"In the Footsteps of the Ancients." The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni.

Ronald G. Witt, "In the Footsteps of the Ancients." The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni

(Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 74.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000. xiii + 514 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-11397-5.

This is an outstanding work of scholarship, and an intellectual feast for students of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literary history. It was preceded by the author's "Medieval Italian Culture and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal" (in Renaissance Humanism, vol. 1, ed. Albert Rabil, 1988), and accompanied by his subentry on "The Origins of Humanism" in the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (1999; vol. 3, s.v. "Humanism"). One criterion we can use to assess large books like this is whether the chapters stand alone as independent units or function as integral parts of the whole, and often enough we are glad if we find that they stand alone, so that we can select the ones we want to read, even though their sum total is an aimless or shapeless book. In this one the chapters are definitely subordinate to the whole, which does have an aim and a shape, and which I think most scholars will want to read right through.

Witt's aim is to shift the conventional low dating of the origins of humanism (roughly speaking, circa 1350) to a higher date two generations earlier, circa 1290; and to locate it rather precisely in the city of Padua, the home of Lovato dei Lovati and Albertino Mussato. His narrative, however, begins a century or more above even that date, for he sees humanism emerging out of the literary history of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is a broad territory, but Witt, whose linguistic range and command of the technicalities of genre, stylistics, metric, and rhetoric are remarkable, has immersed himself in the primary sources, and he succeeds in mapping it in high relief. Italy was overshadowed by France, and the literatures and dialects of northern and southern France each flowed into the peninsula and exerted influence there. This movement brought not only chivalric epic and troubador lyric, but also the seeds of the classicizing revival that we call humanism. The revival itself needed the ur ban, laic, secularly-minded, and rhetorically and legally sophisticated society of the north Italian communes to flourish. Witt takes the time and the space to show just what the halting revival of classicism meant for the writer at his desk, as he analyzes the prose and poetry of Lovato, and those who followed, at the level of the individual prose sentence or passage of verse.

With the shift in chapter five to Tuscany in the age before and after Dante, we move onto territory that most of us may feel we know a little better. Still, the richness of detail with which Witt explores the interplay and interweave between vernacular and Latin literatures there, and between classicizing and scholastic strains of thought, bring just as much surprise and pleasure -- or even more -- as you discover how much you did not know, or see what you did know with fresh eyes. Chapter 6 subjects Petrarch to a process of ridimensionamento, which implies not that he is whittled down in size, but that the framework of the history of humanism is readjusted so that he is not seen to tower at its outset. Yet Petrarch loses none of his prominence, or the contest between Cicero and Augustine for his soul any of its drama; it is just that he represents an impasse in the history of humanism from which his epigone Coluccio Salutati did not entirely escape (chap. 7). At the risk of oversimplifying Witt's argument: f or both men there was a tension between Christian and classical values that they could not resolve. And speaking entirely for myself: to read a history of humanism that does not assert the "reconciliation" of these values in some higher synthesis is like opening up a very stuffy old house to a gust of fresh air. Witt's work is so substantial that no one will be able to ignore it, no matter how much they may like their history conciliatory. The final three chapters are centered on Leonardo Bruni and his age cohort -- the fifth generation of humanists by Witt's reckoning and the first of "Ciceronians." They broke through to a full vision of what a classical revival could be, and they largely succeeded in realizing it. In doing so they arched back over Petrarch to reforge a link with their now remote predecessors in Padua.

The book has an ample introduction and conclusion, but if they were lopped off it would keep its shape, for it has been built up around a hard skeleton of lucid interpretation. The partial summary I have given is reductive, for Witt ranges far beyond the big names to throw light on a host of lesser but important individuals whose texts have survived, and does historical justice to a number of others who did not even achieve eloquence themselves but inspired the ideal of it in others through their teaching. He engages in plenty of courteous dialogue with other modern scholars, but his real interlocutors are the five generations of humanists from circa 1290 to circa 1430. "In the Footsteps of the Ancients" commands a place on the small shelf of essential modern works on humanism and the Renaissance.