Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 397 - Do As the Romans Did - French Humanism.txt

 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 University of London. As Norman Tebbit once said to the unemployed of Britain, get on your bike, because having wrapped up our look at the Northern Renaissance and Reformation in Central Europe and the Low Countries, we're now going on a tour of France. French culture in the 15th and especially 16th centuries will be occupying our attention for about 20 episodes, a mini-series that will take in such figures as Rabelais, Marérit de Navarre, Jean Bodin, Marie de Cornet, and Montagny. As you can tell from my attempt to pronounce these names, my spoken French is not what it could be. It is reputed to be one of the world's most beautiful languages, but this podcast will be offering no evidence to support that claim. To the contrary, I will be subjecting it to the sort of treatment meted out in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, something else we'll be mentioning along the way, so I apologize for that in advance. On the bright side, at least you don't have to see my facial expressions, so you will be spared what P.G. Wodehouse once memorably described as the look of furtive shame, the shifty hang dog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. I'm American, of course, but it applies to us too. As it happens, this first episode will be devoted to a similar topic, what happened when Frenchmen undertook to speak Latin, and even more controversial, when they undertook to speak French. These were the two languages of the humanist movement that swept France in our period, just as it had swept Italy. In fact, it is generally agreed that humanism swept into France because of its emergence in Italy. The French Renaissance is often traced to the impact of Petrarch, the 14th century poet and humanist who inspired later Italians like Salutati and Bruni. Petrarch's poetry was imitated in French lyric verse and translated by Jean Mero in 1534. Mero also exemplified the way that French writers were engaging with classical literature in this period. He translated Ovid and Virgil from Latin into French. Yet medieval French literature still remained relevant in this period. In fact, that is illustrated by Mero too, as he produced an updated version of the 13th century poem Romance of the Rose. We looked at this allegorical work back in episode 254, and in episode 295 we saw how Christine de Pizan and other intellectuals in early 15th century France debated its value. Despite Christine's complaints about its misogyny, it remained a central work. The poet Joachim de Boullée pronounced it the only thing worth reading from older French literature. De Boullée made this judgment in his Defense of the French Language, published in 1549. By this point, people had actually been writing fine literature in French for quite some time, raising the question of why the practice would need to be defended. Even leaving aside the Romance of the Rose and early 15th century authors like Christine de Pizan, we can mention the school of authors called the Retéricueur, poets who worked around the end of the 1400s. The very titles of their works show that they were conscious of working in French rather than Latin. Jean Moliné, for instance, wrote a work called The Art of Vernacular Rhetoric. Even though Moliné anticipated Du Bellet's attitude that vernacular poetry should follow as closely as possible the model of Latin verse, Du Bellet was dismissive of the earlier efforts of Moliné and the other Rhetoricueur. Like so many Renaissance figures, whether in science, philosophy, or literature, he thought that it was only in his own time that the glories of antiquity were finally being revived and imitated with any degree of success. Modern day scholars don't entirely disagree with Du Bellet about this. The French Renaissance is typically seen as a kind of delayed reaction to events in Italy, with a real humanistic flowering only in the 16th century. This was in part thanks to the presence of teachers of ancient Greek. As Italians had done earlier, French intellectuals benefited from the presence of émigrés from the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean. These included George Hieronymus from Sparta and John Lascaris from Constantinople. Both came first to Italy and then traveled on to France, living incarnations of the passage of humanist scholarship from east to west. They shared their knowledge of Greek with a young man who would become the leading figure of French humanism, Guillaume Boudet. He was Paris's answer to Erasmus, to the extent that a visiting Italian humanist complained that in the eyes of the French, none but Boudet had a knowledge of literature. In fact, Boudet answered Erasmus quite literally, in a rather prickly exchange of letters which touched sometimes on issues of genuine scholarship, but more often on the interpersonal feuds that were such a mainstay of humanist culture. Erasmus had misgivings about Boudet's ponderous and obscure Latin style. In turn, Boudet, in a letter written half in Latin and half in ancient Greek, lamented that Erasmus was wasting his talents on lighter works, probably having in mind such texts as the Praise of Folly. No one was going to accuse Boudet of any such frivolities. He produced, among