also victims of their own success: they boosted ancient literature so convincingly that they created a widespread and lasting belief that all Latin written after antiquity is at best second-rate. It didn’t help that—unlike with painting and music—there was a great deal of extant ancient Latin to imitate, so that a lot of humanist work, particularly in poetry, is rather slavish mimicry.
A further problem is that, for all their veneration of literary merit and rejection of university culture, most of the greatest accomplishments of the humanists, in the domain of writing, were not in belles lettres, but in scholarship—an activity which they created in the form in which we know it. The humanists achieved titanic feats not just in the rediscovery of ancient Latin texts and the importation of ancient Greek ones, but in the interpretation of these texts. The medieval manuscripts in which most ancient texts survived contained thousands upon thousands of difficulties: passages that could not be understood, because their language was obscure, because they referred to puzzling ancient phenomena, or because later scribes had corrupted the original form of the text. The humanists resolutely cut through these thickets: classical scholars have continued to do so in the ensuing centuries, but the bulk of the work was done by the end of the sixteenth century. Antiquity was rendered comprehensible in a way it had not been since the fall of Rome.
Antiquity was rendered comprehensible in a way it had not been since the fall of Rome.
The humanists could not have accomplished this without the example of the schoolmen whom they so disliked. Their work was, in effect, largely an application of the universities’ textual practices to a new series of authorities. It was now not just, or primarily, Aristotle, but all the ancient authors who were to be known perfectly, studied from beginning to end, explained and argued over in every detail. Philological and historical problems were to be resolved with the same precision, the same obsessive attention to sources, the same mixture of reverence and boldness, that had emerged to form philosophy and theology into scholastic disciplines.
This is a reliable pattern in intellectual revolutions, and perhaps in all revolutions. No one revolts against a hegemonic power unless he feels most acutely the weight of that power. Then, again and again, the rebel will recycle and repurpose what he has sworn to reject.
