 🎵 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at HistoryofPhilosophy.net. Today's episode, Republic of Letters – Italian Humanism At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old fogey, I'd like to complain that no one writes letters anymore. When was the last time you got one? Not an email, I mean, but something on paper in a stamped envelope, preferably handwritten. A friend of mine, who's a historian of the American Civil War, once pointed out to me that experts on his chosen specialty have many 19th century letters to draw on in their research, whereas future historians of our present day may well curse the fact that our correspondence took the form of ephemeral data long deleted or trapped in no longer readable storage devices. Historians of philosophy, too, can learn a lot from letters. Beginning in antiquity, they were often written with a view to wider publication, not only for the private reading of one recipient. Thus, the letter or epistle has long been a popular form for writing philosophy used by Plato, Seneca, Peter Abelard and Heloise, El Kindi, and John Locke, to name only a few. Around the turn of the 15th century, the master of the letter was Coluccio Salutati. He studied epistolary techniques called in Latin, Arstictaminus, at the University of Bologna, where he obtained his degree in 1350 before becoming chancellor of the Republican city of Florence in 1375. As the Florentines contended with the Papacy and rival cities, such as Milan, Salutati's elegant letters were the most powerful weapon in a war of words. Famously, the Milanese duke Gian Galliazzo Visconti remarked that one letter of Salutati's was worth a troop of horses. Not that Salutati's audience would necessarily have been capable of understanding his high-flown Latin, but his rhetoric did honor to his city and lent dignity to any diplomatic occasion. Salutati's style was not only about being stylish. Alongside state business, he was in the business of carrying on the tradition of Italian humanism. I say carrying on rather than beginning that tradition because as Salutati himself would have been the first to point out, Italian humanism took inspiration from an earlier Florentine, Petrarch. As we saw in episode 298 of this podcast, in the middle of the 14th century, Petrarch already embodied the values and activities taken up by Salutati and his followers. Actually, modern day scholars have pointed to still earlier anticipations. The tradition of Italian dictatores, masters of rhetorical letter writing, stretched back as far as the 12th century, and one can name such figures as Albertino Mosato, a Padovan scholar who wrote plays inspired by Seneca and history based on Livy. But for Salutati, it was Petrarch who could be credited with initiating the humanist movement, which had its symbolic birth on Easter Sunday 1341, when Petrarch was crowned with laurels by a Roman senator. Salutati was not a student or close colleague of Petrarch, though he was in touch with him at one point, by letter of course. For him, Petrarch was, to use a word that will make any Roman senator nervous, one of a triumvirate of Florentine authors worthy of veneration, along with Dante and Boccaccio. Their exalted status is at the heart of a founding document of 15th century humanism, the Dialogue, written by one of Salutati's proteges, Leonardo Bruni. Bruni was one of several younger scholars who were inspired and promoted by Salutati. The group also included Poggio Barcellini, whom we met last time coming to blows with George Trapezuntius, as well as Niccolò Nicoli. Members of the group studied Latin with Giovanni Malpagini, who had been Petrarch's assistant, and Greek with the Byzantine scholar Manuel Kreislerus, also mentioned in the previous episode. It was Salutati who invited Kreislerus to Florence as a teacher. Bruni's dialogue is, among other things, a testament to the cockiness that young men may adopt once you give them this level of education. Salutati himself initiates the discussion as Bruni shows him exhorting the circle to engage in disputation and not only bookish research. This is met with a speech by Niccolò Nicoli, who complains that there is little prospect of refined debate given the parlous state of education in Italy at this time. Thanks to a lack of both books and refinement, the intellectual level of the time cannot measure up to what we see in the works of a man like Cicero. The situation is, as Niccolò puts it, nothing less than a shipwreck of learning. When it's put to him that he is being too pessimistic, given the achievements of the aforementioned heroes of literature in Florence, Niccolò responds with an irreverent speech attacking Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as failing to match the high standards set in antiquity. This is a surprising, if not shocking, line of argument. But in a second part of the work, Niccolò reveals that he was only trying to provoke Salutati to defend these three role models. When he does not rise to the bait, Niccolò agrees to give a second speech answering his own criticisms. What is going on here? Well, for starters, the dialogue is an ironic and playful work. How seriously should we take Niccolò's supposedly devastating complaint that in the Divine Comedy, Dante describes Cato as an old man when we all know he died before turning 50? No more or less seriously than the answer, which is that the white beard sported by Cato is just a symbol for virtue befitting an older sage. But the standing of Dante and the others is nonetheless serious business. Around the same time the dialogue was written, Salutati had a falling out with Poggio when the younger man brashly insulted Petrarch's knowledge of Latin. Needless to say, they exchanged letters over the matter. There was also a good deal of civic pride at stake. The excellence of these three authors was a triumph for Florence, and insulting them was accordingly an affront to the city. And this is only the beginning of the political import of Bruni's dialogue. Another of Niccolò's complaints is that Dante quite literally reserved a special place in hell for the murderers of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. Natural enough for Dante, whose political philosophy envisioned a single monarch ruling over the whole world, but it hardly