other things, Des Assé. It is not about donkeys, or whatever else you may be thinking, but rather a punishingly well-documented exploration of Roman coins, one of which was called the ass, hence Boudet's title. A modern biographer of Boudet has complained that, on the face of it, Des Assé is poorly composed, poorly written, and poorly edited. But it does display Boudet's impressive research into such topics as the cost of bread and antiquity, and is opinionated on such matters as the debasement of currency and the counterproductive use of tax money to hire mercenaries. Digressions scattered throughout the work touch on scarcely relevant topics like the relative merits of active and contemplative life, another typical concern of humanism that we most recently encountered in Lipsius. For Boudet, an active life, Métouin lived at court, especially the court of the French king Francis I. He was the monarch most central to the story of the French Renaissance. Scholars have long admired the blossoming of culture and art during his reign, including the art of music, as in the case of Pierre Atagnan, whose piece Toudian you just heard as the new music clip I'm using for the episodes on France. It was recorded especially for the podcast by lute-playing philosopher Helene de Cruz. Thanks, Helene. In any case, King Francis also supported numerous humanist scholars, including Boudet. Boudet is credited with helping persuade Francis to establish the Collège de l'heuteur royeur in 1530, later it would become the Collège de France. Its motto was, teach everything, but the curriculum was oriented towards such core humanist disciplines as Hebrew, Greek, and mathematics. It was during the long reign of Francis, from 1515 to 1547, that the study of Greek really bedded down in France. As one modern-day scholar has put it, in the sort of phrasing that Boudet might use if he were writing in English, what had once been the esoteric learning of a few became the necessary appendage of every educated man. Deep knowledge of Latin was also highly valued, with Cicero, of course, being the gold standard in this language. An amusing story, as the humanist Marc-Antoine Muray laying a trap for his critics by deliberately using Latin words that were drawn from Cicero's works, but omitted from the standard lexicon of Cicero's Latin. The idea was, of course, that the critics would accuse him of using un-Ciceronean Latin, only to be exposed for their own ignorance. Boudet drew on Cicero and other ancient sources for a work of political advice offered to King Francis, the Institutions de France. It shares the features we've found in other mirrors for princes in this period. That is to say, Boudet is a steadfast defender of monarchy, a sensible position to take when you're writing for the King of France, and presupposes that the welfare of the state turns on the individual character of the ruler. Another modern scholar who can turn a nice phrase complains about this aspect of the work, saying, Boudet is full of high sentence, but yes, a bit obtuse. The obviousness of his censures and injunctions is so soporific that the contradictions in them easily pass unnoticed. But Boudet does at least have an idea about how the prince should shape his moral outlook, an idea that could hardly be more humanist. He should study history, to the point of making it his great mistress. Thus, the Institutions de France is full of examples taken from the lives of ancient rulers like Alexander the Great. Meditating on such examples, the ruler will develop practical wisdom or prudence, the same virtue later celebrated by Lipsius in his comparable work, the Politica. As Boudet writes, Prudence is acquired in this way by the man of good judgment in reading and reflecting about the past and present government of the world, and how all kingdoms and great monarchies have met their end, and by what shortcomings they have fallen into difficulty. If you asked Boudet's contemporaries about his greatest achievement, they would probably mention his study of the legal tradition. In 1508, he published his Annotations on the Digest of Justinian, which, it has been said, did for Roman law what Erasmus' New Testament was to do for biblical studies. Boudet was unsparing in his criticism of the scholastic legal tradition. Our imagined English-speaking version of Boudet would have found the name of the leading scholastic jurist, Acursius, all too apt. He blamed Acursius and other university jurists for misunderstanding Latin vocabulary and, more subtly, for failing to appreciate the way that both the Latin language and Roman law had evolved over time. This was a significant caveat to the idea of a single normative version of Latin enshrined above all in the writings of Cicero. Which is not to say that Boudet was free of anachronisms of his own, as when he assimilated the medieval relationship of feudal lord and tenant to the relationship between the Roman patron and his clients. Still, this was a great leap forward for legal scholarship, and especially the application of philology to this field. Boudet inspired other scholars to follow his example, like Louis Le Roy, professor of Greek at the newly founded College. He wrote a biography of Boudet and took seriously the latter's injunction to steep himself in history, something that shows itself in Le Roy's translation of