Nec rhetor neque philosophus: Fonti, lingua e stile nelle prime opere latine di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1484-87).

Francesco Bausi. Florence: Olschki, 1996. 213 pp. IL 48,000 ISBN: 88-222-4426-5.

These monographs approach the study of Renaissance authors from three distinct perspectives. McManamon traces intellectual threads through their elaborations in Vergerio's works, thereby elucidating consistent strands of his thought; Bausi uses the tools of philology to interpret the puzzling coincidence of different vocabularies and styles in Pico's early works; and James attends to the rhetorical strategies of Arienti's writings for different seigneurial patrons, gauging the strictures that audience and social context imposed upon his efforts.

McManamon highlights Vergerio's original contributions and focuses upon three in particular: 1) promoting humanist education as conducive to moral development; 2) advocating public service through oratory; and 3) appropriating Saint Jerome on behalf of the humanist movement. While studying and teaching at Bologna (1388-90), Vergerio insisted upon the close interrelation of humanist education and moral edification. Subsequently, while in Padua, he became the first humanist of his time to exploit the genre of classicizing oratory. Dissatisfied with Petrarch's legacy of contemplative withdrawal, he sought to recover the political dimension of ancient rhetorical culture, in which the orator aimed to inspire society's governors to moral behavior. By deploying words so as to create compelling visual images, he believed, one could enhance the impact of public ceremonies and help to reinforce the political order. As in antiquity, then, the orator could operate at the center of public life. McManamon emphasizes the moral dimension of Vergerio's thought. Reviving the principle of ethos as the Romans had defined it, he insisted that the orator exemplify and promote an all-embracing integrity. Political leaders, too, were to be measured against the standards that they themselves advocated. Vergerio thus focused upon the character of rulers rather than upon the structures of government, an emphasis that suggests a consistency to his political writings that may have transcended his oft-noted willingness to work both for republican and for princely regimes. In both settings, he used praise and blame to foster a sense of merit and of the common good within the elite, hoping thereby to persuade them to choose public utility over personal gratification.

McManamon respects the integrity, too, of Vergerio's appropriation of Jerome as "Humanism's Patron Saint." In his youth in Capodistria, Vergerio and his family had celebrated annually the feast of St. Jerome, whose veneration would serve as a stable point of reference for him throughout his life. When he came to interpret Latin grammar as a culturally cohesive force that similarly helped the individual to be well-ordered, he enlisted Jerome in support of that ideal, portraying the saint not as the ascetic in the desert but as the Christian scholar in his study, who modeled the "value of humanistic learning for scriptural exegesis and for an authentically Catholic piety"(125). As an advocate of a "sacred philology," Vergerio's Jerome fused the ideal of the classical Roman orator with that of the doctor of the Church, thereby helping Vergerio to defend the humanist program against those clerics who viewed it as too concerned with the ancient pagans. Indeed, in panegyrics Vergerio portrayed Jerome as having achieved so much for the Christian community precisely because of his humanistic training. In sum, McManamon presents Vergerio as a man of deep commitment, both moral and religious, whose activities in the public sphere promoted the ideal of the Christian orator and, in so doing, helped to redirect the course of Italian humanism.

Bausi's more focused study offers a meticulous philological analysis of the rhetorical elements in Pico's early writings. Most scholars in recent years have interpreted the letter to Ermolao Barbaro (3 June 1485), "De genere dicendi philosophorum," as a polemic in which Pico decisively chose speculative content over rhetorical and stylistic form. In effect, they have read Pico as agreeing with the positions espoused by the figure of the philosopher in the central part of his letter. Bausi argues, however, that Pico has had his imagined "barbarous" philosopher attack eloquence only so as to incite Barbaro to defend it. The language and style of the letter closely resemble those of Pico's letter/panegyric to Lorenzo de' Medici (1484): both draw extensively upon the Latin authors that Barbaro favored, including silver-age figures such as Gellius and Apuleius. Rather than signifying a triumph of rhetoric over philosophy or vice-versa, the letter is an ambiguous synthesis.

