Beyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical Antiquity 9783110638776, 9783110635775

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Beyond Reception

Transformationen der Antike

Herausgegeben von Hartmut Böhme, Horst Bredekamp, Johannes Helmrath, Christoph Markschies, Ernst Osterkamp, Dominik Perler, Ulrich Schmitzer Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Frank Fehrenbach, Niklaus Largier, Martin Mulsow, Wolfgang Proß, Ernst A. Schmidt, Jürgen Paul Schwindt

Band 62

Beyond Reception

Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical Antiquity Edited by Patrick Baker, Johannes Helmrath, and Craig Kallendorf

The publication of this volume was made possible through the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, using funds provided to Collaborative Research Center 644 »Transformations of Antiquity«.

ISBN 978-3-11-063577-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063877-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-064816-4 ISSN 1864-5208 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967608 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Logo »Transformationen der Antike«: Karsten Asshauer – SEQUENZ Cover design: Martin Zech, Bremen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Patrick Baker, Johannes Helmrath, and Craig Kallendorf Introduction 1 Lutz Bergemann, Martin Dönike, Albert Schirrmeister, Georg Toepfer, Marco Walter, and Julia Weitbrecht (edited and translated by Patrick Baker) 9 Transformation: A Concept for the Study of Cultural Change Giancarlo Abbamonte The Transformation of Attitudes towards Ancient Latin Authors and the Legacy of Lorenzo Valla 27 Federica Ciccolella The Greek Renaissance: Transfer, Allelopoiesis, or Both?

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Peter Mack How Did Renaissance Rhetoric Transform the Classical Tradition?

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Johannes Helmrath (translated by Patrick Baker) Political-Assembly Speeches, German Diets, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini 71 James Hankins The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists

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Roland Béhar “Haec Domus Omnium Triumphorum”: Petrarch and the Humanist Transformation of the Ancient Triumph 115 Craig Kallendorf Tradition, Reception, Transformation: Allelopoiesis and the Creation of the 133 Humanist Virgil Jill Kraye Renaissance Humanism and the Transformations of Ancient Philosophy

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Contents

Ada Palmer The Effects of Authorial Strategies for Transforming Antiquity on the Place of the Renaissance in the Current Philosophical Canon 163 Contributors Index

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Introduction

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ (John 3:1– 7, English Standard Version; emphasis added)

To be born again – this is the metaphor on which the Renaissance rests, enshrined in the period label that Petrarch and his descendants chose for themselves, as Mommsen and Ullman showed years ago.¹ Scholars of humanism do not always agree on the details, but men with such diverse approaches as Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eugenio Garin, and Hans Baron all agree that what was reborn was the Greek and Roman past, seen not through the prism of a later scholastic culture but essentially as it had been.² Access, the humanists believed, was unimpeded by modern life: as Machiavelli put it, “[I] step inside the venerable courts of the ancients … where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives of their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. … I absorb myself into them completely” (emphasis added).³ Much of the cultural activity of the Renaissance, from the rediscovery of lost manuscripts to the recreation of a classical building style, revolves around the actu-

 T. E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages,” Speculum 17 (1942): 226 – 42; B. L. Ullman, “Renaissance: The Word and the Underlying Concept,” in Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd edn., Storia e letteratura, Raccolta di studi e testi, 51 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1973), 11– 25; and M. L. McLaughlin, “Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Treand Quattrocento,” Renaissance Studies 2 (1988): 131– 42.  P. O. Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” Byzantion 17 (1944– 1945): 346 – 74; reprinted, with updated notes, in his Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 92– 119 and 150 – 63; in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 4 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956 – 1996), 1:553 – 83; and in his Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 85 – 105 and 272– 85; Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance, trans. P. Munz (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); and Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). A good overview of Renaissance history from a current perspective can be found in Bernd Roeck, Der Morgen der Welt. Geschichte der Renaissance (Munich: Beck, 2017).  Niccolò Macchiavelli, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, trans. J. B. Atkinson and D. Sices (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 262– 65, letter to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-001

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alization of this metaphor, but for some time now scholarship in the history of humanism suggests that access to the past might not have been as unimpeded as Machiavelli had thought. For one thing, mistakes were often made: the humanist book hand, for example, was called littera antiqua because it was presented as a revival of the ancient handwriting style, but its origins were actually in the Carolingian period.⁴ In some cases, like the fragmentary manuscript of Petronius’s Satyricon, parts of the classical past proved beyond recovery, while in others, like the ‘Torso Belvedere,’ a restoration that might have been never came into being, which suggests that at least now and again, antiquity seemed sufficiently Other to its Renaissance observers that it could not, or should not, be restored and recreated.⁵ Indeed, as Thomas Greene showed some thirty-five years ago, the process of imitating antiquity extends far beyond simple “reproductive” or “sacramental” copying. Imitation can become “heuristic” when it distances itself from its subtext while simultaneously advertising its derivation from it, and, as Petrarch’s Secretum shows, heuristic imitation shades into “dialectical” when the text becomes the site of a struggle between two worlds whose conflict cannot be easily resolved.⁶ As Nicodemus noted, it is difficult indeed to be born again. This discussion about the nature of Renaissance humanism has taken place within the larger context of methodological changes in what is now generally referred to as ‘reception studies.’ During the last century, the handful of classicists working in this area were laboring in what was then called the ‘classical tradition.’ The emphasis there was on how elements from antiquity, which occupied a privileged status in the inquiry, were handed down essentially intact to later ages, which were understood to be the richer for this transmission. As more scholars began entering the field around the end of the century, a new name, ‘reception,’ gained favor, as a way of suggesting that the receiving culture took a more active role in appropriating the past than the earlier model had suggested. Practice did not always keep up with theoretical innovation, however, so that many studies in classical reception did not look all that different from those that had been produced under the label of the classical tradition.⁷ Something more needed to be done.

 B. L. Ullman, Ancient Writing and Its Influence, Our Debt to Greece and Rome Series (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963; rpt. of New York, 1932 edn.), 105 – 17, 137– 44 provides the basic account.  Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 191– 200.  Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 28 – 53.  For an example of what had been accomplished using the older methodologies, see A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. Craig Kallendorf, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); and A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). For work in transformation specifically, see note 9 below and Classics Transformed, ed. Giancarlo Abbamonte and Craig Kallendorf, Testi e studi di cultura classica, 69 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2018),

Introduction

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If we return to the quotation from the Gospel of John, we read again, “Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’” I would like to suggest that both Nicodemus and Jesus are right, and that what they are saying can help us move beyond humanism as it has traditionally been understood, and beyond reception as it is currently practiced. If being born again means to enter the mother’s womb a second time, this is indeed not possible. But as Jesus notes, one can be born again, provided we recognize that the second birth is not identical to the first. At its core, rebirth involves change – transformation, if you will. Accordingly, in 2004, a major research effort was organized by Hartmut Böhme, Johannes Helmrath, and other professors mainly at the Humboldt University in Berlin to address this problem. Collaborative Research Centre 644, Transformations of Antiquity, gathered more than sixty researchers into twenty-seven different projects over a span of twelve years that were designed to develop and apply a new methodology for doing reception.⁸ This methodology is called ‘transformation theory’ to increase the stress on the receiving culture: not only is it inevitable that the receiving culture will transform the classical past during the process of reception, but even how that past is seen is shaped by the later culture through which it is viewed. A major conference, ʻBeyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical Antiquity,ʼ was held in Berlin on 23 – 24 March 2015. This conference, whose heavily revised papers are presented here, drew on a group of senior scholars from Europe and America to explore the directions in which the new methodology could go. By focusing on transformation, we can update the foundational metaphor of the Renaissance and launch the study of humanism into a new age, in which active change replaces passive reception as the key to cultural understanding. At the same time, while the receiving culture modifies and constructs antiquity, the latter also has a power of its own to influence and transform later ages. The cultural changes that result from transformations are reciprocal, so we must indeed go beyond mere reception.⁹ ***

which is a collection of essays by a group of younger researchers that addresses some of the same issues as this volume does.  https://www.sfb-antike.de/en/, accessed 9 September 2018.  The concept of transformation is explained at length in Transformation. Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels, ed. Hartmut Böhme et al. (Munich: Fink, 2011), esp. in the first two essays: Hartmut Böhme, “Einladung zur Transformation” (7– 37), and Lutz Bergemann et al., “Transformation. Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels” (39 – 56), the second of which is translated into English in this volume. See also Transformatio et Continuatio: Forms of Change and Constancy of Antiquity in the Iberian Peninsula, 500 – 1500, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Stefan Trinks (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Antike als Transformation. Konzepte zur Beschreibung kulturellen Wandels, ed. Johannes Helmrath, Eva Marlene Hausteiner, and Ulf Jensen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Renaissance Re-

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As an introduction to the concept of transformation and how it can be used profitably in scholarship, Patrick Baker has translated an essay originally written in German by a group of scholars affiliated with the Transformations of Antiquity collaborative research center. It provides the basic methodological framework on which the following essays depend. The classical past stands as a reference sphere, from which various agents select, adopt, or otherwise incorporate various aspects into the reception sphere. This process, however, is not unidirectional, in the sense that the reference sphere does not exist outside of space and time and is in fact construed at the same time as the reception sphere is modified. The research team in Collaborative Research Centre 644, Transformations of Antiquity, has coined the term allelopoiesis (from the Greek words allelos, ‘reciprocal,’ and poiesis, ‘creation’) to describe this relationship of interdependency and reciprocity. Greater precision can be obtained by noting whether the reference object is included in the reception sphere, excluded from it, or recombined with other elements; these three broad categories have been further broken down into fourteen transformation types to which reference is made throughout the essays. For the humanists themselves, the revival of antiquity began with regaining control of the languages of the classical past: the Latin of Cicero and Virgil, and the Greek of Sophocles and Plato. Latin, of course, had remained a living part of the classical tradition through the Middle Ages, but by the time of Petrarch, it had evolved into something whose syntax and vocabulary were both classical and postclassical. As Giancarlo Abbamonte shows in “The Transformation of Attitudes towards Ancient Latin Authors and the Legacy of Lorenzo Valla,” the success of the humanistic movement depended in part on a change in how Latin was taught in the schools. Under the stimulus of Lorenzo Valla, the actual usage of classical authors replaced the reliance on abstract rules set forth by late antique and medieval grammarians, and the canon of authors who were accepted as authorities on classical usage was expanded greatly. In this way, the medieval transformation of the Latin language was followed

writings, ed. Helmut Pfeiffer, Irene Fantappiè, and Tobias Roth (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Apotheosis of the North: The Swedish Appropriation of Classical Antiquity around the Baltic Sea and Beyond, 1650 to 1800, ed. Bernd Roling et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance: The Humanist Depiction of Rulers in Historiographical and Biographical Texts, ed. Patrick Baker et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); Contingentia. Transformationen des Zufalls, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Werner Röcke, and Ulrike C. A. Stephan (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Antikes erzählen. Narrative Transformationen von Antike in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Anna Heinze, Albert Schirrmeister, and Julia Weitbrecht (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Lutz Bergemann, Ralph Cudworth – System aus Transformation. Zur Naturphilosophie der Cambridge Platonists und ihrer Methode (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Verena Lobsien, Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010); Medien und Sprachen humanistischer Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Johannes Helmrath, Albert Schirrmeister, and Stefan Schlelein (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009); Übersetzung und Transformation, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Christof Rapp, and Wolfgang Rösler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007); and in general the series Transformationen der Antike, published by De Gruyter, https:// www.degruyter.com/view/serial/21753, accessed 11 October 2018.

Introduction

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by a second transformation that was developed with an eye on the ancient texts and effected by a group of Roman humanists who worked under the influence of Valla in the Quattrocento. The situation with Greek was different, in the sense that in the Latin west, few people had any real control over this language for centuries. This situation changed, the usual story goes, when a group of Byzantine emigrés fled to Italy and taught the language to the eager humanist scholars who spread throughout Europe and restored access to the Greek sources in the Renaissance. This is true as far as it goes, but in “The Greek Renaissance: Transfer, Allelopoiesis, or Both?” Federica Ciccolella uses the transformation methodology to suggest that the situation is more complicated than the usual story suggests. As Professor Ciccolella shows, “Greek intellectuals living in the West or in Eastern territories under Western rule tended to integrate so deeply into their adopted countries that they can be legitimately considered as parts of the cultures of those countries.” These scholars indeed facilitated the recovery of Greek by humanists in the Latin west, but they inevitably offered access to the classical past through a filter that became increasingly clouded by the values and attitudes of western humanism itself. As the example of Crete shows, cultural transfer went from west to east as well as east to west, so that the traditional Byzantine learning that centered on the study of Greek language and culture was replaced by pedagogical models that the first generation of Greek emigrés had created to help Latin-speaking humanists learn the language. After the pupils in a humanist school mastered grammar, the art of speaking correctly, they moved to rhetoric, the art of speaking well, which leads Peter Mack to ask “How Did Renaissance Rhetoric Transform the Classical Tradition?” His answer, in its most straightforward form, epitomizes what is at stake in viewing humanism through the prism of transformation theory: the humanists “used the classical literary and rhetorical tradition in order to put forward new ideas.” In rhetoric, as in the other core humanistic disciplines, classical texts that had been lost for centuries joined works like the Rhetorica ad Herennium to provide a broader classical foundation for work in the field. But as the examples of Rudolf Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus show, Renaissance rhetoricians took these classical texts and worked from them to a new emphasis on the study of rhetorical doctrines through literary analysis, a new general theory of disposition, a new version of the topics of invention, and a new emphasis on variety that led to a focus on copia (“fecundity of expression”). In “Political-Assembly Speeches, German Diets, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini,” Johannes Helmrath continues the analysis of how classical rhetoric was transformed by the Renaissance humanists. He begins this analysis by defining what he calls ‘oratorics,’ a new perspective on premodern parliaments and councils, with their close connection to classical rhetoric, and shows how the transformation methodology can make the relevant speech acts more comprehensible. The term ‘oratorics’ reflects the intention to transcend the bounds of the classical technical / literary study of rhetoric in favor of an all-encompassing exploration of the “speaking culture” (Redekultur) of political assemblies, one that approaches speeches in their his-

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torical “function as a linguistic instrument in a power game” while also considering orations from a philological point of view. Professor Helmrath argues that transformation can be an ideal complement to the concept of oratorics, because it not only illuminates the fundamental role of references to antiquity in countless assembly speeches, but it also facilitates the analysis of these texts and sheds light on the modes of thought and the actio (delivery) through which classical culture was appropriated or amalgamated in new contexts. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the humanist Pope Pius II, and his orations before the German diets provide a case study that illustrates these points. Early modern politics also serves as the subject of James Hankins’s “The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists.” It is undeniable that when they thought about politics, the humanists turned to Aristotle’s Politics and Cicero’s De legibus, to Pericles and Caesar, so that in a sense they were reviving and carrying on the ancient reform of politics through philosophical study and the moral virtue of rulers. This leads Professor Hankins to coin the term ‘virtue politics’ to describe the general humanist approach to the field. But while virtue politics has its roots in antiquity, it embraces ideas like “equality in the capacity for virtue” and a liberal education as the path to virtue that were not widely accepted in the classical sources. As this essay concludes, “[h]umanist political thought has a creativity and coherence of its own, which though reliant on ancient wisdom is not reducible to it. Some aspects of ancient political thought were included in virtue politics, others excluded, and still others were recombined into a political phenomenon that may stand as a Renaissance transformation of the classical past that is still useful to modern times.” “‘Haec Domus Omnium Triumphorum’: Petrarch and the Humanist Transformation of the Ancient Triumph” takes up how the transformation methodology can help us refine our understanding of history as a humanist discipline. Petrarch’s fascination with the the triumphal ritual, founded by Romulus after his victory over Acron, king of the Cininians, is well known, but Roland Béhar shows how his double transformation of the antique triumphal rite, both historical (in the De viris illustribus) and fictional (in the Triumphi), allowed Petrarch and his humanistic heirs to develop a coherent vision of ancient history, based on a constant meditation on the ritual of the triumph. Petrarch’s recreation of the triumphs gave way to the Roman triumphs that were rescued by the archaeological and epigraphic sciences developed since the middle of the Quattrocento, with both offering insights into the accomplishments of great men that extended from Italy to the rest of Europe, from erudite commentaries to artistic renderings that reached from educated nobles to popular audiences. Most of the essays on grammar, rhetoric, and history, the first three of Kristeller’s five humanistic disciplines, function primarily as meditations on how the concept of transformation can help us identify and validate the aspects of the reception sphere that appear alongside the ones from the reference sphere that the traditional approach to humanism has valued. The last three essays, on poetry and philosophy, follow more closely the model of Professor Helmrath’s and go more deeply into the

Introduction

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transformation methodology by applying some or all of the fourteen transformation types to problems within the remaining humanistic disciplines. In “Tradition, Reception, Transformation: Allelopoiesis and the Creation of the Humanist Virgil,” Craig Kallendorf begins with a paradox: as a ubiquitous school text in the Renaissance that is still well known today, Virgil’s poetry should provide a stable point of entry for modern scholars studying the period, but the closer we look, the more strange and foreign this Renaissance Virgil appears. As Peter Mack indicated, Renaissance rhetoricians often made their points through the analysis of literature, which resulted in the Aeneid becoming an example of substitution, where Virgil the ancient poet was converted to Virgil the Renaissance rhetorician, whose goal was to make the poem into a praise of virtue and condemnation of vice. Those readers who felt that Virgil had not made this point clearly enough could take refuge in Maffeo Vegio’s thirteenth book, an example of supplementation in which elements from the reference sphere were completed by an agent in the reception sphere. The dialogue with Christianity structures the transformation of the Eclogues, where focalization encouraged a Christian reading of Eclogue 4 and ignorance led to a suppression of the homoerotic elements of Eclogue 2. The result was a Virgil whose place in Renaissance culture helped in turn to construct a picture of the classical past that was compatible with that culture. “Renaissance Humanism and the Transformations of Ancient Philosophy” examines what happens when Renaissance Aristotelianism, Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism are studied within the transformation methodology. In this chapter Jill Kraye takes a fresh look at familiar material and identifies instances of transformation that have not been properly recognized as such. A number of different kinds of transformation were employed by the humanists in their engagement with ancient philosophy, and several larger issues have emerged as well, such as the time lag between the discovery and / or translation of a text and the appropriation of the philosophy it contains, which, as with Epicureanism, could be very lengthy. It seems, moreover, that when the humanists appropriated ancient philosophy, they almost always recontextualized it as well, usually by putting it to a new purpose. The case of skepticism has shown that transformations, like virtually all historical events, could have unintended consequences. Finally and most importantly, we have seen that the assimilation of a pagan philosophical school to Christianity was not only the necessary prelude to its Renaissance revival, but was also regarded by most, if not all, of the scholars discussed here as a valid and even essential part of their humanist remit. “The Effects of Authorial Strategies for Transforming Antiquity on the Place of the Renaissance in the Current Philosophical Canon” extends the discussion of philosophy, while at the same time suggesting a way in which the papers in this volume can stimulate further research. Humanist philosophers were often their own worst enemies, in the sense that the style in which they chose to express themselves and their propensity to ascribe what they had to say to classical sources often make it appear as if they made no significant contributions to the development of

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philosophical thought. Ada Palmer clarifies what is at stake here by comparing the humanist philosophers to the seventeenth-century philosophical movements led by Descartes and Francis Bacon, concluding that the authors of each movement used different signature transformation types to advertise or hide moments when they addressed or reused the ideas of their predecessors, especially the ancients. When today we run across figures celebrated as a ‘philosopher-poet’ or ‘philosopher and Platonist’ or who eschew the title of ‘philosopher’ altogether, and when we read treatises that veil their original content under revaluated or inverted ancient labels, or deny the originality of their works of multi-authored philosophical supplementations, it is easy to be deflected by the form and fail to see the innovative content. In contrast, seventeenth-century strategies of assimilating earlier material instead of encapsulating it intact, making only vague references to rivals in a rhetoric of creative destruction instead of keeping their foes alive through active negation, and the comparative paucity of references to everyday politics make seventeenth-century sources easier to detach from their historical context and appreciate today. Professor Palmer’s chapter offers an interesting antidote to the often-repeated belief that the humanists were not philosophers, at least as the term is usually understood. It also suggests that the transformation methodology can be used to write larger cultural history, in which periods can be defined through their acceptance and rejection of specific transformation types, and cultural change can be measured by comparing the rise and fall of particular types. This would be an interesting project to pursue, but one that indeed takes us beyond humanism. College Station and Berlin, October 2018

Lutz Bergemann, Martin Dönike, Albert Schirrmeister, Georg Toepfer, Marco Walter, and Julia Weitbrecht (edited and translated by Patrick Baker)

Transformation: A Concept for the Study of Cultural Change Definition

Transformations are complex processes of change that occur between a sphere of reference and a sphere of reception. ¹ Transformations are effected by agents (who do not necessarily have to be human beings) belonging to the reception sphere, who, by selecting, adopting, or otherwise incorporating an aspect of the reference sphere, modify the reception sphere while at the same time construing the reference sphere. This close connection between modification and construction is an essential characteristic of transformation processes, which can occur both diachronically and synchronically. Such processes therefore lead to something “new” in two senses, namely to mutually dependent, novel configurations in both the reference culture and the reception culture. This relationship of interdependency, of reciprocity, will be denoted in what follows by the term allelopoiesis, a neologism formed from the Greek roots allelon (mutual, reciprocal) and poesis (creation, generation).

Introduction The relationship between continuity and change in cultural phenomena is one of the fundamental problems of the historical study of cultures in general. Several different approaches have been taken to account for it theoretically, for example in the history of ideas or mentalities, in the field of iconology, and in concepts like ‘thought style’ (Denkstil) and ‘paradigm shift.’ A perfect example of how complex and fruitful this line of inquiry can be is provided by the productive metamorphosis of ancient objects, concepts, practices, arts, and sciences that has been taking place for over two thousand years now. How is it possible, for example, that such disparate political regimes as the British Empire, fascist Italy, and the democratic republic of the United States all invoke the ancient idea of the imperium Romanum? What accounts for the success with which humanist historians adopted ancient models of analyzing the past for their own works of history, considering that these models were developed for a totally different society?  In this and the following chapters, technical terms from the transformation methodology will be placed in italics. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-002

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L. Bergemann, M. Dönike, A. Schirrmeister, G. Toepfer, M. Walter, and J. Weitbrecht

What novel meanings grew out of the characters and scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses when they were interpreted morally and allegorically and were subjected to a Christian revaluation in the Middle Ages, or when they were translated in the early modern period into paintings, sculptures, dramas, and operas? What needs were addressed by the idealizing use of antiquity in drama and historical novels in the nineteenth century, especially when one considers the rapidly increasing scientization of antiquity then taking place? Why, again in the nineteenth century, was a new physics able to legitimize itself by relying on the ancient philosophical concept of atomism? And finally, on another level: does this modern trend towards scientization represent the ultimate and final stage in the productive appropriation of ancient cultural phenomena? Or does antiquity continue to be fundamental for the construction of modernity, even if only as an indispensable foil? The theory of transformation proposed here is meant to provide a versatile organon for the description and analysis of such instances of cultural change. The concept of transformation bears on the pragmatic, institutional, and semantic phenomena of cultural change, both in their temporal development and in their spatial location and diffusion. Transformation is understood as reciprocal creative production (but also as creative destruction), as the translation, transfer, and reconfiguration of cultural goods that plays a foundational role for the development of a society’s systems of knowledge and art as well as for its cultural and political self-positioning. In this way the term ‘transformation,’ which is already used prominently across many disciplines, from mathematics to the natural and social sciences and the humanities, is taken up and expanded to include the principle of allelopoiesis, i. e., of reciprocal constitution, construction, or fashioning. The principle of allelopoiesis makes it easier to depart from linear concepts of unidirectional influence. Transformation posits that an object or phenomenon from the reference sphere is not static or simply established, but rather is altered, generated anew, even ‘invented’ by the specific medial conditions attending any given process of transformation. At the same time, the reception sphere itself is altered in the act of transformative incorporation. Thus this act of incorporation cannot merely be understood as an instance of borrowing or adoption, of inscription or documentation, but rather must always be seen as a constructive act as well that follows the rules and impulses of a specific time and culture. It can be assumed, finally, that reception cultures, in their understanding of what they have incorporated, always create a concomitant narrative of self-understanding through which cultural identities and efforts at self-reflection are regulated. Thus an investigation into transformation does not ask primarily whether a given reference to a reference culture is correct or incorrect. The point, instead, is to describe an historical process as an instance of transformation. The theory of transformation introduced in this essay has been developed specifically in order to be applied to the widest range of processes of cultural change. If the illustrative examples in what follows come mainly from Greco-Roman antiquity, this is no accident. For it is only through its dialogue with antiquity as the paradigmatic

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(albeit in no way homogeneous but rather endlessly transforming) cultural foil that European culture, with all its global consequences, has developed. This applies to the constitution of Christian culture, to the differentiation between the arts and the sciences, and to the split between the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as to the development of cultural and national identities. Neither antiquity itself nor its reception are the focus of interest here, but rather the role antiquity plays in the cultural, artistic, political, and scientific self-positioning of subsequent cultures. The vitality with which successive cultures have endowed the various aspects of antiquity accounts for the fact that more ancient artifacts and greater knowledge about antiquity are available today than one thousand or five hundred years ago. Like every historical epoch, antiquity not only existed in the past but has also come into being over the course of history. The interdisciplinary nature of transformation theory is the root of its integrative approach, one that makes it possible to adopt and develop further the tools and methods of various theoretical models such as reception theory, transfer theory, and discourse analysis. Reception theory, which emerged from the field of literary studies, first placed its focus on the relationship between text and reader. The understanding of reception as an interactive relationship was then applied to other arts. One line of reception research is concentrated on the productive integration of artistic phenomena into new aesthetic forms and media. The technical, scientific, political, economic, and social realms, on the other hand, have been largely ignored. Due to this primarily aesthetic focus, recent approaches in reception theory, in which more space is given to the creative performance of reception, generally remain concentrated on the intimate interaction between recipient and work, or rather on how the object is received along the recipient’s horizon. In contrast, another line of research emphasizes the material aspect as a constitutive or leading factor in reception. According to this view, it makes a difference whether the object in question is, for example, a manuscript, a critical edition, or a painting, or whether one is dealing with knowledge gained through laboratory experiments. Transformation theory borrows these various developments and broadens the spectrum of phenomena that they can be used to investigate. In particular, the approaches to reciprocity found in more recent reception scholarship are adopted. In transformation analysis, however, the aspect of interdependence is developed further, since transformation is understood here as a retroactive process, and the focus is not solely on the horizon of the recipient. Indeed, the goal is to comprehend the entire process of transformation in all its component parts. Complementary to reception studies, certain concepts of cultural transfer theory have been developed that are not aimed primarily at aesthetic processes. Instead they investigate people and things, practices and techniques, ideas and concepts in transfer between spatially separate cultures or socially disparate groups. Cultural transfer research tends to concentrate on the analysis of synchronic processes of cultural exchange and on the spatial differences that determine them. It emphasizes the dynamic nature of transfer processes as well as the interaction between source cul-

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tures, intermediaries, and target culture. In addition, the solidity and permanence, or rather the density and duration, of the transfer process are considered the essential elements for differentiating a comprehensive process of this kind from more or less individual reception processes. Transfer theory focuses on processes of appropriation and assimilation into a new cultural horizon, understanding them as deliberately initiated and guided by specific interests. Transformation takes up these approaches but transcends them, for it also accounts for discontinuous and isolated processes of appropriation, as well as (willfully) ignorant and distorting forms of cultural incorporation. Transformation, with its insistence on allelopoiesis, overcomes the focus on the spatial aspect of cultural exchange, while also including temporal dimensions in its analysis. A further important approach to describing cultural change is discourse analysis. It conceptualizes discourse as a dynamic system that determines the potential for what can be thought and said by a specific social group at a specific point in time. Foucault comprehended the diachronic shifts in discourse formations in two epistemological figures: archaeology and genealogy. Archaeology aims to reconstruct historical forms of knowledge and their rules, while genealogy describes the progression of discourses in connection with power configurations. In particular, more recent approaches assume that historical change takes place via the tension between the perpetuation of discourse and the latter’s constant change. In this respect transformation theory shares a basic assumption with discourse theory: realities are generated and regulated discursively. Furthermore, both theories believe that not only practices (as manifested in texts and artifacts) but also supra-individual structures and institutions constitute the parameters and media of cultural change. In contrast to discourse analysis, however, transformation broadens the view to include the reference culture – and the reference culture’s own alteration in the process of cultural change – as a constitutive element of that change.

How Transformation Works Transformations generate dynamics of cultural production that always entail the alteration of what preceded them, on which the transformation reflexively bears and which is only specified over the course of the transformation process itself. Nevertheless, such processes are not linear – that is, they should not be understood as a oneway street. Rather they are characterized by relationships of interdependence: transformations are bipolar processes of construction in which each pole reciprocally constitutes and gives shape to the other – a kind of cultural self-construal. This self-reference can be consciously reflected upon, as the interplay between ‘one’s own’ and ‘the other.’ But it can also flow into the transformation as an unacknowledged projection or identification. This productive reciprocity of cultural phenomena from the reference and reception cultures is denoted by the term allelopoiesis.

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The consequence for the objects of transformation is that they do not move through the process of reception as constant, quasi-unchanged entities. On the contrary, the input and output of transformation must be understood as actively performative elements that mutually generate themselves and each other in the very process of transformation, and that furthermore are determined by the respective contexts of the reference and reception spheres. The two sides of allelopoiesis – the constitution of the reception culture through the reference to a reference culture, and the reception culture’s construction of the reference culture – are historically established phenomena and have in some cases been investigated in detail. In this sense the term allelopoiesis merely makes explicit and contextualizes something that has often been a staple of theoretical reflection, especially in historical scholarship. On the one hand, the concept emphasizes the fact that a given culture does not create itself ex nihilo, i. e., it cannot be thought of as an autopoiesis, but rather stands in relation to divergent cultural phenomena with which it associates itself, from which it distances itself, or by which it is influenced in other ways. On the other hand, the concept underlines the fact that every historical understanding of a circumstance is not a simple realistic representation of the past, but rather develops in the context of a specific perspective and within the parameters of specific theoretical positions and interests. Thus the representation of any past phenomenon must be understood as a construction from a later perspective. The concept of allelopoiesis thus helps to take seriously the dimensions of retrospectivity, perspectivity, selectivity, and particularity that attend any historical representation. Historical descriptions and judgments are retrospective insofar as they regard what comes later as an historical result of what came before. They are perspectival insofar as they analyze and judge from a specific point of view. They are selective insofar as they ignore certain aspects and focus on others. Finally, they are particular insofar as they can never portray an event in its totality. Due to this entangled dynamic of transformation processes, the reference object has an indefinite ontological status that can range between the two extreme poles of discovery and invention. This status cannot be determined or fixed in any general way, but rather, if at all, on a case-by-case basis. Reference objects need not be of a material nature, but can also be structural or semantic. On the one hand their otherness and inherent resistance to change set limits to what can be done with them. On the other hand they are characterized by processuality and formal and semantic plasticity or openness. This relationship between stability and plasticity delimits the scope of transformation. The function and potential force of the object of a transformation are tied to its specific embedding in a sphere of reference. The sphere’s structural repertoires and stock of forms generally serve as a nodal point for transformations. What is more, they themselves can even generate and structure transformations. Conversely, the reception sphere also possesses formal and structural repertoires that determine the choice and incorporation of phenomena from the reference sphere.

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Transformation processes are initiated by one or more agents. Agents need not be human beings, but can also be collective entities, institutions, or mere artifacts. Furthermore, various agents can work interactively or in competition with one another at the same time. Everything that changes the condition of another object or phenomenon by effecting a difference is therefore to be designated as an agent. This understanding of agency affords a more precise view of interdependencies and correlations between individuals and a group, between the material world, institutions, and human actors. Thus in addition to determining and causing relationships, the power and influence of non-human forces can be analyzed, bearing in mind that things, too, can authorize, allow, suggest, influence, block, forbid, etc. Nonetheless, agency cannot be understood as a quasi-magical quality of media and materials. Just like the human actors involved in transformation, these, too, only become agents of cultural change during the transformation process. In this context media are assigned a special significance, precisely because they are not neutral communication channels or carriers of information. By virtue of their particular medial qualities, texts, images, and numbers – and in a broader sense also materials, technologies, genres, etc. – influence the objects of the reference and the reception spheres. The kind of object being transmitted (e. g., a text, an image, a formula), the material form it takes (a printed book or a manuscript, a painting, sculpture, or geometric structure), and the genre within which it is realized (epic or drama, mythological tale or popular genre scene, scientific treatise or mathematical model) is therefore of decisive importance for the transformation process. Fundamental for the scholarly observation of transformations is the methodologically informed and dissociative distinction between reception sphere and reference sphere that underlies the investigation. Since these spheres must be identified anew in each transformation analysis, and since their relationship shifts with each successive transformation, the comparative criterion that underlies the analysis can only be determined by the state of knowledge possessed by the scholarly observer. Each transformation modifies the state of knowledge about the reference sphere, thus also modifying the validity claim (Geltungsanspruch ²) made on this basis in the reception sphere.

The Validity of Transformation In this context, the term ‘validity’ does not denote ahistorical truth or atemporal applicability, but rather refers to the value or impact that is ascribed to a transformation by an historical actor and his environment. It therefore makes more sense to speak of

 For a discussion of the term ‘validity claim’ (Geltungsanspruch), see the article on Jürgen Habermas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by James Bohman and William Rehg, http://plato.stan ford.edu/entries/habermas/ (accessed 28 September 2018).

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claims or pretensions to validity, in order to analyze better the full range of conditions that lead to the legitimation and authorization of transformations. These exist on all levels of transformation, even on that of the scholarly observer. The point of considering validity claims, it is important to emphasize, is not to test a transformation in terms of its success, correctness, or representational suitability. Instead it serves to investigate the criteria for success, correctness, or suitability that pertain in the reception sphere and to which transformations are subject, thus opening them up to analysis. Transformations are always embedded in historical contexts and are therefore always tied to specific validity claims. The selection and arrangement of reference material are also determined by the claim made for them at a specific point in time by specific authorities or institutions. Pretensions to validity can also be expressed and negotiated in a less institutionalized and unarticulated form. For example, a work of art also makes an (aesthetic, political, etc.) validity claim. Therefore transformation analysis is devoted to both the explicit and the implicit validity claims made for an object and treats them in light of the criteria for validity pertaining at the time. The examination of how transformations are legitimated and authorized also helps to clarify what forms are operative for constructing the past and allelopoietically utilizing the reference culture. Is the reference culture instrumentalized in the reception sphere for validity claims, or are pretensions to validity at work in certain transformations that are unrelated to the reference sphere or that can be differentiated from it? Both are significant for transformation. An object whose affiliation with a specific reference culture makes it problematic can be ‘ennobled’ in the transformation – that is, its value can be increased through its contextualization in the reception sphere. Yet the validity claim can also be based on this very affiliation (e. g., the object’s great antiquity), which remains constant in all transformations. If knowledge is what a given community recognizes to be knowledge, then in the reconstruction of transformation processes, those things will appear as ancient, medieval, modern, etc. when they are considered to be such in a specific knowledge community at a specific point in time. From this perspective, transformations in scholarship and science can also be considered without judging them primarily according to their correctness or the truth of their research results. The point is rather to ascertain their significance for certain transformation processes. Thus there are phenomena in the history of science that from today’s point of view appear wrong or highly retroprojective but that were of great importance for the development of the episteme. In this way historical genealogies can be elaborated that do not aim at causes or origins and that do not lend themselves to the narration of the history of science as a history of progress, but that instead can assist the investigation of transformations, including with respect to the history of their validity claims. Noting the significance that pretensions to validity have for transformation processes also helps to differentiate the roles played by the historical actor and the scholarly observer. To the degree that scholarly observers select, classify, and interrogate the material they study, they create new pretensions to validity that may seem suit-

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able in the present but that need not necessarily be objectively ‘correct,’ thereby in turn themselves becoming agents of further transformations. In this sense, scholarship is itself transformative and triggers new transformations. Although scholars can be aware in their work of how tied their own assumptions are to their own time and context, this fact itself cannot be subjected to analysis, but rather must be the object of future transformation research. Hence cultures are constructed even in the hands of scholars – not only foreign ones, but also their own.

Transformation Types Due to the allelopoietic character of transformations, no typology can fully account for the multifaceted forms in which they occur throughout history. Most descriptions of transformation processes concentrate terminologically on the effects such processes have on the reception culture. As for the specific types of transformation, the distinctions between them are largely determined by the perspective of the observer. Ultimately, it is the observer who decides whether the object, the reference sphere, the reception sphere, or the agent is decisive for the distinction made. The same transformation can be subsumed under different transformation types by different observers. The typology of transformation set out here is a proposal for focusing the individual elements of a transformation, placing each one in turn in the foreground as decisive. This having been said, transformations are characterized primarily by one of three basic modes, namely the inclusion, exclusion, or recombination of cultural phenomena, which can be observed in relation to the object of the transformation as well as to the reception and reference spheres. With respect to the agents, furthermore, transformations can have various motivations depending on whether the goals and effects of the transformation include the conservation, authorization, legitimation, canonization, or idealization – or on the other hand the alienation, rejection, etc. – of the transformed phenomena. When considered this way, transformations are assumed to be projective processes. In addition to these analytically describable forms, there are transformation phenomena that, albeit evincing no effect on the micro-level, nonetheless have a considerable impact on the macro-level. For example, various elements of a transformation or of several collateral transformation processes can interact with, strengthen, or weaken one another. In this way they can bring about a complex, perhaps unintentional, and unforeseen dynamic that, in light of its non-additive and non-linear effects, can be understood as an emergence. Precisely because transformations are always complex networks, it is sensible to differentiate heuristically between diverse types in a way that allows the contributing factors to be reconstructed. The open list proposed here in no way replaces historical analysis. On the contrary, it is intended as a handmaiden to such research.

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Appropriation A transformation that detaches a reference object from its original context and incorporates it, largely preserved (different from assimilation), into the reception culture. Appropriation can be the result of the intention of historical actors, but the relative constancy of ancient reference phenomena can also be due to material or medial factors. One example of appropriation is provided by humanist editions of ancient historiographical and semi-historiographical texts, such as the Swiss humanist Heinrich Glarean’s 1544 edition of Caesar’s Commentarii de bello Gallico. The text as then known is included in its entirety and is supplemented with commentaries on geographical designations and the text’s content, by prefatory images such as a map, and by still other texts. Through these alterations, the ancient text – the self-justification of a military commander – is adapted to the reading habits of a humanistically educated audience, but it still exists independently. In this way, humanist editorial practice brands the ancient version as ‘other’ while at the same time claiming it for itself in the commentary. On the other hand, it can be seen as an assimilation of the same source text when Caesar’s opening sentence (“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres”) is taken up and incorporated nearly verbatim into original works of sixteenth-century humanist historiography, leading seamlessly into the author’s own narration. This is the case in Polydore Vergil’s (1470 – 1555) Anglica historia and in the Bavarian history by Johannes Aventinus (1477– 1537).

Assimilation A transformation that integrates elements of the reference sphere into the context of the reception culture, blending the two together. In contrast to appropriation, the elements are subject to more marked alterations. Whereas appropriation denotes various processes of gradual incorporation into the reception sphere, assimilation is a form of fusion in which the assimilated reference object can ultimately be recognized only as an allusion or, in extreme cases, can no longer be recognized at all. An example of a moralizing Christian assimilation is the didactic program that Conrad of Hirsau (1030 – ca. 1091) formulated in his Dialogus super auctores, for use in monastic schools. In its conceptual arrangement of didactic material, this handbook of Latin literature constructs a textual canon of pagan and Christian authors that ignores temporal and religious boundaries and instead seems homogeneous and continuous. The differences between ancient and Christian authorities disappear, since, in Conrad’s presentation, a pious and judicious reception of ancient works shows that they can be read as sources of divine truth.

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Disjunction A transformation in which something from the reference culture is dressed in a form belonging to the reception culture, or in which something from the reception culture is endowed with a form belonging to the reference culture. Proceeding from inclusive or from exclusive selection processes, disjunction can serve to legitimize a given art form by filling it with sanctioned content (such as inscribing Christian content in pagan poetic forms) or to adapt pagan or otherwise questionable content by means of a formal approximation (usually accompanying acts of revaluation) to the reception culture. The term derives from the “principle of disjunction” of meaning and form developed by Erwin Panofsky in his book Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. In characterizing a predominant tendency in medieval art, Panofsky made the following important observation: Wherever in the high and later Middle Ages a work of art borrows its form from a classical model, this form is almost invariably invested with a non-classical, normally Christian, significance; wherever in the high and later Middle Ages a work of art borrows its theme from classical poetry, legend, history or mythology, this theme is quite invariably presented in a non-classical, normally contemporary form.³

Encapsulation A transformation in which the object is passed down unchanged and integrated as a self-contained whole into the reception sphere, but without being subsumed into it entirely. The converse process is also relevant from the point of view of transformation theory and the history of science and scholarship, namely when individual elements are detached from their encapsulation and put into new contexts (such as a museum or a scholarly study) where they are perceived as discrete, ancient objects. An example of encapsulation is the reliefs removed from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, which were reused as building materials in the walls of the neighboring crusader castle. Today the reliefs are preserved as discrete objects in the British Museum. With regard to texts, quotations and motifs can also generally be understood as spolia in a metaphorical sense, as in the cento, a poetic form composed entirely of classical quotations that are decontextualized and assembled into a montage (montage / assembly). An example of textual encapsulation and recontextualization is the fate of a longer quotation from the proem of Parmenides’ didactic poem from the fifth century BCE. Sextus Empiricus quoted the passage in the second century CE,

 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 84.

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but without explaining its historical background. In the modern fragment collection edited by Laura Gemelli Marciano,⁴ the quotation is detached from the context in which it was passed down (i. e., it is detached from Sextus Empiricus’s text) and is arranged in what is posited to be the original order of Parmenides’ poetic fragments. Furthermore, it is historically recontextualized in the editor’s proposed interpretation of the poem.

Focalization / Obfuscation⁵ A transformation in which the agent’s interest is concentrated on a specific object while other items or circumstances around the object are neglected, obfuscated, or otherwise marginalized. Focalization entails a narrowed but at the same time an intensified handling of the highlighted aspects of the reference object. An example of the related processes of focalization and obfuscation is the ideal of Greek art propagated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717– 1768) in his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, which for him was characterized by “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (“edle Einfalt und stille Größe”).⁶ From the broad spectrum of art works transmitted from antiquity, Winckelmann concentrated above all on those that corresponded to the ideal he hypostatized (peaceful individual figures), whereas he tended to marginalize emotional portrayals (maenad groups, for example). Focalization and obfuscation can also be observed in Winckelmann’s treatment of one and the same object. In his interpretation of the Laocoön group, for example, he directed his attention primarily to the dying priest’s “greatness of soul” (“magnanimitas”), obfuscating all the aspects of the artwork that indicate a desperate fight to the death. In addition, a focalization of this kind can be productive in a broader context. For example, Winckelmann’s focalization led to a new interpretation of the ancient tradition that became the basis for Neoclassical aesthetics.

 Die Vorsokratiker. Griechisch-lateinisch-deutsch. Auswahl der Fragmente und Zeugnisse, ed., trans., and com. Laura Gemelli Marciano, 3 vols. (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2007– 2010), vol. 2: Parmenides, Zenon, Empedokles (2009).  As an alternative to ‘obfuscation,’ the German term Ausblendung could be translated as ‘marginalization.’  The translation is found in the Wikipedia entry on Winckelmann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Johann_Joachim_Winckelmann (accessed 28 September 2018).

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Hybridization A transformation in which novel cultural configurations are formed from elements of the reference and reception cultures, including intersections, distinctive syncretisms, and fusions, even of contrary and contradictory elements. An example is provided by the Alexander poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, fusions of ancient lore and courtly culture. In these Latin and vernacular hybrid forms, elements of the reference or the reception culture can dominate, depending on which language or poetic form is chosen. Whereas in the Old French Roman d’Alexandre, the ancient material is largely absorbed into the world of courtly norms, i. e., into the normative system of the reception sphere, the primacy of the ancient model is evident in the form and content of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, which was also produced in France in the same period.

Ignorance⁷ A transformation that pays no attention to certain facts or circumstances. It can refer either to active ignorance, i. e., the conscious refusal to acknowledge something, or to passive ignorance, i. e., the (unconscious) inability to take cognizance of something. An example of ignorance is the stance taken in the field of classical archaeology toward the colored painting of ancient sculpture. Although the polychrome nature of numerous works had been documented and described, the notion of a “white antiquity” endured far into the twentieth century.

