Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe.

During the past thirty years there have been a number of synthetic presentations of humanism, but none as "historical" as this one. Nauert has presented us with a relatively detailed narrative history of humanism, one which takes into account the numerous scholarly debates that have developed during the past generation, among them the practical reasons for the excitement about the classical Greek and Roman traditions, the existence and nature of civic humanism, the question of whether humanism was a philosophy and its relation to Renaissance philosophy, the influence of Italian humanism on the development of humanism in northern European countries, the nature of Christian humanism, the relation of humanism to the Protestant Reformation, and the enduring conflict between humanism and scholasticism and its outcomes. In the discussion of each of these, Nauert takes us through a complex cultural history with a sure hand.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first two, on Italy, comprise almost half the total text. In chapter 1 he focuses on the Florentine cultural revolution and treats the development of humanism throughout the remainder of Italy as an extension of innovations that occurred in Florence. The chapters in fact follow the history of Florence during the quattrocento, detailing the transformation to Platonism during the latter half of the century, concluding this cultural history with a look at popular culture and Machiavelli. Something of the real sweep of humanism is lost here; major humanists from other Italian city-states are mentioned barely if at all. The omission is even more striking in the case of women humanists who are mentioned once as a small group (45), none ever by name. This omission of women continues in the discussions of vernacular writers in later chapters; only Marguerite de Navarre is mentioned. Notice is taken in the bibliography, if not in the text, of books, articles, and translations of Italian women humanists, but not of the Women Writers in English series, of which eight volumes have been published by Oxford, most of them from the Renaissance period. Women deserve more notice than they have received here; the appearance of texts by a number of women writers during the next few years, translated from Latin and the vernaculars of western Europe, will make evident this lacuna. But even now their omission is less excusable than it might have been a few years ago.

Chapter 2 concludes with a narrative account of the Florentine artistic revolution. The narrative skill displayed so well in his discussions of the issues listed in the opening paragraph fails Nauert here. Instead of relating art to humanism, he simply recounts the various innovations in Florentine art and architecture, and several of the famous works of art included with the text are not discussed at all in the text itself. The few pages devoted to the relation of art and humanism in Eugene Rice's Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 (2d ed., 1994) provide a much better model of how Nauert might have gone about his task, keeping his account within the brief compass allotted it in a book of this kind. The reader finishes this section without knowing why it was included in a history of humanism.

Chapter 3 takes us beyond the Alps and narrates the Italian influences on the development of humanism in Germany, France, Spain, and England, and the actual development of various humanisms in those countries. Chapter 4 details the extent of the triumph of humanist educational reform in the universities, the "Christian humanism" of Lefevre d'Etaples and Erasmus; and the relation of humanism to the Lutheran Reformation.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the contributions of humanism and its significance in European culture. Its critical method - especially in the study of law, widespread changes in the educational systems of western Europe, the influence of humanism on the vernacular literatures of France, Spain, and England, on northern art, and on the Reformation in England complete chapter 5. Chapter 6 details the end of humanism, focusing especially on the rise of scepticism during the sixteenth century, culminating in Montaigne.

In narrating the history of humanism, including the history of its interpretations by modern scholars, Nauert is at his best. His narrative is less effective when, as in his discussion of art, he keeps to the narrative history and does not make the internal connections. This defect recurs more than once. In the discussion of Italian humanism, for example, we become convinced that humanism, while it is not a philosophy, has philosophical implications. But while we are told how humanist accounts of human dignity differ from the medieval account of Pope Innocent III, we are not told what humanists said about the subject. And in his concluding chapter Nauert says that rhetoric and moral philosophy were the most important humanist subjects, but there is virtually no discussion in his earlier chapters of texts that might have demonstrated their importance. In chapter 4 Erasmus and Luther are said to disagree on issues of grace and free will, but their quarrel is never discussed. Undergraduate readers (to whom I assume this book is addressed - it is announced as a textbook opposite the title page) will certainly not understand the assertions or allusions in the absence of demonstrations by examples.

The text raises some less serious questions as well. Why are there only a few references in parentheses to texts from which ideas have been cited? Either there should have been many more of these (which I think would have been preferable) or they should have been eliminated altogether as inappropriate in a textbook. I also wonder why the names of the protagonists on various sides of scholarly debates about the Renaissance are mentioned in some instances (R. R. Post on the Modern Devotion is a good example) but not in other instances ("these scholars" in the debate over the existence and nature of the Renaissance between medievalists and Renaissance scholars). The names are more consistently mentioned in the annotated bibliography at the end of the book; to have included them in the text would have served as an additional road sign to beginning readers, though Nauert seems to believe that they would have been of no interest to most readers. I believe they would have added clarity, but in any case the lack of consistency is somewhat annoying. The bibliography is as complete as it needs to be in a textbook, but some entries are missing that should be there, including the mention of other texts similar to this one.

These reservations aside, I recommend this book as the best synthesis of humanism by one writer thus far penned. The book is also well produced; there are virtually no errors in it. Although the story of humanism is not likely to be a major subject as far as course adoptions is concerned, if the series of which this book is a part catches on at all, the author and press might think as other textbook writers and publishers do, namely, of issuing a second edition based on the experiences of teachers who use the book as a textbook. I offer the criticisms here in that spirit. Despite its limitations, Nauert's synthesis is a substantial contribution to the necessary task of bringing what has been learned about humanism to a wider and non-specialist audience.

ALBERT RABIL, JR. State University of New York, Old Westbury