Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism.

Carol Everhart Quillen. Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism.

(Recentiores: Later Latin Texts & Contexts, 4.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. ix + 25 pp. $42.50. ISBN: 0-472-10735-8.

From the premise of a shared "preoccupation with reading and writing" (217), the book examines Petrarch's appropriation of Augustine's language to shape and articulate his humanism. It does this through a comparison of their textual practices: habits of reading, characteristics of writing, and methods of argumentation. After an examination of Petrarch's marginal annotations and general comments about imitation, it scrutinizes the genres of correspondence and polemic. These display the figuration of Augustine both to illustrate and to challenge humanist practices. Finally, the book interprets the Secretum as "an appropriation of Augustine's authority for an exploration of the specifically humanist project of reviving and emulating the literary and cultural standards of antiquity" (190). Petrarch used Augustine's practice of reading pagan authors as an implicit justification for the recovery of classical models. Yet the Secretum also reveals a conflict between two Petrarchan strategies: reading through identif ication and questioning authorial intention. Quillen summarizes humanism as a complex variety of textual practices mediating the present and the past.

The premise of the book is not supportable, however, so its heuristic falters. Although Augustine was a reader and writer, his reading conducted him through the discovery of philosophy to the very transcendence of reading. From that speculation he most profoundly wrote. Quillen's fundamental misconception is this: Augustine assumed that "the methods of analysis and discovery appropriate to any true philosopher were derived from grammar and rhetoric" (167). Rather, the methods of analysis and discovery appropriate to Augustine's true philosophy were philosophical. Quillen notes that the alternative to a grammatically and rhetorically based philosophy would have been mysticism or asceticism or, perhaps, the abandonment of the text. Yet this alternative was precisely Augustine's. As Petrarch understood, Augustine was a Platonist, whose ascetical and mystical intentions toward contemplation did ultimately abandon texts for ideas. Reading and writing are discursive, rational. Contemplation is apprehensive, intell ectual. Significant in Renaissance humanism was not the imitation but the rejection of Augustine, for his mere tolerance of grammar and rhetoric as only propadeutic to philosophy. To poetize not only legitimately but also spiritually, as Petrarch desired and did, he necessarily developed a poetics in contradiction to Augustine. Quillen does not ponder Petrarch's bold assertion that his poetry was contemplative. The book deliberately omits his poetry -- his major work by his own claim -- to the jeopardy of its project.

The argument is so involved in details that it ignores issues. For another example, it takes Augustine's reading of the Psalms as typical of his reading of the Bible and his reading of the Bible as paradigmatic of his reading in general. It considers how Petrarch guided his own reading of the Psalms by Augustine's exegesis. Despite a vital concern with phiology it does not question their mutual use of a translation. Yet the authenticity of the text, especially the Bible, was a hallmark of humanism. The remark that Augustine had to learn to read the Old Testament not literally but spiritually misses the fact that he could not read it literally because he did not know Hebrew. Augustine's citation of the "sweet" verse that "brothers live together as one" (45) grossly mistranslates the Hebrew, "God gives the lonely a home" (Ps. 67:7). This grammatical mistake had existential import, since Augustine canonized this misreading as the prime precept of his monastic Rule, which many religious orders not only read but lived. Humanist scholars endured persecution to render the Hebrew text as preferable to the Septuagint and Vulgate translations. How does Augustine's ignorance and Petrarch's imitation of it relate to humanism?

The book does recognize some differences in the textual practices of Augustine and Petrarch and some differences between the historical and the constructed Augustines. It conscientiously documents these; for example, it explains polemical quotations taken out of context. But its particulars are too myopic of the general distinction, intellectual and methodological, to understand Petrarch's humanism definitively.

Bracketing its failures at comparison, Rereading the Renaissance still offers many worthwhile observations and insights on Petrarch's textual practices in prose. Especially interesting is its interpretation of his Secretum. A revised thesis, the book is very academic in its definition, method, and style. Although it sets its agendum from theories, it is most mature in the interpretation of texts.