Creative Destruction A transformation in which the deliberate destruction of elements from the reference sphere is the necessary condition for the creation of something new. The empty space left by the act of destruction provides the possibility for cultural change. A prominent example of transformation via creative destruction is Michelangelo’s radical demolition of Old St. Peter’s Basilica to make way for his own building plans. Noteworthy in this respect are also the numerous Christian churches that, beyond simply rededicating preceding pagan structures, arose from the latter’s modification or demolition. Another example of creative destruction, this time in the field of literature, is the polemical attack on formal rhetoric and rule-based poetics that took

 ‘Ignorance’ is a problematic term, as in transformation theory it embraces both the active, conscious refusal to acknowledge a person or thing denoted by the verb ‘to ignore,’ and the passive, (usually) unconscious lack of knowledge denoted by the noun ‘ignorance.’ As an alternative to ‘ignorance,’ the Geman term Ignoranz could be translated as ‘nescience,’ but the same difficulties inhere.

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place in the second half of the eighteenth century, since only in its wake could a new literary language develop.

Montage / Assembly A transformation that individually takes up various elements from the reference sphere and puts them together with elements from other contexts, creating a new relationship among them. This interplay creates new dimensions of meaning. The spectrum of montage ranges from the integration of individual elements into a new unit of meaning (e. g., in a syncretistic, hybridizing, or synthesizing way) to the desultory juxtaposition of elements whose fractured aspect holds in store a wider range of potential meanings and interpretations. Montage can also be considered a process of decontextualization (excision) and recontextualization (collage). Justus Lipsius used the literary technique of the cento in his Politicorum libri sex (editio princeps 1589). He was then one-upped by the Baroque poet Julius Wilhelm Zincgref, whose Emblemata ethico-politica (1619) assembles original commentaries to its individual emblems out of passages taken from ancient texts and original content by the author; the various contributions are signaled by the use of different fonts. An example of collage technique in the academic context is the Mnemosyne Atlas conceived by Aby Warburg, intended to illustrate the “afterlife of antiquity” in European culture. For this purpose Warburg used photographs of paintings and sculptures, but also of postage stamps, placards, and newspaper clippings, that he mounted on wooden frames covered with black fabric and continually rearranged around certain thematic foci.

Negation A transformative process of active and explicit exclusion. The object is rejected, but it continues to remain present though the negative relationship or rather is first constructed via this relationship. As opposed to ignorance, negation entails a demonstrative repudiation. An example is to be found in the famous opening sentences of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909), in which, in a radical departure from the academic tradition, the modern machine replaces ancient art, whose legacy is portrayed as hostile to both life and progress: “A roaring car … is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace…. We want to free [Italy] from the countless museums that cover it like so many cemeteries.”⁸

 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto del Futurismo, in Le Figaro, 20 February 1909: “Un automobile ruggente … è più bello della Vittoria di Samotracia.… Noi vogliamo liberarla … dagli innumerevoli

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Reconstruction and Supplementation A transformation that results from a focus on fragments and through their connection to one another; the fragments can be available but may also be mere clues. Reconstructions are attempts at restoring a lost or only fragmentarily preserved whole. They pretend to the authenticity of the transformed product and neglect the interpretive dimension of the transformation. As opposed to reconstruction, in supplementation the reference elements are usually interpreted more freely in the process of attempted completion. The Supplementum Lucani (published 1640), by the English poet and historian Thomas May (1595 – 1650), provides an example of reconstruction. It continues the Latin poet Lucan’s (39 – 65 CE) civil-war epic Pharsalia, which in all likelihood was never actually completed by its author, who made it end with the death of Caesar. In the process, May adapts the discourse of the Roman Republic to the events of his own time. Accordingly, he idealizes and simplifies the figure of Cato the Younger, stripping him of Lucan’s ambivalent portrayal and depicting him instead as a Stoic sage and epic hero. From the sixteenth century until far into the nineteenth, sculptures found in fragmented form were completed via material supplementation, although such procedures just as often led to new creations. Thus in the seventeenth century, torsos of young boys, which the modern discipline of archaeology identifies as Narcissus, Hyacinthus, or victorious youths, were transformed into Apollos by having supposedly characteristic attributes added to them. Why? The contemporary desire for Apollo statues was great, and the appearance of the youths corresponded to the contemporary notion of what this god looked like.

Substitution A transformation that exchanges one cultural complex for another. An example of the substitution of an ancient practice for a medieval one is the poetic crowning of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch). In 1341, at the invitation of Robert, King of Naples, Petrarch was crowned poeta laureatus by the Roman Senate. He claimed to be reviving an ancient Roman honor. However, the crowning was also meant to substitute for a university graduation ceremony that included exams, a diploma, and an oration – a ceremony that, as we know from Petrarch’s Familiares, the University of Paris had offered him at the same time. Petrarch systematically suppresses this fact, however, in all reports of the poetic crowning in order to emphasize the revival of an ancient tradition.

musei che la coprono tutta di cimiteri” (as quoted from Wikipedia, http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Manifesto_del_futurismo, accessed 29 September 2018).

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Translation A transformation that transposes content from a reference culture into a reception culture, thereby recombining it under changed circumstances. This applies not only to the translation of a text from one language to another, but also to phenomena such as the ‘translation’ of Stoicism into a political theory in the Renaissance or into utopian and dystopian literature in the Baroque period. A classic example of the manifold intertextual translation of ancient references in literature is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Similar are inter-pictorial processes in the fine arts, such as Édouard Manet’s use of the compositional structure of an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi (Judgment of Paris, after Raphael, ca. 1515) for his painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862/63). According to Glenn Most, Raphael’s School of Athens (1509 – 1511), with its division into three groups of people and their thematic characterization, can be understood as a multi-layered transmedial translation: the reference text is Plato’s dialogue Protagoras in the Latin translation of Marsilio Ficino (editio princeps 1484).⁹

Revaluation / Inversion A transformation that leaves elements of the reference culture recognizable as such but that creates semantic shifts. Inversion appears as a radical form of revaluation bordering on negation. An example of a transformation that gives new meaning to and inverts an ancient reference object is Giordano Bruno’s treatment of the central tenets of Aristotelianism. According to Paul Richard Blum, in his 1588 Camoeracensis Acrotismus Bruno revaluated the Aristotelian concept of “nature” as “eternal and indivisible essence,” at the same time characterizing it as a “tool of divine providence animated by an innate wisdom.”¹⁰ Thus he formulates a concept of nature that Aristotle himself explicitly rejected, but he designates it as Aristotelian by combining it with Aristotelian approaches to natural philosophy and scientific theory. In this way Bruno succeeds in portraying Aristotle as a representative of his own philosophy and himself in turn as a proper Aristotelian.

 Glenn Most, “Reading Raphael: The School of Athens and Its Pre-Text,” Critical Inquiry 23:1 (1996): 145 – 82.  Paul Richard Blum, Giordano Bruno (Munich: Beck, 1999), 107: “Deshalb favorisiert der Anti-Aristoteliker … den Begriff einer einheitlichen Natur, gegen den Aristoteles ausdrücklich am Beginn der Physikvorlesung argumentiert hatte, nämlich die Natur als ‘ewige und unteilbare Essenz, Werkzeug der göttlichen Vorsehung, die durch eine innewohnende Weisheit aktiv ist.’”

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L. Bergemann, M. Dönike, A. Schirrmeister, G. Toepfer, M. Walter, and J. Weitbrecht

Multilevel, Complex Transformation Processes¹¹ For an example of a complex transformation process in which various types can be discerned, let us consider the development of early Christian concepts of the afterlife and their transformation of ancient pagan and Jewish elements. The first Christian text to speak extensively of the damnation of sinners and the salvation of the elect and the just is the Apocalypse of Peter, which probably dates to the first half of the second century. The text relates how Peter sees the end of the world in the palm of Jesus’s hand: And he showed me … on the palm of his right hand the image of that which shall be accomplished at the last day: and how the righteous and the sinners shall be separated, and how they do that are upright in heart, and how the evil-doers shall be rooted out unto all eternity.¹²

The punishment of individual groups of sinners that Peter sees is portrayed in the text of the Apocalypse as an eschatological prophecy of Jesus: Then shall men and women come unto the place prepared for them. By their tongues wherewith they have blasphemed the way of righteousness shall they be hanged up.… And again behold two women: they hang them up by their neck and by their hair; they shall cast them into the pit. These are they which plaited their hair, not for good (or, not to make them beautiful) but to turn them to fornication, that they might ensnare the souls of men into perdition. And the men that lay with them in fornication shall be hung by their loins in that place of fire…. And the murderers and them that have made common cause with them shall they cast into the fire, in a place full of venomous beasts, and they shall be tormented without rest.¹³

The theatrical reception situation in which Peter observes this eschatological prophecy is of structural importance for the differentiation of a punitive Christian afterlife, for this reception situation puts the Apocalypse of Peter in a tradition of pagan performance based on a model of publicly staged punishment. How the Apocalypse of Peter utilizes these Roman imperial spectacula can be described as a multilayered transformation process. In the Apocalypse of Peter, a Christian afterlife topography is constructed that is distinct from the here and now. In this process, structural and reception patterns of a specific cultural practice, namely the punitive and performative forms of spectacula, are translated into a new reception situation and into a narrative depiction of the last days. This intermedial transfer makes recourse to the narrative procedure from the early Jewish tradition for describing journeys to the afterlife. This procedure was first used in the Book of the Watchers, and it is what made the narrative suggestion of an  This section was contributed by Maximilian Benz (Excellence Cluster Topoi, Berlin).  The Apocalypse of Peter, “The Ethiopic Text,” trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), available online, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/apocalypsepeter-mrjames.html, accessed 29 September 2018.  The Apocalypse of Peter, “The Ethiopic Text,” trans. James.

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afterlife topography possible in the first place. It consists of the combination of imaginary movement (a traveler to the afterlife successively sees the locations of salvation and damnation) and demonstrative dialogue (the punishments and rewards are described and interpreted in a dialogue between the traveler and an angelus interpres). The Apocalypse of Peter adopts the spatial concept but modifies the narrative procedure: the imaginary journey is replaced by a collection of punitive images, and the technique of demonstrative dialogue is converted into the deictic structures of a monologue, namely Jesus’s eschatological prophecy. This is done with a view to the didactic, exhortative function of the eschatological spectacle. In addition to this focalization on admonition, the transformative adoption of the narrative procedure of the afterlife journey also constitutes an instance of revaluation. For the Apocalypse of Peter clearly departs from the early Jewish tradition. It does not narrate a journey to the afterlife – and thus describes no afterlife topography – but is rather a virtual ‘tour of Hell,’ concentrated on the punishments of the Last Judgment. This function of the ‘tour of Hell’ is supported by an act of hybridization, in which gruesome images of staged corporal punishment from pagan spectacula and philosophical and literary schemes of the underworld (for example in Plato or Virgil) are fused with the principle of mirror-image punishments familiar from the ancient Jewish tradition. The Apocalypse of Peter’s peculiar eschatological narrative makes it an early Christian transformation of pagan spectacula. The creative power of this transformation consists precisely in the fact that it fuses components of the early Jewish tradition with genuinely Christian elements, incorporating a visually impressive archetype of pagan culture into a haunting narration of the full range of punishments of the last days. In one fragment in which it is transmitted, the Apocalypse of Peter ultimately culminates in universal salvation: in this version the gruesomeness of the transformed spectacula exclusively serves the purpose of exhortation, and it is sublimated in the view that all humankind will be saved. However it is not only the Christian reception sphere that is transformed in this relationship of reciprocal construction (allelopoiesis). In the punitive images of the Apocalypse of Peter, due to the necessarily selective reference, a Christian perspective on pagan spectacula becomes evident that both proscribes them and repudiates them as futile. The cultural practices of the reference sphere are newly interpreted as if sub specie aeternitatis. The Apocalypse of Peter represents only one facet of the way Christianity dealt with spectacula over the centuries. From a broader perspective, the allelopoietic dimension of this transformation process lies not only on the plane of the historical actors, but rather must also be calculated on the plane of the scholarly observer. For the modern reconstruction of late-antique pagan spectacula depends largely on Christian testimony. Thus the Church Fathers’ polemics against Roman imperial spectacle culture have preserved conceptions of the spectacula that even now continue to determine our understanding of this phenomenon from the ancient pagan reference sphere.

Giancarlo Abbamonte

The Transformation of Attitudes towards Ancient Latin Authors and the Legacy of Lorenzo Valla¹ During the fifteenth century many ancient Latin authors were brought back into circulation and revalued, especially in the schools, where they were used to teach the Latin language. This paper will focus on the influence of the newly discovered Latin texts in the teaching of Latin in fifteenth-century Italian schools and universities: in particular, my purpose is to underline the decisive role played by Lorenzo Valla’s linguistic theories in promoting this transformation of Latin teaching. Valla’s linguistic works, namely the Elegantie, the Antidotum in Facium, and the Raudensiane note,² were published by the author himself in the middle of the century (around 1448) and represent a turning point in the approach to classical texts and their use in the schools by grammarians, teachers, and professors.³ As is well known, medieval grammarians based their Latin learning on two pillars. The first one is represented by the grammatical schoolbooks inherited from late antiquity, such as Donatus’ Ars minor and Ars maior, which were recast in an easier schoolbook known as Ianua and used to study the morphology of Latin, along with Priscian’s Institutiones grammatices for syntax.⁴

 I wish to thank the organizers of the conference “Beyond Reception” for inviting me to participate in this stimulating initiative, where I have had the opportunity to benefit very much from the papers, questions, suggestions, and simple conversations that I took part in. Thanks to all the speakers and listeners, the present paper has been very much improved from the version I read then. Of course, I am the only one responsible for what I have written. In order to facilitate the reading of the Latin texts, I have normalized the orthography of the medieval and humanist sources I have quoted.  The Antidotum in Facium was edited by M. Regoliosi (Padua: Antenore, 1981) and the Raudensiane note by G. M. Corrias, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Lorenzo Valla, Opere linguistiche (Florence: Polistampa, 2007), whereas the Elegantie are still awaiting a critical edition, although one has been announced as imminent by M. Regoliosi and C. Marsico: see M. Regoliosi, “Per lʼedizione delle Elegantie. Proposte metodologiche,” in Pubblicare il Valla, ed. M. Regoliosi, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Lorenzo Valla, Strumenti (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), 297– 304.  Although the two Antidota in Poggium also deal with linguistic subjects, Valla himself did not include them in the series of his ‘grammatical’ works. On the Antidota in Poggium and the polemics between Valla and Poggio, see Lorenzo Valla, La prima apologia contro Poggio Bracciolini, ed. Ari Wesseling, Respublica literaria Neerlandica, 4 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1978), 25 – 39.  In the extensive bibliography on the subject, see at least L. Holtz, Donat et la tradition de l’enseignement grammatical. Étude sur l’Ars Donati et sa diffusion (IVe – IXe siècle) et édition critique (Paris: CNRS, 1981), which is still useful; and Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300 – 1475, ed. R. Copeland and I. Sluiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 82– 103. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-003

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The second pillar was a selection of a few Latin authors that had to be read, explained, and commented on during classes. Sometimes the only texts that were used were the four that constituted the well-known quadriga: Cicero and Sallust for prose, and Virgil and Terence for poetry, with the study of Virgil’s and Terence’s poems often being accompanied by the late-antique commentaries of Servius and Donatus. Teachers also read the satires of Persius and Juvenal, the Thebais of Statius (and sometimes Lucan’s epic poem), the Consolatio of Boethius, and the anonymous Disthica Catonis. ⁵ At the highest educational level among the humanists, this canon began to be questioned during the fourteenth century in Italy, where a new interest in Latin authors outside the curriculum manifested itself. Thus Petrarch (1304 – 1374) was proud of the manuscript of Livy that he possessed, and he also studied Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia with great care. In Florence, Boccaccio (1313 – 1375) was one of the first who had the opportunity to read Ovid’s Ibis and the pseudo-Virgilian Priapeia. His copies of Varro’s De lingua Latina and the rare works of Tacitus and Apuleius came from the library of Monte Cassino. Finally, Coluccio Salutati (1331– 1406) collected manuscripts of rare Latin poets, such as the most ancient witness containing the works of Tibullus, one of the three manuscripts that preserve Catullus, and Cicero’s letter collection, Ad familiares. ⁶ In the first decades of the Quattrocento, Poggio Bracciolini, a pupil of Salutati, brought back into circulation many Latin works that had been neglected during the Middle Ages (i. e., Lucretius, some plays of Plautus, the whole Institutio of Quintilian, many speeches of Cicero, Silius Italicus’s Punica, Statius’s Silvae, Columella’s agricultural treatise, Petronius’s novel, etc.). He discovered these works in the churches and monasteries of modern-day Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Great Britain, where they were often preserved in only one manuscript.⁷ Nevertheless, the curiosity, the discoveries, and the efforts of these wise and cultivated men were unable to broaden the school curriculum. As Robert Black has masterfully shown in his works on the history of fifteenth-century education, Boethius’s Consolatio was still one of the most important schoolbooks for learning Latin in Tuscany during the first part of the fifteenth century, and for the most part Latin continued to be taught with the help of the very same school books and anthologies that  Of course during the Middle Ages, there were also some particularly cultivated people who showed curiosity for other Latin writers, but these cases were isolated and they had no impact on the curriculum in the schools, which remained stable for centuries.  See B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua: Antenore, 1963), 129 – 209, and the third chapter, entitled “La biblioteca e l’officina di Salutati,” in Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’Umanesimo, ed. T. De Robertis, G. Tanturli, and S. Zamponi, Catalogue of the exhibition held in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 2 November 2008 – 30 January 2009 (Florence: Mandragora, 2008), 219 – 363.  About the discoveries of Poggio, the bibliography is endless, but a good summary can be found in L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 136 – 40.

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had been used in the Middle Ages. Thus, despite the fact that the Italian humanists around the year 1440 had access to more or less the same corpus of Latin texts that we have today, the medieval curriculum continued to dictate the way Latin was taught.⁸ If this is the situation we encounter until the middle of the fifteenth century, when did the school teachers at the highest level of Latin education or the university professors start to use a wider selection of Latin authors in their classes? Fast-forwarding to the humanist production of school texts at the end of the Quattrocento, we note that the inclusion of many, if not all, Latin writers into the school curriculum has, at this point, been accomplished. This can be seen from the list of authors that a humanist who taught in the 1470s at the University of Rome (the so-called Studium Urbis), Domizio Calderini (1446 – 1478), treated in his classes. The information comes from a letter written on 20 July 1478 by Angelo Callimaco, a pupil of Calderini, and sent to his brother Orlando on the occasion of the death of Calderini: Interpretatus est Marcum Valerium Martialem, qui propter antiquitatem et eius subtilitatem ignorabatur, in cuius libros ita erudite atque acute scripsit ut eo eruditior atque acutior videatur. Interpretatus est Iuvenalem, opus profecto difficile, multis erroribus et amfractibus plenum, quod commentariis suis tam mite et placidum fecit quam ovem. Taceo Sylvas Papinii et Sylium Italicum, quae cum maxima omnium attentione, ut in ceteris operibus, professus est. Omitto divinam Aeneida, quam una cum Quintiliani Declamationibus legit, in quorum altero Homerum, poetarum principem, in altero Ciceronem magna ex parte declaravit. Praetereo ipsius Ciceronis Oratorem, Heroides Ovidii, Propertium, in quibus artificium et magnam amoris vim ostendit. Sileo divinum illud Ciceronis opus De officiis, quod tanta arte et doctrina mostravit, ut eius ingenium et in philosophia non mediocris eruditio tandem eluxerit. Legit et publice et privatim Suetonium deditque auditoribus nonnulla dictata se digna.⁹ (Calderini commented on Martial, who was unknown because of his antiquity and subtlety. His comments are written in such a learned and sharp way that he seems to be more learned and sharper than Martial himself. He commented on Juvenal, whose work is certainly difficult and

 See R. Black and G. Pomaro, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Education. Schoolbooks and Their Glosses in Florentine Manuscripts (Florence: SISMEL, 2001) (data confirmed for the Abruzzo area by G. Abbamonte, “Su alcuni codici boeziani della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli ‘Vittorio Emanuele III’,” Boezio e Gregorio Magno tra Antichità e Medioevo, ed. M. Špelič, OFM and P. Limoncini, Proceedings of the First International Symposium, 31 March – 2 April 2005 (Ljubljana: Brat Frančišek, and Rapallo: Studium Rapallense, 2007), 99 – 140); R. Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and R. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250 – 1500, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).  Preserved in Rome, Biblioteca Alessandrina, MS. 239, f. 31r-v, the letter was edited by R. Malaboti, Domizio Calderini (Secolo XV). Contributo alla storia dell’Umanesimo (Milan: Tip. dell’Istituto Marchiondi, 1919), 59 – 63, and cited by M. Campanelli and A. Pincelli, “La lettura dei classici nello Studium Urbis tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento,” in Storia della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia de “La Sapienza”, ed. L. Capo and M. R. Di Simone (Rome: Viella, 2000), 160.

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full of errors and dangers, but his commentaries made him as mute and peaceful as a sheep. I shall not speak about Statius’s Silvae and Silius Italicus, whose works he commented on in his classes with all the listeners paying the greatest attention, as always. I omit his discussion of the divine Aeneid, which he explained together with Quintilian’s Declamationes. In the former he made evident the substantial presence of Homer, the prince of poets; in the latter, that of Cicero. I pass over the Orator of Cicero himself, Ovid’s Heroides, and Propertius, where he made clear the skill of the poet and the great strength of his love. I shall not mention that famous work entitled On Duties, where Cicero showed such skill and knowledge that his philosophical attitude and unusual erudition shone out. Calderini commented on Suetonius both at the university and privately, and offered to his listeners some handouts, which were worthy of him.

From the list of authors mentioned by Callimaco, we can draw the conclusion that Calderini focused on poets and rhetoricians, and that he almost exclusively commented on authors who were not included in the medieval curriculum (Martial, Statius’s Silvae, Silius Italicus, Quintilian’s speeches, Ovid’s Heroides, Propertius, and Suetonius). The enlargement of the canon of the Latin authors studied in these classes is confirmed by the contemporary printed commentaries, which were often written by humanists for their students. Thus in 1482, Paolo Marsi (1440 – 1484) published in Venice a printed commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, a didactic poem rarely studied during the Middle Ages.¹⁰ Marsi’s teacher was the Roman humanist Pomponio Leto (1428 – 1498), a pupil of Valla’s, who had reevaluated the Fasti because of his interests in the Roman calendar and commented on it in his classes.¹¹ In the preface to his commentary on the second book, Marsi admits that his printed commentary on Ovid’s Fasti makes use of the notes taken by his pupils (“ab illis”) during his class and confirms the strong link between teaching and printed commentaries: At nullum pene profertur verbum quin ab illis omne protinus excipiatur, excepta donum referent, relata in suum ordinem digeruntur. Ab illis deinde, siquid edituri sumus, labores nostros mutuamur et quo ordine a nobis omnia prolata sunt, eo quoque edenda esse ducimus.¹² (Almost all the words that are expressed here come from my students, for they return these words to me as a gift, and once returned, they were put in order. Therefore, if we are ever

 Except in the French school of Orléans, especially with Arnulf (late twelfth century), the Middle Ages did not pay too much attention to the Fasti: see A. Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices. The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015), 1– 28. On Marsi, see P. Pontari, “Marsi, Paolo,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 70 (Rome: Treccani, 2008), 741– 44; and Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, passim.  See the manuscripts of the Fasti written and glossed by Leto, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3264; and Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, esp. 29 – 50.  P. Marsus, Comm. in Ovid. Fast. II (Venice: B. de’ Torti, 24.xii.1482), f. e6v (ISTC io00170000). In the preface, Marsi adds, “At last I took up this teaching [scil. in Rome], and in the first year [scil. in 1474] I very assiduously interpreted the poems of Horace and Ovid’s Tristia. The next year I taught before a crowd of listeners with great care and prudence that sublime work, the Fasti” (text translated by Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, 34).

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going to publish anything, we are borrowing our works from my students, and we believe that these works must be published in the same order in which they were explained by us.¹³

Marsi’s didactic interest in Ovid’s Fasti was not unique: in the same years the humanist Antonio Costanzi (1436 – 1490) at Fano (today in the Marches) wrote another commentary on the Fasti, printed in Rome in 1489, that was originally intended for use by his local pupils.¹⁴ Eventually, Merula published an edition of the Fasti in Venice in 1497, in which he united the two earlier commentaries. This edition was reprinted more than twenty times during the sixteenth century in many European countries.¹⁵ Another testimony of the pedagogical interest in ‘new’ Latin works is the Punica of Silius Italicus, one of the texts discovered by Poggio during the Council of Constance (1413 – 1418). Silius Italicus represents an important case study for both the manuscript and printed traditions that I will discuss again later.¹⁶ If we move from the realm of printing to that of manuscripts, where it is easier to find school documents produced by both teachers and students, we confirm that from the 1470s onwards, a vast range of Latin authors was regularly read and commented on in the highest level of Latin classes. Thus, for example, in the 1480s Politian lectured at the University of Florence and commented on Statius’ Silvae, Persius, Virgil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Letter of Sappho to Phaon, the Fasti, etc. Although Politian had intended these commentaries for his classes and never published them, they are still extant¹⁷ and prove that the curriculum of Latin grammar and rhet-

 The same link between teaching and printing is confirmed by another Roman humanist, Antonio Mancinelli (1452– 1505), in the preface to his printed commentary on Virgil’s Bucolics and Georgics (Rome: E. Silber, 20.x.1490) (ISTC iv00219500). The texts of Marsi and Mancinelli are discussed by Campanelli and Pincelli, “La lettura,” 129 and 162. On Mancinelli, see Antonio Mancinelli (1452 – 1505), pedagogo, grammatico e umanista, ed. F. Lazzari, Quaderni della Biblioteca Comunale di Velletri, 10 (Velletri: Comune di Velletri, 2005).  (Rome: E. Silber, 24.x.1489) (ISTC io00175000). In the poem Ad posteros, Costanzi writes, “Nanque meus tantum potuit crevisse libellus / ut fieret cuivis sarcina discipulo” (f. 1v, vv. 9 – 10). On Costanzi’s commentary on the Fasti, see F. Toscano, “Le redazioni manoscritte e stampate del commento di Antonio Costanzi ai Fasti di Ovidio,” Studi Umanistici Piceni 31 (2011): 269 – 91; F. Toscano, Il commento di Antonio Costanzi da Fano ai Fasti di Ovidio. Edizione critica del commento a Fast. I-III, Ph.D. dissertation, Salerno, Università di Salerno, 2017; and Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, passim.  (Venice: Johannes Tacuinus, 12.vi.1497) (ISTC io00176000). The sixteenth-century Italian reprints are listed in EDIT16.  Campanelli and Pincelli, “La lettura,” 167, regarded Ovid’s Fasti and Silius Italicus’ Punica as “… le due epopee in versi della storia e della leggenda di Roma, autentiche miniere di notizie antiquarie …”.  Several commentaries of Politian have been published in the last forty years. See A. Poliziano, Commento inedito all’epistola ovidiana di Saffo a Faone, ed. E. Lazzeri, 2 vols., Studi e testi, 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1971); A. Poliziano, Commento inedito alle Silvae di Stazio, ed. L. Cesarini Martinelli, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Studi e testi, 5 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1978); A. Poliziano, Commento inedito alle Satire di Persio, ed. L. Cesarini Martinelli, Istituto Nazionale di Studi

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oric at the University of Florence included many Latin authors whose works had never been part of the medieval curricula. Now if we have seen that until the middle of the fifteenth century, the canon of Latin authors remained the same one that had been used in the medieval schools, while the situation has dramatically changed at the end of the century, I shall try to narrow down the moment in time when this canon of Latin texts was actually broadened, and also to single out a person responsible for it. Although I am well aware of the fact that humanism was a large movement and that many people participated in renewing the medieval standards of Latin teaching, nevertheless I cannot help but point out how important Lorenzo Valla’s grammatical works were for establishing a new and more liberal attitude towards Latin learning.¹⁸ In particular, in Valla’s most important linguistic work, the Elegantie, we find not only practical suggestions, but also the theoretical justification that facilitated the learning of Latin grammar based on the study of all the possible Latin authors. As is well known, the Elegantie is a work in six books, in which Valla focuses on many aspects of the Latin language (the meaning of simple words or of single sentences, the use and meaning of prepositions, syntactical problems, etc.). For every problem, Valla based his analyses and conclusions exclusively on passages taken from a very wide selection of Latin works written in the period between Plautus (second century BCE) and Boethius (sixth century CE), and he compared the results of these analyses with the rules and theories of the famous grammarians Donatus, Priscian, Servius, etc., whose works were commonly used as grammatical handbooks in the schools. Through this method Valla often underlines polemically the differences he notes between a usage as it appears in the occurrences of actual Latin works and the rules stated in the grammar books. From this point of view, Valla can be regarded as the first to insist that the actual Latin usus, as demonstrated by the authors, must prevail over the rules formulated by the grammarians, which were often based on [ana]logical arguments rather than on the Latin works.¹⁹

sul Rinascimento, Studi e testi, 11 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1985); A. Poliziano, Commento inedito alle Georgiche di Virgilio, ed. L. Castano Musicò, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Studi e testi, 18 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki), 1990; and A. Poliziano, Commento inedito ai Fasti di Ovidio, ed. F. Lo Monaco, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Studi e testi, 23 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1991).  Of course I do not intend to undervalue the active role of Guarino da Verona’s school at Ferrara or that of Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua, where the humanae litterae were taught with new methods that included the study of the Greek language, physical activities, and the performance of music and dance. However, my present paper focuses on Latin teaching, where the role of Valla’s theories was essential.  On Valla’s linguistic theories, see S. Gavinelli, “Le Elegantie di Lorenzo Valla: fonti grammaticali latine e stratificazione compositiva,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 31 (1988): 205 – 57; M. Regoliosi, “Usus e ratio in Valla,” in Lorenzo Valla. La riforma della lingua e della logica, ed. M. Regoliosi, Proceedings of the Congress of the Comitato nazionale 6º centenario della nascita di Lorenzo Valla,

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One of Valla’s letters, sent in 1441 to Giovanni Tortelli, the future dedicatee of his Elegantie, presents a clear testimony to the authority that Valla grants to the “living voice” of the ancient sources. In this letter Valla explains to his friend that he will not publish the Elegantie until he has studied the texts of several Latin authors that so far he has not had a chance to read yet: Nam forsitan alia quaedam aut adiicerentur, aut mutarentur, aut tollerentur si libros quosdam qui restant mihi legendi legissem; quorum sunt duodecim comediae Plauti recenter inventae, Donatum in Terentium, cuius tantum Eunuchum vidi, Victorinus, Cornelius Tacitus, et siqui sunt alii, quos cum hic [scil. at Gaeta] non reperiam, ad vos venire decreveram, ut istic [scil. in Roma] illos percurrerem. Eis non lectis non existimo mihi opus publicandum: si non publicandum, ergo ne transcribendum quidem.²⁰ (Perhaps some parts could be implemented, some others changed or removed, if only I had the opportunity to read the works that I have still to read. Those are the twelve comedies of Plautus recently discovered, Donatus’s commentary on Terence (of this I have seen only the part on the Eunuchus), Victorinus, Tacitus, and other works. If I cannot find those here [namely at Gaeta], I have to take the decision to come to you [i. e., to Rome] in order to see them. Until I have read them, I believe that my work cannot be published, and if it is not to be published, it cannot be copied either.)

Valla is here conscious that the Elegantie’s analysis of the phenomena of the Latin language was incomplete unless he studied a number of additional authors whose works were not available to him at Gaeta, where he was in the service of the Aragonian king, Alphonse the Magnanimous.²¹ This passage is also an extraordinary example of Valla’s scientific method. Just like a modern researcher, he realizes that the solidity of his linguistic work will grow with the number of Latin authors he manages to consult. In particular, Valla confirmed that he had to read Plautus’s twelve comedies, brought by Nicholas of Cusa to Italy, for he considered them a primary source for his research because of their archaic and colloquial language. The case of Plautus’s comedies is significant, for Nicholas of Cusa had brought these comedies back into circulation, but he himself had been unable to grasp the potential innovation contained in their language.²² Because of his new empirical approach to linguistics, Valla urged his colleagues not to feel satisfied with the usual grammar textbooks or the limited anthologies of classical authors. He insisted that they acquaint themselves with as many ancient

Prato, 4– 7 June 2008, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Lorenzo Valla, Strumenti, 3, 2 vols. (Florence: Polistampa, 2010), 1:111– 30; and G. Abbamonte, Diligentissimi uocabulorum perscrutatores. Lessicografia ed esegesi dei testi classici nell’Umanesimo romano di XV secolo, Testi e studi di cultura classica, 56 (Pisa: ETS, 2012), 29 – 60.  L. Valla, Epistole, ed. O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi (Padua: Antenore, 1984), 210 (nr. 14).  On Valla’s life, see G. Mancini, Vita di Lorenzo Valla (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1891).  After Valla, Niccolò Perotti (1430 – 1480) took many passages from Plautus’s plays as examples in his Cornu copiae, the first modern Latin lexicon based on the occurrences of words in classical Latin authors. On Perotti’s Cornu copiae, see below.

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Latin works as possible, in order to introduce these works into their classrooms, but also in order to have at their disposal a sample collection of Latin grammatical phenomena that was as complete as possible. Valla’s new approach emerges clearly in a passage where he criticizes the late-antique grammarian Priscian, one of the most respected medieval authorities: ‘Ludicra’ (inquit Priscianus) et non ‘ludicria.’ Ab hoc ‘ludicri’ dicimus. Vergilius in XII: ‘Neque enim levia aut ludicra petuntur Praemia’ (Aen. XII.764– 65). Per quod vult ‘ludicra’ tertiae declinationis, cum contra notum sit secundae esse, ut in lege illa frequenter repetita: ‘Qui autem ludicra exercuerit, in quatuordecim ordinibus primis ne sedeat’ (Paul. Sent. 5.26.2 var.).²³ (Priscian says that we have to use ‘ludicra’ (‘sportive’), and not ‘ludicria.’ Hence, we say ‘ludicri’, as Virgil does in the twelfth book: ‘For no trivial or sporting prizes are at stake’. Because of this passage, Priscian believes that ‘ludicra’ belongs to the third declension despite the fact that it is well known that it belongs to the second, as we can see in that often-mentioned law: ‘Who was an actor, cannot take a place [i. e., in the theatre or in the amphitheatre] in the first fourteen rows of seats.’)

Priscian considered “ludicra” a substantive belonging to the third declension due to a passage in Virgil. Valla contests this opinion and refers instead to one of the Sentientiae written by the jurist Paulus, in which “ludicra” seems to be a noun of the second declension. Here it is noteworthy that Valla gives his preference to the usage in the passage of the jurisconsult Paulus over another found in Virgil, one of the four authors of the medieval quadriga. Thus we realize that in his quest for the real usage (usus) of the Latin language, Valla considered all Latin sources to be equally valid, as long as they were ancient, although we shall see that this attitude was refined in the decades after Valla, especially in Rome, where the humanists often confirmed a usage on the base of Latin epigraphs.²⁴ In the following passage, Valla’s target is not only another authoritative textbook, Servius’s commentary on Virgil, but also an analogical method applied in linguistics by the medieval lexicographers, the so-called differentiae verborum: ‘Barba’ idem [scil. Servius] inquit hominis est. ‘Barbae’ vero quadrupedum. Sed non est ‘barba’ tantum hominum, neque ‘barbae’ tantum quadrupedum, quin et ‘barba’ quadrupedum et ‘barbae’ hominum utique multorum dicuntur. (Valla, Eleg. 6,14, p. 205). (Servius claims that the singular ‘beard’ refers to a man, while ‘beards’ refers to the quadrupeds. But neither the singular refers only to men, nor the plural only to the quadrupeds, for there are cases where ‘beard’ refers to quadrupeds and ‘beards’ to many men.)

 Valla, Elegantie, 1,3 (De hoc nomine ludicrum) (Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1540), 6.  See below, pp. 41– 42.

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In order to confirm his analysis of the word “barba/barbae,” Valla reports passages taken from Horace, Pliny the Elder, and Virgil²⁵ which contradicted Servius’s peremptory distinction between the usage of the singular “barba,” as referring only to human beards, and its plural “barbae,” used for that of quadrupeds. The ancient commentator based his distinction on three passages of Virgil (Georg. III,311, III,366, and Aen. II, 277): … ‘Barbam’ singulari numero hominum, plurali quadrupedum dicitur: unde dubitatur de quibus dixerit: ‘Stirique inpexis induruit horrida barbis’ (Georg. III,366) (Serv. Aen. II,277, pp. 266,2– 4 Thilo).²⁶ (The singular ‘barba’ is used for men, the plural for quadrupeds. Hence there are doubts about to whom he is referring, when he says: ‘the rough icicle hardens on the unkempt beard.’)

On the contrary, Valla easily proves that both Horace and Pliny the Elder make use of the singular “barba” when referring to animal beards, and that Virgil himself (and Pliny the Elder again) use the plural form also for men.²⁷ However, Servius is not the only target of Valla’s polemics here. The criticism is aimed equally at another important component of the medieval system of Latin teaching, namely at the so-called differentiae verborum as applied in lexicography. The differentiae (i. e., the distinctions) consisted in the careful differentiation between words that have similar meanings (i. e., synonyms) and those that have similar forms (i. e., homonyms). As Valla shows in the case of “barba,” this medieval practice of establishing the differentiae was often based on theoretical reasoning alone that had no support in the actual usages of the words. Valla’s passage on “barba /barbae” illustrates clearly both his method and his polemical targets. His starting point is the accepted (and generally taught) knowledge of his day, based on the grammarians (in the case of “barba,” the strictly different usage between the singular and the plural). Then he goes on to prove that the distinction in question does not find any support in the occurrences of “barba” in the ancient Latin authors, but that it was Servius who established a distinction based on nothing more than the comparison of three passages in Virgil and elevated it to the status of a law. Moreover, Valla uses his criticism of Servius to attack another common practice of medieval Latin teaching, namely the creation of endless lists of distinctions between words (differentiae verborum) that were not based on the actual occurrences of the words but that the poor students had to learn by heart anyway.

 They are, respectively, Horace, Serm. I,8,42– 43; Pliny the Elder, Nat. XXVIII, 198; Virgil, Georg. III,366 and III,311– 12; and finally Pliny the Elder, Nat. XXX, 96 – 97.  See also Servius, Georg. III,311, p. 300,28 – 29 Thilo, and Georg. III,366, p. 305,22– 26 Thilo.  On this passage of Valla, see Abbamonte, Diligentissimi, 48 – 51.

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Hence it is clear that Valla’s new approach undermined the roots of medieval Latin learning, namely the authorities of Servius and Priscian, and the [ana]logical rules such as the differentiae verborum. *** After the Elegantie had been published, Valla’s revolutionary message was immediately heeded by his colleagues, as we can see both from the huge number of manuscripts of the Elegantie that circulated in Italy and in Europe just a few years after its publication and from the twenty-six printed editions that appeared between 1471 and 1504.²⁸ Of course, there were people who criticised Valla’s conclusions and defended the old grammatical system, but such people are never lacking whenever there is a development in any field of human knowledge. Nevertheless, changes in the educational field take some time, and the Elegantie’s immediate success does not mean per se that the Latin curricula at the highest level in the schools were modified overnight according to Valla’s new approach. Instead Valla’s theory had to be introduced into the school system, if it was to renew and rejuvenate the medieval approach to grammar effectively. This, however, could only take place under two conditions: – New school grammars and new lexicographical works had to be published, to take into account Valla’s results and correct the late-antique grammatical works of authors like Priscian, Donatus, and Servius, as well as the works of medieval lexicographers like Papias, Ugutio of Pisa, and John Balbi of Genoa, which relied on [ana]logical reasoning rather than on actual Latin usage. – Teachers and scholars had to familiarize themselves with the largest possible number of Latin authors, instead of limiting their Latin learning to the few authors who had been generally studied in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the Elegantie was not a text meant to accomplish these two goals, for it is not a didactic handbook, nor are its refined discussions addressed to students, but rather to fellow humanists and colleagues. Therefore, if Valla’s theories were to have an impact on Latin learning, they had to be adapted to certain teaching requirements. This led to numerous revisions of the Elegantie by other authors in the last thirty years of the fifteenth century, and these revisions were very popular during the sixteenth century as well: 1) Bonus Accursius, Compendium Elegantiarum Laurentii Vallae, dedicated to Cicco Simonetta, editio princeps: Milan: Ph. de Lavagnia, 27.vi.1475 (ISTC ia00026000). 2) Aurelius Bienatus, Laurentii Vallae Elegantiarum epitoma, editio princeps: Naples: F. di Dino, ca. 1478 – 1480 (ISTC b00664000).

 On the manuscripts of the Elegantie, see M. Regoliosi, Nel cantiere del Valla. Elaborazione e montaggio delle ‘Elegantiae’ (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993); and M. Regoliosi, “Per lʼedizione delle Elegantie.” The printed editions are listed in the ISTC s.v. “Valla, Laurentius.”

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3) Anonymous, Elegantiae terminorum ex Laurentio Valla et aliis collectae, editio princeps: Deventer: [R. Pafraet], 1490 (ISTC ie00028800). 4) Anonymous, Elegantiarum viginti praecepta, editio princeps: [Cologne: J. Koelhoff the Elder, 1477– 1483] (ISTC ie00029900). 5) Juan Esteve, Liber elegantiarum, editio princeps: Venice: P. de Paganinis, 3.x.1489 (ISTC ie00111200). 6) Nicolaus Ferettus, De elegantia linguae Latinae, editio princeps: Forlì: P. Guarinus and J. J. de Benedictis, 16.iv.1495 (ISTC if00098000). 7) Guido Juvenalis, Interpretatio in Laurentii Vallae Elegantias Latinae linguae, editio princeps: Paris: W. Hopyl, 26.v.1490 (ISTC ij00667800). 8) Antonio Mancinelli, Lima in Vallam, editio princeps: Venice: J. Tacuinus, de Tridino, 8.viii.1497 (ISTC im00119500).²⁹ Unfortunately, we lack studies on this massive body of texts³⁰ that flourished beside Valla’s Elegantie and met with an extraordinary success in the schools, to which their numerous reprints all over Europe for more than a century testify.³¹ It is safe to say that there is still much research to be done if we want to understand more fully how each of these texts reworks Valla’s Elegantie and how exactly they go about adapting it for an audience of students or for use by teachers. However, we know much more about the development of lexicographic studies after the Elegantie. The work that best put Valla’s lessons into practice was the Cornu copiae, written by Valla’s pupil and friend Niccolò Perotti (1429 – 1480). The Cornu copiae is a huge, but incomplete, lexicon that reached 671 folio pages in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 301, a partial autograph manuscript of Perotti, and more than a thousand pages in the printed edition published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1526 – 1527.³² Although Perotti died before he was able to complete his Cornu copiae, the work nonetheless represents an innovation in the field of lexicography, which was domi-

 Mancinelli consciously used the power of the press to dominate the school book market with his works: see P. F. Gehl, “Off the Press into the Classroom: Using the Textbooks of Antonio Mancinelli,” History of Education and Children’s Literature 3.2 (2008): 19 – 32, and chapter three, entitled “Antonio Mancinelli and the Humanist Classroom,” in P. F. Gehl, Humanism for Sale (website: http://www. humanismforsale.org/text/, visited on 10 October 2015).  For instance, the Elegantiolae of Agostino Dati (1420 – 1478) was often listed among the works born beside the Elegantie, while in fact it only has a title that recalls Valla’s.  Accursius’s work appeared in twenty-four editions up through 1504 throughout Europe, while Bienatus’s Epitoma had three editions in the fifteenth century after the princeps. The anonymous Elegantiae terminorum ex Laurentio Valla et aliis collectae was printed nine times in less than ten years, from 1490 to 1497. The anonymous Elegantiarum viginti praecepta was reprinted dozens of times throughout Europe, Juvenal’s work had another fifteen editions after the princeps, and Mancinelli’s Lima was reprinted dozens of times throughout Europe. The data are taken from the ISTC.  The critical edition of Perotti’s Cornu copiae has been edited by J.-L. Charlet et al., 8 vols. (Sassoferrato: Istituto Internazionale Studi Piceni, 1989 – 2001).