Bausi's second chapter provides a major reinterpretation of the manuscripts of the Oratio de hominis dignitate. According to Eugenio Garin, ms. Palatino 885 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence contains the first redaction of the work, dating from before autumn 1486. Bausi itemizes the manifold defects of this copy, including trivializations, errors, and lacunae, and he argues that it is actually anterior to the so-called editio princeps. The passages in the Palatine manuscript that do not appear in the princeps are not subsequent additions but instead are parts that were suppressed, probably after Pico had begun to circulate the text and had encountered doubts about its orthodoxy. Thus, the princeps edition omits the earlier emphases on the importance of Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic wisdom, and on the necessity of reading texts in the original languages, as well as Pico's earlier assertion that no single philosopher or school could attain to the fullness of knowledge and truth. Bausi hypothesizes at least three phases of redaction, the third of which (datable between 7 Dec. 1486 and 20 Feb. 1487) includes the addition of a lengthy response to criticisms he had received. The added apologetic and defensive material, written in the austere style favored by Scholastics, lacked the flowery elegance of the opening.

A final chapter assesses Pico's "Parisian" - style works, the Conclusiones and the Apologia. While in the initial section of the latter Pico uses humanist Latin typical of his earlier writings, in the strictly philosophical and theological sections he resorts to Scholastic technical terms and neologisms. Comparison of the Apologia's section on the Cabala with that of the Oratio shows just how much Pico rewrote material in the "barbaric" style for the use of the pontifical commission. If the Conclusiones and the Apologia thus stand apart from Pico's other works, they do so in large part because of the exigencies of expositive clarity, conceptual distinctions, and terminological precision, which forced the use of Scholastic language already codified for centuries for discussion of similar materials. In sum, according to Bausi, Pico's writings do not alternate between rhetoric and philosophy, or between the pagan and the Christian, but instead those elements all coexisted in his methods and thinking in ways that defy easy classification.

Carolyn James details the precarious career of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (d. 1510), which is documented by over two hundred letters and a number of literary compositions in the Bolognese vernacular. Long dependent upon Lodovico Bentivoglio and his son Andrea, leading figures in a lesser branch of the local ruling family, Arienti later sought the patronage of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, as well as of the Estensi of Ferrara, but never with more than modest success. In part, Arienti failed to meet a challenge that confronted all humanists writing for seigneurial regimes, namely, that of "finding the right tone, language and genre with which to praise and idealise rulers who had no iron-clad claim to legitimacy but wished to use literature to enhance their prestige and princely personae" (93-94). His quest for patronage was stymied, too, by the need to market. his writings to more than one potential patron at a time.

James ably elucidates Arienti's longstanding connection with Ferrara. Already in the early 1480s, he corresponded with Duke Ercole d'Este and received occasional support, and subsequently he tailored works to appeal not just to the Bentivoleschi but also to the Estensi. Thus Arienti's Hymeneo Bentivoglio, a painstaking account of the wedding between Annibale Bentivoglio (Giovanni's son) and Lucrezia d'Este (1487), included glowing praises of Duke Ercole. The duke, however, appears to have valued Arienti less for his literary prowess than for his "ability to keep him in touch with Bolognese clients and to provide him with valuable political information"(50), tasks that required Arienti to remain in Bologna (Isabella d'Este, too, would benefit from Arienti's services as an informant). Nor did the rulers of Bologna help much. At a particularly bleak moment in Arienti's career, Giovanni Bentivoglio refused to reverse a decision by the Sedici (1495) to discontinue the writer's stipend, the money from which was subsequently reallocated for road construction. Only then did Ercole at last sponsor Arienti's appointment to a minor customs post in Ferrara and support him, if only as an emergency measure, until the author's return to Bologna in 1499.

James perhaps gives too much weight to sociopolitical factors in explaining Arienti's professional failures since, as her close readings show, despite Arienti's local reputation as the "Bolognese Boccaccio," his writings were stylistically uneven and at times quite cumbersome. If he obtained only modest and inconsistent remuneration, and that less for his literary efforts than for his political service, his rewards may nonetheless have been commensurate with his talents. Still in all, James's careful, well-documented study suggests the range of factors that panegyrists needed to take into account, and it makes clearer the challenges that militated against an author's success in the competitive quest for patronage.

Taken together, these three monographs evidence the variety of approaches that can fruitfully be taken to assessing the writings of Renaissance intellectuals. All three will prove useful to subsequent scholars of their subjects.

KENNETH GOUWENS University of Connecticut