Plato's Phaedo, which begins with an overview of the history of ancient philosophy. But in one respect, Boudet was not a model for what would come in the middle of the 16th In his own history, he was a French scholar who barely ever wrote in French. He apologized for this shortcoming in the Anse-Toussaint de France, humble bragging that his native tongue was the one he had practiced the least. He was patriotically convinced that the torch of humanist studies was being passed from Italy to France, a process called in Latin, the translatio studii, but he saw this as a phenomenon that should manifest itself in Latin letters, or when one really wanted to show off in Greek. Others saw things differently. They believed that French could equal and ultimately even supplant Latin as the language of literature, becoming, if you will, a lingua franca. A concern for the vernacular alongside classical language is clear in the work of Étienne Doulé. He wrote a guide to the Latin language in imitation of an introduction to Greek produced by Boudet, but Doulé also translated Cicero into French. To explain how he managed this sort of task so well, he put out a treatise called How to Translate Well from One Language to Another. Doulé's advice can be boiled down to five rules. Understand the content of the work you are translating. Learn perfectly the language it is written in. Do not translate word for word, but render the meaning of whole phrases and sentences. Avoid neologisms and archaisms, and produce a text of your own that is pleasant to read in terms of rhythm and sound. Which as someone who has to do a lot of translating between English and German, I find, ser über zuigend. Doulé was furthermore involved in printing editions of French texts, including the writings of Rabelais and the Geneva Bible. More generally, printed books were tracking the arrival of humanism in France and its increasing tendency to span the divide between Latin and the vernacular. Printing got a late start in France due to a combination of factors. The availability of printed books coming from Germany, as well as minor problems like the Hundred Years War and regular outbreaks of plague. Once they got going, the two main centers were of course Paris, where a press was set up at the Sorbonne, and Lyon, a city that was an important intellectual crossroads because of its proximity to Italy. Aptly enough, the first effort of the Sorbonne press was a guide to writing letters. It doesn't get much more humanist than that. Under Guillaume Fiché, this press went on to publish classical Latin texts in history and philosophy, as well as works by more recent authors like Lorenzo Valle. By the turn of the 16th century, printed texts would include humanist grammars and even medieval works. And, as of 1476, books were being printed in French, not only Latin. Which brings us back to Joachim de Bellay and his defense of writing in the vernacular. De Bellay was a member of a group of poets we call the Pléade, named for the constellation of stars, which in English is called Pleiades. And rightfully so, as they played a starring role in the history of French literature and its use of ancient philosophy. In general, the poetry of the Pléade is studded with classical allusions, which are often unidentified so that the reader can have the satisfaction of spotting them. The poems of Pierre Ronsard were so rich in these allusions that other French humanists, including the aforementioned Marc-Antoine Moray, took the trouble to write commentaries identifying all the sources. The verses of the Pléade might be in French, but they were testaments to the enduring value of ancient Greek and Latin literature. So why write in French at all, instead of Latin? De Bellay's defense shows how a committed classicist would answer that question. It begins by arguing that languages are all of equal merit, their diversity caused by the local needs and desires of different peoples. De Bellay is aware that the ancients were deeply chauvinist about their own languages, as when the Greeks called all non-Greek speakers barbarians, which evokes the nonsensical-sounding words of these other peoples. De Bellay quotes the ancient Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, retorting, The Scythians were barbarians among the Athenians, but so were the Athenians among the Scythians. De Bellay's relativistic or egalitarian attitude toward languages is tempered by his admission that French is only just starting to develop as a language. It will reach perfection only when its users carefully imitate classical models, just as Romans like Cicero imitated the Greeks. The largest part of artfulness, says de Bellay, is encompassed in imitation. We should not fear that philosophical ideas can be phrased only in Greek or Latin, because any idea can be put forward in any language. De Bellay uses a political metaphor to express his own idea. If the philosophies sown by Aristotle and Plato in the fertile Attic field were transplanted in our French Plain, they would not be casting it among brambles and thorns where it would prove sterae, but it would be making it near rather than distant, and instead of a foreigner, a citizen of our own republic. Ultimately, de Bellay looks forward to a time when it will no longer be necessary to spend so much time mastering classical languages, and speculates