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nated at that time by the medieval works of Papias (eleventh century), Ugucio of Pisa (twelfth century), and John Balbi of Genua (ca. 1286).³³ In fact, while medieval lexicographers took most of their examples from the Bible or from a select list of classical and Christian authors to explain single lemmas, Perotti makes use of almost all the Latin works written between Plautus and Boethius (namely, the chronological period used by Valla). Moreover, just as Valla preferred Quintilian, Perotti’s Cornu copiae relies heavily on the writers of the first two centuries CE (i. e., Martial, Statius, Pliny the Elder, and Gellius) and the jurisconsults, rather than the usual Cicero, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid – very few quotations are taken from the Bible or the Church Fathers.³⁴ Another new aspect of Perotti’s Cornu copiae lies in the attempt to limit the distinctions between words (differentiae), or better to ground them exclusively in passages of the ancient Latin works. If the ideal of the modern researcher consists of a person who relies only on his or her own analyses and who feels free to challenge authorities when they are not supported by the data, then Perotti embodied this new intellectual standard perfectly. After all, he even started to criticize Valla himself, as we can see in the following passage on the meaning of obiter: Et ‘obiter,’ quod non est, ut Valla et alii quidam existimarunt, ‘spetialiter’ [v. Eleg. 2,49], sed quod vulgo dicitur ‘incidenter,’ hoc est praeter propositum, quasi ‘in itinere occurrens.’ Iuvenalis: ‘Atque obiter leget’ (3,241 apud Tortelli, De orthographia, De Syllabis desinentibus in B). Plynius: ‘Ego plane meis adiici posse multa confiteor, nec his solis, sed et omnibus quae aedidi, ut obiter caveam istos Homeromasticas’ (Nat. praef. 28 var.) (Perot. Corn.c. II 2.48 p. 23 Charlet). (Obiter does not mean ‘especially,’ as Valla and other grammarians believed, but it means what is commonly called ‘incidentally,’ i. e., beyond intention, or ‘what occurs almost in an accidental way.’ Juvenal: ‘And he will read in passing.’ Pliny the Elder: ‘I plainly admit that many things could be added to what I have said, and not only to what I have said now, but to whatever I have published, in order to pay attention in passing to those who would have censured even Homer.’)

Perotti’s work in turn had great success until the middle of the sixteenth century: the lexicon of Ambrogio Calepino (ca. 1440 – 1510), for example, depends heavily on it. Calepino’s lexicon was published for the first time in 1502 and is regarded as the

 See Abbamonte, Diligentissimi, 61– 63.  In the Index of the critical edition of the Cornu copiae (vol. 8 (2001)), Cicero’s passages cover 314– 18, with Pliny the Elder on 364– 73, Ovid on 349 – 50, Horace on 328, and Martial on 338 – 43.

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first step in the production of scientific Latin lexica and a forerunner of the current Thesaurus linguae Latinae, published in Munich since 1899.³⁵ *** The second recommendation that a teacher could take from Valla’s Elegantie was to read and comment on the largest possible number of Latin works in their classes. During the last three decades of the fifteenth century, this recommendation was taken up widely in the highest level of the schools and in the universities.³⁶ As we have seen, Angelo Callimaco praises his teacher Calderini in the letter mentioned above for commenting in his classes on numerous Latin works that were not part of the medieval curriculum. ³⁷ Among the poets, the case of Silius Italicus deserves special attention. In the 1460s, only a few years after Valla’s death, Pietro Odo of Montopoli, a friend of Valla who succeeded him at the University of Rome, was the first to comment on the Punica of Silius Italicus in his classes.³⁸ Pietro Odo’s lessons on Silius Italicus survive in two manuscripts. The first, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottob. lat. 1258, contains notes written by Pietro Odo himself, while the second, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2779, preserves notes taken by a student during Odo’s lessons.³⁹ After Pietro Odo, other Roman humanists continued to expound on Silius Italicus in class. In 1469, Pomponio Leto, a pupil of Lorenzo Valla who also attended the lessons of Pietro Odo, produced a copy of the Punica and added his own notes for the use of his private pupil Fabio Mazzatosta of Viterbo (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3302). Already in 1468, Leto had taught a class on Silius’s poem during his stay in Venice.⁴⁰ Some years later, Leto read Silius once more during a class at the University of Rome, as we know from the notes taken by one of his pupils, which have been preserved in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. 52,8.⁴¹

 On the history of the reprints of the Cornu copiae, see W. Milde, “Zur Druckhäufigkeit von N. Perottis Cornucopiae und Rudimenta grammatices im 15 und 16. Jahrhundert,” Studi Umanistici Piceni 2 (1982): 29 – 42.  Nevertheless, the classical texts traditionally studied in the schools, like Juvenal’s satires, Terence’s comedies, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Cicero’s De officiis and rhetorical works, were never completely replaced. See Campanelli and Pincelli, “La lettura,” 167.  See above, pp. 29 – 30.  See G. Donati, Pietro Odo da Montopoli e la biblioteca di Niccolò V – con osservazioni sul De orthographia di Tortelli (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2000), 25, where a passage of Pietro Marsi is quoted: “The first who had the courage to reveal the sacred sources of this poet [scil. Silius] to our father, to penetrate into his sanctuary and to explain his poem in the classes at the flourishing University of Rome was Peter of Montopoli, the most cultivated man of his age,” Praef. in Sylius Italicus cum commentariis … Petri Marsi (Venice: J. Tacuinus, 20.ix.1493), f. IIr (ISTC is00509000).  Donati, Pietro Odo, 60.  Campanelli and Pincelli, “La lettura,” 122 – 23.  Campanelli and Pincelli, “La lettura,” 144.

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Finally, in 1471, Leto published what is considered the editio princeps of the Punica. ⁴² However an incunable edited in the same year by G. A. Bussi challenges the idea that Leto was truly the first to publish the Punica. ⁴³ In Italy, the Punica was printed seven times between 1471 and 1493: twice in Rome, once each in Milan and Parma, and three times in Venice.⁴⁴ As we have seen from his pupil’s letter, another professor at the Studium Urbis, Calderini, commented on the Punica in his classes during the 1470s. His commentary is preserved in the manuscript written by Pietro Odo and in four copies of Leto’s edition of Silius, containing notes taken by Calderini’s students during his class.⁴⁵ Finally, in 1483, Pietro Marsi, a pupil of both Leto and Calderini, published the first printed commentary on Silius Italicus.⁴⁶ *** Although Pietro Odo, Calderini, Leto, Paolo and Pietro Marsi, Costanzi, and Mancinelli often commented on authors who did not belong to the circle of texts studied in the Middle Ages, they nevertheless made use, both in their classes and in their printed works, of the commentary genre that was also popular in the medieval school system. Therefore we have to consider whether there is a difference between the medieval commentaries and those produced in the late fifteenth century, and whether the humanist way of interpreting the ancient works was really new and influenced by Valla’s approach.⁴⁷ One of the most striking differences between the two kinds of commentaries is their structure. The humanistic commentary rarely opens with the so-called accessus ad auctorem, i. e., the list of questions about the life of the author, the title of the work, and its purpose, content, usefulness, and position in the philosophical system that usually occupies the first pages of medieval commentaries.⁴⁸

 (Rome: ‘Printer of Silius Italicus,’ between 26.iv. and 26.viii.1471) (ISTC is00504000).  Apart from the Punica, the incunable contains the Bucolica of Calpurnius and Nemesianus, and Hesiod’s Works and Days (Latin translation by Nicolaus de Valle) (Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, [not before 5.iv.1471]) (ISTC is00503000).  The list is taken from the ISTC. It is noteworthy that the Punica is available today in Italy in only one edition with an Italian translation published in the series of the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli (Silio Italico, Le guerre puniche, ed. M. A. Vinchiesi, 2 vols. (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001)), while there is no commentary on the poem.  Domizio Calderini, Commentary on Silius Italicus, ed. F. Muecke and J. Dunston, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 477 (Geneva: Droz, 2011).  (Venice: B. de Tortis, 6.v.1483) (ISTC is00507000).  On commentaries in the early modern period, see Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire, ed. G. Mathieu-Castellani and M. Plaisance (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livre, 1990); and NeoLatin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400 – 1700), ed. K. Enenkel and H. Nellen, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013).  Campanelli and Pincelli, “La lettura,” 174– 77.

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A good example is the tradition of the humanist commentary on Juvenal. The first example here, Angelo Sabino’s Paradoxa in Iuvenali, was printed in 1474.⁴⁹ Here Sabino did not give any room to the life of the satirist (the first part of the accessus), whereas some biographical data are scattered throughout the work. However, in Calderini’s commentary on Juvenal (1475),⁵⁰ there is a different approach, as well as some fierce polemics against Sabino. Although Calderini decided to publish a Life of Juvenal at the beginning of his work, this choice does not represent a return to the traditional accessus, since Calderini did not compose a new Vita of the poet, nor did he rely on the medieval tradition or on the Vitae of Juvenal written by previous humanists. In a section with the significant title Vita Iuvenalis ex antiquorum monumentis (f. aiii = 2v), Calderini published the most ancient Life of Juvenal, taken from some unknown old manuscripts he had found. Calderini’s choice was at the same time innovative and very close to Valla’s point of view. Just as Valla gave more importance to an occurrence in Plautus than to Priscian’s or Servius’s rules, Calderini preferred the most ancient biographical material to the centuries-long tradition of the medieval Lives of Juvenal, which had accumulated false information about the satirist.⁵¹ We find a similar principle operating in Leto’s editio princeps of Lucan,⁵² where the humanist published the most ancient life of Lucan we know, which has been transmitted under the name of the grammarian Vacca (ca. sixth century), the author of a lost commentary on Lucan.⁵³ Turning the pages of humanistic commentaries even further, we also discern a completely different way of interpreting classical works, and in this Valla certainly played an important role. In the passage of the Elegantie mentioned above concerning the word ludicra, Valla justified a linguistic usage with the help of a non-literary text, namely a law taken from Paulus’s Sententiae, which Valla considered even more authoritative than Virgil. A generation after Valla, the tendency to include non-literary sources in one’s study of the ancient world became dominant. Especially Pomponio Leto, Valla’s pupil, systematically collected Roman epigraphs in his house on the Quirinal and stressed the importance of studying such documentary evidence, if one wanted to get acquainted with the customs and traditions of Ancient Rome.⁵⁴ Leto’s message

 Angelo Sabino, Paradoxa in Iuvenali (Rome: G. Sachsel and B. Golsch, 9.viii.1474) (ISTC is00013000).  Domizio Calderini, Commentarius in Iuvenalem (Venice: J. Rubeus, 24.iv.1475) (ISTC ij00642000).  On the tradition of Juvenal’s Lives in Roman humanism, see G. Abbamonte, “Materiali biografici antichi su Giovenale recuperati da Domizio Calderini,” Renæssanceforum 9 (2015): 173 – 212.  (Rome: C. Sweynheym and A. Pannartz, 1469) (ISTC il00292000).  The new attitude of the Roman humanists towards the Vitae of ancient authors has been analysed in “Vitae Pomponianae”: Lives of Classical Writers in Fifteenth-Century Roman Humanism [= Renæssanceforum 9 (2015)], ed. M. Pade.  See S. Magister, “Pomponio Leto collezionista di antichità. Note sulla tradizione manoscritta di una raccolta epigrafica nella Roma del tardo Quattrocento,” Xenia Antiqua 7 (1998): 167– 96; and

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was immediately heeded by other Roman humanists, who also used epigraphic texts for explanations in their commentaries. One of the earlier cases where epigraphs were employed in a commentary is the aforementioned Paradoxa in Iuvenali, where Sabino comments on Juvenal’s verses “Vivant Artorius istic / et Catulus, …” (3.29 – 30) and tries to identify Artorius with a person of the same name who has come down to us in an epigraph that is still extant on the wall of the church of St. Bartholomew at Ameria. The text is entirely transcribed by Sabino⁵⁵: ‘ARTORIVS’ ET ‘CATVLVS’ id est similes ‘Artorio,’ qui et ‘Persicus’ etiam dictus est. Erat autem dives et orbus ideoque dilectus. Hunc ego puto eum Sexti filium cuius inscriptio in aede Sancti Iuvenalis apud Ameriam habetur talis: ‘Sex(to) Artorio Sex(ti) f(ilio) patri, Praeconiae C(ai) f(iliae) Possillae matri, Sex(to) Artorio Sex(ti) f(ilio) fratri, L(ucio) Artorio Sex(ti) f(ilio) fratri, Artora Sex(ti) f(ilia) Secunda fecit’ (Parad. in Iuv. f. 38v). (‘Artorius’ and ‘Catulus’ are in fact similar to ‘Artorius,’ who is also called ‘Persicus.’ He was rich and blind, and therefore loved. I believe that he was the son of Sextus, whose name is inscribed in the epigraph that is in the church of Saint Juvenal at Ameria: ‘Artoria Secunda, daughter of Sextus has built this in memory of her father Sextus Artorius, son of Sextus, in memory of her mother Praeconia Possilla, daughter of Caius, and of her brothers Artorius and Lucius Artorius, sons of Sextus.’)

Sabino’s identification of Juvenal’s Artorius with the one in the epigraph is incorrect. Nevertheless the episode is worth mentioning, since it shows a deep change in the attitude toward the ancient world among teachers and students / readers during the late Quattrocento. Both are now ready to accept epigraphs as authoritative testimony when they need to prove a point or support an argument. The use of an epigraph in the passage on Artorius is by no means an isolated instance in Sabino’s commentary. In his comment on Iuvenal 3.133 (“accipiunt Calvinae vel Catienae”), Sabino identifies “Catiena” with a woman mentioned in another epigraph, which is unfortunately lost today.⁵⁶ The fact that Sabino’s argument relies on an ancient, non-literary source does not seem to cause any agitation on the part of his audience / readership. If Sabino’s attitude towards epigraphic documents depends on Leto, for whom epigraphs have attained a new status as historic sources of the highest level, then this epigraphic interest of the Roman humanists may be regarded as yet another consequence of Valla’s new approach, which preferred ancient documents to the abstract rules of the medieval tradition.

S. Magister, “Pomponio Leto collezionista di antichità. Addenda,” in Antiquaria a Roma. Intorno a Pomponio Leto e Paolo II, RR inedita, 31, Saggi (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2003), 51– 121.  See CIL 11.4438.  “CATIENA autem liberta fuit. Q. L. ut in quodam epitaphio legi” (“Catiena was a free woman, as I read in an epigraph”). See Sabino, Parad. in Iuv. f. 42v.

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However the humanists did not just use ancient lives and epigraphs as sources for their commentaries on ancient Latin works. Many times, they also appealed to the authority of ancient manuscripts when they had to restore a corrupt reading found in their texts. Thus in his commentary on Virgil’s works, Pomponio Leto often corrects the text on the base of one of the oldest Virgil manuscripts, today known as the Vergilius Mediceus. ⁵⁷ This manuscript arrived in Rome from the monastery of Bobbio around 1467, and it seems that Leto owned it for some time.⁵⁸ In his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, Leto treats some of the text’s disputed passages and frequently mentions the readings of the Vergilius Mediceus, which he considers trustworthy, as in the following example: AVERNO ad Avernum, sic legit Apronianus (Leto in Verg. Aen. VI,126, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonicianus Classicus Latinus 54, f. 258r). (Averno to the Averno, it is the reading of Apronianus.)

The Virgilian tradition was divided on the expression “facilis descensus Averno” (dative) or “Averni” (genitive) (Aen. VI, 126). The Vergilius Mediceus, which Leto calls “Apronianus” after the name of its subscriber, the consul Flavius Turcius Rufus Apronianus Asterius, had the reading with the dative “Averno,” which Leto preferred on the basis of the old document’s superior authority. *** In conclusion, I have tried to show how deep the impact of Valla’s linguistic theories was. He was the one who first preferred the authority of ancient texts and documents over those of the medieval tradition, and who criticized the abstract rules and the presumed authority of the late-antique and medieval grammarians. In Rome during the 1460s and 1470s, there lived and worked a generation of humanists who had had the opportunity to know Valla personally and to attend his lessons, among them Pietro Odo da Montopoli, Pomponio Leto, Niccolò Perotti, and probably Angelo Sabino. Out of this circle of humanists grew a younger generation of scholars who were already educated with Valla’s theories in mind. Paolo and Pietro Marsi, Domizio Calderini, and Antonio Mancinelli are only a few of them. They took every possible effort to apply and develop Valla’s method in their works, but they also extended his method and applied it to areas that Valla had not touched.

 Today the Mediceus is preserved as Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 39,1.  See G. Mercati, “Il soggiorno del Virgilio Mediceo a Roma nei secoli XV e XVI,” in G. Mercati, Opere minori (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1937), 4:525 – 45 [= Rend. Pont. Accad. Rom. di Archeologia 12 (1936): 105 – 24]. On the readings of the Vergilius Mediceus used by Leto, see G. Abbamonte and F. Stok, “Intuizioni esegetiche di Pomponio Leto nel suo commento alle Georgiche e allʼEneide di Virgilio,” in Esegesi dimenticate di autori classici, ed. C. Santini e F. Stok (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2008), 135– 210.

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Thus Perotti wrote a new Latin lexicon that used the largest sample collection of occurrences ever, drawn from Latin works.⁵⁹ Calderini adopted an ancient Life of Juvenal in his commentary to substitute for the large number of medieval and humanistic lives of Juvenal, which were full of false anecdotes and inaccurate information. Leto did the same with the life of Lucan. Moreover, he and his pupils, along with Sabino, were the first to back their interpretations of ancient texts with the help of epigraphs (a method unknown to Valla, as far as I know). And last, but not least, they often emended corrupt texts with the help of ancient manuscripts like the Vergilius Mediceus that they had had the opportunity to study and considered authoritative. All these changes in the interpretation of classical works would probably have happened anyway in the new and vibrant atmosphere of humanism. However Valla’s studies certainly facilitated the new and liberal attitude towards all kinds of ancient sources that is so evident in the generation of Roman humanists educated at Valla’s school. This constitutes a true transformation of the teaching of Latin in the Renaissance, one in which the expansion of the canon and a change in how the language was understood to work led to a different vision of what it was that humanism was attempting to revive.

 Valla’s method is transferred by Perotti also in his metrical treatises (ca. 1453), where he discarded the medieval authorities and took into account examples drawn from the ancient poets and the ancient metrical theories, transmitted by an unknown work of Servius entitled De centum metris and the Greek treatise of Hephaestio that was preserved in a manuscript belonging to his patron, Cardinal Bessarion. See G. Abbamonte, “Un allievo e un maestro nel Quattrocento: i trattati metrici di Perotti e l’insegnamento di Lorenzo Valla,” in Il miglior fabbro. Studi offerti a G. Polara, ed. A. De Vivo and R. Perrelli (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 2014), 339 – 52.

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The Greek Renaissance: Transfer, Allelopoiesis, or Both?

1 From East to West and Vice Versa “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio”: “Conquered Greece conquered her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.” With these words, at the end of the first century BCE, the Latin poet Horace commented on the process of Hellenization that had already shaped Latin culture for two centuries.¹ Among the complex causes, aspects, and consequences of this phenomenon,² three issues deserve consideration. First, although Latin culture shows traces of Greek influence from its very beginning, Horace and the other Roman intellectuals of his age perceived the direct absorption of Greek culture as a radical change. This change corresponded to a program that the Roman cultural elite had consciously pursued in the third and second centuries BCE, as a way to make Roman military power acceptable to nations that were culturally more advanced.³ Second, translation favored the spread of Greek literature in Rome to such an extent that scholarship considers ‘official’ Latin literature to start with the translation of the Odyssey made by a Greek slave from Tarentum, Livius Andronicus.⁴ And third, since the Hellenization of Roman culture meant the abandonment – or at least the loss of importance – of authentic Latin forms of culture, resistance in the name of tradition arose very soon, but it came from isolated voices that remained totally ineffective.⁵

 Hor. Epist. II. 1. 156 – 57. On this epistle, addressed to Augustus, see, among others, Luke Roman, Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 232– 34, and the bibliography cited there.  For an overview, see Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, trans. Joseph B. Solodow (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 25. As Thomas N. Habinek has pointed out in The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 43, the Hellenization of Latin literature “is sometimes regarded merely as the submission of an inferior culture to a superior or the gradual evolution from primitive to sophisticated.”  See, e. g., Richard Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 55.  On Livius Andronicus (ca. 284– ca. 204 BCE) and his translation of the Odyssey, see Conte, Latin Literature, 40 – 41; and Ahuvia Kahane, “The (Dis)continuity of Genre: A Comment on the Romans and the Greeks,” in Generic Interfaces in Latin Literatures: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations, ed. Theodore D. Papanghelis, Stephen J. Harrison, and Stravros Frangoulidis (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2013), 39 – 45.  E. g., Cato the Elder: see Conte, Latin Literature, 89 – 90; and Albert Henrichs, “Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek Culture,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 (1995): 244– 50. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-004

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The Greek revival in the Renaissance shares several aspects with the Hellenization of Latin culture. In fourteenth-century Italy, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Giovanni Boccaccio, and other intellectuals realized that their knowledge of Latin literature would have been incomplete without a direct approach to the Greek works that had so deeply influenced it. Since no tradition of teaching Greek had survived in the West during the Middle Ages, both Petrarch and Boccaccio resorted to the help of two South Italian native speakers of Greek: Barlaam of Seminara and Leontius Pilatus, respectively. Neither attempt was successful: the elementary knowledge of Greek that both Petrarch and Boccaccio acquired did not enable them to read Homer or the Attic poets and prose writers.⁶ A change occurred in 1397, when the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras began to teach Greek at the Studium of Florence. For his non-Greek pupils, Chrysoloras created a textbook, entitled Erotemata (“Questions”), which presented a simplified version of the traditional Byzantine Greek grammar. The many fifteenth-century copies of Erotemata, both in manuscript form and in print, as well as the praises that Chrysoloras earned from his pupils, document the first stages of the process leading to the reestablishment of Greek studies in the West. The knowledge of Greek spread slowly, first through Italy and later in the rest of Europe. An abridged version of Chrysoloras’s grammar, attributed to Guarino Guarini of Verona, was equipped with a Latin translation, which made it possible for Westerners to learn Greek without a teacher.⁷ During the fifteenth century, under the pressure of the advancing Turks, many Byzantine scholars settled in Italy, bringing with them their books, their pedagogy, and their culture. Some of them – for example, Theodore Gaza and Constantine Lascaris, who became teachers of Greek – followed and perfected Chrysoloras’s model in their grammars for Westerners.⁸ The knowledge of classical Greek allowed Western See Federica Ciccolella, Donati Graeci: Learning Greek in the Renaissance (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 97– 99 (with bibliography).  Both versions of Chrysoloras’s Erotemata have been edited by Antonio Rollo, Gli Erotemata tra Crisolora e Guarino (Messina: Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Umanistici, 2012). On the history of Chrysoloras’s text and its use by Renaissance teachers of Greek, see Erika Nuti, “Greek Grammars through the Case of Chrysoloras’ Erotemata,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013): 240 – 68. On Chrysoloras’s teaching in Florence, see in particular Lydia Thorn-Wickert, Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1350 – 1415). Eine Biographie des byzantinischen Intellektuellen vor dem Hintergrund der hellenistischen Studien in der italienischen Renaissance (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 43 – 47. The creation of Chrysoloras’s ‘myth’ among his contemporaries has been examined, e. g., by Hartmut Wulfram, “Ein Heilsbringer aus dem Osten. Manuel Chrysoloras und seine Entindividualisierung im italienischen Frühhumanismus,” in Byzanzrezeption in Europa. Spurensuchen über das Mittelalter und die Renaissance bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Foteini Kolovou (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 89 – 116.  Christian Förstel has offered an exhaustive treatment of the three most important Renaissance Greek grammars in “Les grammaires grecques du XVe siècle: étude sur les ouvrages de Manuel Chrysoloras, Théodore Gaza et Constantin Lascaris,” thése présentée pour l’obtention du diplôme d’archiviste paléographe (Paris: École des Chartes, 1992), vol. 1. See also Erika Nuti, Longa est via. Forme e

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ers to approach Greek literary and scientific texts directly and, in this way, to recover the Greek roots of their culture. In 1498 – that is, one century after Chrysoloras’s arrival in Italy – Aldus Manutius published the first Greek grammar written by a Westerner, Urbano Bolzanio of Belluno.⁹ At that time Greek had obtained a stable position in the Western curriculum studiorum. It is possible to regard the beginning of the Greek revival in the Renaissance as another case of cultural transfer,¹⁰ where the re-appropriation of Greek culture re-established a link that had never been completely severed.¹¹ So as ancient Greek pedagogi used to teach their language to the children of Roman patrician families, Byzantine scholars of the Renaissance taught Greek to pupils who knew Latin and used it widely. Also translations, first into Latin and later into the vernacular languages, contributed to spreading the knowledge of Greek literary works that the West had almost totally ignored for centuries.¹² The list of similarities may be long; and by the way, as with Cato the Elder in the second century BCE, the spread of humanist culture elicited resistance especially among churchmen, who perceived the study of ancient pagan literature as a threat to Christian morality.¹³ contenuti dello studio grammaticale dalla Bisanzio paleologa al tardo Rinascimento veneziano (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2014), 73 – 129. On Costantine Lascaris, see Teresa Martínez Manzano, “Konstantinos Laskaris Humanist, Philologe, Lehrer, Kopist,” Ph.D. dissertation, Hamburg University, 1994; and Teresa Martínez Manzano, Constantino Láscaris. Semblanza de un humanista bizantino (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1998).  See Antonio Rollo, “La grammatica greca di Urbano Bolzanio,” in Umanisti bellunesi tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Proceedings of a congress at Belluno, 5 November 1999, ed. Paolo Pellegrini (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 177– 209.  For a definition of “cultural transfer” and related concepts (“interculturality,” “transnationalization,” etc.), see, e. g., Hannes Siegrist, “Comparative History of Cultures and Societies. From Cross-Societal Analysis to the Study of Intercultural Interdependencies,” Journal of Cultural Education 42 (2006): 377– 404. The migration of Greeks from Byzantium to Italy and its cultural and social consequences have been widely explored: see, e. g., Jonathan Harris, Greek Emigres in the West, 1400 – 1520 (Camberley: Porphyrogenitus Ltd., 1995); John Monfasani, “Greek Renaissance Migrations,” Italian History and Culture 8 (2002): 1– 13 = Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy: Studies on Humanism and Philosophy in the 15th Century (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), I; and John Monfasani, “The Greeks and Renaissance Humanism,” in Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. David Rundle (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures, 2012), 31– 78.  On the survival of Greek in the West through the Middle Ages, see the seminal study by Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988); and articles I-VIII by Robert Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek: Collected Essays (Padua: Antenore, 1977), 3 – 133.  On the methods, purposes, and features of humanist translations, see, e. g., Nigel G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd edn. (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2017), 15 – 25; and Peter Kuhlmann, “Übersetzung,” in Renaissance-Humanismus. Lexikon zur Antikerezeption, ed. Manfred Landfester (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2014), 983 – 99.  Documents recording this resistance include Giovanni da San Miniato’s letters to Coluccio Salutati (lost) and Angelo Corbinelli (ca. 1405: see Viviana Pelloni, “Giovanni da San Miniato,” in DBI 56); Giovanni Dominici’s Lucula noctis, ed. Edmund Hunt (Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1940); and Giorgio Cracco, “Banchini, Giovanni di Domenico,” in DBI 5); several letters by Al-

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This paper, however, proposes to look at the Greek revival in the Renaissance from a different point of view. While Greek scholars undoubtedly played a decisive role in shaping Renaissance culture, to what extent did the Renaissance affect Greek culture? Did culture travel only from East to West, or can we trace a journey in the opposite direction as well? Moreover, if the Renaissance influenced Greek culture, did it happen through a simple absorption of Western culture – a counter-transfer, a translation into Greek, etc. – or did it involve an allelopoiesis, a creation of new forms and a re-creation of Greek culture? Answering these questions requires, first of all, an enlargement of the field of enquiry. Studies on Renaissance Greek usually focus on the first generation of Byzantine émigrés (Chrysoloras, Argyropoulos, Bessarion, Trapezuntius, Musurus, etc.) and pay little attention, if any, to the second and third generations, that is, to the Greek scholars who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lived at the crossroads between the two cultures and experienced the full development of humanism. Most of them are known only to a very restricted group of specialists. One reason, certainly, is the rigid distinction between fields of research, which makes sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Greek culture too late for Byzantinists and too early for Neo-Hellenists. Another reason, as George Karamanolis has put it, is the definition of that stage of Greek culture as “post-Byzantine,” which focuses on the persistence of the Byzantine heritage as a burden suffocating any innovation, including the absorption of humanism: consequently, “the underlying idea of this approach … seems to be that there may have been some overlap between Byzantine scholarship and humanism, but at a more mature stage the latter becomes a movement where the Greeks did not play any major role.”¹⁴ Actually, Greek intellectuals living in the West or in Eastern territories under Western rule tended to integrate so deeply into their adopted countries that they can be legitimately considered as parts of the cultures of those countries. While Greek communities thrived in the major European cities, the most important Greek scholars from the sixteenth century onwards studied or taught at Italian universities, used Latin along with their native language, and participated in religious polemics taking either the Orthodox or the Catholic side.¹⁵ More importantly, the works and achievements of some of these neglected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Greek intellectuals show that they basically followed the paths traced by fifteenth-century

berto Berdini da Sarteano (see Enrico Cerulli, “Berdini, Alberto,” in DBI 8); and Giovanni da Prato’s sermons against pagan literature, delivered in Ferrara in 1450 (see Franco Bacchelli, “Giovanni da Prato,” in DBI 56). On the debate concerning studia humanitatis and studia divinitatis in the early Renaissance, see, e. g., Charles Trinkaus, “Antiquitas Versus Modernitas: An Italian Humanist Polemic and Its Resonance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 11– 21.  George Karamanolis, “Was There a Stream of Greek Humanists in the Late Renaissance?,” Ἑλληνικά 53 (2003): 22.  See Thomas Conley, “Greek Rhetorics after the Fall of Constantinople: An Introduction,” Rhetorica 18 (2000): 268 – 69.

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Byzantine émigrés and Italian humanists. The best representatives of the second and third waves of Greek humanism received both a Greek and a Western education; spent most of their lives in the West as teachers, pupils, or collaborators in cultural projects; and were in close contact with Western intellectuals; consequently, they were committed to the values of humanism and adopted its methods, contents, and tastes. Three examples may explain this point. Frankiskos Portos, a distinguished Hellenist and an editor of classical texts, followed the tradition of the great Byzantine teachers of the early Renaissance; one of his pupils was the French humanist Isaac Casaubon. Portos, who used Latin for his teaching, shared with some Western humanists the rejection of the vernacular – in his case, demotic Greek – in favor of a pure literary language. Maximos Margounios, like his fellow Cretan Marcus Musurus, was an editor, translator, and commentator of Greek and Byzantine philosophical and theological works. Like Cardinal Bessarion and other Greek intellectuals of the Quattrocento, he promoted the Union of the Churches, trying to demonstrate that the doctrinal differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism were more apparent than real. Ioannis Kottounios, a representative of Paduan Aristotelianism, displayed the same commitment to education as Vittorino da Feltre and other humanists, founding a boarding school for Greek boys in Padua.¹⁶ Although much work remains to be done on the Greek scholars of that period, we may assume that these three cases were not isolated: sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Greek intellectuals, even if certainly aware of their national identity, were almost indistinguishable from their Western colleagues.¹⁷ Consequently, while Karamanolis’s claim for including them among the representatives of Greek humanism is substantially correct, it is difficult to assess to what extent their being Greek influenced their reception of humanist culture.

 On Portos (1511– 1581), Margounios (1549 – 1602), and Kottounios (ca. 1577– 1658), see Karamanolis, “Was There a Stream,” 27– 41, and the bibliography cited there. On Portos’s life and activity, see also Eleonora Belligni, “Francesco Porto da Ferrara a Ginevra,” in Ludovico da Castelvetro. Letterati e grammatici nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento, Proceedings of the XIII giornata Luigi Firpo, Turin, 21– 22 September 2006, ed. Massimo Firpo and Guido Mongini (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2008), 357– 89. On Margounios, see Federica Ciccolella, “Maximos Margounios (c. 1549 – 1602), His Anacreontic Hymns, and the Byzantine Revival in Early Modern Germany,” in Receptions of Hellenism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Natasha Konstantinidou-Taylor and Han Lamers (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).  Fyrigos’s observation on Ioannis Kottounios also may apply to other ‘post-Byzantine’ scholars: Kottounios, although aware of being Greek, was “by mentality one thousand miles away from the Greek world”; consequently, he was “neglected in Greece because he wrote in Latin and ignored in the West possibly because he was a Greek” (my translation). See Antonis Fyrigos, “Joannes Cottunios di Verria e il Neoaristotelismo padovano,” in Renaissance Readings of the Corpus Aristotelicum. Proceedings of the Conference Held in Copenhagen, 23 – 25 April 1998, ed. Marianne Pade (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), 239 – 40. On the shaping of Greek national identity in early modern Europe, see the excellent study by Han Lamers, Greece Reinvented: Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015).

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2 The Cretan Case Probably it is not by chance that both Portos and Margounios came from Crete, whose culture offered a significant example of interaction between Byzantium and humanism between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Venice had acquired Crete in 1211, after the capture of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade (1204), but had managed to establish control over the island only after the 1460s.¹⁸ In the fourteenth century and, especially, after the fall of Constantinople (1453), Crete became a prominent center of Byzantine culture thanks to the immigration of many Greek scholars. At the same time, Venetian officials settled on the island with their families, along with several Western intellectuals eager to learn Greek.¹⁹ Latin-Italian culture and customs slowly penetrated the island’s urban centers, while the Venetian ruling class gradually adopted the local language. This cultural assimilation paved the way toward the so-called ‘Cretan Renaissance’, which lasted up until the Turkish conquest of the island in 1669. Education offers a first indicator of the effects of the coexistence of Greeks and Westerners. Indeed, our knowledge of Cretan schools is still very defective: literary sources rarely mention schools and teachers, while archival documents do not provide a complete picture of the educational system. Only in the sixteenth century did the Venetian government institute a public teaching position at the capital, Candia (Chandax or Castro, now Iraklion).²⁰ However, we can infer that Italian and Latin already were taught together with Greek in the fourteenth century from the words of the Cretan poet Leonardos Dellaportas (1350 – 1419/20), the son of an Italian father and a Greek mother, who learned at school “Frankish” (i. e., Italian or Latin or  Among the many studies on the Venetian conquest and rule of Crete, see Theocharis E. Detorakis, History of Crete, trans. John C. Davis (Iraklion: Detorakis, 1994), 143 – 225; and the essays included in Βενεκρατούμενη Ἑλλάδα: προσεγγίζοντας τὴν ἱστορία της. La Grecia durante la Venetocrazia: approccio alla sua storia, ed. Chryssa A. Maltezou et al. (Athens: Ἑλληνικὸ Ἰνστιτοῦτο Βυζαντινῶν καὶ Μεταβυζαντινῶν Βενετίας, 2010).  On Western scholars travelling to Crete, see, e. g., Agostino Pertusi, “Leonzio Pilato a Creta prima del 1358 – 1359: scuole e cultura a Creta durante il secolo XIV,” Κρετικὰ Χρονικά 15 – 16 (1961– 62): 363 – 81; and David Speranzi, “Praeclara librorum suppellectilis: Cretan Manuscripts in Pietro da Portico’s Library,” in Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance, ed. Federica Ciccolella and Luigi Silvano (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 155 – 212.  On Cretan education, in addition to Pertusi, “Leonzio Pilato a Creta,” see Theocharis E. Detorakis, “Διδασκαλικὲς καὶ βιβλιογραφικὲς συμβάσεις στὴ βενετοκρατουμένη Κρήτη,” in Βενετοκτρητικὰ μελετήματα (1971 – 1994) (Iraklion: Δήμος Ἡρακλείου Βικελαία Βιβλιοθήκη, 1996), 37– 53; Nikolaos M. Panagiotakis, “Ἡ παιδεία κατὰ τὴν Βενετοκρατία,” in Κρήτη: ἱστορία καὶ πολιτισμός, ed. Nikolaos M. Panagiotakis (Iraklion: Βικελαία Δημοτικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη, 1988), 163 – 95; and Ioannis Markouris, “Apprenticeship in Greek Orthodox Chanting and Greek Language Learning in Venetian Crete (14th15th Century),” in Βενετοκρατούμενος Ἑλληνισμός: Ἄνθρωποι, χῶρος, ἰδέες (13ος-18ος αἰ.) / I Greci durante la Venetocrazia: uomini, spazio, idee (XIII-XVIII sec.), Proceedings of the Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Venice, 3 – 10 dicembre 2007, ed. Chryssa A. Maltezou et al. (Venice: Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Post-Bizantini, 2009), 233 – 49.

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both) and Greek letters (γράμματα φράγκικα καὶ ῥωμαίκα).²¹ This is not unusual: the teaching of Italian and Latin met the interests and goals of the Venetian ruling class, which essentially consisted of the practice of law and commerce. Unfortunately, we know very little of the pedagogical project of Michael Apostolis (ca. 1422– 1478), who was active as a teacher, manuscript dealer, and copyist. In some of his letters, presumably written in the 1460s, Apostolis begged his patron, Cardinal Bessarion, to fund the establishment of a school on the island.²² The most plausible hypothesis is that Apostolis envisaged a school centered on the teaching of Greek rhetoric and poetry (Ep. 31. 2: Ἑρμοῦ τὰ δῶρα καὶ τῶν Μουσῶν, “the gifts of Hermes and the Muses”) and, as such, reflecting the traditional Byzantine educational curriculum.²³ Apostolis did not omit the real reasons for his request: the new school would have secured him a job and allowed him to overcome his financial difficulties. However, in letter 28, he expressed a less prosaic and more idealistic aim: with Bessarion’s help, Greek culture would be taught, and the language would remain uncontaminated by barbarism (ἀβάρβαρος).²⁴ Apostolis was probably reacting to the threat that Western culture posed to Crete’s authentic Greek tradition. For this reason, some years after Bessarion’s death (1472), he wrote a long oration to criticize the use of Latin in the teaching of Greek, which was the rule in Italian schools and, we may suppose, was spreading through Cretan schools as well. Apostolis maintained that the continuous switching from Greek to Latin and vice versa prevented students from improving their Greek and made them unable to write in Greek without mistakes. Apostolis also criticized the value of translating Greek authors into Latin, which was the main objective in the teaching of Greek in Western schools: ὅταν γάρ τις τῶν Ἰταλῶν ῥωμαικῶς ἀναγινώσκει τὸν Ὅμηρον ἢ Δημοσθένην καὶ Θουκιδίδην ἢ καὶ ἄμφω τὼ φιλοσόφω, τίνα τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς παιδείας κομίζονται τὸν καρπόν, ὅτι μὴ νοῦν μόνον, τὸν καὶ βαρβάροις κοινόν;

 See Panagiotakis, “Ἡ παιδεία,” 168. On Leonardos (or Linardos) Dellaportas, see Arnold van Gemert, “Literary Antecedents,” in Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete, ed. David Holton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 56 – 58.  For the text of the letters of Michael Apostolis, I refer to the edition by Rudolf Stefec, Die Briefe des Michael Apostoles (Hamburg: Verlag Dr Kovač, 2013). On Apostolis’s life and works, see Stefec’s extensive introduction and bibliography (Die Briefe, 5 – 20). According to Stefec (Die Briefe, 16, 149, and 151), letters 12, 28, 31, 32, and 34, where Apostolis presents Bessarion with his project, date from between 1461 and 1463. For an analysis of Apostolis’s letters, see also Alexander Riehle, “Kreta: Ein ‘melting pot’ der Frühen Neuzeit? Bemerkungen zum Briefnetzwerk del Michaelos Apostoles,” in “Inter Graecos latinissimus, inter Latinos graecissimus.” Bessarion zwischen den Kulturen, ed. Claudia Märtls et al. (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2013), 167– 86.  On Byzantine education, see the survey by Athanasios Markopoulos, “Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 785 – 95.  Ep. 28. 43 – 44 (Stefec, Die Briefe): δὸς τῇ Κρήτῃ τὸν Ἕλληνα λόγον ἢ τὴν γλῶσσαν αὐτὴν ἀβάρβαρον ἐπὶ σοὶ διαμεῖναι.

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(Whenever an Italian reads Homer, Demosthenes, or Thucydides or the two philosophers [i. e., Plato and Aristotle] in Latin, what fruit of Greek culture does he gain? All he acquires is the bare meaning that even barbarians can understand.²⁵)

The term “barbarian” (βάρβαρος) establishes a link between this oration and letter 28.²⁶ It is important to stress the fact that Apostolis would have never asked his patron to fund a project that had little or no chance of being successful. However, his (probably) exclusive focus on Greek teaching was doomed to become outdated very soon, because new pedagogical trends were emerging and imposing themselves. Some manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford document the activity of Andreas Donos and a group of teachers of Greek related to him who were active in Crete between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These manuscripts include texts for the teaching of Greek at all levels: grammars, treatises on syntax, and literary works that were read to practice the grammar acquired at the initial levels of instruction. In particular, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Barocci 6 contains a grammatical compilation for the teaching of elementary Greek, entirely written by the hand of Donos. An analysis of this grammar demonstrates that Donos maintained the framework of traditional Byzantine grammar, which had been established in late antiquity and systematized by Manuel Moschopoulos in the early fourteenth century, but supplemented it with material from the Greek grammars that Manuel Chrysoloras and Constantine Lascaris had composed for their Western pupils in the fifteenth century.²⁷ In a multilingual environment like Crete, Donos’s choice may have been inspired by the presence of non-native speakers of Greek in his classes. At the same time, however, Donos seems to adhere to a new view of Greek grammar resulting from the meeting

 Michael Apostolis, Exhortation from Gortyna to Rome in Italy, 144– 47. The Greek text has been edited and translated into Italian by Anna Pontani, “Sullo studio del greco in Occidente nel sec. XV: l’esempio di Michele Apostolis,” in Italia ed Europa nella linguistica del Rinascimento: confronti e relazioni, Proceedings of the Convegno Internazionale, Ferrara, Palazzo Paradiso, 20 – 24 March 1991, ed. Mirko Tavoni, vol. 1: L’Italia e il mondo romanzo (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1996), 134– 70. An English translation has been provided by W. Keith Percival, “Greek Pedagogy in the Renaissance,” in Heilige und profane Sprachen – Holy and Profane Languages. Die Anfänge des Fremdsprachenunterrichts im westlichen Europa – The Beginnings of Foreign Language Teaching in Western Europe, ed. Werner Hüllen and Friedericke Klippel (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2002), 93 – 109. See also my remarks in Donati, 146 – 49; on the teaching of Greek in Latin in humanist schools, see my article “De utroque fonte bibere: Latin in the Teaching of Greek Grammar during the Renaissance,” in City, Court, Academy: Language Choice in Early Modern Italy, ed. Eva Del Soldato and Andrea Rizzi (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 137– 57.  On Apostolis’s attitude toward the West, see, e. g., Deno J. Geanakoplos, “A Byzantine Looks at the Renaissance: The Attitude of Michael Apostolis toward the Rise of Italy to Cultural Eminence,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 1 (1958): 157– 62; and below, p. 58.  I offer an analysis of Donos’s elementary grammar in “Greek in Venetian Crete: Grammars and Schoolbooks from the Library of Francesco Barocci,” in Teachers, Students, and Schools, ed. Ciccolella and Silvano, 371– 93.