seems an attitude we should endorse as good Florentine Republicans. This too was a point of contention in other humanist writings. Salutati himself wrote a work called On the Tyrant, in which he tried to explain why Dante had meted out this punishment to Caesar's killers. His argument was that Caesar actually ruled with a popular mandate, so Dante was right to condemn Brutus and Cassius. All of which brings us to one of the philosophical themes that modern scholars associate with humanism, republican government, rule of the people, and not a tyrant or a group of oligarchs. This would have been another reason to admire Cicero. Not only did he write fabulous Latin, but he was a martyr to the cause of the Roman Republic. These values are evident in an encomium to the city of Florence written by Leonardo Bruni, which begins by extolling the well-balanced structure of the city's government, preserving as it does both justice and liberty. Salutati's group was delighted when some historical research proved that Florence had not been founded by Caesar, as often supposed, but already existed in the time of the Republic. Having said that, humanist literary taste did not require republican political leanings. Humanism was practiced in cities that lacked republican institutions, like Venice. Even in Florence, the rhetoric of liberty masked the fact that power was exercised by a relatively small group of citizens. Scholars have pointed out that between the years 1282 and 1532, only about two dozen families held the reigns of the government. Then again, one might make similar observations about Rome in the generations leading up to Julius Caesar. The humanists were never better students of Cicero than when they followed his lead by squinting hard enough to make an oligarchy look like a genuine republic. It's also important to bear in mind that, whatever the political appeal of Cicero, the main attraction was indeed his fabulous Latin. Tellingly, Bruni compares the perfect constitution of Florence to a well-formed sentence, as if he can think of no higher praise. Perhaps you have friends who are language purists, always telling you off for using who when you should say whom and which when you should say that. I can practically guarantee, though, that these friends have nothing on Coluccio Salutati. This was a man who could get seriously upset about people using the second person plural pronoun, vos, as a polite form of address because the ancients consistently used the second person singular, tu. We don't have this grammatical feature in English unless you count y'all, but it's the same as the difference between vosotros and tu in Spanish or ir and tu in German. As this detail shows, Salutati believed in using Latin correctly, and he believed that the standard of correctness was set by ancient authors like Cicero. The humanists are famous for decrying the repugnant Latin and neologisms of the medieval, and this is certainly true. It's a point made by that opening speech of Nicolae in Bruni's dialogue and Salutati's unsparing in his scorn for the crass efforts of medievalists like Abelard. Even John of Salisbury, another 12th century philosopher whom many see as a forerunner of the humanists, gets low marks. But Salutati believed the rot had set in earlier with the inelegant writing style of late ancient authors like Marciana's Capella. It would be easy to accuse the humanists of snobbery here, of indulging in pedantry and self-satisfied display of an aristocratic education available only to the elite. But I for one am hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of pedantry, and for the humanists, the pursuit of rhetorical skill was not just about showing off. It led to higher aims. Salutati advised that eloquence should be paired with wisdom, and that a well-turned sentence could turn souls to virtue. He wrote, "...that the things you write produce something in your readers which not only charms them, but does them good." As for the snobbery, you might recall that Dante wrote a philosophical work in the vernacular to reach a wider audience, including women. This spirit was not entirely dead among the humanists. A couple of episodes ago, I mentioned in passing that Leonardo Bruni was in favor of teaching the classics to women. It's worth mentioning the context where he said that, namely a letter to an admittedly quite aristocratic woman, Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro. After the usual lament about the poor state of learning, which is so far decayed that it is regarded as positively miraculous to meet a learned man, let alone a woman, he assigns her an ambitious curriculum of Greek and Latin classics. He concedes that women have no opportunity to use rhetoric in public speeches, but still believes that women should study eloquent literature for the sake of moral improvement. With all this fetishizing of antique literature, you could be forgiven for assuming that the humanists disdained the use of vernacular languages. But while they did exalt Latin and Greek above their mother tongue, they also preferred good Italian to bad Latin. How else could they have so admired the Florentine poets Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all of whom wrote at least sometimes in the vernacular? Thus, Salutati remarked that, "...whatever is well spoken is eloquent," while his fellow humanist, Benedetto Accolti, said, "...to me it is not important whether one speaks in Latin or the mother tongue, provided that he speaks with gravity, ornament, and abundance." The humanists were well aware that Italian and other vernaculars were derived from Latin, and wondered about the way that these new languages had evolved. Lorenzo Valla, for example, noted that Spanish had introduced definite and indefinite articles, but dropped the declension of nouns. Still less clear was the relation of Latin to the vernacular of classical times. When Cicero delivered the speeches that left the humanists in such rapture, would the average Roman even have been able to understand him? Or would they have been like the nobles presented with speeches and letters of Salutati, pleased and flattered but secretly uncomprehending? The question became a point of dispute between Bruni and yet another humanist, Flavio Biondo. Biondo wrote to Bruni asking whether the