Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 419 - Write Till Your Ink Be Dry - Humanism in Britain.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 LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Write Till Your Ink Be Dry. I have a friend from England who once spent a miserable week at his in-laws, suffering through an unbroken succession of ready-made meals prepared in the microwave. My friend isn't much of a cook, but in desperation he resorted to making a meal for the whole family, a simple pasta with meat sauce. To his surprise, his homemade food was greeted with little enthusiasm. His father-in-law gamely picked away at his plate of spaghetti bolognese for a while, but then pushed it away, saying, I'm sorry, we just don't like foreign food. I love this story because it illustrates so nicely something I've already mentioned a few episodes ago, the literally insular attitude of the British towards all things European. Paradoxically though, when the British do welcome foreign fare onto their island, they enthusiastically make it their own. In the modern day, a politician made headlines by saying that the national dish of the United Kingdom is chicken tikka masala, while the meal my friend made is in fact now so common that it is known simply as spag bol. As we've been seeing, this is how the British handled the Reformation, first resisting it and then domesticating it. And the same approach was taken with humanism. In this case, the foreign import came not from Germany and Switzerland, but from Italy, the Netherlands, and France, as British scholars took up the ideas and educational program of such figures as Guarino Veronese, Massidio Ficino, Erasmus, and Peter Rames. Naturally, that list of places and figures is pretty well the itinerary we'll follow in this episode. We're first going to talk about the initial stirrings of humanism in 15th century England, which centered on the travel of books and people back and forth to Italy. Then we'll move on to humanism in the Tudor period, and especially in the early 16th century, when English humanism became more of a homegrown phenomenon under the influence of Erasmus. I'll also touch on developments under Queen Elizabeth, though we'll have the chance to learn much more about that in coming episodes devoted to Elizabethan literature and science. And finally, we'll head back to Scotland and talk about Andrew Melville, who studied in Paris and then drew on Ramism to reform the educational institutions of Glasgow and St. Andrews. In both England and Scotland, that sort of restructuring would be attempted only in the 16th century. It's been said that the 15th century suggests how humanist interest could survive without educational reform. It was an interest that thrived within institutions but was not institutional. In this earlier period, universities and libraries were still more or less as we left them when we considered late medieval philosophy, something confirmed by the great Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini when he visited England for four years, starting in 1418. As I mentioned, back when covering Poggio, he was bitterly disappointed that he found no opportunity to study Greek and no interesting manuscripts. Of course, for him, this meant manuscripts of otherwise unknown classical works, not anything medieval. Poggio's sojourn seems to have had little impact than those of other less famous Italian visitors like Piero del Monte, a papal collector who came in the 1430s. Thanks in part to such contacts, certain members of the English elite started to get interested in that most humanist of enterprises collecting books. The most outstanding such patron in this period was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, whom the later humanist, John Leland, called a singular phoenix of erudition. Since Humphrey collected books and phoenixes have a habit of bursting into flame, it's fortunate that Leland meant this metaphorically. To be more precise, the Duke's books were manuscripts, since this was before the rise of printing. His library included numerous Latin classics and translations of Greek works, including one of Aristotle's politics, which was produced for the Duke by none other than Leonardo Bruni. They were passed on to Oxford University, creating a basis for humanist research there. Oxford expressed its gratitude in fulsome terms. Previously there had been, it is true, a university of Oxford, but study was there none, for there were no books. Now, however, through your gifts, we too can discern the secrets of learning. Though Humphrey has long been praised for his intellectual cultivation, it's not clear whether he spent much time actually reading the books he was collecting. His interest in the project may have had more to do with establishing a glorious reputation than advancing any particular ideology or intellectual approach, but he at least provided a model for scholarly exchange with Italians, like the aforementioned Del Monte and Tito Livio Frutovisi, who was from Ferrara. That city would go on to be important in this story of cultural exchange, as Englishmen journeyed there to study with Guarino Veronese. The first to do so was William Gray, later a bishop, and especially relevant for us because he collected works by Plato and the ethics and politics of Aristotle. Again, his private collection was donated to a university, in this case Cambridge. Then there was John Freeh, who learned Greek well enough that he was able to produce reliable translations into English for another patron named John Tiftoft. One of Freeh's productions was a version of a text by Cenasius of Chirenae with a title to gladden the heart of shiny-headed fellows like myself, a paradox proving that baldness is much better than bushy hair. With these developments, the potential for humanism in England was like my head, unlocked. The reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI saw humanists continuing to win support from powerful patrons, including members of the royal family. There was still a connection between Italian and English humanism, especially in the case of John Colette. He traveled to Italy right at the end of the 15th century and knew Marsilio Ficino. Once he returned, Colette disseminated the ideas of Florentine Platonism in his lectures on theology at Oxford. But in this period, the most powerful influence came from the most famous humanist in Europe, the Dutch scholar Erasmus. His ideas had an impact on such significant figures as Thomas Cranmer, who has been described by last episode's interview guest, Darmon McCulloch, as having been more of an Erasmian than a Protestant early in his career. Even later on, Cranmer was so closely associated with scholarship that it was said, If learning were discountanenced, it was esteemed to cast some disparagement upon him. If it flourished, it was a sign that Cranmer prevailed at court. In fact, James McConaca's 1965 book on humanism in this period relates pretty well all modernizing scholarly activity to the influence of Erasmus. While other historians have seen this as something of an exaggeration, Erasmus clearly did have quite an impact. He visited England in person, for one thing. You might remember that he wrote his famous Praise of Folly while staying with Thomas Moore. He was also friends with Colette and other members of the group of humanists associated with Moore, like Richard Pace. The work of Colette, Moore, and others inspired him to comment, It is marvelous to see what an extensive and rich crop of ancient learning is bringing up here in England. Under Henry VIII, works by Erasmus were translated into English, and Erasmus composed educational works for use in England. To be specific, they were to be used at St. Paul's School in London, a new institution whose humanist orientation was thanks to its founder, John Colette. As in Italy and Northern Europe, humanists saw a tight connection between the study of antiquity and the improvement of young souls. Speaking of his students at St. Paul's, Colette said, I would they were taught always in good literature, both Latin and Greek, and good authors, such as have the very Roman eloquence joined with wisdom, especially Christian authors, who wrote their wisdom in clear, chaste Latin. The same idea is captured in a work by Richard Pace, called On the Fruits of a Liberal Education. Taking as its motto an ancient saying that all virtues originate in learning, Pace says that mastery of rhetorical eloquence distinguishes man from beast, allows for the establishment of cities and laws, and is a prerequisite for all other arts. All of which sounds thoroughly Erasmian, yet Erasmus himself was not too impressed by the work. He compared it to sick men's dreams, and asked whether it was meant seriously or not. If it was meant seriously, how can one take it seriously? But if it was meant comically, why isn't it funny? Fortunately other treatises were being written on the same theme. Another associate of Moore's, named Thomas Allot, composed the Book of the Governor, which sounds like it should be about political philosophy, but for the most part that's true only in a rather indirect sense. Actually, the treatise gives advice for how to educate a young man to prepare him for political life. In the prologue, he explains that he has, "...gathered as well of the sayings of most noble authors, Greeks and Latins, as by mine own experience, I have been continually trained in some daily affairs of the public wheel." This is not a bluff. Allot was a clerk of the King's Council under Henry VIII, and later an English ambassador. As for the public wheel, or commonwealth, Allot explains that this is equivalent to the Latin notion of a res publica, or republic. It is a political community, a living body, which must be ruled by reason to maintain order and proportion in it, like the ordering of the elements in the universe. This cannot be achieved with democracy, which as the history of ancient Athens showed, is inevitably like a monster with many heads. All these claims will remind us of one of those noble Greeks, namely Plato, and his republic. As Allot goes on, he gives advice you wouldn't find in Plato, teach your kids Latin. His advice here, in the spirit of the ancient rhetoric specialist Quintilian, is humane and pedagogically astute. Children need time to play, should have language instruction integrated into everyday life, as by introducing them to the names of objects around them, and in general should work with natural disposition and not by coercion. Unfortunately, the youth of Allot's own day lag well behind their potential, because their parents are too stingy to pay for proper instruction and there are too few qualified masters around. Even when children do receive proper schooling, they often stop after learning Latin, at the age of 13. This is a waste, since the fruit of speech is wise sentence, which is gathered and made of sundry learnings. Those sundry learnings are the ones we'd expect from other humanist texts, argument theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, with a strong emphasis on ethics using works by Aristotle, Cicero, and above all, Plato. Less expected, and more fun, are the last chapters in the book, in which Allot explores the educational role of non-academic pastimes. For sport, Allot warmly recommends training with the longbow. Indeed, he indulges in paranoid speculation that crossbows and gunpowder weapons were introduced into England by foreign enemies, to undermine the physical condition and military preparedness of the people. If he were alive today, he'd probably say the same about Spaghetti Bolognese. But the most remarkable of these closing sections are those that offer a philosophical defense of dancing. Yes, you heard right, dancing. He