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of the Byzantine and Latin pedagogical traditions. While the purpose of traditional Byzantine grammar was to provide tools to investigate and evaluate the style of literary texts, the grammars created for Westerners focused on forms rather than definitions. This implied a different view of the language, which was no longer seen as a series of patterns for analysis and imitation, but as a dynamic reality in which the speaker or writer played a more active role. A confirmation comes from the variants of grammatical forms in the different Greek dialects, including the koine, which Donos inserted in the margins and interlinear spaces of his manuscript. Apparently Donos knew that traditional grammar presented a limited view of the Greek language: because of its exclusive focus on the Attic dialect, in which Byzantine literature had been written, that grammar did not account for the variety of forms appearing in literary texts and, most of all, for the changes that the language had undergone over the centuries, including during the most recent times. Consequently, Donos’s grammar presupposes a rethinking of the Byzantine grammatical tradition in light of the new pedagogy of Greek that the first generation of Greek émigrés had established. Donos’s efforts apparently paid off: up until the first half of the sixteenth century, the study of ancient Greek culture was extensively pursued in Crete. But the second half of the century most probably marked a change. In 1576, the German scholar Martin Crusius observed that in Crete there were neither prestigious cultural institutions nor good teachers, but only scholae triviales, elementary schools, where children did not go beyond the reading of the Psalter and liturgical books. One year later, Maximos Margounios, who had studied at Padua, pointed out that Cretan students who attended Italian universities had little or no knowledge of the grammar of their language and were, therefore, unworthy of their origin. An explanation may come from a contract drawn up in 1646, between Messer Maneas Sevastó and Zorzi Pronotarios. Sevastó hired Zorzi to teach his son to read and write in volgare (βολγάρε), i. e., Italian. According to the contract, Zorzi would teach “neither ancient Greek nor Latin, but simply the volgare, and this methodically and not superfluously” (ὀχ’ἐληνηκα μηδε την λατηνα μα ἀπλος βολγάρα και τουτο ὀρδεναριαμεντε και ὀχι σουπερφλουαμεντε [sic]). This document, written in a mixture of demotic Greek and Venetian vernacular, suggests that the study of Italian was gaining ground at the expense of ancient Greek and Latin.²⁸ Although at that time, Venetian Crete was basically a Greek environment, by the second half of the sixteenth century the focus of Cretan education shifted toward Italian, and Greek language and culture lost their prevalence in the school curriculum.²⁹

 On these texts and the related bibliography, see Ciccolella, Donati, 252– 53.  See Dimitris Tsougarakis, “Cultural Assimilation through Language Infiltration: Some Early Examples from Venetian Crete,” in Bosphorus: Essays in Honour of Cyril Mango, ed. Stephanos Efthymiadis et al. (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1995), 181– 94. According to Tsougarakis, “the Venetian settlers failed to bring forth a corresponding Latin cultural development that would embrace more than a handful of intellectuals, even though the study of Greek was pursued in Crete” (186). On the other hand, van

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Obviously, the teaching of the Italian language could not be separated from the set of ideas, thoughts, and values carried by the Italian culture of that time. Translations largely helped the spread of Italian and, more generally, Renaissance literature, which exerted a remarkable influence on literary works produced in Crete between the 1570s and 1669. These works, written in Italian or in demotic Greek, encompass a wide range of literary genres: tragedy, comedy, pastoral poetry, epos, and romance.³⁰ Classical imagery and subjects occur frequently but, apparently, are seldom drawn directly from ancient Greek sources. As David Holton has demonstrated, Cretan writers quoted most ancient myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which circulated on the island in the popular Italian translation by Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara.³¹ Ovid’s poem, together with Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid, and Gianbattista Marino’s Adone, inspired the surviving eighteen Cretan interludes, short dramatic pieces performed in the intervals of banquets or between the acts of plays.³² In the case of tragedy, the direct models were not plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, but sixteenth-century Italian tragedies with their five-act structure, respect for the Aristotelian unities, and influence of Seneca.³³ As for com-

Gemert, “Antecedents,” 50, observes: “This [scil., the prevalence of Italian culture] does not mean that Byzantine culture and education were eradicated; that tradition continued during the whole period of Venetian rule. Crete retained its function as a hinge between Venice and the Greek world in this respect also. However, Byzantine culture lost its monopoly position and its influence on whatever was written in Greek. In its place, spoken Greek … and western culture acquired equal, or even superior, status.”  In addition to the essays collected in Literature, ed. Holton, see the study by Nikolaos M. Panagiotakis, “The Italian Background to Early Cretan Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 281– 323; and Stylianos Alexiou, Η Κρετκή λογοτεχνία κατά τη Βενετοκρατία (Crete: Σύνδεμος Τοπικών Ενώσεων Δήμων & Κοινοτήτων Κρήτης, 1990). The originality of Cretan literature has been stressed by Arnold van Gemert, “The 15th Century Cretan Literature,” in Βενεκρατούμενος Ἑλληνισμός, 637– 47. On Cretan theater, see in particular Walter Puchner, “Early Modern Greek Drama: From Page to Stage,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 25 (2007): 243 – 66.  See David Holton, “Classical Antiquity and Cretan Renaissance Poetry,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 27 (2001): 88. After a first edition in Paris in 1554, Anguillara’s complete translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in ottava rima was published in Venice by Giovanni Griffio in 1561. Anguillara’s unfaithfulness to the model and insertion of new stories drew harsh critiques among his contemporaries. Nevertheless, many reprints, editions, and commentaries testify to the success of this translation. See Claudio Mutini, “Anguillara, Giovanni Andrea dell’,” in DBI 3; and Gabriele Bucchi, ‘Meraviglioso diletto’: la traduzione poetica del Cinquecento e le Metamorfosi di Ovidio di Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara (Pisa: ETS, 2011).  See Rosemary E. Bancroft-Marcus, “Interludes,” in Literature, ed. Holton, 159 – 78.  On Renaissance Italian tragedy and its relationship to classical models, see, e. g., Salvatore Di Maria, The Poetics of Imitation in the Italian Theater of the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 3 – 25. For example, Georgios Chortatsis (ca. 1545 – 1610) wrote an Erophile (after 1595, published in Venice in 1637 by the Cypriot priest Matthaios Kigalas), modeled on Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinzio’s Orbecche. Chortatsis also drew on other Italian literary works: e. g., Torquato Tasso’s poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581) and tragedy Re Torrismondo (1587). Tasso’s play also inspired Ioan-

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edies, Cretan playwrights drew their models from Plautus, Terence, and especially the Italian commedia erudita, which, in turn, was directly inspired by Latin comedy; classical quotations and allusions are usually restricted to stock-characters such as the pedantic schoolmaster or the braggart, whose ostentatious knowledge produced comic effects.³⁴ Vitsentzos Kornaros’s romance Erotokritos offers another interesting nis Andreas Troilos (b. ca. 1600) for his King Rodolinos (1645). Chortatsis’s Erophile has recently been edited and translated into English by Rosemary E. Bancroft-Marcus in Georgios Chortatsis (fl. 1576 – 96), Plays of the Veneto-Cretan Renaissance, vol. 1: Texts and Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 150 – 319. King Rodolinos, published in Venice in 1647, is available in the modern edition by Martha Aposkiti, Ροδολίνος, τραγωδία Ιωάννη ᾿Aνδρέα Τρωίλου (Athens: Στιγμή, 1987). On both plays and their Italian antecedents, see Giuseppe Spadaro, “Il teatro cretese,” in Letteratura cretese e Rinascimento italiano (Soveria Mannelli and Messina: Rubettino, 1994), 57– 71; Giuseppe Spadaro, “La tragedia a Creta nel XVII secolo,” in Letteratura cretese, 92– 106; and Walter Puchner, “Tragedy,” in Literature, ed. Holton. 129 – 54.  See Di Maria, Poetics, in particular 168 – 70. On Cretan comedy, see Alfred Vincent, “Comedy,” in Literature, ed. Holton, 103 – 28. The pedantic schoolmaster appears in Chortatsis’s Katsourbos or Katzarapos, ed. Bancroft-Marcus, 320 – 445. The following example, taken from a dialogue between the Schoolmaster (Δάσκαλος) and an old man, Armenis, shows the mixture of demotic Greek, Italian, and Latin in the former’s language (in Bancroft-Marcus’ translation quoted below, Italian is rendered in French): Act 2. 296 – 301: Δασ. Κι α μου τσεδέρεις, poco fa! Τι ήτον η μάνιτά-σου; Noli ποτέ irasci ab re, μα πρώτα θά λογιάζεις! Αρμ. Τούρκος δεν είμαι, Δάσκαλε, και ‘μπρέ’ γιατί με κράζεις; Δασ. Per lettera είναι αυτό το ‘μπρέ’ usato dal Catone, e se tu voi intendere se ho lettere pur bone, γρίκησε την εξήγηση· ‘Noli’ vuol dir ‘Non voi…’ κ.τ.λ. Sch. If you give in, tant mieux! Why all that fury? Noli irasci ab re—think ere you rage! Arm. I’m not a Turk; why call me ‘bre,’ Schoolmaster? Sch. Cato se sert par lettre de this ‘bre.’ Si tu veux voir que je sais bien mes lettres, Let me explain: ‘noli’ veut dire ‘Ne veuille …’ etc. Like the other characters interacting with the Schoolmaster, Armenis knows neither Italian nor Latin and, therefore, ignores or misinterprets references and quotations. Conversely, Chortatsis’s Greek-speaking audience was most probably familiar with both languages and the classical authors and works mentioned in the comedy: Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Catullus, Horace, Tibullus, Quintilian, and Martial, along with Donatus (i. e., elementary Latin grammar) and Pseudo-Cato the Elder’s Disticha, which provided the foundations of medieval education. There are references to classical Greek texts also: for example, Plato’s Symposium inspires the short monologue in Act 3. 487– 494, where Armenis, who is in love with a young girl, thanks Eros for bestowing on him an elevated mind and supreme wisdom. By assigning classical quotations to a pedantic schoolmaster and an old

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example of the treatment of Greek antiquity in the Cretan context: although its plot is set in ancient Athens, references to Greek myths and history do not overshadow the medieval color of its primary model, the fifteenth-century novel Paris et Vienne by Pierre de la Cypède.³⁵ Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cretan culture, therefore, represents another case of cultural transfer, in which models and trends coming from the West superseded the long tradition of classical Greek studies that had made the island famous in previous centuries. However, this interpretation appears reductive if we consider, for example, the treatment of classical myth in pastoral poetry. The most important Italian representative of the pastoral mode, Jacopo Sannazaro, and his European imitators set their poems in Arcadia, a rural region located in the Greek Peloponnesus. In their works, Arcadia is an ideal place where it is possible to soothe the anxieties of everyday life and restore harmony between humankind and nature.³⁶ Cretan poets, although imitating Italian models, constructed their own Arcadia on their Mount Ida, the birthplace of the god Zeus. Both Cretan literary texts and travelers’ diaries concur in praising Mount Ida for its delightful beauty.³⁷ But that place was, first and foremost, a domain of the Calergi or Kallergis family, who claimed descent from Byzantine emperors and had played an important role in the anti-Venetian revolts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Two centuries later, the Kallergis family was still very influential as champion of the Greek Orthodox faith. Consequently, to quote Rosemary Bancroft-Marcus, “Mount Ida represented for Cretan Greeks a symbol of the liberty from Venetian rule for which they never ceased to yearn.”³⁸ A strong political message also appears in the pastoral tragicomedy L’amorosa fede by the Cretan Antonio Pandimo, written in Italian for the wedding of a member of the Kallergis family. This play, based on Giovanni Battista

simpleton, Chortatsis was probably expressing his criticism over an outdated educational system. On pedants and braggarts in Cretan comedies, see also Holton, “Classical Antiquity,” 92– 94.  Erotokritos, written in the early seventeenth century by Vitsenzos Kornaros (1553 – 1617), can be defined as a romance and / or a chivalric poem. In 10,012 political (fifteen-syllable) verses, it recounts the adventurous love between Erotokritos (called “Rotokritos”) and Aretousa, the daughter of Herakles, King of Athens. The text has been edited by Stylianos Alexiou, Βιτσέντσος Κορνάρος: Ερωτόκριτος (Athens: Ερμής, 1980). See David Holton, Erotokritos (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1991); David Holton, Μελέτες για τον Ερωτόκριτο και άλλα νεοελληνικά κείμενα (Athens: Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, 2001), 71– 137 and 159 – 191; and Panagiotis Roilos, “Orality and Performativity in the Erotokritos,” Cretan Studies 7 (2002): 213 – 30.  Among the many studies on Renaissance pastoral poetry, see Giovanni Ferroni, Dulces lusus: lirica pastorale e libri di poesia nel Cinquecento (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2012); and William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983). For a general treatment of the pastoral mode in the Renaissance, see Federica Ciccolella, “Idyll,” in Renaissance-Humanismus. Lexikon zur Antikerezeption, ed. Manfred Landfester (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2014), 460 – 68.  See Rosemary E. Bancroft-Marcus, “The Pastoral Mode,” in Literature, ed. Holton, 79 – 83.  Bancroft-Marcus, “The Pastoral Mode,” 81.

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Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1589/90), is set on Mount Ida at the time of the tyrannical King Minos, who obviously impersonates the Doge of Venice.³⁹ Moreover, in the second prologue to Georgios Chortatsis’s pastoral comedy Panoria, Joy (Χαρά), disguised as a shepherd, abandons the city and its men who have “sold themselves to gold and riches” (34) and returns to Ida, where “men have preserved their ancient virtues” (58).⁴⁰ Other authors also selected their myths for their relationship with Crete and its tradition: for example, in the Erotokritos, the few classical myths Kornaros alluded to are the story of Daedalus and Icarus and the myth of Cephalus and Procris, which are both set in Crete.⁴¹

3 Conclusions Like the Hellenization of Latin culture in antiquity, the Greek revival in the West in the early fifteenth century can be considered a transfer of cultural forms from East to West, albeit with substantial adaptations of the Byzantine tradition to the demands of Westerners. At the same time, the Renaissance exerted a large impact on early modern Greek culture at the stage that is incorrectly defined as ‘post-Byzantine.’ The culture of Venetian Crete is particularly significant as a means of detecting the manifold consequences of this impact. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, two significant changes occurred in Cretan education: the adoption of the pedagogical methods created for Westerners by the first generation of Greek émigrés and the loss of the importance of traditional Byzantine learning, centered on the study of the Greek language and culture, in favor of Latin-Italian education. These changes paved the way for the absorption of the stimuli of contemporary European culture, which, in turn, had been shaped by the classical revival of the previous centuries.

 Bancroft-Marcus, “The Pastoral Mode,” 96 – 98. For the Amorosa fede by Antonio Pandimo (1602– 1647), first published in Venice in 1620, see the modern critical edition by Cristiano Luciani and Alfred Vincent (Venice: Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Post-Bizantini, 2003).  Bancroft-Marcus, “The Pastoral Mode,” 84– 89. The text has been edited by Bancroft-Marcus, “Interludes,” 2– 149.  See David Holton, “The Function of Myth in Cretan Renaissance Poetry: The Cases of Achelis and Kornaros,” in Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Greek Poetry. Essays in Memory of C. A. Trypanis, ed. Peter Mackridge (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1996), 6 – 10; and David Holton, “Classical Antiquity,” 95. On Ovid’s treatment of the myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus escaping from Minos’s palace at Knossos (Metamorphoses VIII. 183 – 235 and Ars amatoria II. 21– 96), see Marjorie Hoefmans, “Myth into Reality: The Metamorphosis of Daedalus and Icarus (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 183 – 235),” L’antiquité classique 83 (1994): 137– 60. The myth of Cephalus and Procris in Ovid’s version (Met. VII. 661– 865 and Ars III. 685 – 746) is also connected to Crete: Procris, betrayed by her husband Cephalus, escaped to the island and cured King Minos from the curse of his wife Pasiphae, who had made him unable to conceive children. See Julia D. Hejduk, “Death by Elegy: Ovid’s Cephalus and Procris,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 141 (2011): 285 – 314.

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Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cretan intellectuals did not abandon their tradition, but renewed it through the new culture. On the one hand, this caused an enlargement of their spatial and temporal horizons. In an oration written ca. 1453, Michael Apostolis stated his firm belief in the superiority of Greek culture, although he was forced to admit that the Byzantines were reduced to “the remnants of the Greeks” (τὰ λείψανα τῶν Ἑλλήνων).⁴² More than a century later, Georgios Chortatsis expressed his view of human history as including not only the glories of ancient Greece and Byzantium, but also the achievements of the Chaldaeans, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Rome, and Carthage.⁴³ On the other hand, the use of myths in Kornaros’s Erotokritos shows that, from the vast and articulated universal history, Cretan writers selected and encapsulated elements recalling the traditions and the mythical past of their island and inserted them into literary contexts of different origin. Their interest in local myths, which can certainly be considered as an outcome of Renaissance antiquarianism, was also a way to construct their past by creating, or re-creating, an authentically Cretan antiquity that could replace the ‘universal’ Ovidian world of ancient myth in early modern European literature. Also the substitution of Arcadia with Mount Ida is just one example of the ways in which Cretan poets adapted a genre imported from the West (specifically, the pastoral mode) to address contemporary issues and express their political ideas. We may therefore answer the question in the title of this paper by considering that transfer and allelopoiesis appear strictly intertwined and almost interdependent in several aspects of post-Renaissance Greek culture. It is to be hoped that further studies will enlarge our picture of the impact of the Renaissance in the Eastern Mediterranean and, in this way, open new avenues for research.

 See Geanakoplos, “A Byzantine.”  Georgios Chortatsis, Erophile, Prol. 23 – 32 and 41– 58: Charos, coming from Hades, reminds the audience that nothing lasts forever and every nation is equally subject to rise and fall. See Holton, “Classical Antiquity,” 90 – 91.

Peter Mack

How Did Renaissance Rhetoric Transform the Classical Tradition? In this paper I shall aim to discuss some of the most important ways in which Renaissance theoreticians innovated in the field of rhetoric.¹ I shall consider the ways in which they used the classical literary and rhetorical tradition in order to put forward new ideas. At the end of the paper I shall consider the relationship between tradition and innovation in Renaissance rhetorical teaching, and think about the ways in which traditions both enable and constrain innovation. I shall begin with some comments on the legacy provided by classical rhetorical texts. Above all classical rhetorical theory constituted a complex and developed system that provided teaching on a wide range of different topics connected with the use of language. Thus rhetoric discusses the nature of the audience, the best means of presenting oneself, the construction of delightful sentences, the arousal of emotions, the discovery of arguments, the best way to tell stories, the impact of patterns of words and sounds, different ways of addressing the audience suitable for particular moments in a speech, the nature of the tropes and figures, and the use of the voice and gesture. The achievement of rhetorical theory was to bring all these diverse insights and tactics into a single system. At the same time rhetoric is characterised by a single large idea, which is that one must always think of the text one is composing in relation to an audience. One must always consider what one is trying to achieve with that audience, how they are likely to react, and what will be the most effective way of presenting ourselves and our subject material in order to achieve the result we intend. We should also remember that for the Hellenistic student of rhetoric, the textbook was always only the beginning. Its intention was to present the wide range of doctrines relatively simply as a foundation. The real training and full understanding of the complexities of the issues involved came about through apprenticeship to an orator and through practice, which meant both composing one’s own speeches and analysing the great speeches of the tradition under the direction of a practicing orator.² Later students of rhetoric inherited the textbooks but not the wider system of education of which the textbook was only the beginning.

 This paper was prepared at the same time as my paper, “Learning and Transforming Conventional Wisdom: Reading and Rhetoric in the Elizabethan Grammar School,” Renaissance Studies 32 (2018): 427– 45. There are some overlaps of material between the two papers, but the argument made is different.  Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, 34; Cicero, De oratore, I.96 – 99, II.2; J. May and J. Wisse, “Introduction”, in Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. J. May and J. Wisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-005

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There was one important difference between rhetoric and other curriculum subjects. In most subjects the recovered Greek texts represented the overriding authorities. In rhetoric, by contrast, the Latin tradition was just as impressive as the Greek. Quintilian and Cicero’s De oratore are as fundamental to the rhetorical tradition as Aristotle’s Rhetoric. But all the new texts, and especially the Greek ones, took some time to be absorbed into the ordinary teaching of rhetoric. For the Renaissance, as for the Middle Ages, the Rhetorica ad Herennium continued to be the most common choice for the first manual of classical rhetoric to be assigned to students. So what were the innovations of Renaissance rhetorical theory, and how did they come about? The two rhetorical thinkers who best combined innovation with influence were Rudolph Agricola and Erasmus. Rudolph Agricola (1443 – 1485) wrote his masterpiece, De inventione dialectica, in the last months of an almost ten-year stay in Italy and on his return journey to his native Groningen. The text was completed in Dillingen an der Donau, near Augsburg, in September 1479.³ It was first printed in Louvain in 1515 and was published in a total of forty-four editions and thirty-two epitomes up to 1600, making it one of the most successful rhetoric books of the sixteenth century.⁴ The work was the fruit of the teaching that Agricola gave to a number of his northern fellow-students in Pavia and Ferrara. It begins with an attempt to provide a new understanding of the process of communication, from first principles. I want to begin by looking at the opening paragraphs of Agricola’s De inventione dialectica. ⁵ In these paragraphs Agricola announces the main structural themes of his book: first, that in using language, teaching is more fundamental than pleasing and moving; and second, that teaching can be brought about through exposition or argumentation; and third, that argumentation depends on the topics of invention, which will be the subject of the remainder of De inventione dialectica. Agricola begins with the general underlying principles of communication. In the notes I have given the whole opening section, but I am going to translate and comment more selectively here.

 R. Agricola, Letters, ed. A. van der Laan and F. Akkerman (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2002); Rudolph Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus’s Testimonies, ed. F. Akkerman (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2012); Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444 – 1485), ed. F. Akkerman and A. J. Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1988); and P. Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 1993).  G. C. Huisman, Rudolph Agricola: A Bibliography (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1985); Renaissance Rhetoric Short-Title Catalogue 1460 – 1700, ed. L. D. Green and J. J. Murphy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); P. Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380 – 1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 30 – 32, 56 – 75.  R. Agricola, De inventione dialectica (Cologne, 1539; rpt. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1967), hereafter DID; and R. Agricola, De inventione dialectica, ed. Lothar Mundt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992). A new edition with English translation by Marc van der Poel is in preparation.

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Any discourse that is undertaken about any subject and indeed every conversation in which we express our thought appears to have in view and has as its specific function to teach something to the listener.… For if a discourse is the sign of the things that the speaker has in his mind, then it is clear that the specific task of the discourse is to reveal and to explain that for which it is meant to serve as a sign.⁶

Agricola begins his textbook by considering the general conditions of all language use and states unequivocally that the function of language is to teach, that is to say, to convey to the people listening what is in the mind of the speaker. Immediately he confronts an axiom of rhetorical theory: that a speech should aim to teach, to move, and to please. He agrees that this is the case, and in fact moving and pleasing will be important elements in book two and especially in book three of the work, but he continues to argue that, of the three aims, teaching is the most fundamental: When one formulates a request, a complaint or even a question, we may seem to be doing something different, but the main thing one does is to inform the listeners about one’s desire, one’s grief, or one’s wish for information. Sometimes we inform only so that the listener may understand, and sometimes so that he may be convinced. We either convince a person who gives us his credence and who follows us, as it were, willingly, or we prevail upon someone who does not give us credence, and we pull while he or she resists. The first is done by means of exposition, and the latter is brought about by means of argumentation. Exposition I call a discourse, which only explains what the speaker has in mind, without bringing in anything to persuade the hearer. Argumentation I name a discourse through which one attempts to create conviction in the subject that is discussed.⁷

 “Oratio quaecunque de re quaque instituitur omnisque adeo sermo quo cogitata mentis nostrae proferimus id agere hocque primum et proprium habere videtur officium, ut doceat aliquid eum, qui audit. Cuius rei quod certius quis propiusque capiat indicium, quam quod soli omnium animantium homini, ut rationis doctrinaeque capaci, parens ille et auctor rerum Deus loquendi atque orationis indulserit munus? Quod si est signum rerum, quas is qui dicit animo complectitur, oratio, liquet hoc esse proprium opus ipsius, ut ostendat id atque explicet, cui significando destinatur.” DID, 1. The English translations in the body of the text are by Marc van der Poel from his forthcoming edition.  “Nec me praeterit maximis auctorum placuisse tria esse quae perfecta oratione fiant, ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet, et docere quidem rem facilem esse et quam quisque tantum non inertissimae mentis praestare possit, concutere vero affectibus audientem et in quemcunque velis animi habitum transformare, allicere item audiendique voluptate tenere suspensum non nisi summis et maiori quodam Musarum afflatu instinctis contingere ingeniis. Nec sane infitias vero esse ista praecipua bene dicendi praemia sequique orationem, verum sequi verius quam effici, potiusque accessionem esse ipsius, quam proprium opus. Sed de his alio loco explicatius dicendum erit. Hoc in praesentia dixisse sufficiat, posse docere orationem, ut non moveat, non delectet, movere aut delectare ut non doceat non posse. Itaque precantes, conquerentes, sed et interrogantes quoque, quanquam aliud agere videntur, hoc tamen primum efficiunt, ut discant audientes, cuius desiderio teneantur, quo urgeantur dolore, quid sit, quod scire velint. Docemus autem nonnunquam hoc tantum pacto, ut intelligat auditor, quandoque ut fiat illi fides. Fidem facimus vel credenti et velut sponte sequentem ducimus, vel pervincimus non credentem atque repugnantem trahimus. Alterum expositione fit, alterum argumentatione conficitur. Expositio-

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For Agricola, persuasive language is divided into exposition and argumentation. This distinction reflects, first, a judgement about the listener’s view of the speaker and the subject (will the audience follow willingly? will they resist?); and second, a difference in the linguistic forms employed, either stating things plainly or linking sentences together so that one overtly supports another and adding further information as supporting evidence. Clearly Agricola’s distinction between exposition and argumentation is related to the rhetorical doctrine of the parts of the oration, in which the arguments for and against are preceded by the narrative of the case, but Agricola makes the distinction far more general by saying that it is true of all discourse. Furthermore he bases his explanation of the difference between the two in the fundamental rhetorical issue of the relationship between audience, subject-matter, and speaker. So here we see Agricola adapting a particular rhetorical doctrine to a more general use in the light of the underlying principles of rhetoric. Let us return to the text. Now conviction about any uncertain thing cannot be made out of itself, and we must gather certainty about each thing from other things that are better known and more firmly established; and some people, relying on their sharp mind, are able to think up abundantly and with ease an argument, that is, as Cicero says, a likely thing found for the sake of creating conviction, while other people, who are not so bright, grope in the dark when they behold subjects and are not able to find something which could be said about each thing or they find it too late. It is for these reasons that the people who have invented some seats of arguments, which they call topics, seem to have done something extremely useful. By means of these as a reminder or a kind of sign, we may go over the very things in our mind and perceive what is plausible and suitable to the purpose of our discourse.⁸

Agricola now needs to connect argumentation to the topics, but he makes the connection through considering the differences between people and the role of the topics in helping people explore a subject. He does this by emphasizing the role of the topics in helping people think about a subject or an issue and make the connections between ideas that will lead to arguments. The emphasis is on the role of the topics in helping writers or speakers to think about their subject-matter and the best way to present it.

nem voco orationem, quae solam dicentis mentem explicat, nullo quo fides audienti fiat adhibito, argumentationem vero orationem, qua quis rei de qua dicit fidem facere conatur.” DID, 1– 2.  “Cum vero nulli dubiae rei queat ex se constare fides, sed ex aliis quibusdam notioribus atque magis exploratis de unoquoque certitudinem colligamus necesse sit, iamque alii, mentis acumine freti, uberius expeditiusque argumentum, id est (ut inquit Cicero) probabile inventum ad faciendam fidem excogitent, alii contra hebetiore mentis vi ad rerum obtutum caligent et vel nihil vel sero quid quaque de re dici possit invenire queant, utilissimum videntur fecisse qui sedes quasdam argumentorum (quos locos dixerunt) excogitavere, quorum admonitu, velut signis quibusdam, circumferremus per ipsas res animum, et quid esset in unaquaque probabile aptumque instituto orationis nostrae perspiceremus.” DID, 2.

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No earlier rhetoric book begins like Agricola’s or is structured in the same way.⁹ Agricola constructs an original approach to the process of planning a text by adapting individual doctrines drawn from the traditions of rhetoric and dialectic. This new development is grounded in a reconsideration of the fundamental ideas of rhetoric, in the relationship between speaker, subject-matter, and audience. A second major resource for Agricola is the close reading of literary texts. When he returns in the middle of book two to the distinction between exposition and argumentation, he chooses to illustrate the difference by comparing two passages from the beginning of the Aeneid. In the first (Aeneid I, 12– 32) the poet explains the reasons for Juno’s hatred of Aeneas. The poet takes this hatred for granted and sets out the reasons for it. For Agricola, this is exposition. In the second passage (lines 37– 49), Juno presents to herself the arguments for her right to create the storm and disrupt Aeneas’s journey to Italy. Because she connects the propositions in order to persuade herself of her right to anger and revenge, Agricola suggests that Juno’s speech is argumentation. He also shows how the first passage illustrating exposition could be converted into argumentation, by posing a question at the start and by linking each of the propositions together so that they contribute to proving that Juno hated Aeneas. Thus although exposition and argumentation are alternatives into which all persuasive discourse is divided, they are also closely connected; the same material can be presented in both ways.¹⁰ In the following chapter (II, 17, “That the method of persuasion is various”), Agricola argues that sometimes exposition may be a more effective form of persuasion than argumentation. He analyses Sinon’s speech from Aeneid II, 67– 194 to show that Sinon never links his propositions together into an argumentation, but rather makes statements that are true or that are plausible in themselves; he then allows the audience to make the connections between them and thus to persuade themselves of the truth of what he says. Agricola begins by summarising the situation in which Sinon speaks. The Greeks have left, so the Trojans are less suspicious. They feel some compassion for this desperate-looking man who has been left behind. Because everything is narrated in consonance with all those circumstances, the listener convinces himself that everything is so by gathering together and comparing the things and by their sequence and agreement, although there is nothing in the address that proves that the truth is being told.¹¹

Agricola then analyses the statements Sinon makes into five groups, marked as new paragraphs in the notes: those that were undoubtedly true; those that were plausible

 Mack, History, 57– 60.  DID, 258 – 59; Mack, Renaissance Argument, 190 – 92.  “Quia narrantur omnia consentanea istis, quanquam nihil sit in oratione, quo vera quae dicuntur probentur, ipse tamen auditor collectione collationeque rerum, et earum inter se ordine et congruentia, sic esse sibi persuadet.” DID, 262.

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in themselves; those that were similar to true things; those for which there was no reason to question whether or not they were true, since it seemed to make no difference; and those that are believed because they appear to connect two things that are undoubtedly true.¹² Then he summarizes: It is these things that occupy our mind since we do not look at the other things, and so we believe them to be true also. Thus, it is an acknowledged fact that Palamedes was killed by the fraudulent acts of Ulysses, and the circumstances make it evident that Sinon had been left behind by the Greeks, who had gone to their homeland. Sinon connects these two points and obtains from this the foundation for his lie that he is a relative of Palamedes. And precisely because this does not seem to add anything to the main thing – it is a side-issue and not at all to the point – , it is accepted as true and provides the base for everything that is said afterwards…. Finally, the speaker himself (Sinon) is believed because he is considered to be a serious or a well-meaning person.… Although all these things have their place in the address itself, they are not brought to bear one on the other, so as to create belief, but, each thing standing by itself, through the appraisal of the listener who compares them in his mind, they bring about belief.¹³

Agricola’s detailed, close analysis of Sinon’s speech supports his claim that the persuasion works because the Trojans connect the propositions for themselves and

 “Ergo creduntur alia, quia vera esse certum est, quale est quod primum narratur de Palamede: Quem falsa sub proditione Pelasgi Insontem infandi indicio, quia bella vetabat, Demisere neci (83 – 85). Et iterum: Omnis spes Danaum, et coepti fiducia belli Palladis auxiliis semper stetit (162– 63). Alia creduntur, quia sunt per se probabilia. Ut: Saepe fugam Danai, Troia cupiere relicta Moliri, et longo fessi discedere bello (108 – 9). Et: Eripui (fateor) leto me, et vincula rupi (134). Et: Assensere omnes, et quae sibi quisque timebat, Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere (130 – 31). Alia creduntur, quia alii veris similia sunt. Ut: Sanguine quaerendi reditus (118). Creditur enim, quia simile illius est: Sanguine placastis ventos et virgine caesa (116): quod certum est. Sic etiam: Hinc semper Ulysses Criminibus terrere novis, hinc spargere voces In vulgum ambiguas (97– 99). Certum erat antea talia solitum illum facere. Quaedam velut in numerum creduntur, quia non est cur ea falsa putemus. Ut: Illi me comitem et consanguinitate propinquum, Pauper in arma pater primis huc misit ab annis (86 – 87). Et: Bis quinos solet ille dies, tectusque recusat Prodere voce sua quenquam, aut opponere morti (126 – 27). Et: Limoso lacu per noctem obscurus in ulva Delitui (135 – 36). Non enim est, cur ista vel sic, vel potius non sic facta credamus. Quaedam etiam fidem habent, quia inter duo prorsus vera, velut via vel transitus quidam statuuntur.” DID, 262– 63. Added line numbers in brackets are from Aeneid II.  “Occupantque ea mentem, quia ad alia non respicimus, ut haec vera credamus. Ut Palamedem fraudibus Ulyssis occisum esse pro confesso est, et Sinonem relictum a Graecis in patriam profectis, res ipsa indicat. Connectit haec duo capita Sinon, hinc sumpto fundamento fraudis, quod consanguineus esset Palamedis. Quod cum videatur nihil summae rerum allaturum, et velut extra rem, et nihil ad rem pertinens: pro vero accipitur, originemque fidei praebet omnibus illis quae postea dicuntur…. Postremo creditur dicenti ipsi, quia vel gravis vir, vel benevolus putatur. Ad id figurandum quod dicit: Fas odisse viros (158). Et: Quod dii prius omen in ipsum Convertant (190 – 91). Quanquam sint autem haec omnia in ipsa oratione, non tamen altera adhibentur alteri, tanquam fidem factura: sed singulae per se positae, reputatione audientis, et apud animum suum comparantis eas, parant fidem.” DID, 263. Added line numbers in brackets are from Aeneid II.

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thereby convince themselves that they are true. If Sinon had set his speech out as an argument, the Trojans might have been prompted to question the connections he was making. Because they have made the connections for themselves, they do not do so. So my second observation is that Agricola develops his rhetorical teaching by comparing rhetorical doctrines with what he learns by analysing passages of classical literature. Thinking critically about passages from Latin literature in the light of classical rhetorical doctrines enables him to develop new rhetorical thinking. A further example of both thinking about general principles and working through the analysis of classical literature is offered by Agricola’s account of disposition. Within the classical rhetoric textbook, as exemplified by the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian, disposition had become a somewhat empty category. The assumption is that there is one standard order for the oration, namely introduction, narrative, confirmation, refutation, and conclusion. Because the treatise on invention was organised in relation to the parts of the oration, the section on disposition, which was usually very short, was left to consider only when one of the parts might be omitted and when the order of the parts might be altered, as, for example, when the orator might decide to refute the opponent’s argument before giving the introduction to his own speech.¹⁴ By contrast, Agricola’s account of disposition begins by considering general principles of organisation: three types of order (natural, arbitrary, and artificial) and four senses of the word priority (in relation to time, in relation to the necessity of existence, in relation to place, and in relation to dignity). Agricola took these four senses of priority from Aristotle’s Categories. ¹⁵ After establishing these general principles, he surveys some examples from Latin literature and analyses the structures of the Aeneid, of comedies by Terence, of histories by Tacitus, Livy, and Valerius Maximus, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Tacitus’s Germania, before turning to some of Cicero’s speeches.¹⁶ The effect of all this is to dethrone the four-part oration and to insist that many different types of organisation are possible. Then Agricola considers disposition in much more local detail, for example by pointing to the way in which some arguments may need to be made in advance of others because they are logically prior, either absolutely or in relation to different audiences and to the need to end with a strong argument. This leads him to a conclusion about the doctrine of disposition. Now to make something like a summary of the points relating to disposition, it is first and foremost necessary that the person who wants to create a good disposition places as it were before his eyes the entire bulk of his invention, that is, everything that he is about to say; next that he weighs carefully what he wants to bring about in the mind of the hearer, and then that he mutually compares his findings, the parts of them and the force and nature of each finding and of

 Rhetorica ad Herennium, III.9.16 – 18; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VII. Pr. 1– 3, VII.1.1.  DID, 412– 15; Mack, Renaissance Argument, 218 – 24.  DID, 416 – 20.

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all of them together, and all these things in connection with the rules. He will then perceive without difficulty where he must follow the chronological order; where the subject matter must be arranged by species, and by what boundaries, so to speak, the individual items must be discerned; where one item must be gathered from another item, according to whether something lies closest by or is the most appropriate; then what must be granted to pleasure; how he must make himself ready for victory and strife; which order of the questions, which of the argumentations, which of the propositions he must observe.¹⁷

Where the classical rhetorical textbooks had regarded the four-part oration as the predestined structure of all texts, Agricola argues that the author can only determine the organisation of a particular text once all the material has been brought together, by considering the general principles of organisation, the nature of the particular audience being addressed, and the models of organisation offered by classical literature. The principles of logic and rhetoric and the study of examples from Latin literature offer him a way to develop the general theory of disposition that was missing in classical rhetoric. The heart of Agricola’s work is his new version of the topics of invention. Where the classical tradition had treated the topics mainly as a list of headings under which an orator could look for arguments, Agricola’s much longer entries seek to explore the nature of the relationship named by the topic. Getting to know the nature of the relationship will enable the writer to have a sense of when to apply each.¹⁸ In every case, the writer will need to consider the strength of the implication and its likely effect on the audience. To give just one example, Agricola begins his account of the topic of comparison by pointing out that whereas comparison will have very little effect on an audience that resists the speaker, since the comparison can always be refused, nevertheless if someone can be persuaded to entertain a comparison, it may have a lasting effect on the way they consider a particular issue. He turns to an example from Quintilian. When Quintilian says that teaching boys is like pouring liquid into a narrow-necked vessel that will quickly overflow if one pours too fast, he has not proved that teaching should be gradual, but nevertheless once a person has considered the comparison for a short while, they will find it difficult to think of the question in another way.¹⁹ The focus is on helping writers find ways to persuade an audience, through close critical analysis of examples from classical litera “Ut ergo quae ad dispositionem pertinent, in summam quandam redigamus: opus est in primis, quisquis bene disponere volet, ut totam inventionis suae sylvam, hoc est, omnia quaecunque dicturus est, velut conspectui suo subiiciat. Tum quid in animo auditoris efficere velit, diligenter expendat. Deinde res ipsas, rerumque partes, et vim naturamque singularum, omniumque, et inter se conferat, et cum praeceptis omnia. Tum non difficulter videbit ubi temporum sequenda ratio, ubi per species res digerenda, et quibusdam velut limitibus singula discernenda, ubi aliud ex alio, et quicque proximum aptissimumve fuerit, ducendum. Tum quid tribuendum voluptati, quomodo victoriae certaminique serviendum, quis quaestionum ordo, quis argumentationum, quis propositionum servandus.” DID, 449 – 50.  Mack, Renaissance Argument, 130 – 67.  DID, 142. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, I.2.28.

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ture. Reflecting on these examples enables Agricola to transform the teaching on the topics that he inherited from the classical manuals. Erasmus’s De copia was the most successful new rhetorical textbook of the Renaissance. Its 168 editions between 1512 and 1579 far exceeded the printing record of any classical rhetorical textbook in the same period.²⁰ Part of De copia’s success probably derived from its careful positioning within the grammar-school syllabus, tackling amplification and forming a practical introduction to some rhetorical ideas rather than seeking to compete with the classical manuals.²¹ In introducing the idea of copia, which we might translate as “fluency” or “fecundity of expression,” Erasmus begins by relying on Quintilian’s ideas about the usefulness of variety and the importance of avoiding repetition, but he also gives value to the skill he is about to teach, insisting that it will help the student in many everyday tasks, such as translation, commentary, verse composition, and extemporary speaking.²² The first book on copia of words begins by outlining twenty methods of substituting one expression for another, most of them based on the tropes of rhetoric, such as metaphor, allegory, metonymy, synecdoche, and hyperbole but also including synonyms and heightening of vocabulary.²³ This section of the book culminates in a demonstration, using combinations of these techniques, to devise over 150 ways of rephrasing the sentence “your letter pleased me greatly” and almost 200 ways of expressing “always as long as I live I shall remember you”, which he says is much more difficult to vary, because words like “letter” and “pleased” can be varied easily.²⁴ These lists demonstrate great exuberance and a very telling sense of playing with the possibilities of language, full of extravagance and humour while showing impressive virtuosity in combining different types of substitution. The remainder of the first book, which is a sort of thesaurus of phrases, offers dozens of ways of expressing ideas and sentiments that will often be needed in Latin speech, showing how these twenty techniques can produce variety of expression. Some of the phrases in these sections are taken from Erasmus’s reading in classical Latin literature, but many are Erasmus’s own inventions. The principles and the reading work together to generate the thesaurus of expressions.²⁵

 Renaissance Rhetoric Short-Title Catalogue, ed. Green and Murphy, 185 – 88, Mack, History, 30 – 32.  C. Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works and Influence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); J. Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981); M. Mann Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); W. Barker, The Adages of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Mack, History, 76 – 103; and P. Mack, “Erasmus’s Contribution to Rhetoric and Rhetoric in Erasmus’s Writings,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 32 (2012): 27– 45.  Erasmus, De copia, ed. B. Knott, Opera omnia, I-6 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 32– 34, translated in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, trans. B. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 301– 3.  Erasmus, De copia, 35 – 76, trans. Knott, 304– 48.  Erasmus, De copia, 76 – 90, trans. Knott, 348 – 64.  Erasmus, De copia, 90 – 196, trans. Knott, 365 – 571.

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These different expressions can be considered in two different ways. In some senses the phrases devised are alternatives, and they show the student writer that any expression of an idea implicitly involves choosing among many different possible ways of expressing it. In another way they promote an ideal of style in which the writer aims at a very dense style and enjoys showing off several of the many different ways in which an idea can be put into words. This is the kind of style that we find in Rabelais and in Thomas Nashe and that Terence Cave has discussed in his Cornucopian Text. ²⁶ Copia of things, which is the subject of book two, involves looking beyond the words of the initial sentences one is aiming to amplify to find new material by thinking about what is implied in the starting phrases, what causes them, what follows them, and what can plausibly be said about the circumstances. The idea in this section is to devise new material related to or implied in the initial sentence. Copia of things generates new linguistic resources by thinking about the ideas and circumstances implied in the initial sentence rather than working from the words themselves, as copia of words does. Copia of things always results in an expansion of the material, whereas many of the products of copia of words are more or less the same length as the original sentence. The eleven methods at the start of book two are based on the topics of invention,²⁷ but the section also includes a thorough discussion of new material or short sections that can be added in, such as comparisons, lively descriptions, supporting examples, relevant proverbs, or axioms suitably elaborated. One effect of this section is to widen the focus of rhetorical expression. Instead of searching mainly for arguments, the student writer is encouraged to look into models of other different elements that might be included in a text. Erasmus is careful to show that classical writers used these techniques and to refer his students to passages from which they might borrow comparisons, descriptions, proverbs, and axioms. Erasmus also composed works like the Adagia, collecting proverbs, and the Parabolae, collecting comparisons, to provide this type of material for the use of students. Rhetoric is a field that continued to be defined by a group of classical texts. Medieval writers did not attempt new syntheses of the subject as a whole. Their preference was for commentary and for innovation at the margins, especially within the arts of dictamen, preaching, and poetics. Renaissance theorists found a way to innovate within the classical tradition, by rethinking some of the established doctrines of rhetoric in relation to the foundational ideas of rhetoric and drawing on conclusions derived from the close analysis of classical texts. The Latin rhetorical tradition provided a strong foundational idea and many diverse, detailed perceptions and doctrines that could be developed in relation to the foundational idea. Crucial to the project of Renaissance rhetoric was a change in the understanding of dialectic.

 T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).  Erasmus, De copia, 197– 230, trans. Knott, 572– 605.

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Once dialectic was thought of as a way of producing and understanding persuasion within a highly developed natural language, Renaissance rhetoricians could take doctrines and principles from dialectic and use them to develop new ideas within rhetoric. Understanding dialectic as a technique of persuasion within natural language encouraged Renaissance scholars to produce dialectical analyses of orations and poems. Their logical and rhetorical approach to Latin literature enabled them to make new observations about writing, through comparing teachings from the tradition with their own understanding of the way in which particular passages worked. Their innovations were created within a critical, yet respectful and thorough understanding of the tradition. But what were the larger factors favouring the uptake of these individual innovations? In Northern Europe around the turn of the sixteenth century, there seems to have been a new sense of the importance of education in producing functionaries from different social classes for assertive unitary states, a sense of crisis within the actual educational system, and a shared confidence that a training based on reading Latin literature and writing neo-classical Latin was the way forward. De copia was written out of Erasmus’s experience of training private pupils in Paris in the 1490s, and it was written for St. Paul’s School in London in 1512. As sympathisers for humanist learning founded new schools and reformed old ones, they created an opening for new ways of teaching the use of Latin based on the study of classical Latin literature. Educational reformers chose the textbooks of Agricola and Erasmus because they wanted something new that was intensely respectful of the classical tradition and because they knew and admired Erasmus. Erasmus had also taken care to position his book so that it did not compete with any of the established classical manuals. Other humanists found that manuals that covered the expected syllabus of rhetoric were more likely to succeed than those that attempted a new approach. Later in the sixteenth century, neither the social mobility nor the religious change driven by the humanist grammar schools seemed so desirable, as the new dynasties of royal servants sought to consolidate their family positions and to control thinking about religion and church organisation. A tradition is created retrospectively by the imposition of chosen models and the exclusion of alternatives, as much as it is created prospectively by authors and by developing ideas expressed in earlier texts.²⁸ The thinking of the individual writer was indispensable for the development of the rhetorical tradition, but that thinking could only produce results if it corresponded with what later readers wanted from rhetorical training. People chose their textbooks and the ways in which they would use them on the basis of their beliefs about the best ways of achieving their goals through language. These beliefs

 My thinking on the nature of literary tradition, which has developed since I wrote this article, will appear in more detail in my book on “Reading Old Books, Writing with Traditions,” to be published by Princeton University Press in 2019.