that this arduous task has held back the scholars of his own day, which is why France has boasted no Plato's and Aristotle's. For the future, one should be able to speak of all things throughout the world in every language. For now though, imitation is more than the sincerest form of flattery, it is flat out necessary for anyone who wants to write finely in the vernacular. De Bellay had the chance to go straight to the source of eloquence when in 1553 he went to the papal court in Rome, as secretary to his relative, the cardinal, Jean de Bellay. His disappointment with what he found there was recorded in his poems, collected in his Regrets and his Antiquities of Rome. Having left his homeland, hoping to learn mathematics, philosophy, law, and theology, he came back with herring rather than gold. Rome had been reduced to a shadow of its former glories as all things in this world decay over time. So it is now up to poets like de Bellay himself to restore the soul of Rome by recalling its ancient past. His conclusion that Rome is no longer Rome is one that de Bellay reached in part because his expectations were so high. For him, Rome was not just a city or even an empire, but a universal power that united all the people of the earth in a single cosmopolis. The plan of Rome, he says, is the map of the world. It would be unrealistic to expect any Renaissance nation to assume that mantle. As a modern study of de Bellay's Antiquities of Rome puts it, there is no need to fight over the fallen crown of Rome for it belongs both to everyone and to no one. With this, de Bellay distanced himself from the widespread conception of a translatio imperii, or handing over of empire, the political analogue to the cultural idea of a translatio studii. Here at the height of the French Renaissance, de Bellay was skeptical about the idea that the glories of ancient Rome could truly be reborn, though the odd poet might manage to write something that could measure up to the ancient standards. Bellay's colleague in the playa, Pierre Ronsard, was the leading candidate to manage that feat. At first glance, his poems are apt to remind us of medieval courtly love literature, full of agonized longing for an unattainable beloved. But at second glance, they show that Ronsard was carrying out de Bellay's advice to base his verses on the classics. Especially relevant for us are his extensive borrowings from Plato and the Platonic tradition. Sometimes these remain superficial, if charming, as when he asks Plato, If, as you say, there is no void within the cosmos, where will all my tears flow as I lament my grief at lost love? But at a deeper level, his very understanding of love recalls the Platonist ideas of Marsilio Ficino and other figures of the Italian Renaissance. Like Ficino, Ronsard refers to Plato's symposium for a contrast between a lower, bodily love and a higher, spiritual one, and opposes the lower kind of love to these sober dictates of rationality. And like Leoni Hebrea, Ronsard sets up a kind of dialogue between a male lover and a female beloved. In this case, the love object, Elan, tries to persuade Ronsard the lover to abandon erotic lust for the sake of pure love. Ronsard and other poets of the playa use another idea from the symposium, when they describe pairs of lovers as halves of an original whole, divided apart by the gods, and now longing for literal reunion. At a more cosmic level, Ronsard draws on Plato's Timaeus, as he conceives of love as a power that moves the heavens and governs the whole universe. Ronsard was not alone in his enthusiasm for the Platonic dialogues. Duvalet, for example, works into his poetry the idea that the soul should return to its home on feathered wings, a clear allusion to Plato's Phaedrus. And in both Duvalet and Ronsard, we find fairly frequent evocations of the form of beauty from the symposium, sometimes in a rather un-Platonic fashion, as when Duvalet says that beauty itself is outdone by the physical beauty of his beloved. Ronsard goes even further, imagining that heaven quite literally broke the mold of beauty when it made his beloved Elan, and will have to look to her as a model for recreating it. These passages may seem more playful than truly philosophical, but Ronsard also did write a Hymn to Philosophy, which shows how a 16th century French poet could pay due tribute to our favorite discipline. Among those of noble heart, it takes first prize above every art. As first of the sciences, it's only right that it should give all others its light. In the poetry of the Pleiade, women are mostly cast in the familiar and reductive role of beautiful love object, but that was not their only contribution to the story of French humanism. Alongside Francis I, another royal personage helped to form the reception of Plato in the 16th century. By virtue of her patronage and the works she herself wrote, she richly merited the praise she received from Duvalet, who wrote to her, Your eye, sole beacon of our age, will guide my ship, however perilous the tide or dark the storm, and lead it home once more. Not until the days of Freddie Mercury would a queen inspire such rhapsody. Having discussed a crazy little thing called love in the works of the Pleiade, next time we will rock you with an episode on Marguerite de Navarre, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. you