explains away a passage from Augustine that takes a dim view of this practice on the grounds that only more lascivious forms of dance were meant. And a more positive view can be gleaned from the great pagan authors like, again, Plato, who compared the exquisite motions of the heavens to a cosmic dance. When done properly, dancing instills a similar harmony in the soul, by encouraging the acquisition of a key virtue, namely prudence. Allot analyzes the parts of prudence and relates them to the different stages of a Renaissance dance. With these ideas, Allot was himself in harmony with other humanists of the age who made similar remarks about music. We tend to think of 16th century intellectuals as a pretty joyless lot, but in fact even strict reformers, such as Calvin, recommended the use of music in church, albeit with the same caveat given by Allot regarding dance, namely that these activities can be beneficial so long as they aim at moral improvement and not mere pleasure. In this spirit, Erasmus referred to Plato's restrictions on music, which again are found in the Republic, where only certain modes of performance are permitted in the ideal city. A number of English humanists complained about musicians who reveled in mere technique rather than seeking to aid the appreciation of sacred text. Thus the reformer, Peter Marder Vermigli, who we saw coming from abroad to teach at Oxford wrote that church music is to be welcomed so long as the performers sing not only in voice but also in heart, for the voice soundeth in vain where the mind is not affected. Humanism and the arts would continue to flourish under Elizabeth. Her reign, after all, produced the greatest writer of English literature, and she was herself responsible for such scholarly productions as a translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. She received a solid humanist education from Roger Ascham, yet another humanist who wrote about education, in a book simply called The Schoolmaster, and also in a work whose topic Allot would have applauded, namely archery. Ascham explained that he would school the princess in New Testament Greek first thing in the morning and then move on to ancient rhetoricians like Isocrates and Sophocles. We will probably be pleasantly surprised to see a woman being provided with this sort of education, even if this woman was in every respect an unusual one. But actually aristocratic women had been involved with humanism throughout the Tudor period. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was an early example. She even endowed colleges at Cambridge University. Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, supported humanists including Colette and Moore, and hired no less a humanist than Juan Luis Vives to teach her daughter Mary. The tradition was carried on by Henry's last wife, the one who survived her husband and seldom has a husband been so difficult to survive. This was Catherine Parr. Her circle included the aforementioned Ascham, and she was herself an author, penning a pious text called Lamentation of a Sinner. The humanist Nicholas Udall wrote the following when dedicating a work to her. When I consider most gracious Queen Catherine, the great number of noble women in this time and country of England, not only given to the study of human sciences and of strange tongues but also so thoroughly expert in holy scriptures, I cannot but think and esteem the famous learned antiquity so far behind these times that there cannot justly be made any comparison between them. That's a bold and striking reversal of the usual Renaissance lament that the moderns could scarcely hope to live up to their classical models. One last thing to notice about English humanism is that it was often, well, English. Most of the original texts I've mentioned were written in this vernacular language rather than Latin, and humanists from John Free to Elizabeth devoted themselves to providing English translations of classical texts. Humanists also extended their interest to the English language itself. The first philological explorations of Anglo-Saxon literature came during the reign of Elizabeth thanks to scholars like William Lombard and Lawrence Nowell. Nowell was employed as a tutor by a powerful advisor to the Queen, William Cecil, who was in fact himself something of a humanist, a collector of manuscripts, and highly proficient in Greek as well as Latin. In a project probably motivated by English nationalism, Nowell applied the tools of philology to the history of the island. He made perhaps the first modern map of Britain and Ireland, and heavily annotated his copy of a Latin-English dictionary by adding in his own hand equivalents from the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon as well as lists of ancient English legal terms and place names. As a study of this extraordinary document has pointed out, it shows how printed books and manuscripts coexisted through the early modern period. In fact, the result of Nowell's labor is a book that is both printed and handwritten. But as we already know, not all the nationalists in the British Isles were English. In episode 417, I mentioned the history of Scotland penned by Hector Boisse, which was more imaginative than accurate. But along with this work of historical fantasy, Boisse found time to kickstart the Renaissance in Scotland in his capacity as instructor of classics at King's College, the one in Aberdeen, not the one that would be founded several centuries later in London. But the real stars in the firmament of Scottish humanism were George Buchanan, whom we met last time, and Andrew Melville, whom we'll meet right now. The two men were close. They met in Paris, where Melville was a student, and Buchanan his private tutor in Latin poetry. By this time, Melville was already a precocious classicist. He was influenced by his brother Richard, who had studied in Germany