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were shaped by their rhetorical inheritance, but could be changed through careful application of general principles, practical logic, and appropriate classical examples. In this way the classical tradition of rhetoric was transformed, into something that combines elements of the reference sphere and reception sphere into a new creation that is inextricable from the classical rhetorical tradition in which it is based.

Johannes Helmrath (translated by Patrick Baker)

Political-Assembly Speeches, German Diets, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini

In this contribution,¹ I would like to combine two innovative concepts that are the fruit of humanities and social science Großforschung, that is, of large-scale, longterm collaborative research projects, conducted in the first two decades of the twenty-first century at the Humboldt University in Berlin: ‘oratorics,’ a new perspective on premodern parliaments and councils, with their close connection to classical rhetoric; and ‘transformation,’ a tool for analyzing cultural change and the appropriation of hegemonic cultural models from the past, especially Greco-Roman antiquity. ‘Oratorics’ was the subject of a project anchored in Collaborative Research Center 640 “Representations of Political and Social Order in a Comparative Perspective” (with grant funding from the German Research Foundation from 2004 to 2013). ‘Transformation,’ in contrast, was the overarching theme of CRC 644 “Transformations of Antiquity” (with grant funding from the German Research Foundation from 2005 to 2016). “Beyond Reception,” it goes without saying, means ‘transformation,’ the basics of which are explained in the first chapter of this volume. This contribution will concentrate first on the concept of ‘oratorics.’ Second, a case study will be presented as an example of how the two concepts of ‘oratorics’ and ‘transformation’ can be linked in research on humanism and in historical scholarship generally. There the focus will be on speeches delivered by the humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) at German imperial diets in 1454 and 1455.

Oratorics² Contrary to widespread belief, a major tradition of political assembly with a pronounced culture of rhetoric first emerged not in the modern age but in late medieval

 Preliminary versions of this contribution were presented at the Warburg Institute (March 2013); at the conference “The Classical Tradition and the Middle Ages,” held in Cuma, Italy (September 2013); at the colloquium “Parliaments, Politics, and People” at the History of Parliament Trust (October 2013); at David d’Avray’s colloquium in the Department of Historical Research at the University of London (February 2014); and at Michail Bojcov’s colloquium at the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Economics in Moscow (October 2014).  The concept is explained in depth in Johannes Helmrath and Jörg Feuchter, “Parliamentary Oratory – A New Approach to the Study of Pre-Modern Representative Assemblies,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation 29 (2009): 53 – 66; Politische Redekultur in der Vormoderne. Die Oratorik europäischer Parlamente in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Jörg Feuchter and Johannes Helmrath, Eigene und Fremde Welten, 9 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2008), with contributions by Josef Kopperschmidt, Henry J. Cohn, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Peter Mack, Loris Petris, and others (see esp. the preface, “Einleitung – https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-006

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and early modern times. Whether we consider the French États Généraux, the German Reichstag (diet), the English Parliament, the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm or the Iberian Cortes and Corts – all were fora for political speeches and all consisted of a sequence of various speech acts. And in that sense, all can be classified as ‘parliaments,’ a term whose origin lies in ‘speaking’ (parlare). This may seem trivial. But it is precisely the supposedly trivial or self-evident that is often disregarded. With all due respect to Geoffrey Elton’s well-known dictum, “Parliament ‘does’ only what is set out in the enactment,” I would contend that, in a parliament, speaking is doing.

A Few Examples from Various Countries Although the English king was often absent from Parliament and, if he was present, he mostly had to be “a silent king”³ (Bradford), there is nevertheless a record of many royal speeches having been delivered – e. g., a speech of Henry III reported by Matthew Paris. Genet counts no fewer than 260 speeches (mainly opening addresses) before the English Parliament that were explicitly reported in the rolls during the Late Middle Ages.⁴ The Good Parliament of 1376 is not only the best documented parliament of the Middle Ages (the Anonimalle Chronicle, Parliament rolls, etc.), but it is also a milestone of controversial (and not merely ceremonial) oratory. For the first time, the Commons found a spokesman of its own: the eloquent Peter de la Mare, who, incidentally, was later thrown into prison by King Edward III for this very act of impertinence.

Vormoderne Parlamentsoratorik,” 9 – 22); and Parlamentarische Kulturen vom Mittelalter bis in die Moderne. Reden-Räume-Bilder, ed. Jörg Feuchter and Johannes Helmrath, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, 164; Parlamente in Europa, 2 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2013), with contributions by Thomas Mergel, Willibald Steinmetz, Pasi Ihalainen, Philip Manow, John Rogister, Jean-Philippe Genet, Michel Hébert, Pedro Cardim, and others (see esp. the preface, “Einführung. Parlamentarische Kulturen vom Mittelalter bis in die Moderne,” 9 – 31, with bibliography). Important considerations on assembly procedures and forms of decision-making are found in Zelebrieren und Verhandeln. Zur Praxis ständischer Institutionen im frühneuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Tim Neu, Michael Sikora, and Thomas Weller, Symbolische Kommunikation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme, 27 (Münster: Rhema, 2009); and Politische Versammlungen und ihre Rituale. Repräsentationsformen und Entscheidungsprozesse des Reichs und der Kirche im späten Mittelalter, ed. Jörg Peltzer, Gerald Schwedler, and Paul Töbelmann, Mittelalter-Forschungen, 27 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2009).  Phil Bradford, “A Silent Presence: The English King in Parliament in the Fourteenth Century,” Historical Research 84 (2011): 189 – 211.  Jean-Philippe Genet, “Political Language in the Late Medieval English Parliament,” in Parlamentarische Kulturen, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 245 – 70.

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In France, the important États Généraux of Tours in 1484 are well documented in the Journal of the deputy of Rouen, Georges Masselin. This source is full of speech acts.⁵ From the Aragon Corts, about forty opening speeches of the kings (and queens) are preserved. And, on the other side, we have many recorded speeches of other Cortes speakers.⁶ For the German Diets, the Reichstage of the Holy Roman Empire, between 1438 and 1555, I count at least eighty orations whose text is not only reported but completely preserved.⁷ We are also informed about countless further speech acts. Let us look closely at a more-or-less typical session of the Diet of Augsburg in 1525.⁸ According to the record – and exemplifying very well what I mean by a ‘sequence of various speech acts’: 1. First a bishop spoke, representing the papal legate. The speech is described as a skillful oration (“ein geschickt oration”). It took one hour. 2. Then the legate had a papal brief read by the chancellor of the elector of Mainz (“Und als sollich oration, die uf ein stund gewert, beschehen, ließ der legat das breve apostolicum durch den meinzischen canzler verlesen”). 3. After that the legate himself held “a highly decorated oration full of good sententiae and great emotion” (“und [nach] verlesung desselbigen thett der legat selbs ein uberaus geschmückt oration vol guter sentenz und trefflicher bewegung”). 4. The estates asked for a written copy of both orations (“Daruf haben die steend … bider oration abschrift begert”). 5. The chancellor of Mainz spoke again, but quite poorly (“frigide satis et barbare retulit”).

 Journal des États généraux de France tenus à Tours en 1484 sous le règne de Charles VIII, rédigé en latin par Jean Masselin, député du baillage de Rouen, publié et traduit pour la première fois sur les manuscits inédits … par A. Bernier, Collection des documents inédits sur l’histoire de France … Première série: Histoire politique (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1835). Fundamental for the Estates of Tours is Neithard Bulst, Die französischen Generalstände von 1468 und 1484. Prosopographische Untersuchungen zu den Delegierten, Beihefte der Francia, 26 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1992). For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Marc Fumaroli, L’ȃge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et ‘res litteraria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique, Centre de recherches d’histoire et de philologie, 5: Hautes études médiévales et modernes, 43 (Paris, 1980; rpt. [Titre courant, 24] Geneva: Droz, 2002).  Parlaments a les corts catalanes, ed. Ricard Albert and Joan Gassiot, 2 vols., Els Nostres Classics, 19 – 20 (Barcelona: [El Barcino], 1928); and Mark D. Johnston, “Parliamentary Oratory in Medieval Aragon,” Rhetorica 10.2 (1992): 99 – 117.  Johannes Helmrath, “Reichstagsakten,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters 7 (1994): 643–45; and Johannes Helmrath, “Reden auf Reichsversammlungen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” in Licet praeter solitum. Ludwig Falkenstein zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Lotte Kéry, Dietrich Lohrmann, and Harald Müller (Aachen: Shaker, 1998), 265 – 86.  Deutsche Reichstagsakten (= RTA), Jüngere Reihe, vol. 5: “Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V.: Der Reichstag zu Augsburg 1525,” ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften durch Eike Wolgast, bearbeitet von Rosemarie Aulinger (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), p. 147 l. 34 – p. 148 l. 15.

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The legate spoke again, this time ex tempore although no less skillfully (“hat der legat ex tempore nit weniger ein geschickte ret gethun mit großer erpietung”).

Here we note several types of orality (longer and shorter speeches, questions, the reading of documents, etc.), a media shift (oral to written), the use of vernacular languages besides Latin, and judgments on the speeches’ form and quality.⁹ Orality, especially the giving and hearing of various speeches, shaped the course of these events more than any other element. The same applies, incidentally, to the great church councils of the Late Middle Ages in Constance (1414– 1418) and Basel (1431– 1449).¹⁰ Accordingly, and as the surviving reports show, contemporaries attached high importance to such speeches, their content, their circumstances, their performance, their reception by the audience, and their political impact. When CRC 640 began its work in 2005, we were convinced that this fact had been underestimated for a long time. In the last decade, however, things have begun to change. My own work in this area began twenty years ago, when I was named editor of volume nineteen of the Deutsche Reichstagsakten series, founded by Ranke, and thus started to work on political orations.¹¹ Before that, only Friedrich Hermann Schubert had noticed, in 1966, that the perception of German diets was dominated by rhetoric, at least on the part of the humanists.¹² For example, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, at Regensburg in 1454, and Riccardo Bartolini, at Augsburg in 1518, perceived these assemblies in their vivid records mainly as oratorical procedures, or rhetorical contests. More credence should be given to this view, especially considering that Piccolomini himself participated at Regensburg as an orator. As we have seen, elaborate, long speeches were not the only kind of orality. There were also debates with short ‘statements,’ votes, interjections, and consulta-

 The importance of Latin orality for the Middle Ages has been pointed out by Thomas Haye, Lateinische Oralität. Gelehrte Sprache in der mündlichen Kommunikation des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 2005); see 143 – 49 on the 1471 Diet of Regensburg.  See, e. g., “Kommunikation auf den spätmittelalterlichen Konzilien,” in Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Hans Pohl, Vierteljahrshefte für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beiheft, 87 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989), 116 – 72, esp. 140 – 54; Johannes Helmrath, “Diffusion des Humanismus und Antikerezeption auf den Konzilien von Konstanz, Basel und Ferrara-Florenz,” in Die Präsenz der Antike im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Ludger Grenzmann et al., Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse, 3. Folge, 263 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 9 – 54, esp. 29 – 43; and Ecclesia disputans. Die Konfliktpraxis vormoderner Synoden zwischen Religion und Politik, ed. Ch. Dartmann, C. Pietsch, and S. Steckel (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2015).  The volume appeared in 2013: Deutsche Reichstagsakten, ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Ältere Reihe, Bd. 19, 2. Teil: “Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Friedrich III. 5. Abt. 2. Teil: Reichsversammlung zu Frankfurt 1454,” ed. Johannes Helmrath (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013).  Friedrich Hermann Schubert, Die deutschen Reichstage in der Staatslehre der frühen Neuzeit, Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966).

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tions in small groups, along with simple noise and laughter as well as plain silence. But it was the speeches that, as “basic acts” (to translate Braungart’s German term Basisakte),¹³ opened the assemblies, formally structured their progression, determined their content, and ultimately closed them again. It is true that growing literacy – i. e., the increased use of writing – characterized the diet procedures in the sixteenth century, but this did not entail a considerable reduction in their orality. Remember Luther at the Diet of Worms. In fact, it actually engendered a greater desire to speak. Thus the delegates to the French États Généraux in Tours in 1484 were not satisfied merely to submit their long and detailed list of grievances in writing; it also had to be read aloud to King Charles VIII, which took no less than three hours. But the delegates felt it was even more important to make a speech preparing the monarch and his princes for the reading of the list.¹⁴ For the grievances were regarded as “naked propositions” (“nuda proposita”) and as “unadorned material” (“res non ornata”), whereas the king and the royal family were known to be a refined and rather unreceptive audience. In fact, the preparatory speech took considerably longer than the reading of the grievances themselves, namely about five hours, and was therefore held in two parts on different days.¹⁵ Research informed by ‘oratorics’ deliberately avoids the term ‘rhetoric’ in favor of ‘oratory,’ the practice of speaking. This reflects the intention to transcend the bounds of the classical technical / literary study of rhetoric in favor of an all-encompassing exploration of the ‘speaking culture’ (Redekultur) of political assemblies. On the one hand, the oratorical approach tackles the pragmatic aspect of parliamentary speeches as performative speech acts in a particular social and political context. Thus it is primarily about their historical “function as a linguistic instrument in a power game.”¹⁶ On the other hand, this approach also considers orations from a philological point of view. And this is where, in my view, the concept of ‘transformation’ will be very profitable. Methodologically, ‘oratorics’ brings together theories and disciplines that for a long time operated in isolation from one another:

 Georg Braungart, Hofberedsamkeit. Studien zur Praxis höfisch-politischer Rede im Territorialabsolutismus, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 96 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988).  Masselin, Journal des états généraux de France, 78 – 84.  Speech by Jean de Rély, 10 and 12 February 1484: Masselin, Journal des états généraux de France, 66 – 216 and 236 – 66. Jean de Rély began on 10 February shortly after noon, when the king arrived at the assembly, and finally stopped after (at least) three hours in order to allow the Cahiers de doléances to be read the same day. De Rély did not resume his speech until shortly after one in the afternoon two days later (12 February), when the king again attended the assembly. Masselin gives no precise indication of the duration of this second part, but given that he recorded (mainly paraphrasing) the first part on twenty-five pages and the second on fifteen, we can assume it lasted about two hours.  Hans-Jochen Schild, “Parlamentsrede im englischen Sprachraum,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, 12 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992– 2015), 6:cols. 597– 617, at 601: “Funktion sprachlicher Mittel für ein Machtspiel.”

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Classical rhetoric, derived from the indelible classical stamp of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, and thoroughly systematized in the twentieth century in Heinrich Lausberg’s handbook.¹⁷ ‘New rhetoric,’ founded by Chaïm Perelman and developed in Germany by the studies of Josef Kopperschmidt and many others.¹⁸ Developments in the field of modern German rhetoric have been distilled in the monumental Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. ¹⁹ The concept of performativity (as developed in the Berlin Collaborative Research Center 447 “Cultures of the Performative”).²⁰ Some basics of speech-act theory, insofar as Austin and Searle say that “speaking is doing.” The speaker’s intention (illocution) has an effect on the audience (perlocution).²¹ Comparative constitutional history of European (and non-European) political assemblies in the tradition of the Berlin historian Otto Hintze.²² Also important are Helen Maud Cam and Émile Lousse,²³ who co-founded the ‘International Com-

 Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft, 3rd edn. with forward by Arnold Arens (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990), with the English version: Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998); and an abridged German version: Heinrich Lausberg, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich: Max Hueber, 1963).  Encouraging for the concept of ‘oratorics’ is Kopperschmidt, “Oratorik – ein erfolgreiches Forschungskonzept?” in Politische Redekultur, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 23 – 44, with further bibliography. See also Rhetorik, I: Rhetorik als Texttheorie, II: Wirkungsgeschichte der Rhetorik, ed. Josef Kopperschmidt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990 – 1991); and Hitler der Redner, ed. Josef Kopperschmidt (Munich: Fink, 2003).  Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Ueding.  Kulturen des Performativen, ed. Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Historische Anthropologie der FU Berlin, Paragrana, Vol. 7, Heft 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998); Theorien des Performativen. Sprache – Wissen – Praxis. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Klaus Hempfer and Jörg Volbers (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011).  See, e. g., Friedrich Christoph Dörge, Illocutionary Acts. Austin’s Account and What Searle Made Out of It (Tübingen: Eberhard Karls Universität, 2004).  Otto Hintze, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” Historische Zeitschrift 141 (1930): 229 – 48, reprinted in Otto Hintze, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, vol. 1: Staat und Verfassung, ed. Gerhard Oestreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 84 ff., and in Otto Hintze, Feudalismus – Kapitalismus, ed. Gerhard Oestreich, Kleine Vandenhoeck, Reihe 313S (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 48 – 67; and Otto Hintze, “Weltgeschichtliche Bedingungen der Repräsentativverfassung,” Historische Zeitschrift 143 (1931): 1– 47, reprinted in Hintze, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 1:140 – 85, and in Hintze, Feudalismus – Kapitalismus, 68 – 113. See now the biography by Wolfgang Neugebauer, Otto Hintze. Denkräume und Sozialwelten eines Historikers in der Globalisierung 1861 – 1940 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015).  Émile Lousse, “Assemblées d’états,” in La société d’Ancien Regime. L’organisation et représentation corporative du Moyen Age à la fin de l’ancien régime (Louvain / Leuven: Éditions Universitas, and Bruges: Desclées de Brouwer, 1943), 231– 66. See also the fundamental volume of Antonio Marongiu, Medieval Parliaments, a Comparative Study, with a foreword by Helen Maud Cam, Studies Presented to the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions / Etudes présentées à

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mission for the History of Parliamentary and Representative Institutions’ in 1936, as well as Wim Peter Blockmans and many others.²⁴ The ‘oratorics’ approach, pursued as it is here in the sense of a comparative cultural history of the political, opens up a new path for comparison, one that had been more or less abandoned for a long time in a mood of resignation regarding the alleged incomparability of parliaments. I am optimistic, however, that oratory is an apt comparative parameter for studying the individual flavor of the political culture of all these regional representative bodies. Widespread historical research on ritual, ceremonies, and performativity. In CRC 640, we viewed our own work as part of broader research about the ‘history of political culture’ (Kulturgeschichte des Politischen) and were inspired by the studies of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger²⁵ and Chris Kyle.²⁶ We also enjoyed close and fruitful contacts with Michel Hébert’s inspiring parallel project at Montreal, which dealt primarily with the French États provinciaux of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and put a strong emphasis on speech acts. In 2014, Hébert presented the results of decades of research in a magnificent volume entitled Parlementer. ²⁷ Stollberg-Rilinger’s research, incidentally, has many merits, including highlighting the ceremonial aspects of political assemblies, but it focuses heavily on non-verbal ritual space (e. g., struggles about precedence). Studies in oratorics are able to fill such gaps. At any rate, one must remember that ritual and

la Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des Assemblées d’États, 32 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968) (first published in Italian in 1949). On Marongiu, see Ricordo di Antonio Marongiu. Giornata di studio, Rome, 16 June 2009, ed. Maria Sofia Corciulo (Soverio Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2013). See also the overview by Thomas M. Bisson, “The Problem of Medieval Parliamentarism: A Review of Work Published by the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, 1936 – 2000,” in Parliaments, Estates, Representations 21 (2001): 1– 14.  Wim Peter Blockmans, “A Typology of Representative Institutions in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval History 4 (1978): 189 – 215; Kersten Krüger, “Die ständischen Verfassungen in Skandinavien in der Frühen Neuzeit. Modelle einer europäischen Typologie,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 10 (1983): 129 – 48.  Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Einleitung: Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen?,” in Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen?, ed. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft, 35 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), 9 – 24; and Vormoderne politische Verfahren, ed. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft, 25 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001). With a focus on the German Reichstage, see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers Alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich: Beck, 2008).  Chris R. Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 36 – 55, esp. 36: “The soundscape of Parliament was constituted by far more than frequent voluble speech, rhetoric, and debate. Noise was not just a characteristic of the scene but also, at times, an instrument that could be used to pointed and deliberate political effect.”  Michel Hébert, Parlementer. Assemblées représentatives et échange politique en Europe occidentale, à la fin du Moyen Age, Romanité et modernité du droit (Paris: Editions de Boccard, 2014).

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oratory are not mutually exclusive: assembly speeches have a ceremonial and a persuasive character at the same time.²⁸ Theories of ‘picture’ and ‘media,’ e. g., Horst Bredekamp’s Bildakttheorie and the iconographic studies of Kevin Sharpe, as applied to research about texts and pictures.²⁹ Images of assemblies, of oratorical habitus and gestures, have long been ignored from an oratorical point of view. They must be analyzed not in their illustrative capacity as pictures per se, but as arranged representations with an autonomous agency, as, for example, we see in the iconography of the English Parliament.³⁰ In this way textual and iconographic sources can be used complementarily.

Let us continue with some further observations on the cultural context of premodern political oratory: 1. The parliamentary speech of the pre-modern era did not appear out of nowhere. It was based on other rhetorical traditions and functional types (medieval and classical), such as the ecclesiastical sermon, the synodal address, the envoy’s oration, and the forensic speech. But there were also genuinely ‘parliamentary’ origins for a genre of ‘parliamentary speech’ in the various countries and assemblies. Let us recall the artes arengandi of the Italian communal milieu, which grew out of a new need for public political speech.³¹ Similarly, humanism, with its textual and performative re-staging of classical speeches, transformed

 Still important for having emphasized this aspect is Thomas N. Bisson, “Celebration and Persuasion: Reflections on the Cultural Evolution of a Medieval Consultation,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 7 (1982): 181– 209.  Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2011); and Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603 – 1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).  See, e. g., Anna Maria Blank, “Das Parlament der Herolde. Bildliche Repräsentationen des englischen Parlaments im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Parlamentarische Kulturen, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 215 – 44. Blank is currently finishing a dissertation on the visual representation of the English Parliament from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with a main emphasis on heralds’ rolls. See also Anna Maria Blank, “Neue Bilder für eine neue Ordnung? Bilder vom Parlament als Repräsentationen der politischen Ordnung in England im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Bild-Macht-Unordnung. Visuelle Repräsentation zwischen Stabilität und Konflikt, ed. Anna Maria Blank, Verena Isaiasz, and Nadine Lehmann, Eigene und fremde Welten, 24 (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 2011), 219 – 51.  ‘Cum verbis ut Italici solent ornatissimis.’ Funktionen der Beredsamkeit im kommunalen Italien / Funzioni dell’eloquenza nell’Italia comunale, ed. Florian Hartmann, Super alta perennis: Studien zur Wirkung der klassischen Antike (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011); and Peter von Moos, “Die italienische ‘ars arengandi’ des 13. Jahrhunderts als Schule der Kommunikation,” in Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Bedingungen, Typen, Publikum, Sprache, ed. Horst Brunner and Norbert Richard Wolf, Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter, 13 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1993), 67– 90, reprinted in Peter von Moos, Rhetorik, Kommunikation und Medialität. Gesammelte Aufsätze zum Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville, Geschichte Forschung und Wissenschaft, 15 (Berlin et al.: LIT Verlag, 2006), 2:127– 52.

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European oratorical culture (including its parliamentary variants).³² In the second part of this paper, I will explore the earliest example of humanist oratory in the German diets: the speeches delivered by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini at three imperial diets, the so-called Türkenreichstage, in 1454/1455.³³ With humanism providing a general foundation for European elite education, classical materials, stylistics, and quotations became a kind of ‘reservoir’ for parliamentary discourse in sixteenth-century European political assemblies, such as in Elizabethan England,³⁴ France, and above all the Sejm of early modern Poland,³⁵ whose nobility was sophisticated and well educated. Oratorics draws on a dual concept of representation. On the one hand, the assemblies as a whole and their constituent parts (chambers, curiae, brazos, etc.) stand for social groups, which either represent themselves personally or are represented by elected deputies. On the other hand, this social representation through verbal, ceremonial speech acts, as dramaturgy, both reflects the corpus politicum theoretically and, at the same time, constitutes its social order. Parliaments are places for the cultural construction of meaning. Speeches are ‘basic acts’ of a sequential verbal ceremonial event, what Dieter Mertens has called “institutionalized communication.”³⁶ They take time (up to several hours), and they demand aural and visual attention throughout. Considering that ‘nothing happens’ in the meantime, they may be a form of taedium. But the ‘oratorics’ approach takes account of this aspect as well, as it pays attention to the way parliamentary speeches are embedded in non-verbal forms of symbolic communication of political will. Nobody can deny the considerable differences between premodern and modern parliaments, the latter being substantially partisan and agonal in character. But premodern assemblies, although king-centered, were not simply vehicles for the pronouncement of monologues of monarchical power; premodern assemblies

 The bibliography is quite large. See at least the pioneering study of John M. McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). See also notes 2 and 34.  See below.  Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 215– 23; and Peter Mack, “Rhetoric and Politics in the Elizabethan Parliament,” in Politische Redekultur, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 171– 88.  Kolja Lichy, “Reden als Aushandeln. Rhetorik und Zeremoniell auf dem polnisch-litauischen Sejm zu Beginn der Wasa-Zeit,” in Politische Redekultur, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 149 – 72 also provides an overview of Polish research; Kolja Lichy, “Wider die Sejm-Komödie. Repräsentation der respublica in PolenLitauen zwischen Sejm und Rokosz,” in Zelebrieren und Verhandeln, ed. Neu, Sikora, and Weller, 213– 32.  See Dieter Mertens, “Die Rede als institutionalisierte Kommunikation im Zeitalter des Humanismus,” in Im Spannungsfeld von Recht und Ritual. Soziale Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Heinz Duchhardt and Gert Melville, Norm und Struktur, 2 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), 401– 21.

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were more than mere ceremonial propaganda.³⁷ To invoke and exhaust mutual resources of the articulable and the plausible, the possibilities and limits of the speakable (Grenzen der Sagbarkeit), was one of the fundamental functions of pre-modern parliamentary oratory. Nevertheless, speeches were not purely an affirmative ‘consensual façade,’ although the semantics of consensus was dominant. Rather they were a politically indispensable medium for negotiating – at least indirectly – positions and decisions. These actors wanted, like every orator, to have an effect on their audience, to act persuasively. Thus speeches were simultaneously discursive and ceremonial, agonal and consensual, their function both display and persuasion. Any speech must attain to an aptum, a balance of content and style suited to the topic, the audience, and the context. It must strive to reach the audience, to be “connective” (to use Kopperschmidt’s term),³⁸ to mobilize the potential common horizon of thinking and feeling (or to plumb the limits of the speakable). Thus its act of communication is a reciprocal, mutual one between speaker and audience. The contextual analysis of speech acts is absolutely bound up with an explication of the sources: records, protocols, rolls, chronicles, etc.³⁹ Paradoxically, oratory from before the invention of audio recording can only be studied via written or printed texts. A ‘traditional,’ in-depth interpretation of the texts is indispensable. This includes structure, forms of address, metaphors of consensus and conflict, intertextuality and conventions of quotation (e. g., classical references), strategies of argumentation, etc. It would be a fatal mistake to let performance, ceremony, ritual, and symbolism blind us to the content, the linguistic and argumentative structural principles, and the semantic codings of orations. Just as ‘oratorics’ places great emphasis on actio and pronuntiatio (Quintilian XI, ch. 3.), i. e., on the delivery, the performance of a speech, it also pays attention to the venue and context of assemblies, the politically configured space and its accoutrements: lecterns, benches, podiums, barriers, carpets, pictures, and, last

 Thus the widely disseminated thesis of Jürgen Habermas, which was opposed by medievalists from the very beginning. With regard to Habermas’s sources (Otto Brunner, Carl Schmidt), see Jörg Feuchter, “Oratorik und Öffentlichkeit spätmittelalterlicher Repräsentativversammlungen,” in Politische Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter, ed. Martin Kintzinger and Bernd Schneidmüller, Vorträge und Forschungen, 75 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2011), 183 – 202. On the problem of public access, see Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England, ed. Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002). The public sphere of parliamentary speeches and discussions depended on the type and size of the bodies in which they occurred, the forms of the speeches given, and the intensity and range of their written diffusion. See, e. g., Information et société en Occident à la fin du Moyen Age, Proceedings of a conference held in Montréal in 2002, ed. Claire Boudreau, Kouky Fianu, Claude Gauvard, and Michel Hébert, Université Paris I Sorbonne/Panthéon, Ancienne et médiévale, 78 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004).  See note 18 above.  Fundamental is Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066 –1307, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also the volumes mentioned in n. 41.

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but not least, seating order. In turn, all this is closely related to the aforementioned pictorial aspect.⁴⁰ One thinks of the frescoes in the Chapter House at Westminster, where the Commons parliamentary sessions were held, or, with regard to the German diets, the council chambers of imperial city town halls, such as the so-called Römer in Frankfurt where Piccolomini orated in October 1454.⁴¹ 8. ‘Oratorics’ is also concerned with the physical attributes of the orators: their voices and their gestures, “the soundscape of Parliament.”⁴² The event and experience of a speech is acoustic in nature and fundamentally related to the voice of the speaker. Although I would not go so far as to invoke the idea of an “acoustic turn,” as some medievalists have taken to doing, this aspect is gaining increasing importance in cultural studies.⁴³ In the field of oratorics, it will be necessary to collect evidence for the way speeches were perceived by others, for audience reactions. It is rare that we encounter so graphic a description of a voice as the account by Wunnebald Heidelbeck, chancellor of the bishop of Basel, who witnessed Johann Hinderbach – the bishop of Trent and an erstwhile friend of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini – delivering the opening speech at the 1471 Diet of Regensburg in a grand chamber of the town hall (“in das rathus in einen witen sal”):⁴⁴ “He is a tiny little man (ein kleins manli), and … even those who stand next to him cannot understand what he says well. His voice resembled the bell in Olten [in Switzerland], which sounds like an old kettle (glich ein stim als die glocke zu Olten …, die tont als ein alten kessel).” As to the audience’s  See the very thorough analysis of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne: Begriffe – Thesen – Forschungsperspektiven,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 31 (2004): 489 – 527. Two specific examples are treated in Benjamin Wiese and Jörg Feuchter, “Oratorik in Text und Bild. Die États généraux von Blois (1576/77) in ‘De tristibus Galliae carmen,’” in Parlamentarische Kulturen, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 313 – 50; and Philip Manow, “Kuppel, Rostra, Sitzordnung – das architektonische Bildprogramm moderner Parlamente,” 115 – 30 in the same volume. See also various articles in Politische Versammlungen und ihre Rituale, ed. Peltzer, Schwedler, and Töbelmann, e.g,. Stephan Selzer, “Überlegungen zur Optik des Reichstags: Kleidung und Heraldik fürstlicher Besucher auf spätmittelalterlichen Reichsversammlungen,” 247– 62; see also above, n. 30.  See below.  See note 27 above.  Karl-Heinz Göttert, Geschichte der Stimme (Munich: Fink, 1998); Bettine Menke, “Die Stimme der Rhetorik – die Rhetorik der Stimme,” in Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung. Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme, ed. Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho, and Sigrid Weigel, Einstein Bücher (Munich: Akademie, 2002), 115 – 32; Die Stimme, Annäherung an ein Phänomen, ed. Doris Kolesch and Sibylle Krämer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006); and Petra M. Meyer, Acoustic Turn (Paderborn: Fink, 2008).  Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Friedrich III. 9. Abt., 2. Hälfte: 1471 [Regensburg], ed. Helmut Wolff, RTA, 22,2 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), nr. 114 h, 737 l.33 – 37: “Er ist ein cleins manli und nit wol gesprech, dann der nechst der neben im stunt, mecht in nit wol verstan, was er seit”; on Hinderbach’s voice: “glich ein stim als die glocke zu Olten …, die tont als ein alten kessel”; on the audience’s reaction: “es floch iederman us dem sale on die fursten herren und botten, die von eren wegen do musten bliben.” RTA 22 is a separate volume: RTA 22 Verzeichnisse und Register, ed. Gabriele Annas und Helmut Wolff (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).

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reaction, he says, “Everyone fled from the hall. Only the princes and their representatives were obliged to remain – for honor’s sake (von eren wegen).”

Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini and His Speeches at German Imperial Diets Oratory has a strong performative character. And that is the link to the overarching concept of this volume: “transformation of antiquity.” In my view, ‘transformation’ can be an ideal complement to the concept of oratory. It not only illuminates the fundamental role of references to antiquity in countless assembly speeches, but it also facilitates the analysis of the texts and sheds light on the modes of thought and the actio through which classical culture was appropriated or amalgamated in new contexts. A singular example is provided by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, humanist and pope. Piccolomini is the key figure, indeed a translator, the very “apostle” for the diffusion of humanism beyond the Alps, to central Europe, especially with regard to letter writing, historiography, and oratory. He was active in the Holy Roman Empire almost continuously from 1432 to 1455. First he participated at the Council of Basel (until 1442, with some interruptions). In 1440 he became secretary to the Savoyard ‘antipope’ Felix V. And in 1442 he joined the chancery of the Habsburg King (and, as of 1452, Emperor) Frederick III, spending most of his time in what is now Austria. There he stayed for thirteen years and became the foremost foreign expert on Germany of his time. With regard to rhetoric, Piccolomini anticipated a tendency that, in the analysis of Peter Mack, becomes manifest in the last quarter of the fifteenth century: “The intellectual leadership in rhetoric had passed to northern Europe.”⁴⁵ Unlike his contemporary George of Trebizond, however, Aeneas Sylvius did not write a theoretical treatise on rhetoric. Rather, he was a humanist educator. Thus he emphasized the importance of rhetoric in his pedagogical letter to the young King Ladislaus (De liberorum educatione, 1450). And in his earlier Pentalogus (ca. 1443), he stipulated that rulers should be skilled in oratory; in his view, Frederick III ought to address the diet in person to win the princes over to his Italian policies.⁴⁶ But Piccolomini was himself primarily an orator, a ‘man of actio,’ on several important occasions: at the Council of Basel, again at the imperial diets of 1454/1455, and as pope at the Congress in Mantua in 1459. Helped by the incomparable nimbus of the papacy, he became the most famous orator of his time. At least thirty-four major speeches delivered between 1436 and 1464 are extant, as are nineteen short speeches, mainly extemporized answers

 Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 306.  Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pentalogus, ed. Christoph Schingnitz, MGH Staatsschriften des späteren Mittelalters, 8 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2009), 66 – 75, 91– 95.

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to the envoys at Mantua. The most famous speeches are the Frankfurt Constantinopolitana clades of 1454 (our model) and the closely related Cum bellum hodie, delivered in Mantua in 1459.⁴⁷ The latter, profiting fully from papal authority and surviving in more than 110 manuscripts, appears to be the most widely diffused speech of the century. All these speeches were held at political assemblies: church councils, diets, congresses of princes, royal audiences, and papal consistories. Piccolomini’s speeches – like those of other orators⁴⁸ – must be studied as a corpus, as concatenations of speeches, as a growing creative pool of patterns, quotations, examples, and materials. This is partly due to the humanist education he had received, which called for copying down excerpts from ancient texts to serve as private cornucopias for application in practice. In Piccolomini’s speeches, for example, the theme of war against the Turks⁴⁹ already appears prominently in 1452 in Moyses vir dei, his first Türkenrede, an oration which Aeneas Sylvius held as bishop on the occasion of Frederick III’s imperial coronation in Rome before Pope Nicholas V.⁵⁰ Unlike the Frankfurt speech of 1454, the Moyses predates the fall of Constantinople and the collective trauma suffered by the West as a result. The parallels – which I cannot discuss in detail here – are significant, but the variatio is remarkable as well. Indeed, every one of Piccolomini’s speeches evokes its very own themes and character. The speeches at the Diet of Wie-

 Cum bellum hodie is available in Pii II P.M. olim Aeneae Sylvii Piccolominei Senensis orationes politicae et ecclesiasticae, ed. Ioannes Dominicus Mansi, 3 vols. (Lucca: Ph. M. Benedini, 1757), 2:9 – 29.  For example, the young star canonist Lodovico Pontano (†1439 at Basel). His speeches at the Council of Basel, and as the Council’s emissary to various courts from 1436 to 1439, are composites of different oratorical components and intersections of component sets, pieced together as called for (aptum) by the occasion at hand. See Thomas Woelki, Lodovico Pontano (ca. 1409 – 1439). Eine Juristenkarriere an Universität, Fürstenhof, Kurie und Konzil, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 38 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), with edition (519 – 788); Tobias Daniels, Johann von Lieser. Diplomatie, politische Rede und juristische Praxis im 15. Jahrhundert, Schriften zur politischen Kommunikation, 11 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2013).  See Johannes Helmrath, “Pius II. und die Türken,” in Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance, ed. Bodo Guthmüller and Wilhelm Kühlmann, Frühe Neuzeit, 54 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 79 – 137, with an overview of the speeches from 1436 to 1463 at 89 – 99 (reprinted in Johannes Helmrath, Wege des Humanismus. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation, 72 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1:279 – 342 Nr. IX, at 289 – 301. On the widespread Türkenrede genre, see the fundamental essay by Dieter Mertens, “‘Europa, id est patria, domus propria, sedes nostra.…’ Zu Funktionen und Überlieferung lateinischer Türkenreden im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Europa und die osmanische Expansion im ausgehenden Mittelalter, ed. Franz Reiner Erkens, ZHF Beiheft, 20 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 39 – 58. See also Jürgen Blusch, “Enea Silvio Piccolomini und Giannantonio Campano. Die unterschiedlichen Darstellungsprinzipien in ihren Türkenreden,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 28/29 (1979/1980): 78 – 138.  Older editions of Moyses have now been superseded by the critical edition: Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Historia Austrialis (1.–3. Redaktion), ed. Julia Knödler and Martin Wagendorfer, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, N.S. 24 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2009): 2:826 – 42.

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ner Neustadt in 1455, for example, deal with the competence of the commander and the ethos of troops in war.⁵¹ The papal speech Cum bellum hodie, delivered at the Congress of Mantua in 1459, is closely related to the older Clades speech of 1454 but nevertheless has its very own emphasis; the performative conditions have changed, and the orator is the reigning pope – the pope as preacher. An individual character is also discernable in Pius II’s 1463 bull Ezechielis,⁵² which enjoyed extremely widespread diffusion in manuscripts, early imprints, and translations in several languages. It was in substance his last summary ‘speech’ against the Turks, but it was also outfitted with the greatest papal gravitas and a presentiment of his own death.

The Speech Constantinopolitana Clades, Held at Frankfurt am Main on 15 October 1454⁵³ Some general remarks about the oratorical situation are in order. The speech functioned as an inaugural oration at the imperial diet at Frankfurt am Main. The location was a chamber in the Frankfurt town hall, traditionally called – in a clear act of transformation – the ‘Römer.’ The audience included various German electors and princes, the papal legate Giovanni da Castiglione, and about forty princely delegates from the Empire and from abroad (Burgundy, Denmark, various Italian city-states) and about sixteen German imperial towns (Reichsstädte). The Latin speech lasted – as Piccolomini himself says – two hours (“duae horae”), including the German translation by the Austrian bishop Ulrich Sonnenberger. More on this below. What can we say about transformation? The speech is fascinating, indeed, for its protean pluralism, its restaging and hybrid overlays, its transformation of four swirling points in time, events, oratorical situations, and types. The first layer harks back

 Piccolomini’s three speeches at Wiener Neustadt have now been edited and commentated on by Gabriele Annas in Deutsche Reichstagsakten, ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Ältere Reihe, 19,3: “Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Friedrich III. 5. Abt. 3. Teil: Reichsversammlung zu Wiener Neustadt 1455,” ed. G. Annas (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), nr. 33 (444– 502 = the opening speech In hoc florentissimo conventu), nr. 36 (559 – 78), nr. 38 (581– 600).  See Aeneae Sylvii Piccolomini … opera quae extant omnia, nunc … in unum corpus redacta cur. C. Hoppeler (Basel: Henricus Petri, 1551 and 1571; rpt. Frankfurt, 1967), 914– 23 (n. 412); and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Selectissimarum orationum et consultationum de bello Turcico variorum et diversorum auctorum, ed. Nicolaus Reusner (Leipzig: Impensis Henningi Grosii bibliopolae, ex officina typographica Abrahami Lamberg, 1596), 1:40 – 59.  Older editions have been superseded by a new critical edition with commentary, based on fifty manuscripts: Deutsche Reichstagsakten, ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Ältere Reihe, 19, 2. Teil: “Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Friedrich III. 5. Abt. 2. Teil: Reichsversammlung zu Frankfurt 1454,” ed. Johannes Helmrath (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), nr. 16 (463– 565). For commentary and bibliography through 2012, see esp. 463– 89 (“Einleitung” and “Handschriftenbeschreibung”). The index for all the three parts of RTA 19 (19,1; 19,2; 19,3) is in vol. 19,3.

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to Rome and the year 66 BCE, when Cicero delivered his famous deliberative oration Pro lege Manilia, also called De imperio Gn. Pompei. ⁵⁴ Cicero’s oration provided the structure for Piccolomini’s own speech. The second layer of transformation takes us to the Middle Ages, to the Crusade sermon of Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1096 and the notion of Deus vult. ⁵⁵ Here we also find crucial echoes of St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Second Crusade. The third layer evokes Piccolomini’s own time, namely 29 May 1453, with a lament over the Fall of Constantinople (the classical type of the urbs capta)⁵⁶ and the atrocities of the Turks.⁵⁷ The West’s collective shock at the Fall of Constantinople was overcome primarily by rhetoric, but it also prompted – on the level of a political response – the series of three imperial diets (with the emperor acting as leader of Christendom) in the towns of Regensburg, Frankfurt, and Wiener Neustadt in 1454/1455. Finally, the fourth point in time transformed by the speech is that of Piccolomini’s very own performance at Frankfurt before an audience of princes, clerics, and town delegates on October 15.⁵⁸ Piccolomini’s own role as orator at this moment can also be characterized in a fourfold way. First, he is a priest, bishop (of Siena), and pastor of souls. Second,

 M. Tulli Ciceronis Orationes, ed. Albertus Curtis Clark, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).  These connections with the early Crusades were uncovered by Dieter Mertens, “‘Claromontani passagii exemplum.’ Papst Urban II. und der erste Kreuzzug in der Türkenkriegspropaganda des Renaissance-Humanismus,” in Europa und die Türken, ed. Guthmüller and Kühlmann, 65 – 78; and Peter Orth, “Papst Urbans II. Kreuzzugsrede in Clermont bei lateinischen Schriftstellern des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Jerusalem im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter. Konflikte und Konfliktbewältigung – Vorstellungen und Vergegenwärtigungen, ed. Dieter Bauer, Klaus Herbers, and Nikolas Jaspert, Campus Historische Studien, 29 (Frankfurt/M.-New York: Campus, 2001), 367– 405. See also Georg Strack, “The Sermon of Urban II in Clermont and the Tradition of Papal Oratory,” Medieval Sermon Studies 56 (2012): 30 – 45.  See G. M. Paul, “‘Urbs capta.’ Sketch of an Ancient Literary Motif,” Phoenix 36 (1982): 144– 55.  See the multiple reports gathered in La caduta di Costantinopoli, ed. Agostino Pertusi, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1976); Testi inediti e poco noti sulla caduta di Costantinopoli, ed. Agostino Pertusi and Antonio Carile, Il mondo medievale, sezione di storia bizantina e slava, 4 (Bologna: Pàtron, 1983); Constantinople 1453. Des Byzantins aux Ottomans, ed. and trans. Vincent Déroche and Nicolas Vatin (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2016). See also the overwiew in Helmrath, Deutsche Reichstagsakten 19,2, 505 n. 45.  I analyzed this speech in my unpublished Habilitationsschrift: Johannes Helmrath, “Reichstag und Rhetorik. Die Reichstagsreden des Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini 1454/55,” 2 vols., Habil. Schrift Cologne 1994, 1:180 – 280. See also Johannes Helmrath, “Pius II. und die Türken,” 92– 94, 111– 117 (reprinted in Helmrath, Wege des Humanismus, 293 – 296, 313 – 319); Johannes Helmrath, “Der europäische Humanismus und die Funktionen der Rhetorik,” in Funktionen des Humanismus. Studien zum Nutzen des Neuen in der humanistischen Kultur, ed. Thomas Maissen and Gerrit Walther (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 18 – 48, at 37– 42 (reprinted in Helmrath, Wege des Humanismus, 159 – 88 nr. VI, at 178 – 82). Valuable new observations based on a close comparison of Cicero’s De lege Manilia and Piccolomini’s Clades are to be found in Ronny Kaiser, “Antiketransformationen in Aeneas Sylvius Piccolominis Clades-Rede (15. Oktober 1454),” in Europa, das Reich und die Osmanen. Johannes Helmrath zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Marika Bacsoka, Anna-Maria Blank, and Thomas Woelki, Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur frühen Neuzeit, Vol. 18, Heft 1– 1 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 87– 109.