ancients really spoke the language studied in the grammatical education that was, depending on your perspective, either inflicted on or enjoyed by the Italian youth. To put it bluntly, did Romans actually speak Latin? Bruni found the very notion preposterous. How could proper Latin, with all its grammatical complexity, have been spoken by every man on the street? In fact, never mind the men. Immediately losing the feminist credentials he won for that encouraging letter he sent to Lady Battista, Bruni asks whether we can really imagine that nursemaids and little women could have mastered the language of Cicero. Here, Bruni is arguably projecting the situation of his own day back onto antiquity, unable to conceive that this language of refinement in literature, now used only in rather artificial contexts, had ever been anyone's mother tongue. He also shows himself prey to a common misunderstanding, namely that some languages are more inherently complex than others, to the point that they are not even serviceable for everyday use. After all, every language has its own difficulties, things that will trip up those of us who try to learn them as adults, yet every language can effortlessly be mastered by children if given even half a chance. Some years later, Poggio Bracciolini made this very point, adding that plenty of adults still managed to learn Latin for use at the papal court. So, at the risk of being somewhat tendentious, and I may as well since I've already admitted to being both crotchety and pedantic, it seems that for Poggio, Roman children and peasants had better Latin than Petrarch did. Salutati and Bruni evidently disagreed about the case of Petrarch, but as we've seen, the humanists were united in their low opinion of most other medieval authors, especially the scholastics. Bruni summed up the attitude after quoting some lines of Virgil's Aeneid, "...when we read these lines, what philosopher do we not despise?" Yet, none other than Salutati tempered the critique of medieval scholasticism by reminding his audience, and perhaps himself, that the schoolmen were, after all, Christians. In this respect, they must be reckoned superior to even the most eloquent pagan author. Indeed, Salutati argued that even the most poorly educated person in his own time was better than Cicero, Plato, or Aristotle. The goal was therefore to make the best use of pagan literature while staying within a Christian moral and theological framework. For guidance, the humanists could look to a treatise by the Greek church father Basil of Caesarea, which gave advice to young readers of classical non-Christian texts. It's no coincidence that Bruni translated this work soon after learning Greek from Caesalorus. What Bruni and the other humanists really couldn't abide, though, was incompetent medieval scholarship devoted to these same classical texts. Hence their ambitious undertaking to produce new, more acceptable translations of works that had already been available in Latin for some time. More acceptable, of course, meant more Ciceronian. Bruni translated the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle, his choice of text again showing the moral emphasis of the humanist endeavor, seeking to replace the version executed by Robert Grossetest in the 13th century. But at least one critic felt that the gain in elegance was matched by a loss in precision. Alonso of Burgos, a Jewish convert to Christianity, argued that Grossetest had often captured Aristotle's point better than Bruni had. For instance, the Greek word for pleasure, hedonē, was rendered into Latin as delectatio in the older medieval version but by Bruni as voluptas. Alonso felt that Grossetest's version was preferable since it sounds more general and could apply to intellectual as well as bodily pleasure. We've already seen enough of the humanists to predict what happened next. Bruni penned a furious reply pointing out that Alonso was in no position to assess his translation since he didn't even know Greek. And of course, he reiterated that any acceptable Latin version must adhere to proper classical usage. Again, proper usage was defined above all by Cicero. For all the variety of opinion and different emphases we've found in this tour of the early Italian humanists, you can hold on to that one point, they really, really liked Cicero. In fact, if we go back to Bruni's dialogue, we can observe that it is closely based on Cicero's own philosophical dialogues. The very structure chosen by Bruni, a speech followed by a counter speech, is very Ciceroian and evokes the ancient rhetorical skill of speaking on both sides of an issue. One particularly witty display of this ability was already put on in the year 1386 when Sino-Rinocini produced orations in praise of and then attacking rhetoric itself. There's a danger lurking here that should have been evident from reading Cicero and would have become even more obvious as Plato's dialogues came back into circulation with their searching critique of the sophists. If you can argue persuasively on both sides of any issue, then won't the result be skepticism? That would have been just fine with Cicero, who declared his allegiance to the academic skeptical school. But would it have been fine with the humanists? One could hold out the hope that, as Poggio puts it, by discussing an issue from both sides, truth usually emerges. But Sadutati sounds more faithful to Cicero when he writes, Every truth grasped by reason can be made doubtful by a contrary reason. It won't be the last time we see ideas from Hellenistic philosophy making a disconcerting reappearance in the Italian Renaissance. Speaking of disconcerting, the time has come for me to make my annual, unwelcome announcement that the podcast is going on summer break. No new episodes will be released in August, but we'll be back on September 8th with a look at one of the greatest humanists, one who, or rather whom, I have mentioned only briefly thus far. He was the match of any of his colleagues when it came to defending the use of Ciceroan Latin, combining superb philological work with moral exhortation, and of course sneering at the medievals. So join me after the break to So join me after the break to meet a man of letters extraordinaire, Lorenzo Valla, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.