with Melanchthon, and by the time Andrew went to study at St Andrews, he was astonishing his teachers and fellow students with his mastery of Greek. Melville pursued further education in France, sitting at the feet of Buchanan, as just mentioned, and studying with other luminaries. Peter Romness, for one, as well as Romness's enemy Jacques Charpentier, for mathematics, for law, Francois Hautman, and for Greek Adrien Toineb, whom Joseph Scaliger, who certainly ought to know, called the most learned man of the age. Young Melville also acquired knowledge of Hebrew and other Near Eastern languages at this time. He then taught elsewhere in France and Switzerland, most notably in Geneva, that center of Calvinism, but also in Poitiers. I mentioned the latter, just so I can tell the following anecdote. Poitiers suffered a siege during the wars of religion, and one of Melville's students was struck by stray artillery fire. As he died in Melville's arms, he cried out, in ancient Greek, Teacher, my course is done. As that story suggests, Melville was an inspiring teacher, and he needed to be, once he returned to Scotland in 1574 to oversee the launch of a new curriculum at Glasgow. Due to the instability of the political situation in Scotland, the university there was in a parlous state. The surviving figures on enrollment show that since the 1550s, only a handful of new students had been arriving each year, and in 1558, none at all. Melville brought in a new approach, based on what he had learned from Ramez, in which rhetoric would be taught in the shortest, easiest, and most accurate way possible. He then moved on to St. Andrews, setting up similar reforms in 1579. One notable feature of Melville's new curriculum was the abolition of the regent system, whereby individual masters would teach all subjects in rotation. Instead, instructors would now focus on teaching their own specialist disciplines, more like what happens at universities nowadays. This made it more feasible to include the teaching of relatively niche topics like Hebrew and Greek. This happened all across Europe. The aggressive adoption of humanist methods ruffled feathers among scholastics, who in St. Andrews still abided by the slogan, Absurdum est dicere erace arozotile, meaning, it's absurd to say that Aristotle has been erased. Melville debated these hostile colleagues in private and in public. According to the story of his life, recorded by his nephew James, Melville succeeded in persuading some to freshen up their philosophical ideas by actually studying Aristotle in the original. But to be on the safe side, Melville and his allies set up a commission in St. Andrews that produced a condemnation of unacceptable teachings. This was in 1583, just a bit more than 300 years after a similar round of condemnations at Paris in the 1270s. That's quite a tribute, albeit a backhanded one, to the longevity of Aristilian scholasticism and its power to influence young minds. Like the medieval censors of Paris, the St. Andrews Commission fretted that impressionable students would, maintain godless and profane opinions obstinately to the great slander of the word of God and defense of the simple and unlearned. But there was at least a bit of updating, since among the propositions on the blacklist was a claim any good Protestant would know to reject, that humans can be good using our natural power of free will. With Melville, indeed, we have a confluence of the two streams that ran in parallel through the 16th century, of Protestant religious reform and humanist educational reform. This wasn't always the case in Britain. The initial stirrings of humanism in England in the 15th century came well before Luther started causing trouble, and Thomas More, a central figure in early 16th century English humanism, would die a Catholic martyr. After his downfall, some of his scholarly friends rushed to excuse themselves for having associated with him. Erasmus wished that More had followed his own example and stayed on the fence. I wish he had never dabbled in so perilous a business and left theology to the theologians. But there would be no fence-sitting for Melville. His combination of Protestant fervor and humanist pedagogy has invited comparison to Luther's associate Melanchthon. Melville wrote poems expressing a Protestant approach to biblical themes like the stories of Moses and Job, and was a prominent defender of Presbyterianism. His tone tended to be polemic rather than politic, and he had a penchant for satire, as in his delightfully named anti-Anglican poem, Anti-Tammy Cami Categoria. All this got him into a good deal of trouble, though not quite as much trouble as caught up with More. Melville was forced into exile from Scotland to England in 1584, and was later put into the Tower of London in 1607. There he covered the walls with Latin poetry, using his shoe as a writing instrument. Now that's what I call having the soul of a humanist. More generally, humanism in this period was bound up with politics. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the elite circles in which these scholars lived, seeking patronage from the nobility and writing court poetry. Besides, with so much upheaval in British political life, it was natural that its intellectuals would reflect on the situation and what might be done to improve it. Over the next three episodes, we'll be looking at a number of authors who did just that, as we consider writers of treatises on political philosophy in the British Renaissance and Reformation, from John Fortescue in the 15th century to Richard Hooker at the end of the 16th century. But we're going to start in the middle, with the ideal mix of humanism with political theory. And I do mean ideal, because the text I have in mind is Utopia by Thomas More. In a perfect world, every one of you would join me for that, next time here on The History of Philosophy. Without any gaps.