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he is – like many humanists⁵⁹ – a Crusade preacher. He promises indulgence and eternal rewards in heaven, and he recalls at length the infinite value of Christ’s work for mankind. Third, he is a diplomat acting as the envoy of the Habsburg Emperor Frederick III – and delivering speeches is part of an envoy’s duty. Fourth, he is a humanist performing an oratorical aristeia on the stage of this theatrum called a Reichstag – an aristeia that he already intends to publish, as we shall see. One could, of course, consider the simultaneous evocation and overlay of the forum Romanum, Clermont in 1096, and the contemporary Fall of Constantinople in the Frankfurt town hall to be an anachronism. And that is exactly the case, but it is perhaps not the most important point to make. Indeed, it is more productive to ask what the German princes, town envoys, and councilors understood – what they thought of the speech while they listened to it. Here I see an interesting parallel between oratory and the processes of transformation. A speech is a communicative act. It aims at persuasion, and as such, according to Cicero,⁶⁰ it is an almost violent (contorquendus) ‘transformation’ of the listeners’ minds. In this particular case, Piccolomini uses his powers of persuasion to incite the German princes to go to war against the Turks. Persuasion needs a link, something in common between speech and audience, what Josef Kopperschmidt calls “connectivity” (“Anschlußfähigkeit”).⁶¹ Otherwise, the speech has no effect – provokes no understanding, no reaction, no response. Thus the rhetorical situation itself is essentially reciprocal, and the transmitted spoken text consists of ancient elements that have been transformed, appropriated, and didactically arranged. What is this if not allelopoiesis?

The Actio of the Clades: Delivery and Publication We are fortunate to have three commentaries on this speech, written at different dates: two by the speaker himself and one by a Bavarian envoy who was in the audience. The first is a letter by Piccolomini dating from the day after the speech was delivered; the second appears in the Commentarii which he wrote a few years later as pope. On October 16, Aeneas Sylvius wrote to Cardinal Juan Carvajal: I gave a speech of about two hours (ad duas horas) in the Emperor’s name. I do not know whether they liked it. Many asked for it [sc. to make a copy; eam petunt], presumably out of flattery. But at least nobody cleared his throat (screante nemine) while I was speaking [or: you could have heard a pin drop]. Some say the speech was useful. Nevertheless, I think that even if Cicero

 James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 111– 207 (reprinted in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1: Humanism, Storia e Letteratura, 215 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), 293 – 424).  Cicero, De oratore II, 72: “Aut tamquam machinatione aliqua tum ad severitatem, tum ad laetitiam est contorquendus [sc. the judge].”  Kopperschmidt, “Oratorik,” passim.

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or Demosthenes had pleaded this case, they would have been unable to soften those hard hearts. If I can, I will make a copy of my speech (for you), albeit inadequately, so that if anything still needs to be done, you may tell me what to add or to omit.⁶²

That sounds sober and not at all enthusiastic. Let us now turn to the Commentarii. Pius begins by evoking the desperate atmosphere: “The Germans’ mood had changed” (Mutati erant Theutonum animi)” – i. e., compared to their optimistic attitude at the preceding Diet of Regensburg – and nobody cared about a crusade against the Turks; it was as though their ears were infected with poison.… But when the speech was held (in contionem itum est) – wonder of wonders – when Aeneas finished speaking, the old eagerness to go to war returned. He spoke for almost two hours, and the listeners were so rapt that none of them even cleared their throats, none took their eyes off the speaker’s face, and everyone wished it had gone on longer. The speech was praised by everybody, and many made a copy of it (multi transcripere).⁶³

In contrast to the first report, this reads like a textbook example of successful actio. Both accounts deal with the immediate impact of the speech on the audience and with its dissemination in writing immediately after the oral delivery. The letter is written from the business-like perspective of the politician, modestly downplaying the impact of his speech while still pointing out how it captivated the audience (screante nemine). The later text, the Commentarii, takes a retrospective view of the actio, celebrating it as a glorious example of the persuasive power of rhetoric and as an auratic, euphoric kairos. We are fortunate to have a third record of the impact of the speech, this one by a member of the audience. The Bavarian delegate Ulrich Rottenauer⁶⁴ says that the

 Deutsche Reichstagsakten 19,2, ed. Helmrath, nr. 13,1 p. 391: “Ego nomine cesaris orationem habui quasi ad horas duas. An placuerit, nescio. Multi, ut puto per adulationem, eam petunt. Fui tamen auditus screante nemine. Sunt qui dicant illam profuisse. Quod si verum erit, deo agam gratias et semper ago, qui me dignatur in rebus uti magnis. Puto tamen, etiamsi Cicero aut Demostenes hanc causam agerent, dura haec pectora movere non possent. Cum potuero, faciam orationis mee quamvis inepte copiam, ut, siquid deinceps sit agendum, quid addam quidve minuam, a tua dignacione fiam doctior.”  “Nec cuiquam placebat expeditionem in Turcos fieri; infecte veluti venenis quibusdam aures neque imperatoris nomen neque Romani presulis ferre poterant. At cum in contionem itum est, mirabile dictu: locuto Enea omnium repente animi in priorem belli gerendi ardorem rediere. Oravit ille duabus ferme horis, ita intentis animis auditus, ut nemo unquam screaverit, nemo ab orantis vultu oculos suos averterit, nemo non brevem eius orationem existimaverit, nemo finem non invitus acceperit…. [5] Orationem Enee ab omnibus laudatam multi transcripsere”; text in: Pii II Commentarii, ed. Adrianus van Heck, Studi e testi, 312 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1984), vol. 1, 83 l. 17– 84 l. 5; and Deutsche Reichstagsakten 19,2, ed. Helmrath, nr. 12,1 p. 376, with commentary. For the oratorical situation of the Clades, see also Daniels, Johann von Lieser, 396 f.  RTA 19,2 nr. 11 [2]: “Auf dem rathauß teten die benanten zween bischof ain lange oracion und schoene red und clagten hoch das lasterlich verlieren und das wewainlich benoetigen und verderben der wirdigen stat Constantinopl.”

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speech was held in the town hall of Frankfurt, and he briefly describes it as extraordinary, as a long speech and a beautiful address (“ain lange oracion und schoene red”). He is also our only source for the fact that Aeneas Sylvius, who spoke in Latin, had a translator. Ulrich Sonnenberger, the bishop of Gurk, translated the speech into German for the benefit of those princes who had no Latin. In fact, Rottenauer observed two actors (sc. Piccolomini and Sonnenberger), saying that “the two bishops complained” (“clagten die zween bischof”). In my view, this is unlikely to have been a simultaneous translation, but rather a summary given after the speech, the actio, was over. Rottenauer’s words, however, permit of either interpretation. One reason Piccolomini’s two accounts are significant is that they address the dynamic of the text’s publication and dissemination, or to use a topic of ‘new philology,’ the mouvance immediately following the speech’s delivery. Here we find ourselves in a liminal situation, as it were: at the transition from oral speech to written text. People from the audience come up to the speaker afterwards (“multi eam petunt; multi transcripsere”) and effectively ask to borrow his manuscript, which of course presupposes that there was a manuscript! In the time before the printing press, giving others permission to make copies of a manuscript was tantamount to authorization and publication. Thus the listeners turn into writers and readers. They put in motion a rapid, uncontrolled, and contingent process, one that resulted in the widespread manuscript transmission of the Clades text we have today. Only the letter to Carvajal alludes to a second form of dissemination as well: publication by the author by means of sending out copies of his speech by mail (“faciam … copiam”). It is likely that Nicholas of Cusa received a specimen of the Clades in this way, as he was in regular correspondence with Piccolomini.⁶⁵ This form of publication also entails the author’s commonplace request for criticism and revision (“quid addam quidve minuam”), which represents also a kind of textual mouvance. At any rate, these forms of textual mouvance constitute acts of (textual) transformation.

Transformations of Antiquity The main model for the speech is, as we have seen, Cicero’s classical deliberative oration De lege Manilia, also called De imperio Cn. Pompei, which Cicero held as praetor in 66 BCE before the people of Rome. In other words, it was not a Senatorial speech. The purpose of the speech was to secure sole command for Pompey in the third war against King Mithridates of Pontus, which had begun in 74 BCE. Regarding its genre, the German humanist Rudolph Agricola said that it also owed a great deal to the  See Deutsche Reichstagsakten 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 505 with n. 5. We know for a fact that he received from Aeneas Sylvius a copy of the decisions (Abschied) of the Diet of Frankfurt (27 October 1454); see the four letters to Cusa of 30 October 1454, 31 December 1454 (RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, nr. 13,6 and 26,9), 8 January 1455, and 5 May 1455 (RTA 19,2, ed. Annas, nr. 6b and 51d).

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genus demonstrativum (specifically in the panegyric of Pompey), as does almost every speech in the genus iudiciale. ⁶⁶ The humanist literature taught by instructors such as Guarino aimed to extract elegant language, topics, and oratorical chains of argumentation from classical texts, including speeches, in order to create an individual, varied arsenal of rhetorical material that could usefully be applied in public (i. e., in orations). Like all the humanists, Aeneas Sylvius knew Cicero’s – in large part recently rediscovered – speeches; that was no special achievement. Further information about them was available from Quintilian, with whom Piccolomini was intimately familiar and who furnishes so many quotations from Cicero’s speeches.⁶⁷ Furthermore, Piccolomini was surely influenced by Antonio Loschi’s Inquisitio super XI orationes Ciceronis of 1395,⁶⁸ which systematically analyzes the eleven speeches in terms of six categories. The very first speech is Pro lege Manilia. Piccolomini owned Loschi’s commentary, as we know from a letter dated 1 June 1444, in which he thanks Franciscus de Fuxe for having transcribed and sent to him from Basel this text, which he had desired to own for a long time and which he had sought to copy as early as his time at the Council of Basel: “Antonius Luschus … venit et apud me est.”⁶⁹ Why did Piccolomini choose this speech as his model? The reception takes the form of a rather subtle act of assimilation. Piccolomini does not aim at a close imitation of individual phrases, but his latinitas has strong Ciceronian elements. He also appropriates some of Cicero’s subject matter: deliberations before the start of a war,

 We can allude only briefly to the later humanist analyses of De lege Manilia in rhetorical treatises by George of Trebizond, Rudolph Agricola, and as late as Cypriano de Soarez (1567); see Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1360 –1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).  But only one is from Pro lege Manilia (II,4,40), whereas seventy-two quotations are from Pro Cluentio, sixty-seven from Pro Milone, etc.  Antonio Loschi, Inquisitio super XI orationes Ciceronis, ad fratrem suum optimum (Venice: J. de Colonia, 1477). See Paolo Viti, “Loschi, Antonio,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 66 (Milan: Treccani 2006), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-loschi_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, accessed 4 October 2018.  Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini to Francesco da Fusce, 1 July 1443: “Anthonium Luscum super orationes Ciceronis quantum desideraverim Basilee dum essem, intellexisti, quem etiam mea manu transcribere statueram, si otium fuisset. sed obstitit repentinus meus recessus. postea curavi, ut per alium mihi rescriberetur. id quoque negatum est, quia librarius nusquam apud vos peritus inventus est (sc. at the Council of Basel), qui hoc opus recte absolvere posset. nuper vero scripsit ad me Peregallus, velle te mee aviditati satis facere librumque mihi dono mittere, quam oblationem, si coram te forem, non auderem suscipere”; Der Briefwechsel des Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, ed. Rudolf Wolkan, I. Abt.: Briefe aus der Laienzeit (1431– 1445), I. Band: Privatbriefe (FRA 61) (Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1909), 162 nr. 62. Aeneas Sylvius received the text in Vienna on 1 June 1444, as he wrote to John of Segovia (thanks to Fusce, “qui Antonium Luscum ad me misit,” Der Briefwechsel, ed. Wolkan, 1,1 337 nr. 147) and to Giovanni Peragallo, 1 June 1444: “Cupis scire, Antonius Luscus in meas ne manus venerit. venit et apud me est, mihi carissimus. te rogo, gratias meo nomine prestanti et facundissimo theologo Francisco de Fuce dicas”; Der Briefwechsel, ed. Wolkan 1,1 332 nr. 145. Both John of Segovia and Giovanni Peragallo were active at the Council of Basel.

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the scenario of a threat from the Orient, a king committing atrocities against a people – and here King Mithridates implicitly prefigures Sultan Mehmed II,⁷⁰ as the Romans had been betrayed at Ephesus by Mithridates in 88 BC, and Christians were slaughtered in nearly the same region by the Turks at Constantinople in 1453 (the topos of ‘Turkish atrocities’ after the fall of the second Rome). I cannot provide a more detailed comparison here, but from what has been said so far, it is clear that Piccolomini’s transformation of Cicero falls into the category of assimilation. The Ciceronian speech (as reference sphere) is intensively transformed, nearly obliterated by Aeneas Sylvius, the agent. At the same time, this process transformed the reception sphere, providing the Frankfurt speech – in a sort of merging of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung)⁷¹ – with a specific ‘ancient’ flavor. Frankfurt becomes Rome, with Aeneas Sylvius an imitator – indeed an aemulator, or assimilator – of Cato and Cicero, the oft-invoked “vir dicendi peritus” (Quint., Inst. XII,1), fighting a self-fashioning paragone with them. Classical quotations are not extensively used in the Clades. About ten authors like Sallust, Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal are quoted,⁷² but so are dozens of biblical sententiae. It was, after all, both a political speech evocative of antiquity and, at the same time, a religious sermon. Of course, intertextuality remains a basic field of transformation philology. Quotations from classical authors and their nearly unlimited possibilities of recontextualization can be viewed – in the terminology of transformation – as encapsulations, as textual spolia, but also as interactive semantic links or windows between reference and reception sphere. In any case, Aeneas Sylvius uses the entire arsenal of techniques at his disposal, above all assimilation and montage. On the level of genre, Piccolomini transforms Cicero’s speech as a specimen of the genus deliberativum. In my view, he was interested in ‘the deliberative’ as such, in Roman deliberation per se, as it were. He was concerned with deliberative semantics, with the deliberative political and oratorical situation, with deliberative actio. Even if De lege Manilia was a speech before the Roman people, the fiction

 See Kaiser, “Antiketransformationen,” 91.  Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 4th edn. (Tübingen: C. B. Mohr, Paul Siebeck, 1975), 289 f., 356 f.  Many of these quotations are popular, for instance the Augustus prophecy of Anchises in Virgil, Aen. VI, 792– 97 or the death of Nisus and Euryalus (Aen. IX, 446 f: “Fortunati ambo …”); see RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 519 and 541. Other quotations are less common, such as Aen. III, 214– 18 (the description of the Harpies) and VII, 15 – 20 (the magic art of Circe). A characteristic act of transformation concerns Aen. IX, 606 – 12, where Piccolomini uses the Virgilian description of the archaic Italian tribes and their exotic weapons to characterize the alleged weakness of the Turkish army (besides the Janissaries), and to suggest that they could be beaten easily by the German imperial army (see RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 543). The argumentative aim is to demonstrate the “facilitas belli.” For the transformational use of Virgil, see Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hannover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989); and Craig Kallendorf, The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics, Classical Presences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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of rational assessment in a deliberative assembly – which is how Piccolomini anachronistically viewed the Roman Senate – is ultimately projected onto the hierarchical, aristocratic imperial diet. Aeneas Sylvius wants to view the Frankfurt Diet as an advisory, decision-making assembly⁷³ – at least, that is the impression he gives. This is more than a sophisticated or ironic conflation with antiquity. And I think there are also traces of idealistic reflection about the corpus politicum itself, a common element of assembly speeches. A more meticulous examination than is possible here of this deliberative, consultative semantics would focus on the following passages:⁷⁴ “de bello gerendo tota consultatio est” (504); “conventum [i. e., the Diet of Frankfurt], in quo de tuenda Christiana re publica consilia caperentur” (500); and, following Sallust, Catilina 1,5: “nam priusquam incipias, consulto, et ubi consulueris, mature facto opus est” (500). The princes are being coached in consultative culture: “Omnis senatus omnisque populus, cui de bello gerendo consultatio est, clarissimi principes, tria diligenter ac rigide et presse discutere debet” (504). The speech also includes the three classical criteria for justifying war. First, iustitia belli, including the threnodies for the Greeks, the cruelty of the Turks, and the alleged illegitimacy, historical and moral, of the Turkish enemy. Second, utilitas belli, consisting in the prevention of further Turkish expansion, the advantage of foreign as opposed to civil war, and the heavenly rewards awaiting the Crusaders. Third and finally, facilitas belli: the Christians are braver and better equipped than the Turks; this applies especially to the Germans, who are reminded of their old Germanic bravery, which they had shown in the face of the Romans. But in reality the three points (iustitia, utilitas, facilitas) are not exactly those deployed by Cicero,⁷⁵ who in De lege Manilia singles out genus belli, magnitudo belli, and de imperatore eligendo. This means that Piccolomini selects certain of Cicero’s criteria and transforms them, focusing on his own argumentative needs and ignoring (i. e., actively neglecting) what was not of use to him. And this is a specific instance of a general phenomenon: the excellence of a humanist consisted inter alia in his ability to activate selected aspects of antiquity in order to overcome contemporary problems. Of course, there are many elements of the Roman speech that Piccolomini ignores because they are simply incompatible with the needs of his circumstances. One of these is the role of the populus Romanus. In the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, there was no politically empowered “people” such as had existed in Rome and Athens, whose political structures offered scope for free political oratory. Other such elements are the provincial administration, the tax system, and the

 See above.  For the following quotations, I provide parenthetical citations to the page numbers where they are found in my edition in the Deutsche Reichstagsakten, vol, 19,2, ed. Helmrath.  See Kaiser, “Antiketransformationen.”

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financial market, all of which were core points in Cicero’s speech but of no interest for the reception culture of 1454.⁷⁶ In contrast, the prominent element of panegyric, which in Cicero’s speech is focused on the person of Pompey, is projected in the Clades onto the heroes of the past, most notably the German Crusader-emperors of the Middle Ages, who are referred to in the generic plural as Heinrici, Friderici, and Caroli (506 f.), and onto the reigning emperor and pope and the exemplary champions in the current war against the Turks: King Alfonso V of Naples and Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (560 f.). The glorification of the medieval Crusading emperors may be considered an early trace of humanist ‘medievalism,’ a topic that has been in vogue of late.⁷⁷ Although the immediate aim of the actio – to unleash a crusade against the Turks – can be said to have failed (no German or European army marched out at all), the speech had an immense afterlife. Its reception was extremely broad. As we have seen, many copies were made immediately at Frankfurt, and Piccolomini himself sent the text to his friends. Today more than fifty manuscripts and many printed editions are extant.⁷⁸ The Frankfurt Türkenrede became a model speech, first for the anti-Turkish orations that would feature regularly at imperial diets down to the end of the sixteenth century (e. g., Bessarion’s speech Quamvis omnibus at Vienna in 1460, Giannantonio Campano’s (undelivered) speech at Regensburg in 1471, the speeches of several humanists, including Ulrich von Hutten, at Augsburg in 1518, and some Croatian orators at imperial diets of the sixteenth century)⁷⁹ and second as an ideal model of a humanist speech used for the purposes of study. The speech singularly inaugurated (and served as the vehicle for) several discourses that became important in the future: First, Europe and the Greeks. Europe is identified primarily with Christianitas, but, we might say, a Christianitas afflicta, a Christendom threatened by the Turks, driven into a corner (“angulus,” 495).⁸⁰ At the same time, the Greeks, the former her See Kaiser, “Antiketransformationen,” 91.  See Johannes Helmrath, “Perceptions of the Middle Ages and Self-Perception in German Humanism: Johannes Trithemius and the Cathalogus illustrium virorum Germaniam … exornantium,” in Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing. The Tradition of Collective Biography in Early Modern Europe, ed. Patrick Baker (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 177– 247 (edition: 209 – 39); and Renaissance Medievalisms, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Essays and Studies, 18 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009).  For an in-depth treatment of this topic, see Deutsche Reichstagsakten, ed. Helmrath, 19,2, 477– 89.  Helmrath, “Reichstagsreden”; RTA 22,2 ed. Wolff, 475, 584; Blusch, “Piccolomini und Campano,” for an important comparative analysis; Lucas Rüger, “Der Augsburger Reichstag von 1518 – ein Höhepunkt politischer Oratorik?,” in Politische Redekultur, ed. Feuchter and Helmrath, 65 – 84; Michael B. Petrovic, “The Croatian Humanists and the Ottoman Peril,” Balkan Studies 20 (1979): 257– 73; and Klára T. Pajorin, “I primordi della letteratura antiturca in Ungheria e Pio II,” in Pio II umanista europeo, Proceedings of the XVII Convegno Internazionale, ed. by Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Nuovi Orizonti, 2007), 815 – 27.  See Mertens, “Europäischer Friede,” 48 – 54; and Mertens, “Europa id est patria,” 48 – 54; RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 495 f. n. 2.

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etics and perfidi Graeci, are rehabilitated as Europeans, as victims, as a bulwark and transmitter of classical culture (“o nobilis Graecia,” 512 f.) – an early stirring of philhellenism that almost prefigures that of Lord Byron. As encapsulated in his ubi sunt? threnody (513 f.), Aeneas Sylvius was one of the first to become aware of the immense cultural losses caused by the Fall of Constantinople. Second, the Turks. The speech contributed to forging negative topoi and stereotypes of the Turks and Islam. The Origo Turcarum discourse, for one, has recently been the subject of much interest.⁸¹ The Turks may not descend from the noble Trojans, as was believed during the Middle Ages, but rather – according to Aeneas after he discovered the text of Aethicus Ister – from the barbarian Scythians. Their sultan, Mehmed II, is depicted as an outrageous fighting machine, dressed up in classical (as a new furious Neoptolemos; see Virg., Aen. II, 499 ff.) and Biblical (as apocalyptic beast) allusions. Third, the Germans. They are portrayed, in part at least, like the ancient Germanic tribes. This Germanic discourse, which was to become so important among German humanists like Celtis around 1500, is very well explored today.⁸² It was Aeneas Sylvius, the Italian Cicero, who was the first to cheer on the German princes in Frankfurt as Germani (“vos magni. Vos bellicosi, vos potentissimi, ac deo accepti Germani,” 540). He exhorts them to take up the old Germanic bravery, which they had displayed in their victory over the Romans at the Teutoburg Forest, and to re-enact it in a Crusade. Piccolomini’s peroratio plays with the perennially transforming ‘interpretatio Christiana,’ specifically by posing two rhetorical questions that turn on the primeval Roman terms res publica and patria: “What republic (respublica) is greater or better than our Christian republic? What fatherland (patria) is sweeter or more noble than ours?”⁸³ Here Piccolomini combines the ancient notion of pro patria mori with the death of Crusaders and their heavenly rewards (563). Whereas “illi veteres” – i. e., the Germans’ pagan Germanic forefathers, who were praised earlier as heroes –

 Deutsche Reichstagsakten 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 515 n. 65; Helmrath, “Pius II, und die Türken,” 106 – 11 (reprinted in Wege des Humanismus, 306 – 13); Margaret Meserve, “Medieval Sources for Renaissance Theories on the Origins of the Ottoman Turks,” in Europa und die Türken, ed. Guthmüller and Kühlmann, 409 – 37, which deals mainly with Aeneas Sylvius; Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Humanist Historical Thought, Harvard Historical Monographs, 158 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 68 – 116; and Kaiser, “Antiketransformationen,” 92– 107.  See at least the excellent study of Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen. Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005); Christopher B. Krebs, Negotiatio Germaniae: Tacitus’ Germania und Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel, Hypomnemata, 158 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), at 127– 38; Gernot Michael Müller, Die ‘Germania generalis’ des Konrad Celtis. Studien mit Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, Frühe Neuzeit, 67 (Tübingen; Niemeyer, 2001); and Kaiser, “Antiketransformationen,” 98 – 102.  RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 562 : “sed que respublica maior aut melior quam nostra christiana? Que patria dulcior aut nobilior quam nostra?”

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“died for their fatherland, they were nevertheless forced to live in exile. We, on the other hand, when we die, end our exile and enter our true fatherland. O happy death!”⁸⁴ And the person who opens the gates to this paradise is none other than the pope himself, through his power to bind and unbind sin, and through the indulgence he has declared for the Crusade. The Clades ends – and this is often overlooked – with a vision that is truly cosmic (563 f.): Behold, ‘the heavens have opened’ (Ezek. 1:1; Acts 7:55). Behold, it is now time to enter the fatherland. Behold the ladder upon which you can ascend above all the planets and arrive at the Milky Way, which leads directly to the palace of God who is great. For as Cicero⁸⁵ says, ‘for all who have increased or aided their fatherland … there is certainly a special place in heaven where the blessed enjoy eternal life.’

Oh so delicately, Aeneas Sylvius combines here the Old Testament Jacob’s Ladder, Dante’s vision of the ascent (scala) to the Seventh Heaven of Saturn (which was probably influenced by the Muslim Liber scalae Mahometi), and the heavenly vision of the ‘Somnium Scipionis,’ the sixth book of Cicero’s De re publica. This vision is offered to deserving statesmen like Scipio, to the future Crusaders who have just been transformed by Bishop Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, but above all to those present at the Diet of Frankfurt. A final call to battle (“O Germani nobiles”) is made to them in the name of the pope, the emperor, and Christ himself. And that is how the speech ends (565).⁸⁶ Far-reaching are the paths of oratorics.

 RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 562: “illi veteres cum pro patria morerentur, tamen maxime exulabant. Nos, cum morimur, tum finimus exilium, tum patriam ingredimur. O felix mors!”  Cic., De re publica VI, 13,13; see also Cic., De re publica VI, 24,26; RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 564 n. 196.  RTA 19,2, ed. Helmrath, 565: “Quales vos futuros esse. O Germani nobiles, nemo dubitaverit, si hoc bellum, ut imperator admonet, papa petit, Christus iubet, pro divino honore atque amore suscipietis. Amen.”

James Hankins

The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists One who rules through the power of Virtue is analogous to the Pole Star: it simply remains in its place and receives the homage of the myriad lesser stars. – Confucius, Analects 2.1.

Logicians teach us that universal negatives – statements in the form ‘No X is the case’ – are hard to prove. Rhetoricians advise that to begin a speech with a dogmatic utterance is unlikely to be an effective form of captatio benevolentiae, unless you happen to be the pope, preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, this paper begins with what will for the present have to be a dogmatic utterance cast in the form of a qualified universal negation. It makes a claim about what is not a major theme in the political thought of Renaissance humanism. It claims that the humanist defense of republican liberty, which leading scholars – authorities such as Hans Baron, Eugenio Garin, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner – have presented as central to humanist political thought for several generations is at best a minor theme in their writings, mostly appearing in propagandistic contexts. It sees the foregrounding in modern scholarship of republican or neo-Roman liberty as anachronistic, a result of a selection bias coming from modern political interests and contexts. Of course the claim that republicanism is not a major theme in humanist political thought is already qualified, and takes as read that there do exist a certain number of sources where humanists praise city-states with popular or oligarchic regimes of the kind moderns describe as “republican,” i. e., non-monarchical.¹ The claim being made here is that such sources should not be taken as typical or characteristic, and to do so leads to serious distortions when assessing the humanist attitude to political order. Later on I shall suggest that what counts as Renaissance republicanism or civic humanism should be re-imagined as terms that are not specific to regimes.² In any case, the praise of particular regimes qua regimes does not turn out to be a theme richly documented in Renaissance humanist sources, especially ones in Latin.

 James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory 38.4 (2010): 452– 82. The present paper is part of a book-length project on humanist virtue politics.  As an example one may adduce the problem of tyrannical government, the central problem of humanist political thought. In this case the focus on “republicanism,” in the sense of a commitment to popular government, will prima facie be inadequate, since the power-sharing arrangements of popular communes constitute only one set of safeguards against tyranny and in fact are not much discussed in humanist political literature. It also disguises the fact that respublica in its Roman sense of a legal and morally sound state that defends citizens against arbitrary power is the lexical opposite of tyranny; in fact the instituta et mores of the republic in the ancient sense are the primary prophylactics against tyranny in the eyes of most humanists. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-007

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On the other hand, after studying over many years now some hundreds of formal treatises, histories, orations, letters, dialogues, dramas, and other works written by humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli, I have concluded that scholars have unduly neglected what I would myself claim to be the central theme of humanist political writing, namely the theme of Virtue. So pervasive is this theme that I believe we are justified in describing humanist thinking on politics as a kind of “virtue politics.” The rest of this paper will explain what I mean by this term and give some examples of its implications, significance, and impact on Renaissance culture. My hope and belief is that my initial dogmatism will be vindicated by subsequent research, my own and that of others.³ For once one becomes attuned to the subject, one realizes that the theme of virtue is ubiquitous, not only in the political writings of the Renaissance, but in its literature, philosophy, art, and even music. It is the master value of humanist politics (as Montesquieu already recognized),⁴ just as liberty is of classical liberalism or equality is of modern socialists or fairness is of Rawlsian progressives. The expression “virtue politics,” as those familiar with modern philosophical ethics will recognize, is meant to recall the term “virtue ethics.” Virtue ethics is an approach to moral philosophy, usually said to descend from Aristotle, that has been revived in the modern academy by philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Julia Annas.⁵ In contrast to the other two

 See my articles, “The Unpolitical Petrarch: Justifying the Life of Literary Retirement,” in Et amicorum: Essays in Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy in Honour of Jill Kraye, ed. Margaret Meserve and Anthony Ossa-Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 7– 32; “Biondo Flavio on the Roman Republic,” in The Invention of Rome: Biondo’s Roma Triumphans and Its Worlds, proceedings of a conference at the British School in Rome, 26 – 28 November 2014, ed. Frances Muecke and Maurizio Campanelli (Geneva: Droz, 2017), 101–18; “Boccaccio and the Political Thought of Renaissance Humanism,” forthcoming in A Boccaccian Renaissance, ed. Martin Eisner and David Lummus, Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press); “Filelfo and Sparta,” in Francesco Filelfo, Man of Letters, ed. Jeroen De Keyser (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 81– 96; “Europe’s First Democrat? Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius,” For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 2:692– 710; and “Machiavelli, Civic Humanism, and the Humanist Politics of Virtue,” Italian Culture 32.2 (2014): 98 – 109. See also Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Fulvio delle Donne, Alfonso il Magnanimo e l’invenzione dell’umanesimo monarchico: ideologia e strategie di legittimazione alla corte aragonese di Napoli (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2015); numerous articles of Guido Cappelli (available on academia.edu), some of them now collected in his Maiestas. Politica e pensiero politico nella Napoli aragonese (Rome: Carocci, 2016); and Matthias Roick, Pontano’s Virtues: Aristotelian Moral and Political Thought in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).  Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, author’s forward: “la vertu [politique] … est le ressort qui fait mouvoir le gouvernement républicain, comme l’honneur est le ressort qui fait mouvoir le monarchie.” See also Book III, chapter iii.  For an overview, see Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu, accessed 4 October 2018. For a more extended treatment, see Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press,

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leading approaches to normative ethics in the modern world – deontology and utilitarianism – virtue ethics emphasizes the need to develop, through reflection and practice, excellent patterns of conduct (“the virtues”) so as to achieve the human good and human flourishing (“happiness”). It thus distinguishes itself from other ethical theories that are more concerned with (1) defining norms of practical action, or duties, based on maxims common to all rational beings, as in Kant; or (2) with elaborating rules to be followed by a subject who judges the moral value of actions primarily by their consequences, i. e., their capacity to maximize goodness, as in the case of the utilitarians. “Virtue politics,” by analogy with virtue ethics, focuses on improving the character and wisdom of the ruling class with a view to bringing about a happy and flourishing commonwealth. It sees the political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of rulers and especially their sense of justice, defined as a preference for the common good over their own private goods – their “other-directedness,” as a modern might put it. The issue of legitimacy is a key one in humanist texts. Not the legitimation of rulers via law and institutional routines, which was rarely discussed by humanists in the Trecento and Quattrocento, but moral legitimacy. For the humanists, what gives rulers legitimacy are personal qualities of character and intellect that win trust and obedience from the ruled. Political legitimacy for humanists does not come from divine sanction or from hereditary right or from the constitutional form of the polity or from the express consent of the governed. What ultimately makes a regime legitimate is power well exercised, what I call “legitimacy of exercise.”⁶ Power can be legitimately exercised only by those who have “true nobility,” a humanist term of art for a merit-based claim to rule.⁷ The connection between natural nobility and the acquisition of virtue and the entitlement to rule others was made by the leading political authorities of the ancient world, Aristotle (Politics I.2, 1252a 31) and Cicero (De legibus III.4), and often repeated by Quattrocento literati. It was a 2011). My term “virtue politics” overlaps a good deal with the concept of “political meritocracy” in modern political science, where it is associated with Chinese neo-Confucianism (see note 48, below).  The locus classicus for this form of legitimacy comes in Petrarch’s Invective against a Man of High Rank with No Knowledge or Virtue, in Petrarca, Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 180 – 222, where Petrarch argues that the legal differences between tyranny and “legitimate” rule are irrelevant, and that what counts is how you exercise power and the way you live your life: excessive luxury in princes, for example, is disqualifying: “The most virtuous and innocent ruler – or more correctly the least harmful one – is the one who is most sparing and moderate in exploiting his privilege” (hac licentia parcius modestiusque utitur).  For the medieval background of the theme of true nobility, see Andrea A. Robiglio, “The Thinker as a Noble Man (bene natus) and Preliminary Remarks on the Medieval Concepts of Nobility,” Vivarium 44 (2006): 205 – 47 and the same author’s “La nobiltà di spada in Dante: un appunto su Il Convivio IV xiv 11,” in Il Convivio di Dante, ed. Joannes Bartuschat and Andrea Robiglio (Ravenna: Longo, 2015), 191– 204. My claim here is that the theme of true nobility is central to the construction of virtue politics in a way that it is not for, say, Dante’s political theory, where legitimacy is understood as of divine origin and residing in the Roman emperor, and true nobility is ultimately a quality conferred on someone by God.

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commonplace that the ancient Romans gained their empire thanks to their virtue and lost it through their vices.⁸ “Virtue is the only and unique giver of true nobility,” says the scholar-poet Cristoforo Landino, citing Plato as his source: [true] nobility [i. e., based on virtue] is a kind of health-bringing constellation and the highest support of the state.… All the greatest dignities and highest magistracies should be handed over and entrusted to those who are more noble; … and because the country itself especially belongs to the nobles, it should be committed to their care.⁹

In an honorable republic, says Buonaccorso da Montemagno – the most popular Quattrocento writer on true nobility – nothing is owed to anyone by virtue of their family connections, even if their parents served the state well. Only those with learning, wisdom, and virtue deserve to rule.¹⁰ Leonardo of Chios contrasts true and false nobility, i. e., the humanist conception and the traditional, hereditary conception, as follows: Nobility is of two kinds: One is ostentatious, has a high opinion of itself, is (as often as not) possessed along with wealth, ancient lineage, pomposity, and hereditary right. The other is a purer nobility, not to be judged by the common crowd, without contempt for poverty, replete with every virtue, and without dishonor. The first kind, proceeding from ambition, encompasses the whole world. The second arises from the root of virtue, as though its strength had sprung from innate principles of nature, and it belongs most fittingly to those few who are strong in

 For example, Bartolomeo Platina, De laudibus bonarum artium (to Pius II), in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magl. IX 140, f. 84r-v: “Non te latet, beatissime pater, Kartaginem foedifragam et crudelem corruisse, Corinthum petulantem et superbam incendio consumptam, urbem Romae, imperio orbis terrarum potitam, auaritia et libidine ciuium suorum eo loci redactam, ut quae ante caeteris nationibus imperitare consueuerat, nunc omnibus cum dedecore et turpitudine pareat.” See note 19 below and Hankins, “Flavio Biondo and the Roman Republic,” for Biondo’s argument to the same effect.  Landino, De vera nobilitate, quoted in Knowledge, Goodness and Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists, ed. and trans. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 212. Latin text in Cristoforo Landino, De vera nobilitate, ed. Maria Teresa Liaci (Florence: Olschki, 1970), 49: “Ex quibus quidem rebus huc rem perducit: salutare quoddam sidus et summum rei publicae columen esse nobilitatem … atque propterea nobilioribus … omnes maximas dignitates maximosque magistratus demandandos committendosque censet [Plato], et quoniam ipsa patria maxime nobilium est, eam in maximis gravissimisque periculis illis comendandum iubet. Soli enim nobiles iccirco patriam maxime curant, quoniam illi suam maxime eam putent.”  Buonaccorso, On Nobility, qtd. in Knowledge, Goodness, and Power, 40 – 52. The text was generally (but falsely) attributed to Leonardo Bruni, which could only have increased its authority; it was widely circulated in the original Latin as well as in Italian, German, French, and English. The statement quoted above is put in the mouth of the interlocutor whose opinion appears to be endorsed by Buonaccorso himself.

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mind and dynamic in action. Whoever has this nobility, endowed as he is with wisdom and virtue, is better suited to govern the republic or to perform significant individual deeds.¹¹

The humanist view, then, is that access to power should properly depend on meritocratic criteria. The wealthy and well born may exercise power, but they only do so legitimately when they are also virtuous. More radically, most humanists from Petrarch onwards insist that even persons of humble birth can merit a place in the ruling class via the acquisition of virtue.¹² Boccaccio in his De casibus virorum illustrium insists that true, natural nobility can be found in all social ranks, from farmers and craftsmen to the rich and well born. He gives a litany of examples from Roman history – the novi homines Marius and Cicero, the emperors Vespasian and Aurelian, the farmer Regulus, and Verginius, the defender of Roman liberty against the tyrannical Appius Claudius – all of whom achieved excellence as generals and statesmen despite their humble birth.¹³ The list was often repeated in the Quattrocento. Biondo Flavio in Roma triumphans argues that ancient Roman greatness in general was to a large extent a result of her readiness to accept into the ruling class virtuous men from the lower classes and from outside Rome, even outside Italy. Indeed, the Roma triumphans – a text I have elsewhere described as holding a position in humanist literature analogous to that held by the Encyclopédie of Diderot in the Enlightenment – makes the innate virtue and piety of Romans the key to understanding the success of the greatest empire in history.¹⁴ The humanists of the Quattrocento may indeed be credited with inventing a new form of equality not found in modern political theory – nor in its ancient predecessor, for that matter. Modern political theorists recognize various competing conceptions of equality such as equality of opportunity, equality of economic outcomes, or equality in “capabilities.” Pericles, in the famous funeral oration reported by Thucydides, praised the equal right of adult male citizens to participate in self-government, while Cicero praised equality of citizen rights under law as the basis of liberty.¹⁵ The

 Leonardo of Chios, On True Nobility against Poggio, ed. and trans. Rabil, 118 – 19. Rabil’s translation based on the Latin text in Caroli Poggi De nobilitate liber disceptatorius, et Leonardo Chiensis De vera nobilitate tractatus apologeticus cum eorum vita et annotationibus Abbatis Michaelis Justiniani (Avellino: Heredes Camilli Caballi, 1657), which I was not able to consult. (There are copies at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)  Francesco Petrarca, Selected Letters, trans. Elaine Fantham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1:223 (III.5.5 = Fam.), 148 – 50 (VI.6.20 – 23 = Fam.); De remediis 1.16.  Hankins, “Boccaccio and Political Thought.”  Hankins, “Biondo Flavio on the Roman Republic.”  Kurt Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, trans. Renate Franciscano, revised edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); on the Roman conception of liberty in Cicero’s time, an older work is still the most illuminating: Chaim Wirzubski, Libertas as a Political Ideal during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, rpt. 1968). The

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humanists champion a different ideal of equality: equality in the capacity for virtue. The political writer and papal biographer Bartolomeo Platina writes: It is characteristic of nobility to follow the right, rejoice in duties, have command of desires and restrain avarice. Whoever does this, even if he were by some chance born from the lowest human condition, merits being called and regarded as noble. Is this not why we reproach Nature, the parent of us all (as certain perverse persons do), for making some of us noble and others ignoble [i. e., through mere heredity]? Assuming that Nature offers to all an equal [physical and mental] constitution, regardless of family, power, or wealth, the sons of private persons and the offspring of princes and kings, as far as the mind is concerned, are born the same way, though the latter be born in purple clothing and palaces, the former in rags and huts.… Seneca … says that Socrates was neither a patrician nor a Roman knight; philosophy did not find him noble but made him noble.¹⁶

Virtue can be learned, and therefore any normal, rational person of whatever origin can learn it, at least in principle. Poggio Bracciolini even makes the striking claim – astonishing from the perspective of ancient virtue ethics – that “virtue is ready to hand, and comes to all those who embrace it.” For him, it is only the hereditary nobility, inclined to rest on the laurels of their ancestors, who find it hard.¹⁷ This is not to say that humanist virtue politics can be construed as egalitarian in anything approaching the modern sense of that word. Like all premodern political thinkers, the humanists accepted that some degree of hierarchy in politics was natural and necessary. There always needed to be an elite, whether a republican political class, the optimates, with its magistrates or a monarch with his ministers. But the elite should be an open one, accessible to all men of virtue and wisdom, whatever their social or national origin.¹⁸ A political hierarchy should be able to justify itself

idea that all humans have an equal capacity for virtue – by no means held by all humanists – probably reflects Christian anthropological conceptions.  Knowledge, Goodness and Power, 282 (translation modified). For the Latin text, cited from (Cologne: Eucharius Cervicornus, 1529), 172 (sign. dd iiiiv): “Nobilitatis enim proprium est recta sequi, gaudere officio, cupiditatibus imperare, auaritiam coercere. Hoc qui facit, etiam si ex infima sorte hominum natus fuerit, is merito suo nobilis haberi et dici potest. Neque est cur parentem rerum omnium naturam (ut quidam improbi faciunt) reprehendimus, quod hos nobiles, illos uero ignobiles faciat? Aequalem siquidem omnibus temperamentum praestat, non genus, non potentiam, non opes inspiciens, eadem [enim], quoad animum pertinet, nascendi ratio in privatorum hominum filiis est quae in principum ac regum natis, licet ii in purpura et magnis domibus, illi in centonibus et casulis plerunque nascantur.… Seneca … philosophus insignis … ‘Non fuit,’ inquit, ‘Socrates patricius, non eques Romanus, quem tamen philosophia non accepit, sed nobilem reddidit.’” The Senecan quotation is from Epistulae morales XL.2.  Poggio Bracciolini, De vera nobilitate, ed. Davide Canfora (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2002), 36: “Virtus enim omnibus est in promptu; eius efficitur propria, qui illam amplectitur.” Elsewhere in the same dialogue Poggio claims that nobility, which is “the radiance of virtue,” “belongs to us through our own will and power and cannot be withdrawn or taken from us against our will.”  For Cicero’s classic praise of an elite “open to the industry and virtue of all citizens,” see his Pro Sestio 137.

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in moral and rational terms, and not rely merely on its inherited wealth and status. Here the humanists differed somewhat from one of their basic authorities – Aristotle – who in the Politics reports without objection that people believe nobility (eugeneia) to depend in part on lineage and the long possession of wealth.¹⁹ The humanist conception of the path to virtue – how one acquires virtue – also in some key respects contrasts with Aristotle’s. Whereas Aristotle saw the acquisition of virtue as a matter of practice, philosophical reflection and habit, aided by good birth, wealth, good upbringing, and good friends, the humanists as a rule see liberal education – full stop – as the path to virtue. The path to virtue runs through the humanities or studia humanitatis. This is the new and powerful justification for the study of classical literature offered by humanist educators in the fifteenth century. They held that training in the classics, especially the language arts of grammar and rhetoric, plus poetry, history, moral philosophy, and other humane studies, would instill noble mores, ingenui mores, and practical wisdom, prudentia – all the qualities needed for excellence in government. Moral philosophy and history, precept and example, couched in the noble language learned from the ancient poets and orators, would give future rulers both the moral character to govern well and the eloquence needed for the finest form of leadership. Educators who taught the humanities were thus performing a public service. By training the elite in the humanities, they would ensure that noble virtue would radiate down to the populace in general, who would benefit from and imitate the wisdom and moral excellence of their leaders. The great humanist educator Guarino of Verona provides a vivid example of this kind of thinking. Writing to his disciple and countryman Gian Nicola Salerno, a humanistically educated podestà whose superexcellent virtue (Guarino writes) had just reduced the rebellious Bolognese to order, the famous educator declares that the judge should give credit to his education in the Muses, who have taught him the arts of ruling cities. Hence you have demonstrated that the Muses not only govern stringed instruments and the lyre, but also republics…. How much should we value, how much should we praise that learning, those arts, in which he who is going to be a statesman is educated! Once provided with justice, goodness, prudence and modesty, he can share the fruit [of these virtues] with everyone, and their utility commonly spreads to everyone. Philosophical studies do not have the same utility when imbued in private persons.

 Aristotle, Politics V.1, 1301b. Compare IV.8, 1294a, where Aristotle is more dismissive of “gentle birth” as an element in true aristocracy. What Aristotle’s real views were is debated in Poggio’s De nobilitate, passim, where an effort is made to defend the self-sufficiency of virtue in Stoic terms and to devalue Aristotle’s contrary opinion on the importance of external goods; the interlocutor who defends the humanist view claims that when Aristotle said that nobility depended on externa (listed as “divitias, genus, patria, corporis et fortune adiumenta,” 27), he was merely following the opinion of the crowd, and that this was not a real philosophical opinion (Poggio, De nobilitate, 26, repeated on 29).

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The liberally educated statesman is “nurtured by Jove” to prefer, not his own advantage and benefits, but those of the people entrusted to him: “he rules empires not by violence and arms, as tyrants do, but with affability and mercy (clementia),” imitating the duces of the bees, who, themselves unarmed, require no stingers to govern the hive. With good reason, then, did antiquity extol those who educated statesmen, since in this way they reformed the mores and customs of the many by means of a single person: as, for example, Anaxagoras taught Pericles, Plato Dion, Pythagoras the Italian princes, Athenodorus Cato, Panaetius Scipio, Apollonius Cicero and Caesar; and, even in this age, Manuel Chrysoloras, a great man and a great philosopher, educated many men.²⁰

Such passages are easily multiplied, and this is no surprise, given that the theme of moral rearmament via the study of literature and philosophy was a prominent one in the most famous text, De officiis, of the humanists’ favorite ancient author, Cicero. There and elsewhere, Cicero presented his philosophical writings as a way of reawakening the moribund mores et instituta of ancient Rome – the native virtues that had made her great – after the moral and political disasters of the civil wars.²¹ Niccolò Perotti perhaps perceived a parallel between the Roman civil wars and the decline of Christendom, since in the preface to his translation of Polybius’ Histories, dedicated to Pope Nicholas V, he described how, after the fall of Rome, the destruction of the humanities (optimae artes et disciplinae), with their many examples of noble conduct, had resulted in laziness and self-indulgence on the part of Rome’s leaders, and their torpidity had inevitably affected the whole citizen body.

 Letter of Guarino to Gian Nicola Salerno (1419), in Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ed. R. Sabbadini (Venice: C. Ferrari: 1915), 1:263 – 64 (Ep. 159): “Quo effectum est ut Musas ipsas non modo chordarum et citharae sed rerum etiam publicarum moderatrices esse demonstres.… Quanti igitur facienda, quam laudanda ea doctrina, illae artes quibus instituitur is qui futurus est in re publica princeps. Nam ille iustitia bonitate prudentia modestia praeditus communem universis afferre fructum potest in omnesque disseminari utilitas solet. Ceterum si philosophiae studia privatum intrent hominem, non itidem…. Iure itaque illos extollit antiquitas qui primores erudierunt, quoniam una in persona plurimorum mores et instituta reformarentur, ut Anaxagoras Periclem, Plato Dionem, Pythagoras principes italicos, Athenodorus Catonem, Paneatius Scipionem, Apollonius Ciceronem et Caesarem, plurimos etiam hac aetate Manuel Chrysoloras, magnus et vir et philosophus.” See also Guarino’s letter to the same correspondent on the latter’s assumption of the office of podestà of Mantua, Epistolario, 107– 8 (Ep. 50). On this theme, see also Guido Cappelli, ‘Lo stato umanistico’, 3 ff., who notes that the idea of imitatio is a reflection in politics of the humanists’ literary methods. Also highly relevant is Platina’s oration De laudibus bonarum atrium, directed to Pius II, of which I am preparing an edition from the five surviving manuscripts (see note 8 above). The devaluing of the contemplative life in comparison with the active life reflects De officiis I.28.  See A. A. Long, “Cicero’s Politics in the De officiis,” in Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Laks and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213 – 40. Ann Vasaly finds a similar purpose in Livy; see her monograph Livy’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 127. The idea that the ruler’s vices always trickle down to the populace is found in Cicero’s Laws, III.31– 32; see also the next note.

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It is an established fact that such as are the city’s leading men, such also is the rest of the city, and whatever moral alterations appear among leaders are always followed in the people. Since their leaders were illiterate, therefore, the rest were untaught and uneducated as well. [He goes on to complain that in medieval times there were no rewards or honors for anyone inclined to study.] For just as a temperate climate brings forth rich and plentiful fruit, so also the prince’s humanity, honor and generosity produces the liberal arts and fine minds.²²

So too the great humanist printer Aldus Manutius prefaced his edition of Plutarch’s Moralia with an elaborate compliment to his friend Jacopo Antiquario, praising him for his saintly character and learning, qualities that his example had spread throughout his entire household. As your guest in Milan I saw you were endowed with every virtue; I admired not just your saintliness but also that of your young nephew Antiquario, your brother’s son, who displayed such modesty and love of good literature – for he already knew Latin and Greek – that he looked to me as if he would soon be very expert and learned, just like you. I also admired your staff and the whole household, entirely modest and saintly, like its master. So I would affirm the truth of the saying: whatever the qualities of heads of families, masters, noblemen, princes, heads of state, such will be the qualities of a household, the staff and servants, the states and peoples themselves. This view is expressed elegantly, as always, by Cicero in his books On the Laws.… So I would wish all men who have command over others, ‘to whom peoples have been entrusted and such great affairs are a concern,’ to be of excellent character, my dear Antiquario, and very like yourself; certainly the whole of humanity would soon live a blessed existence, by general consensus crime and all vices would be banished.²³

A perennial problem, perhaps the most challenging problem, for all political meritocracies is inducing non-elite citizens to accept the authority of their presumed betters. A claim to superior wisdom and virtue is not so easily recognized as a claim to be a legitimate heir or to be duly elected according to law. In humanist virtue politics, the solution to this problem looks to the force of example and eloquence: the commands of the ruling class are accepted because the ruled are imprinted in some way with the virtues of their betters, enough to recognize that what is being commanded is right

 Perotti, preface to his Polybius translation, quoted in the article on Polybius by Jeroen De Keyser, forthcoming in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 11, ed. Greti Dinkova-Bruun (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016), 13 from Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, MS S.12.2: “Est enim ita comparatum ut qualescunque summi civitatis viri fuerint, talis quoque sit reliqua civitas, et quaecumque morum immutatio in principibus exterit, eadem semper in populo sequatur. Quoniam ergo illiterati principes erant, caeteri quoque rudes erant atque indocti. Nam sicuti temperies ac clementia aeris copiam atque ubertatem frugum, ita humanitas et honor et beneficentia principis bonas artes excellentiaque ingenia producit.” Perotti goes on to give credit to Nicholas that today “ita vigeant studia litterarum et tot se ingenia hominum proferant atque ostentent.” Perotti is surely following here Cicero, Laws III.14: “quaecumque mutatio morum in principibus extiterit, eandem in populo secutam.” The same passage of Cicero is echoed, to the same effect, in Aldus Manutius’s preface to his 1513 edition of Plato’s complete works; see Aldus Manutius, The Greek Classics, ed. and trans. N. G. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 234.  Manutius, The Greek Classics, 201, quoting De legibus III.31– 32 and Homer, Iliad II.25.

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and just and to their benefit. From a modern perspective this claim, or rather hope, might seem naïve, but the idealism that animates it is palpable.²⁴ *** It will be obvious that the virtue politics of the Italian humanists has deep roots in the ancient world, and its sources can be found, not only in the sources mentioned so far, Aristotle and Cicero, but in Plato, Sallust, Livy, and the Roman Stoics as well. In a sense the humanists were reviving and carrying on the work of the ancient philosophical schools, some of which, some of the time – like the early Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoics – emphasized the reform of politics through philosophical study and the moral virtue of the rulers. They embraced the proverbial maxim of ancient statesmen that a man cannot rule others who cannot rule himself.²⁵ At the same time, humanist virtue politics presents a striking contrast with the political thought of the medieval schools. The scholastic tradition of the High Middle Ages, the work of jurists and theologians, had been concerned with a wholly different set of issues: the status and scope of politics in a fallen world, the correct juridical relations between church and state, the nature and extent of ecclesiastical authority, whether and how plenitude of power should be limited – by consent or other means – the nature of law and justifications for coercion, the moral status of property, and the legal and constitutional conditions that need to be met for a government to be called legitimate.²⁶ Scholastic thinking about politics was lawyerly, abstract, and written in a specialist language addressed mostly to fellow scholastics. The humanists, by contrast, thought about politics through the prism of classical history, poetry, and a more accessible, Ciceronian form of moral philosophy. Their writings and speeches were addressed to the educated reader or listener – the reader whom the humanists themselves had trained in classical Latin. The classical past – concrete historical experience as preserved by the great writers of the past – was the best guide to the art of effective government. Much of the moral literature the humanists produced was designed to make ancient wisdom accessible to the political leaders of their own time.²⁷

 The question is explicitly posed by Cicero in De officiis II.20 and leads to his famous discussion of why it is better for a ruler to be loved than feared.  “Absurdum est ut alios regat qui seipsum regere nescit,” a proverbial saying.  For an overview, see Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300 – 1450 (London: Routledge, 1996); a good short introduction is John Kilkullen, “Medieval Political Thought,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu, accessed 4 October 2018.  As one example among many, one may mention Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, his most popular work in Latin and his ethical masterpiece. In the preface to his patron, the tyrant Azzo of Correggio (who for Petrarch was no tyrant), Petrarch states that he wants to do for Azzo what Seneca did for his brother, the statesman and proconsul Gallio: Azzo has the desire to know but not the time to read, so Petrarch is providing him with all the moral teachings from antiquity that he needs to know in “short and precise formulations,” so that he can stock his memory without laboring endlessly over old books.

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The virtue politics of the Italian humanists had effects that lasted for several centuries in European culture, but the political writings of the humanists have not been widely valued as a tradition or even noticed in the standard modern histories of Western political thought. This is no doubt because the humanists’ message was directed to a broadly literate social elite and for that reason did not aim at a high level of theoretical elaboration or rejoice in the kind of technical argumentation that engages the attention of modern academic historians. There is also a widespread tendency to regard Machiavelli as the representative voice of Renaissance political theory, whereas from the perspective of the tradition I have been discussing, he is an outlier, indeed a fierce critic of virtue politics.²⁸ At the same time, a writer like Francesco Patrizi of Siena, the voice of conventional humanist wisdom in Renaissance political thought – printings of whose works far outnumbered those of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century – has been completely ignored.²⁹ The all-too-obvious reason for this is that his works are very long, very learned, and in Latin. There is, however, one fascinating parallel to humanist virtue politics, a tradition found not in the West but which flourished 5000 miles away in China. This is the Confucian tradition, the governing philosophy of China for nearly two millennia, from the Han dynasty down to the founding of the Chinese republic in 1912. Like the humanists, Confucius saw the great political disorders of his time as the result of moral decay. For him, the way to reform politics was to return to antiquity, the political order of the ancient Shang and Zhou dynasties. This could be done by studying the old literary classics, principally the Odes, that Confucius is said to have edited. Study of the ancient classics brought wen, cultural refinement, and strengthened de, sometimes translated as “virtue,” a kind of charismatic goodness. De allowed a ruler to rule by “effortless action,” wu wei, rather than coercion. Rank for Confucius should depend on merit and ren, sometimes translated as humanity, goodness, or benevolence – compassion or empathy for others. The gentleman, junzi, was the man of self-cultivation who studied literature, acquired culture, and behaved with goodness. Gentlemanly ideals had nothing to do with hereditary rank; indeed Confucian education was intended to replace the hereditary nobility with a class of officials who owed their position to education, wisdom, and virtue. This mandarin class served a ruler whose own mandate to rule, the Mandate of Heaven, ming tian, depended on his selfless service to his subjects and his maintenance of the rites, li, which regulated proper human interactions – a word that could be translated as mores, little morals, or the rules of conduct.³⁰ The parallels with what the humanists were trying to achieve is striking. As in the Confucian tradition, humanist virtue politics understands the failure to achieve good government as a problem of human character rather than as a legal and con Hankins, “Machiavelli and the Humanist Politics of Virtue.”  Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism,” 468 – 69.  I develop these parallels in the conclusion of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

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stitutional problem. They knew that prohibitions do not teach; “example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other” (Edmund Burke). Abuse of power or tyranny, a perennial problem in all political communities, they see primarily as a failure of human excellence. Instead of looking to the legal definitions of a Bartolus to determine when a ruler was behaving tyrannically, humanists read Tacitus to understand the psychology of political corruption.³¹ The solution to the problem of rulers who abused their power was not to spin legal theories of consent or to elaborate arguments for legitimate resistance to tyranny. Tyrants could not be stopped by passing laws or quoting legal maxims. The humanist way of addressing tyranny was to surround the ruler with men of virtue whose charisma would influence him to do what was right, as Petrarch maintains in his Invective against a Man of High Rank, and as Castiglione taught in the Courtier. ³² Above all, a corrupt ruling class could not be contained by popular agitation. Allowing the vulgar to influence government through tumult, power-sharing, or consultation only made things worse.³³ Nor could the problem be solved by bringing in a strong man, some condottiere who would enforce peace when civil order broke down – the preferred solution of fourteenth-century city-states in crisis. Coercion did not make men better. The humanists knew from the De officiis, their greatest textbook of political virtue, that society could not be knit together by brute power alone.³⁴ Moreover, the strategies of legitimation used by many Renaissance tyrants – managed communal elections, staged ceremonies of acclamation, loyalty oaths, the corruption and cooptation of guild leadership, the acquisition of imperial and papal vicariates, the purchase of titles of nobility, invented claims to high descent – all of these strategies were in the end transparently fraudulent; none of them would or could create a true community.³⁵ Ultimately, for a stable political order to take root, fraud and force would have to be replaced by loyalty, trust, and mutual interest. It would require changing hearts and minds; it called for all the arts of persuasion. For the humanists, this required government by the wise and the good, men whose speech carried weight and whose lives compelled admiration. Virtue was charismat-

 See Hankins, “Boccaccio and Political Thought.” On Bartolus’s legalistic definition of nobility as a principal target of humanist polemics concerning “true nobility,” see Landino, De vera nobilitate, ed. Liaci, 45 – 46.  Petrarca, Invectives (cited in note 6); and James Hankins, “”Renaissance Philosophy and Book IV of Il Cortegiano,” in Baldesar Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch, Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 2002), 377– 88; an expanded version is printed in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003 – 2004), 1:493 – 509.  This sentiment, often implicit, is made explicit in the first paragraph of Platina’s De principe, ed. Giacomo Ferraù (Palermo: Edizioni “Il Vespro,” 1979), 53.  See especially De officiis II.21– 35, a key passage for virtue politics. At II.23 he writes, “Fear is a poor watchman even in the short run, but benevolence keeps faithful guard forever.”  For such strategies, see Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. John E. Law and Bernadette Paton (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).

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ic.³⁶ Men would not willingly obey magistrates who served their own interests rather than the common good. Rulers needed moral training that would make them otherdirected and a grasp of history that would give them practical wisdom, prudentia. It is no accident that the most famous political quotation of the Renaissance was Plato’s famous dictum in the Republic: that states will not be happy unless philosophers ruled, or rulers become philosophers.³⁷ A close runner-up was another quotation from Plato’s Letters, as reported by Cicero in the De officiis: that we are not born for ourselves alone, but for our family, our friends, and our country.³⁸ Many city-states in the Renaissance tried to solve the problems of tyranny and corruption by passing more laws, insulating judicial processes from local influence, or setting up police magistracies concerned with public morals. But the humanists knew that this would not help. They had read their Tacitus: “corruptissima respublica plurimae leges” (Annales III.27). In any case, laws were useless against the powerful. As an interlocutor in one of Poggio’s dialogues says, Only the little people and the lower orders of a city are controlled by your laws … the more powerful civic leaders transgress their power. Anacharsis justly compared the laws to a spider’s web, which captures the weak but is broken by the strong.… Away then with these laws and rights of yours, that are … obeyed only by private persons and little folk who need their protection against the powerful! … Grave, prudent and sober men do not need the laws; they declare a law of right living for themselves, being trained by nature and study to virtue and good behavior. The powerful spit upon and trample the laws as things suited to weak, mercenary, working-class, acquisitive, base and poverty-stricken folk, who are better ruled by violence and the fear of punishment than by laws.³⁹

Laws and legal coercion did not work against the powerful: they either did not need them, being already virtuous, or held them in contempt as restraining only the weak. It is difficult, indeed, to exaggerate the disgust most humanists felt towards contemporary legal culture. They respected Roman law as a repository of ancient prudence; they believed unreservedly in natural and divine law; but they treated the actual practice of law in their own time as desperately corrupt, a source of civil discord and inhumanity, as a means of obscuring rather than revealing true justice. The law as practiced was a conspiracy against the public good, corrupted by money, indifferent to right and wrong, tying up true justice in the webs of pettifoggery and use-

 See, for example, Petrarch’s remarks in the De remediis, praefatio and 2.190, explaining how the virtues, especially courage, automatically inspire respect and love in good men, but bewilderment in evil ones. A similar description of how virtue inspires obedience may be found in Giovanni Pontano, De principe, ed. Guido M. Cappelli (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2003), 2– 6.  Republic V.473d.  De officiis I.22.  Poggio Bracciolini, Historia tripartita, in his Opera omnia, ed. Riccardo Fubini, 4 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964– 1969), 1:48 – 49, quoted from the translation in James Hankins, “Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123.

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less technicalities. In some ways their objections resembled those of modern legal reformers like Philip K. Howard, founder of Common Good.⁴⁰ Like Howard, humanists complained that the sheer multitude of laws and procedural obstacles to applying the law fairly undermined moral freedom and humanity and ensured bad outcomes. Like Howard, the humanists rejected the premise that the law can dictate correct behavior by specific rules. Like Plato and Aristotle, the humanists believed that the best judge was a wise and good man whom philosophy had trained to understand natural law and apply it in accordance with his discretion. For them, the sound Roman maxim that societies should be ruled by laws, not men, was problematic: it depended on the laws, and it depended on the men.⁴¹ Since laws and institutions were inadequate safeguards against corruption, the only real bulwark against abuse of power in the ruling class was for that class to police itself, informally, via persuasion, not coercion. The best members of the elite had to convince rulers and their fellow aristocrats to behave well. This could be done by education: by bringing up the next generation in the humanist tradition of moral self-cultivation, or by helping one’s own children acquire virtue by study of the classics. But the humanist movement’s ambitions went well beyond their education of the young; they sought to colonize the symbolic environment of the adult world as well. Their ultimate goal was to forge a wider culture that celebrated classical virtue and shamed those who fell short of its ideals. Hence the leading role played in humanist culture by eloquence and the arts of persuasion. Eloquence was the most important vehicle for the self-policing of the elite. It was the trumpet of virtue. The epideictic rhetoric of the humanists aimed to make people want to be virtuous by praising good conduct and character and blaming bad in the most lively colors.⁴² Thanks to the humanist influence in government and society, during the period from the 1390s to the 1430s, occasions for public oratory gradually became more numerous. Eventually it became the practice in Quattrocento Italy to hold ceremonial orations, mostly in Latin but sometimes in Italian, at all the important junctures of public and private life: at weddings and funerals, on taking up public office, on beginning a course at a university, at the beginning of ambassadorial missions or before battles. In Florence, for example, the practice began in 1415 for a member of the government to make a speech on justice, usually filled with classical and biblical authorities, whenever a foreign judge took up his six-

 Philip K. Howard, Life without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).  See, for example, the debate in Bartolomeo Scala’s dialogue On Laws and Courts (De legibus et iudiciis, trans. David Marsh), in Scala, Essays and Dialogues, trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 158 – 231 (esp. §29); for Boccaccio’s hostility to contemporary legal education, see Hankins, “Boccaccio and Political Thought.”  In general see the acute remarks of John M. McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Renaissance Humanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), chapter 2.

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month term of office in the city.⁴³ These speeches praised members of the ruling class for their virtues, even when they had given little evidence of them – in this following Aristotle’s advice that praising men above their merits was a way of motivating them to improve their behavior. But their larger purpose was to communicate the moral expectations of the community to persons who were taking on new public and private responsibilities. Accountability – punishing those who fell below the standards expected of the elite – was left to invectives or to the pages of humanist histories. The ultimate punishment of those who abused power was social rejection by one’s peers and eternal infamy. To put this in modern terms, humanist eloquence was meant as a kind of social technology, incentivizing good behavior through the use of praise and blame – as opposed to repressing bad behavior by using the legal and coercive powers of government. To use Albert Hirschmann’s analytic framework, the humanists aimed to neutralize corrupt passions and appetites, the desire for personal gain or for revenge, by stimulating a countervailing passion: the desire for honor and admiration from the community.⁴⁴ It involved replacing the existing honor code of the aristocratic classes, derived from feudal and chivalric sources, with a new honor code (or “honor world,” to use Anthony Appiah’s useful expression⁴⁵), inspired by an idealized version of Greco-Roman antiquity. Future statesmen were to be immersed in classical history, poetry, and moral philosophy – a moral universe where the highest praise and the highest rewards were lavished on public servants. The political class was to be exhorted to a Sallustian competition for virtue. The humanists understood that the classical ideal of virtue depended on cultivating a certain sense of self: that one is the kind of person who does not do certain things; that one’s dignity and honor within a community depend on not acting, or not being seen to act, out of self-interest, catering to one’s own appetites, but on serving the community. The humanists’ aim was to build up a critical mass of true noblemen and noblewomen who in turn would create the presumption that meritorious behavior would be rewarded with high status and malicious behavior with shame and degradation. To build up their neo-classical honor world, the humanists also enlisted the arts in celebration of antique virtue. It became the goal of humanist culture to saturate the civic and courtly environment with images, inscriptions, and even music that kept the rewards of human excellence, and the consequences of bad behavior, continually before the senses and the minds of the elite. The new, classicizing architecture of the Quattrocento and the design of the built environment in general had the effect of bringing Rome alive again; to walk down a neoclassical courtyard lined with

 See Uwe Neumahr, Die Protestatio de Iustitia in der Florentiner Hochkultur: Eine Redegattung (Hamburg: Lit, 2002).  Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, new edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013; rpt. of 1977 edn.).  Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 19 – 22.

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statues of the mighty dead was meant to inspire in the living a desire to perform similar deeds. In the council chambers of kings and republics, the humanistically educated man could see on the walls and ceilings inscriptions selected from his boyhood reading that would remind him of his obligation to act wisely and well, with pictures, statues, and architecture all reinforcing the message. The inscriptional practices of the ancient world were renewed in the Quattrocento, but with a difference: in addition to commemorating civic generosity, Renaissance inscriptions also taught political lessons. One quotation from Sallust, often found on the walls of Renaissance council chambers, gives the flavor: “Concordia res parvae crescunt, discordia maximae dilabuntur” (“Small states grow with concord; discord causes great ones to dissolve”). Most painting in the Renaissance continued to have religious subjects, but in the course of the Quattrocento the representation of classical subjects, almost always with a moralizing message, became increasingly common. Even music was brought to bear on the project of classicizing the environment. Although humanists had little to do with the great polyphonic music we associate with the Renaissance today – Dufay, Josquin, Isaac, and the rest – the humanists did work out a new style of music criticism that celebrated the ancient ideal of moral music found in the last book of Aristotle’s Politics, and they insisted that music had a proper civic function of supporting virtuous behavior. The humanists also championed a revival of the ancient singer of tales – a genre of musical literature now completely lost – which they reconstructed from their knowledge of ancient literature. We know of a fairly large number of musicians from the mid-Quattrocento to the early sixteenth century who practiced the humanist art song – the performance of Latin poetry, classical or modern, often improvised, to the lira da braccio. As we learn from Raffaele Brandolini, the most famous of these singers, the goal was to reform and elevate the forms of entertainment used by civic and courtly elites. Such entertainments would no longer feature clowns, tumblers, mimes, and singers of love songs; there would henceforth be no drums and cymbals, trumpets and horns playing the music of the hunt. These the humanists tried to stigmatize as vulgar or potentially immoral. Instead, the leisure hours of the upper classes would be transformed into occasions for the celebration of classical virtue.⁴⁶ *** Let me sum up by trying to assess the long-term historical significance of the humanist tradition of virtue politics. To do this I shall take my bearings from the analytic framework elaborated in Francis Fukuyama’s recent works on the origins of modern political institutions.⁴⁷ Fukuyama identifies three elements, three categories of insti James Hankins, “Humanism and Music in Italy,” in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. Anna Maria Busse-Berger and Jesse Rodin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 231– 62.  Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political

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tutions, which distinguish the best-functioning modern states from premodern states and failed states. The first is the presence of an impersonal political order – the state – that replaced tribal and patrimonial orders in premodern societies. The modern state has, in Weber’s expression, a monopoly on the means of violence and welldefined property rights, but it also has servants of the state, civil servants, and magistrates, who are meant to privilege its interests, and presumptively the interests of society as a whole, while fighting against the natural human tendency to favor family and friends – what Fukuyama labels patrimonialism and clientism. The second element is the rule of law, which for him means simply a system where the ruling class, even kings, are forced to comply with written laws; there is no one free from the laws or above them, and judicial discretion is carefully limited by due process. The third element that for Fukuyama characterizes modern political institutions is accountability – a form of legitimacy where rulers are held accountable to “parliaments, assemblies, and other bodies representing a broader proportion of the population,” and where they “subject their sovereignty to the will of the larger population as expressed through elections.” It hardly needs saying that Fukuyama’s criteria of political modernity – which for him also define a normatively superior stage in human development – have not been universally accepted. Chinese neo-Confucian theorists in particular have pushed back against the idea that electoral democracy is a necessary condition of modernity or the only way in which accountability can be achieved in a good society.⁴⁸ The idea that servants of the state automatically favor the interests of the whole against the part is also an idea one may be permitted to doubt.⁴⁹ But for the purpose of this discussion, Fukuyama’s criteria can provide a framework for assessing the humanists’ version of political meritocracy. Weighed in Fukuyama’s scale of modernity, I believe it can plausibly be claimed that humanist virtue politics contributed to the rise of modern political institutions in some respects, while in others its influence was more ambiguous. The humanists arguably contributed to state formation by promoting the idea of a meritocratic elite, persons educated to exercise power well, whose social status and political authority were dependent on merit, understood as moral goodness, practical wisdom, learning, and a commitment to the common good. Virtue politics represented a strong challenge to hereditary, patrimonial forms of power – at least in principle – as well as to clientage systems based on family influence. In this respect at least, virtue politics contributed to the emergence of the modern impersonal state. Its contribution should not be overstated, since most humanists tended to think of political au-

Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalizatin of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).  Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).  Randy T. Simmons, Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Culture, revised edn. (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2011).

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thority as entrusted to individuals by a sovereign people or a prince rather than seeing magistrates as representing an abstract entity, the state, to which powers had been granted permanently via a social contract of some kind.⁵⁰ Still, the humanist idea of meritocracy can be seen as a kind of halfway house to a more modern conception of the state and an impartial bureacracy serving the public interest.⁵¹ The contribution of humanist virtue politics to the rule of law is more difficult to assess. The humanists understood the rule of law to be a key feature of Roman civilization and as such, they embraced it as a necessary feature of a good society modeled on ancient Rome. At the same time, however, the humanists were heirs to the Greek philosophical tradition that tended to see written law as an inferior substitute for a wise and good ruler, and in that sense a second-best source of political order. Since the humanists considered the law of their own times as morally corrupt, irrational, opaque, and excessively technical, too often serving the interests of the part rather than the whole, they often found themselves defending the need for princes and republican magistrates to exercise wide discretionary powers – discretionary powers that all too easily could become a license for arbitrary rule and even tyranny.⁵² That is how some humanist writers found themselves advocating positions similar to that of Jean Bodin, who wanted the king to be subject to the laws of religion but otherwise to have unrestricted authority over the civil laws and the legal system. Like Bodin, many humanists were skeptical of Aristotle’s theory of the mixed constitution as a means of restraining tyranny and self-dealing, however much they admired the rest of his ethical teachings. In sixteenth-century terms, they more commonly favored absolutists than political Aristotelians. In their defense, I would say that, given their context and wider assumptions, the humanists could hardly have embraced unreservedly the sovereignty of law. The rule of law over men is the doctrine of societies that have learned the hard way that human virtue is not to be trusted. The humanists were pushing in the other direction, responding to what they saw as the dysfunctional institutions of their time. They wanted the legal system to be responsive to human virtue and prudence; they feared its manipulation by the powerful who benefited from the expensive mystifications of legal science.

 See Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. T. Bell, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90 – 131, with the comments in Malcolm Schofield, “Cicero’s Definition of Res publica,” in his Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms (London: Routledge, 1999), 178 – 94, at 181. The less formalized humanist view may well be the sounder one, given the well-known tendency of government servants to identify their interests with the state as against the people.  Alison Brown, Bartolomeo Scala, 1430 – 1497, Chancellor of Florence: The Humanist as Bureaucrat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 14, “Scala and the State.”  See Jane Black, Absolutism in Renaissance Milan: Plenitude of Power under the Visconti and the Sforza, 1329 – 1535 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), whose work suggests that it was the lawyers rather than the humanists of Renaissance Milan who ultimately did more to restrain the tyrannical power of the princeps.

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In this respect I am not sure the humanists were entirely wrong. There is surely something to be said for insisting on high moral character from those who make the laws, and for allowing such persons wide discretion in administering them. The humanists were also right to stress the importance of laws that can be understood and respected by those who are obliged to obey them. I am also not quite sure about the last of Fukuyama’s marks of the modern state – democratic accountability. Influential humanists such as Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo expressed a preference for the Roman system of electing magistrates, which they believed would produce more virtuous magistrates than the militantly anti-meritocratic system of choosing magistrates by lot, a common practice in the late medieval popular commune.⁵³ The humanists generally agreed with Tacitus that “sorte et urna mores non discerni” (Histories IV.7) – moral qualities are made invisible through lotteries for office and secret ballots. In their preference for elections, they were largely channeling Cicero, who entertained the conviction that the Roman people had chosen him as a magistrate because they respected his virtue and wisdom. A number of humanist political thinkers also favored elective monarchies.⁵⁴ But with our wider experience of democracy and elections today, it is hard to regard as anything other than naïve the idea that elections favor the most virtuous candidates. When modern theorists favor electoral democracy, they most often do so on negative grounds, echoing E. M. Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy. Democracy is preferable because it “admits variety and permits criticism.”⁵⁵ Democracy is the least bad constitution because it offers the weaker members of society some recourse against exploitation and abuse by their rulers. At best it accords a small measure of dignity to ordinary citizens via participation in self-rule. Few believe that democracy elevates leaders of proven virtue and wisdom. The humanists in general did not think of elections as opportunities for an electorate to exercise accountability over its officials. They did, however, think that other means were available to hold rulers to account. As discussed, that was one function of the humanist rhetoric of praise and blame, in orations, in semi-private correspondence, and in historical and biographical writing. The humanists understood that public esteem and public shame can be powerful tools to shape behavior. This form of accountability can reasonably be seen as the predecessor of the modern idea of a free press. The humanists understood free speech – speaking truth to

 James Hankins, “Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentine urbis, and ‘Virtue Politics’,” Bollettino del Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 119 (2017): 1– 25; and Hankins, “Biondo Flavio on the Roman Republic.”  For example, Petrarch in De remediis 2.78, where he praises the elective kingship of Taprobane (Sri Lanka), which supposedly produces a king chosen for his virtue; Petrarch takes the occasion to attack the principle of hereditary monarchy. The passage significantly alters its source, Pliny, Natural History VI.89.  Forster, “What I Believe,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951): “So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”

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power – as a virtue, not as a right, and in this respect, too, they anticipated the modern ideal of the journalist who uncovers wrongdoing without fear or favor. It would be useless to argue that the humanists had either better or worse success in upholding this ideal; that would be the rashest of generalizations, and no historian will ever be in a position to make it. Real courage to speak out against tyranny when the speaker is in the tyrant’s power is always vanishingly rare, given our human nature. Yet it is also human nature to hold up better ideals for ourselves, and the virtue of free speech in the best sense was one that humanists cherished, even if they may have honored it more in the breach than the observance. In our time we are all too aware of the failures of democratic accountability, and we understand all too well the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson’s remark that a successful republic cannot survive without a virtuous people. To sum up, the virtue politics of the Italian humanists represents an object lesson in how classical literature and philosophy were transformed in Renaissance thought. Virtue politics has its roots in Greek and Roman culture, as the intellectual program of humanism says it should, but it became considerably more than an unfiltered revival of Aristotle and Cicero. Humanist political thought has a creativity and coherence of its own, which though reliant on ancient wisdom, is not reducible to it. Some aspects of ancient political thought were included in virtue politics, others excluded, and still others were recombined into a political phenomenon that may stand as a Renaissance transformation of the classical past that is still useful to modern times.

Roland Béhar

“Haec Domus Omnium Triumphorum”: Petrarch and the Humanist Transformation of the Ancient Triumph¹ 1 The Vision of Rome My conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.²

This sentence from Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life has often been interpreted as the key to a better understanding of his monumental project of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. ³ He acknowledged himself that his project also owed much to Montesquieu’s Grandeur et décadence des Romains, as can be observed in the following passage of the seventh Observation upon the Triumphs of the Romans: Romulus was soon obliged to take arms against the little cities of the Sabines, whom the rape of their daughters had justly provoked against his rising state. Acron, king of the Cininians, was the first victim of Roman valour. He fell by the hand of Romulus, and his subjects had the good fortune to be allowed to unite with the new colony. The conqueror was eager to reap the first fruits of his glory. Driving before him herds and prisoners, and attended by the companions of his victory, he entered the city amidst public acclamation and ascended the Capitoline hill, in order to deposit his trophies and his gratitude in the temple which he had dedicated to Jupiter Feretrius.

 This paper has been supported by the Spanish Proyecto de Investigación Petrarca y el Humanismo en la Península Ibérica FFI2011– 24896 (Ministerio de Ciencia y de Innovación – Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad). We would like to show our gratitude for their useful comments to Anne-Florence Baroni, Peter Behrman de Sinety, Jorge Ledo, Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Xavier Tubau, and Juan Miguel Valero Moreno.  Edward Gibbon, The Autobiographies. Printed verbatim from hitherto unpublished mss., with an Introduction by the Earl of Sheffield, ed. John Murray (London: John Murray, 1896), 302.  See for instance John G. A. Pocock, “Classical and Civil History: The Transformation of Humanism,” Cromohs 1 (1996): 1– 34, http://www.unifi.it/riviste/cromohs/1_96/pocock.html, accessed 22 December 2015. Curiously enough, the centrality of the moment was also observed by Jorge Luis Borges when he wrote Gibbon’s short biography in his prologue for Edward Gibbon, Páginas de historia y de autobiografía, ed. with intro. by J. L. Borges (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1961): “Fue en las ruinas del Capitolio, mientras los frailes descalzos cantaban vísperas en el Templo de Júpiter, que vislumbró la posibilidad de escribir la declinación y la caída de Roma.”) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-008

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By this ceremony, military virtue was forever associated with religion in the imagination of the Romans. Such was the origin of the triumph, an institution which proved the principal cause of the greatness of Rome [a sentence that Gibbon took directly from Montesquieu]. Three hundred and twenty triumphs raised her to that exaltation, which she had attained under the reign of Vespasian. I venture to submit the following reflections on the right of triumph, the road through which it proceeded, and the show itself.⁴

This meditation on the triumphal ritual, founded by Romulus after his victory over Acron, king of the Cininians,⁵ bears the date of the 28th of November 1764, which is to say just over a month after the time when Gibbon decided to write about Rome. As he was moved by a fascination that would also nurture the fantasy of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres a few years later (Romulus, Vanquisher of Acron, 1812),⁶ one of the first objects Gibbon decided to clarify before writing his History was the definition of the triumph. As John G. A. Pocock stated in his essay on “Classical and Civil History: The Transformation of Humanism,” Gibbon’s “Capitoline vision” may be used to explore another twofold theme: that of the presence of the classical paradigm in early-modern neo-Latin historiography, coupled with that of its incessant modification. Though the Enlightened historians modified and obeyed it in their own way, the tension within historiography was very much older and can be traced back to Roman culture itself. To state the paradigm first, in a form which Gibbon knew and recognised in his writings, ‘history’ was by a powerful convention supposed to be a record of the deeds of great men, or of great peoples in the persons of their kings, captains and magistrates, written by the protagonists themselves, or by participants in or witnesses of their actions, and preserved in writing and in memory.⁷

It now seems possible to hazard that, respecting all the necessary differences, a similar claim can be made for Petrarch. As will be recalled here, Laura’s poet experienced his own moment of fascination in front of the Capitoline ruins, his own “Capitoline vision,” in his Familiares VI, 2, where he described his walk through the Eternal City. His fascination for that place becomes evident when we think that it was there where he wanted to be crowned as a poeta laureatus, thereby inscribing his personal history within the frame of general history. But unlike Gibbon, Petrarch did not primarily consider himself a simple historian, but rather the servator of the

 Edward Gibbon. Miscellaneous Works … with Memoirs of his Life and Writings. Composed by himself: Illustrated from his Letters, with occasional Notes and Narrative, by John Lord Sheffield (Dublin: P. Wogan, L. White, et al., 1796), 123 – 24.  On the origins of the triumphal rite, see Lawrence A. Springer, “The Cult and Temple of Jupiter Feretrius,” The Classical Journal 50.1 (1954): 27– 32; Gilbert Charles-Picard, Les trophées romains. Contribution à l’histoire de la religion et de l’art triomphal de Rome (Paris: De Boccard, 1957); Larissa Bonfante Warren, “Roman Triumphs and Etruscan Kings: The Changing Face of the Triumph,” The Journal of Roman Studies 60 (1970): 49 – 66; and Dennis Pausch, “Der Aitiologische Romulus: Historisches Interesse und literarische Form in Livius’ Darstellung der Königszeit,” Hermes 136.1 (2008): 38 – 60.  Now in Paris, at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.  J. G. A. Pocock, “Classical and Civil History.”

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Roman memory, in a way analogous to Livy’s when he reconstructed – and transformed – Roman history in order to serve Augustus’s re-foundational interests. This led Petrarch, as I will try to show, to a double transformation of the antique triumphal rite, both historical (in the De viris illustribus) and fictional (in the Triumphi), which opened new spaces to a mental reconstruction of ancient Rome. This would allow Petrarch and his humanistic heirs to develop a coherent vision of ancient history, based on a constant meditation on the ritual of the triumph. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, inter alia thanks to the influence of Petrarch’s vision of classical military imagery through the De viris illustribus and the Triumphi, erudite fascination for the Roman triumphs would constantly grow. This phenomenon, which will only be sketched here, happened both in Italy and outside of Italy, in France, Spain, and England as well as in the Holy Roman Empire. Each time, Petrarch initially had the role of a catalyst and then, gradually, got left in the background, not without having heavily supported the rebirth of Roman triumphal imagery, which was at the heart of his vision of the history of antiquity.

2 “Haec Domus Omnium Triumphorum”: Petrarch’s Familiares VI, 2 In order to analyse Petrarch’s vision of Rome as an equivalent to Gibbon’s, it is necessary to recall that Theodor E. Mommsen already saw a possible parallel with Gibbon’s text:⁸ the letter Familiares VI, 2, written on 30 November 1341, shortly after the poet’s second visit to Rome when he was crowned as a poeta laureatus, and sent to his friend the Dominican friar Giovanni Colonna.⁹ The topic of the letter is twofold: “non sectas amandas esse sed verum” and “de locis insignibus urbis Romae.” The epigraph of this paper, “Haec domus omnium triumphorum” (“here is the house of all the triumphs”), is borrowed from this letter, where Petrarch tells his readers – potentially, all the future humanists – how he strolled among the ruins of the old Rome. The first part of the letter, of Augustinian inspiration, begins with “Deambulabamus Rome soli…,” whereas the second (“de locis insignibus urbis Romae”) begins with “Vagabamur pariter in illa urbe….” The entire description of the visit revolves around the long list of the monuments he visited, a list that does not follow a geographical order, which would have been the one followed during the visit, but a chronological one, mainly supported by quotations from Livy’s Ab urbe condita. Thus, the important point is not how Petrarch sees the city, but how he

 See Theodor E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’,” Speculum 17.2 (1942): 226 – 42.  We quote this letter according to Pétrarque, Lettres familières, ed. U. Dotti, trans. A. Longpré et al., vol. II, IV-VII (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), 244– 55. See Jean-Yves Boriaud, “L’image de Rome dans la lettre Familière, VI, 2,” Les Cahiers de l’humanisme 3 (2004): 57– 66.

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thinks of it, how he contemplates it mentally.¹⁰ He projects his memory upon the object by the historical event that the historians, and especially Livy, associated with it: We used to wander together in that great city, which though it appeared empty because of its vast size, had a huge population. And we would wander not only in the city itself but around it, and at each step there was something present which would excite our tongue and mind: here was the palace of Evander, the shrine of Carmentis, here the Cave of Cacus, there the famous she-wolf and fig tree of Rumina with the more apt surname of Romulus …¹¹

In this opening, Petrarch relies on Livy, sometimes literally, as here: “et ruminalis ficus, veriori cognomine Romularis,” which is a quote, a spolium, of Livy I, 4, 5: “ubi nunc Ruminalis est, Romularem vocatam ferunt.” Petrarch follows Livy’s text, mainly the first book, but also the fourth book at some points. It is necessary to focus on the passage where Petrarch mentions the creation of the ritual of the triumph and passes to his interpretation of this episode: “… here is the temple of Jupiter Feretrius; this was the temple of Jupiter, this was the home of all the triumphs (haec domus omnium triumphorum).”¹² At this point, after mentioning the temple of Jupiter, the geographical clarity of his evocation becomes somehow blurred, and Petrarch, by referring to a more general vision of the Capitoline Hill, places himself at some distance from Livy and recalls some of the great Roman victories celebrated there, before extending his gaze to other monuments located down the hill, but strongly related to the topic of the triumph: here Perses was brought, from here Hannibal was driven away, here Jugurtha was destroyed as some believe, others indeed believe that he was slain in prison. Here Caesar triumphed, here he

 The point that cannot be explored here in detail is how the Triumphi must be read not only as a poetry of memory (as proposed by Finotti), but as a poem that tried to overcome the problematic status of the image articulated by Petrarch in his Secret. This point has been thoroughly discussed in two essays by Bertolani, who showed Petrarch’s reliance upon an Augustinian conception of the image. See Fabio Finotti, “The Poem of Memory,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 63 – 83; Maria Cecilia Bertolani, Il corpo glorioso. Studi sui “Trionfi” del Petrarca (Rome: Carocci, 2001); and Maria Cecilia Bertolani, Petrarca e la visione dell’eterno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). On Petrarch’s “art of memory,” see Lina Bolzoni, “Note su lettura e memoria in Petrarca,” Paragone 55 (2004): 54– 56, at 25 – 49; Andrea Torre, Petrarcheschi segni di memoria: spie, postille, metafore (Pisa: Scuola Normale di Pisa, 2007); and, recently, Juan Miguel Valero Moreno, “El comentario como lugar de la memoria poética. Hacia el Commento sopra i Trionfi de Bernardo Ilicino,” in Disciplinare la memoria. Strumenti e pratiche nella cultura scritta (secc. XVI-XVIII), ed. M. Guercio, M. G. Tavoni, P. Tinti and P. Vecchi (Bologna: Patròn, 2014), 139 – 62.  Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, I – VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York: Italica Press, 2005), 291: “… Vagabamur pariter in illa urbe tam magna, quae cum propter spatium vacua videatur, populum habet immensum; nec in urbe tantum, sed circa urbem vagabamur, aderatque per singulos passus quod linguam atque animum excitaret: hic Evandri regia, hic Carmentis aedis, hic Caci spelunca, hic lupa nutrix et ruminalis ficus, veriori cognomine romularis.”  Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 292: “hoc Feretrii Iovis templum; haec fuerat cella Iovis, haec domus omnium triumphorum.”

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perished. In this temple Augustus viewed the prostrate kings and the whole world at his feet; here is the arch of Pompeius, here is the portico, here is the Cimbrian arch of Marius. There is Trajan’s Column where he alone of all the emperors, according to Eusebius, is buried inside the city …¹³

The Temple of Jupiter Feretrius thus becomes the turning point of the description. The account of what Petrarch could know about the temple of Jupiter Feretrius and the spolia opima helps to understand why it is at that point of his evocation of the Capitoline Hill that he begins to broaden the historical perspective. The right to dedicate the spolia opima, that is to say, to reach the same glory as Romulus, became indeed the greatest of the Roman distinctions, only achieved by A. Cornelius Cossus in 437 BCE and by M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 BCE, as mentioned by Livy.

3 The Spolia Opima in Parisianus Latinus 5690 Petrarch’s mention of this temple, located in Rome at the place of his own coronation, his laureatio (on 8 April 1341), appears to be especially important if one considers the long-lasting influence of his work on Livy’s text. Particular attention has to be paid to one manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Parisianus latinus 5690, which is a fundamental document for the comprehension of Petrarch’s intellectual work, because it shows how, in his readings of Livy, Petrarch used the older commentary of the text by the French scholar Nicolas Trevet, from which his friend Landolf Colonna (Giovanni Colonna’s uncle) copied many passages.¹⁴ Livy makes reference to the triumphal ritual in different passages of his Ab urbe condita. The ritual of the spolia opima deserves special mention, as the right to dedicate the spolia, the spoils taken from an enemy general who had been slain in single combat by a Roman general, was the highest honour a Roman citizen could achieve. The Roman historian mentions it only three times. First in I, 10, when Romulus founded the temple of Jupiter Feretrius: This state (the Cæninensians), therefore, alone, made an irruption into the Roman territories; but while they carried on their ravages in a disorderly manner, Romulus met them, and, without much difficulty, taught them that rage without strength avails but little. He routed and dispersed

 Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 292: “huc compulsus est Perses, hinc repulsus est Hannibal; hinc impulsus est Iugurtha, ut quidam opinantur, alii vero in carcere illum necant. Hic triumphavit Caesar, hic periit. Hoc Augustus in templo reges affusos et tributarium orbem vidit; hic Pompeii arcus, haec porticus, hoc Marii Cimbrum fuit. Haec Traiani columna, ubi ille unus omnium imperatorum, ut ait Eusebius, intra urbem est sepultus.”  See Giuseppe Billanovich, “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 137– 208; and esp. Reliquiarum servator. Il manoscritto Parigino latino 5690 e la storia di Roma nel Livio dei Colonna e di Francesco Petrarca, ed. Marcello Ciccuto, Giuliana Crevatin, and Enrico Fenzi, with presentation by Francisco Rico (Pisa: Scuola Normale di Pisa, 2012).

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their army; pursued it in its flight; slew their king in the battle, and seized his spoils; after which he made himself master of their city at the first assault. From thence he led home his victorious troops; and being not only capable of performing splendid actions, but also fond of displaying those actions to advantage, he marched up in procession to the Capitol, carrying on a frame, properly constructed for the purpose, the spoils of the enemy’s general whom he had slain; and there laying them down under an oak, which the shepherds accounted sacred, he, at the same time, while he offered this present, marked out with his eye the bounds of a temple for Jupiter, to whom he gave a new name, saying, ‘Jupiter Feretrius, in acknowledgment of the victory which I have obtained, I, Romulus the king, offer to thee these royal arms, and dedicate a temple to thee on that spot which I have now measured out in my mind, to be a repository for those grand spoils, which, after my example, generals in future times shall offer, on slaying the kings and generals of their enemies.’ This was the origin of that temple which was the first consecrated in Rome. Accordingly, it pleased the gods so to order, that neither the prediction of the founder of the temple, intimating that future generals should carry spoils thither, should prove erroneous, nor that the honour of making such offerings should be rendered common, by being imparted to many. In after times, during so many years, and so many wars, there have been only two instances of the grand spoils being obtained; so rare was the attainment of that high honour. ¹⁵

The Frenchman Trevet remarked on this passage, and Landolf Colonna copied it in the margins of Livy’s text. But Trevet only commented on the first and third books of Livy’s Decades, because he did not know the fourth book, whereas Petrarch did. That is why, in his own annotations, Petrarch mostly focused upon the fourth book, where the Roman historian twice recalls the story of Aulus Cornelius Cossus, which turned out to be somehow problematic (about Livy IV, 19, 5, Petrarch remarks, “detracta spolia et abscissum caput” and, about Livy IV, 20, 5, he writes: “hanc ipsam opinionem sequitur M. Emilius in oratione 3a dictature infra eodem libro”).¹⁶ Petrarch notices the historical problem Livy faced here: Cornelius Cossus was only a tribunus militum, not a consul, and the honour of dedicating the spolia opima was in theory reserved to consuls. Cornelius Cossus would become consul only nine years later and should not have deserved this distinction. Nevertheless, Augustus himself claimed that Cornelius Cossus had been a consul, and that is why Livy accepted this version. The historian’s remark acknowledges the importance of Augustus’s influence and, in fact, places his own history under the protection of the imperial power, under his auctoritas. ¹⁷ Livy himself, in a passage just after the one commented upon by Petrarch about the spolia opima, calls the emperor “restorer (restitutor) and founder (conditor) of all our temples” (IV, 20, 7). At the suggestion of Atticus, Augustus indeed rebuilt the temple of Jupiter Feretrius around 31 BCE, which had been neglected and even lost its roof.  Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome by Titus Livius. Translated from the Original with Notes and Illustrations by George Baker, A.M. First American, from the Last London Edition, in Six Volumes (New York: Peter A. Mesier et al., 1823), vol. 1. I have added the final emphasis in the quotation.  See Reliquiarum servitor, ed. Ciccuto, Crevatin, and Fenzi.  See Hermann Dessau, “Livius und Augustus,” Hermes 41.1 (1906): 142– 51; and Dylan Sailor, “Dirty Linen, Fabrication, and the Authorities of Livy and Augustus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 136.2 (2006): 329 – 88.

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Livy’s history is a reconstruction, and as such a transformation, of the history of early Rome: by preserving the memory of the res gestae, he did the same as Augustus did by reconstructing the old temples, as the new founder of Rome, the new Romulus.¹⁸ Recent research also stresses how Augustus, by redefining the function of the triumphal pomp within the frame of his imperial project, connected it strongly with the use of the galleries of summi viri and of Roman epigraphy itself.¹⁹ We should also recall that a statue of Romulus with the spolia opima was situated in a very important location of the Forum Augustum. In this sense, it can be said that Livy himself created the frame for the reading of the antique triumphs by the humanists of the Renaissance – especially by Petrarch. Livy’s mention of the spolia opima was problematic, and Petrarch could not ignore the responsibility of Augustus’s auctoritas in the re-foundation of the temple and his rhetorical mobilisation of the antique Roman pietas for his imperial purposes. Augustus, as a founder, was somehow a model for Petrarch’s self-fashioning, for the recreation of his own image. It has been suggested how Petrarch used Augustus’s life by Suetonius to give form to some autobiographical aspects of his Letter to Posterity. ²⁰ We also know how much Petrarch was interested in Augustus’s insistence on organizing and dating each of his letters, as reported by Suetonius: he applied this method in his own letters and in the painstaking dating of his manuscripts.²¹ This is also the reason why Petrarch dated the ultimate but not definitive version of his

 See Harriet I. Flower, “The Tradition of the Spolia Opima: M. Claudius Marcellus and Augustus,” Classical Antiquity 19.1 (2000): 34– 64, esp. 59: “The spolia opima appear as a tradition ‘reinvented’ to suit the tastes and concerns of Romans at the critical period of transition from Republic to Principate. Consequently, they were associated both with old-fashioned ‘republican’ aspirations and also with the iconography and self-definition of the new ruling family. Augustus himself was influenced by traditions about the career and achievements of M. Claudius Marcellus, perhaps beginning while he was still a child. A positive tradition about Marcellus as a great Roman hero was celebrated by close relatives and by friends of the future princeps. Augustus’ interest in Marcellus helps to explain his special focus on the spolia opima as a significant and hallowed Roman tradition. In this context other leading Romans considered dedicating such spolia, notably Crassus and the elder Drusus.”  See Géza Alföldy, “Augustus und die Inschriften: Tradition und Innovation. Die Geburt der imperialen Epigraphik,” Gymnasium 98 (1991): 289 – 324; Tanja Itgenshorst, “Augustus und der republikanische Triumph. Triumphalfasten und summi viri-Galerie als Instrumente der imperialen Machtsicherung,” Hermes. Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie 132 (2004): 436 – 58; and Tanja Itgenshorst, Tota illa pompa. Der Triumph in der römischen Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 219 ff.  See Martin McLaughlin, “Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance,” in Mapping Lives. The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St. Clair, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37– 60; and Marziano Guglielminetti, Memoria e scrittura: l’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 150 – 51.  See the brief description of Oxford, Exeter College, Ms. 186, fol. 16r by Martin McLaughlin, “Petrarch: Between Two Ages, between Two Languages,” in Italy’s Three Crowns. Reading Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Martin McLaughlin (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007), 23 – 38, here 30 – 32. About this manuscript, one of the four or five manuscripts of Suetonius that Petrarch owned, see Giuseppe Billanovich, “Nella biblioteca del Petrarca. II: un altro Suetonio del Petrarca (Oxford, Exeter College, 186),” Italia medioevale e umanistica 3 (1960): 28 – 58.

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Triumphi on the 12th of February 1374, a few months before his death (the 19th of July 1374). In order to understand the importance of all this, one should also think of Augustus’s auctoritas as reflected in the works of the poets of his time: Horace’s Carmen saeculare (written to be delivered on the same Capitoline Hill), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Propertius’s fourth book of Elegies (Elegy IV, 10 is about the temple of Jupiter Feretrius).²² The Latin poetry Petrarch tried to recreate mainly implied a return to Augustus’s poets. The authority of their poetry reflected the emperor’s authority,²³ and therefore he needed the consolidation of his status as imperator – which required, as it appears through Livy’s hesitations, the symbolism of the spolia opima. ²⁴ This was especially evident in Virgil’s verses that celebrate Marcellus’s triumph (Anchises is speaking): Aspice, ut insignis spoliis Marcellus opimis Ingreditur, victorque viros supereminet omnis! Hic rem Romanam magno turbante tumultu Sistet eques, sternet Poenos, Gallumque rebellem, Tertiaque, arma patri suspendet capta Quirino. (Aeneid, VI, 855 ff.)²⁵

The knowledge Petrarch had of the spolia opima was based mainly on Livy and on Florus.²⁶ The other ancient sources on the subject – Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities (written in the same period as Livy’s Decades), or Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia, or, later, Appian of Alexandria’s Roman History – would be mentioned by some of the commentators of the Triumphi during the Quattrocento, but not by Petrarch himself. Through incremental shifts they cause in the understanding of the text, these commentators encourage a general movement towards a more erudite and less allegorical reception of Petrarch’s text.

 On Propertius, see Jennifer Ingleheart, “Propertius 4.10 and the End of the ‘Aeneid’: Augustus, the ‘Spolia Opima’ and the Right to Remain Silent,” Greece & Rome 54.1 (2007): 61– 81; and Myrto Garani, “Propertius’ Temple of Jupiter Feretrius and the Spolia Opima (4.10): A Poem Not to Be Read?,” L’antiquité classique 76 (2007): 99 – 117.  About the Latin notion of auctoritas, see Richard Heinze, “Auctoritas,” Hermes 60 (1925): 348 – 66, reprinted in Vom Geist des Römertums, ed. Erich Burck, 4th edn. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 43 – 58.  See S. J. Harrison, “Augustus, the Poets, and the Spolia Opima,” The Classical Quarterly 39.2 (1989): 408 – 14.  About the relation between Virgil and Augustus’s rehabilitation of the religious aspect of the rite of the spolia opima, see Michael C. J. Putnam, “Romulus Tropaeophorus (Aeneid 6.779 – 80),” The Classical Quarterly 35.1 (1985): 237– 40.  See Petrarch’s Familiares, XVII, 5, 13, where he quotes directly Florus, Epitome, I, 20, 5 when recounting the death of Viridomarus at the hands of Claudius Marcellus (Pétrarque, Lettres familières, 177: “Marcellus olim dux romanus, ceso Insubrium rege Gallorum Viridomaro, ‘tertia opima spolia’ de ducibus hostium reportavit”).

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Another complementary source for Petrarch’s knowledge of the spolia opima would be some of the silver coins that were stamped under Augustus and restored under Trajan’s reign in order to celebrate Marcus Claudius Marcellus,²⁷ well known in the sixteenth century,²⁸ but it is difficult to know if they had already come into the hands of Petrarch, who was a great numismatist.²⁹

4 The Spolia in the De viris illustribus and in the Triumphi When, in his Letter to Giovanni Colonna (Familiares, VI, 2), Petrarch wrote about the Temple of Jupiter Feretrius, he had in mind the spolia opima. Petrarch mentions them at different places in his oeuvre and, especially, in his two parallel works: the De viris illustribus and the Triumphi, which are, as Guido Martellotti showed, the literary counterpart of the De viris illustribus. Both of them draw upon Petrarch’s readings of Livy, both were planned at the beginning of the 1350s, and both underwent strong modifications until his death in 1374, at which point they remained unfinished.³⁰ The spolia appear in at least two places of the De viris illustribus: in chapter I, De Romulo, 21, and in chapter XIX, De Marco Mario Marcello, 1, where Petrarch mentions the spolia twice. First Petrarch quotes Virgil (Aeneid, VI, 855 – 56, as quoted before): “aspice, ut insignis spoliis Marcellus opimis / ingreditur, ,victorque viros supereminet

 Harold Mattingly and Edward A. Sydenham, The Roman Imperial Coinage, vol. 2: Vespasian to Hadrian (London: Spink & Son, 1926), 310, nr. 809.  The knowledge of these coins during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is proved by the image on the reverse of the coin, which represented Claudius Marcellus bearing Viridomarus’s spolia opima to the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. Exactly the same scene, with the same disposition and the same details, including the orientation of Claudius Marcellus, with the sole difference of the more detailed representation of the spolia themselves, also appears as an engraving that serves as an illustration of the commentaries that Blaise de Vigenère wrote about Livy’s same passage, Les Decades, qui se trouvent, de Tite-Live, mises en langue françoise (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1583), col. 682. A later edition, Les Décades qui se trouvent de Tite-Live en françois (Paris: Chez la Veufve L’Angelier, 1617), col. 676, preserves exactly the same illustration. On Vigenère’s commentary and his use of the reverse of the coins, see Richard Crescenzo, “La traduction commentée des Décades de Tite-Live par Blaise de Vigenère: un dialogue avec l’Europe humaniste des ‘antiquaires’,” in République des lettres, république des arts. Mélanges en l’honneur de Marc Fumaroli, C. Mouchel and C. Nativel, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 445 (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 59 – 82. Vigenère also praises the value of numismatic knowledge for the reconstitution of antiquity (Les Decades, col. 1493): “Or ce fait des medailles est un cas à part qui meriteroit un juste volume; tant il y a de choses à considerer là-dessus. Et certes, nous leur sommes fort obligez, car sans cela nous demourerions en tenebres d’infinies choses de l’antiquité romaine qui nous sont revelees par là; et lesquelles toutes les escriptures du monde ne nous sçauroient si bien representer que font ces revers.”  We know that Petrarch was especially interested in coins of the imperial period – see Alessandro Magnaguti, “Il Petrarca numismatico,” Rivista italiana di numismatica 20 (1907): 155 – 57.  See Francesco Petrarca, De viris illustribus, ed. Guido Martellotti (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1964).

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omnis.…” Virgil’s verses suggest the image of the triumphator in a way that announces the descriptions Petrarch will give of the crowd that surrounds the triumphal chariots. The second reference Petrarch makes to the spolia opima is to be found in chapter XIX, De Marco Claudio Marcello, 6 (“non modo uictoriam insignem sed opima etiam spolia cesi regis tertius a Romulo Ioui Feretrio reportauit”). The importance of Marcus Claudius Marcellus in Livy’s Decades (and therefore in Petrarch’s vision of Roman history) was due not only to his own triumphs, but also to the fact that he was the ancestor of the homonymous Marcus Claudius Marcellus, thought by Augustus to become his heir, until his early death ended that plan. Petrarch was, as he liked to call himself, a conservator or saviour of relics (“reliquiarum servator”).³¹ This opens a possible reading of the Triumphi, not as a dream, but as a vision, in the medieval sense, which is not only the allegorical vision of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. The most direct model for the conception of the Triumphi is to be found, as Guido Martellotti showed, in Ovid, Amores, I, 2,³² but they are also, in their initial impetus, a vision of Rome servata or even restituta – in other words, the true vision of antiquity.³³ The beginning of the Triumphus Cupidinis may thus be read not only as a recreation of Ovid, but also, within a more general perspective, as a vernacular transformation of Petrarch’s “Capitoline vision” of Familiares, VI, 2: Al tempo che rinnova i miei sospiri per la dolce memoria di quel giorno che fu principio a sì lunghi martiri, già il sole al Toro l’uno e l’altro corno scaldava, e la fanciulla di Titone correa gelata al suo usato soggiorno. Amor, gli sdegni, e ’l pianto, e la stagione ricondotto m’aveano al chiuso loco ov’ogni fascio il cor lasso ripone. Ivi fra l’erbe, già del pianger fioco, vinto dal sonno, vidi una gran luce, e dentro, assai dolor con breve gioco, vidi un vittorïoso e sommo duce pur com’un di color che ’n Campidoglio triunfal carro a gran gloria conduce. I’ che gioir di tal vista non soglio per lo secol noioso in ch’i’ mi trovo,

5

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15

 See Roland Béhar, “Petrarca y la restauración de la humanitas antigua: el fragmento y el sueño de la integridad perdida,” in Teoría del Humanismo, ed. Pedro Aullón de Haro (Madrid: Verbum, 2010), 4:409 – 75.  See Guido Martellotti, “Il Triumphus Cupidinis in Ovidio e nel Petrarca,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 8 (1978): 159 – 65, then in Martellotti, Scritti petrarcheschi (Padua: Antenore, 1983), 517– 24. Angelo Poliziano already recognized this imitation (Nutricia, v. 723: “cupidineum repetit Petrarcha triumphum”).  See Francisco Rico, El sueño del humanismo. De Petrarca a Erasmo (Barcelona: Destino, 2002).

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voto d’ogni valor, pien d’ogni orgoglio, l’abito in vista sì leggiadro e novo mirai, alzando gli occhi gravi e stanchi, ch’altro diletto che ’mparar non provo …

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Against the sad memory of his love for Laura, Petrarch constructs a vision, underscored by the repetition of deictics and verba videndi: ivi, vidi, vidi, tal vista, vista sì leggiadra, mirai, alzando gli occhi…. The entire construction of the initial scene has been read as a variation upon a topic that can be found, for example, in the Roman de la Rose (a manuscript of which Petrarch sent to a friend in the same years he was writing the Triumphi, at the beginning of the 1350s). But we should also consider the striking similarity between the new view, which opens the fictional space of the Triumphi, and the gaze that has initially been recalled, the gaze of marvel in Petrarch’s Capitoline vision in his Familiares VI,2. The remarkable abundance of deictics in both passages suggests that Petrarch used this rhetorical device as a way to evoke, in his reader’s mind, the greatness of Rome’s past while seeing the present Rome. It has been shown that the walk among the ruins of Rome cannot possibly be done, geographically speaking. If it is impossible in reality, we have to assume that it is an imaginary one or, rather, a “fantastic” one – a walk through phantasmata, of which the vernacular literary recreation can be found in the unfinished Triumphi. It should be mentioned that there is no consensus among scholars of Petrarch’s work about the date at which he began writing the Triumphi. Whereas most of them think that Petrarch probably began around 1352, others hold that he could already have conceived his project during the 1340s, that is to say, before the Black Death (1348) and at the time of his enthusiasm for his coronation in 1341. Obviously, this second option would strengthen the transformation at the heart of this paper, the link between Petrarch’s vision of the Roman triumphs and his vision of himself as a new, poetical triumphator. ³⁴ It might also be useful to recall that, in these same years, around 1343 – 1345, Petrarch gave fundamental importance to the triumph in his Rerum memorandarum libri. In the section De studio et doctrina, where he first evoked Julius Caesar and Augustus and praised them for the thoroughness of their learning and their great talent as writers, he showed how the first place, among the Latin writers, was to be given to Marcus Varro: “Neque enim nescius eram inter studia Latinorum primum tibi locum eximiamque laudem deberi.”³⁵ After recalling Varro’s significance for Cicero, which was acknowledged by Cicero himself, Petrarch reminds his readers – as he is writing a book about things that have to

 The second option has been proposed by Carlo Calcaterra and Ernest Hatch Wilkins, and accepted by Ezio Raimondi, Nicholas Mann, Marco Ariani, and Ugo Dotti. See Enrico Fenzi, Pétrarque, trans. Gérard Marino (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2015), 207.  Francesco Petrarca, Rerum memorandarum libri, ed. Giuseppe Billanovich (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1943), lib. I, 14, 1.

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be recorded (rerum memorandarum) – that Varro took part in Pompeius’s “famous triumph” after his victory against the pirates. He represented, in the words Petrarch uses to conclude his recalling of Varro, “celeberrimi particeps triumphi,” a kind of celebration of the harmony between arms and letters:³⁶ the triumph eternizes the image for the memory of humankind.

5 Erudite and Less Erudite Fifteenth-Century Readings of Petrarch’s Triumphi This is not the place to show how Petrarch transforms the triumphal imagery to elaborate or to fashion his own image, as the poeta laureatus he claimed to be since his coronation on the Capitoline Hill, on the same place where the ancient triumphs were celebrated (1341). Petrarch is, in a certain sense, the archetype of the Renaissance self-fashioned poet and writer, as has been convincingly demonstrated by the scholars who have emphasized the theme of the laurea and the etymological motivations of Laura, the new Daphne for the new Apollo (Petrarch). There lay in nuce a whole system that would represent the European image of Parnassus, with many developments up to the monumental allegories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, within a triangular relationship between the poet, the Prince, and Apollo.³⁷ Instead, what has to be analysed here is the fact that, although the triumph had never been completely forgotten during the Middle Ages³⁸ and would later be developed as a real event in public festivities, Petrarch, by offering a literary recreation of the ancient ritual, reproduces something that was already present in Livy’s antique text: the role of Augustus as the only true organizer of the triumphs, linked to his pretension to be considered as imperator. Following Augustus’s reuse of the ancient ritual of the triumph and his emphasis on the role of the summi viri galleries, Petrarch’s contemporaries also began to create, after reading his De viris illustribus, galleries that represented great men of the past, although they were probably not aware that there was a Roman model. During Petrarch’s lifetime, the relevant galleries include those of Francesco da Carrara, in Padua (1368 – 1379), and, after his death, the Saletta of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the epigrams of which were conceived by Coluccio Salutati.³⁹ This tendency to represent great men would later lead to works

 Petrarca, Rerum memorandarum libri, lib. I, 14, 6.  See Albert Schirrmeister, Triumph des Dichters. Gekrönte Intellektuelle im 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003).  See Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).  About the importance of numismatics for the revival of antiquity, see Theodor E. Mommsen, “Petrarch and the Decoration of the ‘Sala virorum illustrium’,” The Art Bulletin 34 (1952): 95 – 116; Annegrit Schmitt, “Zur Wiederbelebung der Antike im Trecento. Petrarcas Rom-Idee in ihrer Wirkung auf die Paduaner Malerei. Die methodische Einbeziehung des römischen Münzbildnisses in die Ikonographie

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like the Lives of Paolo Giovio or Giorgio Vasari, but they can also be observed during the fifteenth century in the celebration of great men of the Middle Ages like Thomas Aquinas.⁴⁰ In order to come back to the question of transformation, it is possible to make out a series of acts that Petrarch applied to the spoils, to the spolia of Romulus. He showed a strong interest in the notion of spolium, in his readings of Livy and in his own writings, De viris illustribus and Triumphi (but also in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, to refer to Laura’s beauty). In a certain way, he recognised those spoils that Romulus dedicated to Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitoline hill as the founding element of the Roman pietas that Augustus wanted to save. Therefore Petrarch only repeated the Augustan act of the restitutio and, to do so, he had to come back to the first spolia. He did the same in his Triumphi, and in the process, he created a strong vehicle for images, a Bilderfahrzeug. The images of the Triumphi he recreated gave a form, or a frame, to a vast body of knowledge – the knowledge of antiquity – which could be potentially widened. This transformation strongly supported the growing interest in classical scholarship, and it can therefore be stressed that the Triumphi were not only an allegorical poem that enjoyed great success, but that, in a way that has received less critical attention, the poem was also the means for the expansion of the Renaissance itself, if one understands by ‘Renaissance’ the revival of antiquity based on a certain vision of it. A few examples – the Italian commentaries by Ilicino and Patrizi, and the French one edited by Vérard – will show how the gradual amplification of the text of the Triumphi led to the transformation and, finally, to the overcoming of the form initially defined by Petrarch, within the larger frame of Petrarch’s fortuna during the Quattrocento.⁴¹

‘Berühmter Männer’,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 18 (1974): 167– 218; Johannes Helmrath, “Bildfunktionen der antiken Kaisermünze in der Renaissance oder die Entstehung der Numismatik aus der Faszination der Serie,” in Zentren und Wirkungsräume der Antikerezeption. Zur Bedeutung von Raum und Kommunikation für die neuzeitliche Transformation der griechisch-römischen Antike. Festschrift, ed. Kathrin Schade, Detlef Rößler, and Alfred Schäfer (Münster: Scriptorium, 2007), 77– 97, rpt. in Johannes Helmrath, Wege des Humanismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 379 – 429; Johannes Helmrath, “Die Aura des Runden: Transformationen Antiker Kaisermünzen in Sammlungen der Renaissance”, in Collecting and Arts Patronage in the Renaissance (Moscow: Political Encyclopedia, 2015), 129 – 45.  See especially Salvatore Camporeale, Christianity, Latinity, and Culture. Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, trans. Patrick Baker, ed. Patrick Baker and Christopher S. Celenza, with Lorenzo Valla’s Encomium of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 156 – 64.  See Nino Quarta, “I commentatori quattrocentisti del Petrarca,” Atti della Reale Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti di Napoli 23 (1905): 271– 325; Carlo Dionisotti, “La fortuna del Petrarca nel Quattrocento,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 17 (1974): 61– 113; and Paola Vecchi Galli, “Petrarca nel Tre-Quattrocento,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 11: La critica letteraria, ed. Enrico Malato (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2003), 161– 88. For the history of the impressions of the Triumphi, see Ernest H. Wilkins, “The Separate Fifteenth-Century Editions of the Triumphs of Petrarch,” Library Quarterly 12 (1942): 748 – 51; and Ernest H. Wilkins, “The Fifteenth-Century Editions of the Italian Poems of Pet-

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The large commentary on the Triumphi composed in Ferrara by Bernardino Ilicino (1418 – 1476) reflects this evolution perfectly. Ilicino’s commentary was not the first one: in 1473 Portilia, in Parma, published the first commentary, and Francesco Filelfo wrote one in Milan that appeared in print in 1476. However, due to its twenty-four editions between 1475 and 1521, Ilicino’s commentary, written around 1465 – 1470 and dedicated to the duke of Ferrara, Borso d’Este, was the most influential commentary on Petrarch’s Triumphi until Pietro Bembo’s editorial project in the Venetian press of Aldo Manuzio in 1501 changed the nature of the genre. This, in turn, led to a new wave of commentaries, by Vellutello, Fausto da Longiano, and Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, during the first two or three decades of the sixteenth century. During the success of Ilicino’s commentary, that is to say during the last thirty years of the fifteenth century, which coincided with the spread of Italian literature in Europe due to the Italian wars, the necessity of an erudite antiquarian knowledge prompted by Petrarch’s text led to a constant amplification of the knowledge the commentaries of the Triumphi carried. The importance of Ilicino’s commentary also derives from the fact that it was used for the French and Spanish translations of the Triumphi, and thus guided their interpretation during the first third of the sixteenth century. Ilicino’s commentary is probably the clearest, if not the best, example of this amplification, with his constant and massive use of ancient authors. The lack of a thorough study of this commentary does not allow for a comprehensive discussion here, but some points merit special attention because of the commentators’ role in the development of the erudite background of Petrarch’s Triumphi. ⁴² Recent research by Pere Bescós Prat has shown that Ilicino used not only ancient and medieval authorities, but also authors later than Petrarch, especially Leonardo Bruni, who had written a Vita di Petrarca. ⁴³ Nevertheless the works he used were, along with Bruni’s translations of Aristotle and Demosthenes, historical ones, namely the History of the Florentine People and the De primo bello Punico. Works like these contained much useful information for the explanation of some passages of Petrarch’s Triumphus Famae, for example, when they provided information about Casteggio (Clastidium), the place of M. Claudius Marcellus’s victory over Viridomarus.⁴⁴ The spolia opima thus

rarch,” Modern Philology 40 (1943): 225 – 38. About the Triumphi, see also Petrarch’s Triumphs. Allegory and Spectacle, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare A. Iannucci, University of Toronto Italian Studies, 4 (Toronto: Dovehouse, 1990).  Eric Haywood, “‘Inter urinas liber factus est’: il commento dell’Illicino ai ‘Trionfi’ del Petrarca,” in Petrarca e la cultura europea, ed. Luisa Rotondi Secchi Tarugi (Milan: Nuovi Orizzonti, 1997), 139 – 59, with further bibliography.  Pere Bescós Prat, “Leonardo Bruni in Bernardo Ilicino’s Commento to Petrarch’s Triumphi,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 76 (2014): 527– 42.  “M. Marcello come havemo detto a Clasteggio occise con le propie mano Viridomaro re di Galli et preso Milano triomphò di quelli Clasteggio et una città nella riva del Po, riportò di là le spoglie opime a Giove Pheretrio” (Francesco Petrarca, Trionfi e Canzionere (Venice: Andrea Torresano, 1484), f. 74v, qtd. by Bescós Prat, “Leonardo Bruni,” according to the exemplar in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Inc. 4478).

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remained strongly at the centre of the commentator’s attention: this is not surprising, given that the Roman triumph was the starting point of Petrarch’s poem. In the explanation of Petrarch’s vision, however, Ilicino uses the new discoveries of fifteenthcentury humanism that he could only know thanks to Bruni’s work. The commentary shows how, thanks to the fascination with Petrarch’s vision of Rome, Bruni’s humanism could be disseminated through the vernacular. The same phenomenon can be observed in other commentaries, like the one – also little studied – probably written by Francesco Patrizi.⁴⁵ The introduction of the commentary recalls, under the authority of Dionysius Halicarnassus (“secondo che scrive Dionisio Halicarnaseo, scriptore de hystorie Romane in lingua greca”), how the triumph was a key element of Roman life and how Petrarch transforms it into a moral center (“lo poeta, seguendo l’ordine naturale, a demostrare che omne nostra actione se reduce a summo bene, fa in questo libro sei triumphi, mostrando l’uno essere vincitore dell’altro…”).⁴⁶ The interesting point is that the perspective in which Petrarch’s project is embedded has shifted towards a more historical one: the starting point is the authority of a Greek historian who described the Roman ritual. The shift also reveals to the reader, a prince of Naples, what lay below the Petrarchan fascination for the spolia opima on the Capitoline Hill. It is not surprising that this antiquarian reading of the Triumphi particulary prospered in Naples.⁴⁷ One could also recall that the first French translation of the Triumphi to be printed (Paris: Barthélémy Vérard, 1514) was heavily augmented, especially in the Triumphus Famae, which became almost a separate treatise de viris illustribus. The translator sometimes used Ilicino’s commentary, which would also be translated separately into French, to amplify or to interpret Petrarch’s verses. This amplificatio,

 This commentary can be found in at least two manuscripts: Ms. A 363 of the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna, and Forster Bequest, Ms. 48. D. 28 (436) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ff. 171r-228v). Paola Campari-Cavenaghi (“Un commento quattrocentesco inedito ai Trionfi del Petrarca nel cd. A 363 della Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio,” L’Archiginnasio 16 (1921): 148 – 61) described the text of the first manuscript as anonymous, and so did Gian Carlo Alessio (“The ‘lectura’ of the Triumphi in the Fifteenth Century,” in Petrarch’s Triumphs, ed. Eisenbichler and Iannucci, 269 – 90). It can be said, however, that it comes from the south of Italy (Campari-Cavenaghi states, 14: “pare che, per la lingua, il commento appartenga alla zona centro meridionale”). Dionisotti, “La fortuna del Petrarca,” 92 n. 1, attributed it to Patrizi, also because, in Forster Bequest, Ms. 48. D. 28 (436), the text of the Triumphi follows the one of the Canzoniere with the commentary by Patrizi that had been commissioned at the Neapolitan royal court by Alfonso of Calabria. About Patrizi as a commentator of Petrarch, see Laura Paolino, “Per l’edizione del commento di Francesco Patrizi da Siena al Canzoniere di Petrarca,” Nuova rivista di letteratura italiana 2.1 (1999): 153– 311.  Campari-Cavenaghi, “Un commento quattrocentesco,” 148 – 49 and 151.  During the conference “Beyond Reception,” James Hankins also emphasized that Patrizi was one of the first humanists who adapted Greek authors into the political theory of humanism; see “The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists,” p. 105 above. This point supports the importance of Greek authors for the factual understanding of Petrarch’s verses in this commentary.

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which has been especially studied,⁴⁸ still lacks a thorough interpretation, but if one considers the above-mentioned case of M. Claudius Marcellus, it is easy to perceive the distance, around 1500, between the Italian antiquarian reading of Petrarch’s verses and their French chivalrous interpretation. The French version is as follows: Il y eut encores ung autre Clodius Marcellus ainsi q[ue] escript livius au iiiie livre et co[m]me aussi le recitent Lucius et Florius, lequel Clodius Marcellus ensemble avec Lucius Furius vainquit et supedita Propterius et surmonta les Boyens les Subriens et les Gaules lesq[ue]lz de nouveau oultre ce q[ue] avoit fait Viridomarus avoient assailly les Rommains et de cestes victoires et dessus ditz peuples co[n]quis et subiuguez aux Ro[m]mains Clodius Marcellus triumpha a Romme.⁴⁹

Any mention of the spolia opima, which would have assumed a minimal antiquarian comprehension of the Latin background, disappears here. One can also assume that the act of cutting the head and exposing it in a temple dedicated to Jupiter might seem too cruel and barbaric to a French readership that was searching to define a chivalrous code of behaviour. This reading of the passage of Petrarch’s Triumphus also explains the engraving, on the same page of the book, that constitutes a second commentary to the verse: Marcellus’ fight against Viridomarus becomes a chivalrous battle, according to a manner of reading Petrarch that was contrary to the rules of Italian humanism, but still frequent outside of the peninsula. The same chivalrous reading can be observed in the Spanish translation of the Triumphi by Antonio de Obregón, where it is said that Marcellus won in a “batalla singular.”⁵⁰

6 Conclusion The history of the interpretation of the triumphal dream-world topic created by Petrarch, which launched the strong visual tradition of the Quattrocento and, in Spain, France, and other countries, of the Cinquecento, confirms in a certain way the importance of the Triumphi for the development of the antiquarian world of the Renaissance, at least initially, when the desire for antiquity is stronger than the actual knowledge of it. The Triumphi would undergo deep transformations from the first

 See esp. Elina Suomela-Härmä, “Traducteurs et commentateurs,” in Mettre en prose aux XIVe-XVIe siècles. Approches linguistiques, philologiques, littéraires, ed. Maria Colombo Timelli, Barbara Ferrari, and Anne Schoysman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 235 – 43. For a recent synthesis of studies on the French translations of Petrarch’s Triumphi, see Roland Béhar, “Las traducciones francesas de los Petrarca (ca. 1500). Apuntes para una comparación con su recepción en la España del s. XVI,” Quaderns d’italià 20 (2015): 111– 33.  Les triumphes messire Francoys Petracque [sic], translatez de langaige tuscan en francois … (Paris: Barthélémy Vérard, 1514), f. C3r–v.  Francisco Petrarca con los seys triunfos de toscano, sacados en castellano con el comento que sobrellos se hizo (Logroño: Arnao Guillén de Brocar, 1512), f. lxxxixr.

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commentators, who filled the text with erudition and considered it as a first-rank source to spread the knowledge of antiquity among a non-humanistic audience, such as noblemen of the courts in Italy and in the whole of Europe, to the commentators who, during the Cinquecento, considered it a literary text, not a moral or didactic one. This transformation, which is a second transformation of the Roman triumph during the Renaissance, only became possible once the distance became obvious between Petrarch’s recreation of the triumphs and the Roman triumphs that were rescued by the archaeological and epigraphic sciences developed since the middle of the Quattrocento. The contrast becomes especially strong if one considers the writings the humanists dedicated in Italy to the theme of the triumph. The comparison cannot be developed here, but special attention should be accorded to the end of the Roma triumphans that the humanist Flavio Biondo (1388 – 1463) had written about the theme and dedicated to Pius II. The work became, as can be shown, the starting point of painstaking reconstructions by painters, especially by Andrea Mantegna, the erudite antiquarian who tried to reconstruct Caesar’s triumphal march. Biondo’s work became the object of great interest, and it would be published many times, and even translated into Italian.⁵¹ During the sixteenth century, other writers would try to evoke the Roman triumphal ritual. This would be the case, for example, with Onofrio Panvinio, who published a short Comentario dell’uso et ordine de’ Trionfi antichi (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1571),⁵² and also with Justus Lipsius, who left unfinished a treatise De triumphis, which would later become part of his Admiranda. ⁵³ When the duke of Mantua commissioned from Mantegna the Triumph of Caesar, when Leo X revisited his possesso of 1513 as an ancient adventus,⁵⁴ when Louis XII had the Triumphi translated into French and used the triumphal world for the purposes of celebrating his reign – both in the real entries⁵⁵ and in his iconographic self-stylisation as an emperor of antiquity⁵⁶ –, or when Maximilian I himself commis-

 See Flavio Biondo, Roma Trionfante di Biondo da Forlí, tradotta pur hora per Lucio Fauno di latino in buona lingua volgare (Venice: Michele Tramezzino il Vecchio, 1544).  Panvino is still used by Gibbon, in his Sur les Triomphes des Romains, as one of the main authorities about Roman triumphs.  About Lipsius, see Jan Papy, “An Antiquarian Scholar between Text and Image? Justus Lipsius, Humanist Education, and the Visualization of Ancient Rome,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 35 (2004): 97– 131.  For a thorough discussion, see Nicholas Temple, Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 62.  See Luisa Giordano, “Les entrées de Louis XII en Milanais,” in Passer les monts. Français en Italie – L’Italie en France (1494 – 1525), ed. J. Balsamo (Paris and Fiesole: Honoré Champion-Cadmo, 1998), 139 – 48. The interesting point is that there was a debate about whether the king had to occupy the place of the Roman general, on the triumphal chariot, or if there had to appear – as in Petrarch’s Triumphi – an allegory of the virtues that had led the king to his victory.  See Joseph Burney Trapp, “Remarques sur l’iconographie des Trionfi de Pétrarque au début du XVIe siècle français,” in La Postérité répond à Pétrarque. 1304 – 2004. Défense et illustration de l’hu-

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sioned his own (imaginary) triumph from Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer, with the triumphal chariot and the triumphal arch,⁵⁷ then Petrarch’s vision became true to a certain extent – restituta. More than the De viris illustribus, the Triumphi showed Europe the possibilities that the recreation of the ancient triumphal ritual offered. Thanks to Petrarch and his transformation of the spoils of ancient Rome, and especially of the spolia opima of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, the Roman triumph could pervade European public life, representing its sovereigns as “un di color che ’n Campidoglio / triunfal carro a gran gloria conduce.” That is probably also the reason why meditation on the triumph by Montesquieu and Gibbon would become one of the touchstones of the birth of the philosophy of history in the eighteenth century, towards the end of the period that had begun with Petrarch.

manisme. VIIe centenaire de la naissance de Pétrarque, ed. Eve Duperray (Paris: Beauchesne, 2006), 219 – 48.  See Eva Michel, “‘Zu Lob und ewiger Gedechtnus.’ Albrecht Altdorfers Triumphzug für Kaiser Maximilian I.,” in Kaiser Maximilian I. und die Kunst der Dürerzeit, ed. Eva Michel and Maria Luise Sternath (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2012), 49 – 65, with further bibliography.

Craig Kallendorf

Tradition, Reception, Transformation: Allelopoiesis and the Creation of the Humanist Virgil Any effort to understand humanism as a movement has to come to grips with the place of Virgil in Renaissance culture. Unlike most other Greek and Latin literature from antiquity, the poetry of Virgil became a school text shortly after it was published and retained its place at the center of the school curriculum through the early modern period. As the humanists sought to recover a proper understanding of the life and literature of Rome and (to a lesser extent) Greece, Virgil retained a central place in their cultural archaeology.¹ Given Virgil’s central role in Renaissance culture, it has long been assumed that the broad outlines of Virgilian reception in this period, along with a good many details, are well understood and accessible in any good research library. Recently, however, this picture has come to seem both less clear than it once appeared and more troubling. David Scott Wilson-Okamura’s Virgil in the Renaissance, for example, is a fine study of what humanist commentators thought about the most important poet of ancient Rome. Wilson-Okamura set out “to identify what seems normal, central, common … the chitchat about Virgil that could be exchanged over cocktails without fear of contradiction, because educated people had all learned more or less the same things in the course of their schooling, and could be expected to hold compatible views.”² He is struck throughout his inquiry, however, by how different these views are from ours. Humanist readers of the Eclogues focused on the quest for patronage, while readers of the Georgics stressed, of all things, purity, both moral and stylistic. When they got to the Aeneid, humanist readers allegorized the descent to the underworld as a study of how the soul is purified from vice, and they clearly did not see the final scene of the poem as the defining moment that modern criticism makes it. In other words, Wilson-Okamura was struck by what often seemed to be a troubling ‘otherness’ to the Renaissance interpretation of Virgil’s poetry, a feeling that something that should have been familiar to him had somehow been defamiliarized during the process of reception.³ It is not immediately clear why this defamiliarization should have occurred. Well into the last half of the preceding century, the process Wilson-Okamura had studied

 For Virgil’s place in Renaissance schools, see Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 31– 81.  David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48. This is a courageous book that fills a huge lacuna in scholarship and, as the comments that follow show, has helped others as well as me see more clearly what still needs to be done.  Wilson-Okamura, Virgil, 45 – 248. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-009

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was referred to as ‘the classical tradition,’ which was the title chosen by Gilbert Highet for his monumental study in 1949.⁴ Inherent in this term is the idea that the classical past can be handed across the centuries (tradere), to be received rather passively by later observers. The prevailing assumption was that the resulting chain of receptions (to take up a metaphor that is often used in this field) should generally begin with an understanding of a text that was more or less what a reader of the author’s time would have had and continue as that understanding was passed on to a succession of later readers.⁵ Sometimes the chain was broken, as the humanists pointed out, but once the break was identified, it should have been a relatively straightforward matter to take it up again and move forward. This is what Virgil’s humanist readers thought they were doing. But as scholars of the last couple of generations have noted, this process often seems to have been less straightforward than it should have been. Modern literary theory has made it clear that access to the past is often problematic, so the feeling arose that a new name was needed to acknowledge the fact that later readers often played a more active role in the transmission of the classical past than the image of a passive ‘handing over’ implies. So, in homage to the theories of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss, we are now studying ‘reception,’ – or, to problematize the process even further, ‘receptions,’ as the title of the Oxford University Press journal in this field shows.⁶ Initially it seems that the reception model might begin to explain Wilson-Okamura’s unease in the face of an interpretation of Virgilian poetry that was different from the one he was familiar with. If later readers cooperate actively in the interpretation of the texts they read, then it would stand to reason that the Renaissance Virgil might

 Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). This book has remained enormously influential, as evidenced by the fact that it was reprinted at least fourteen times before being reissued yet again in 2015, with translations into Spanish and modern Greek as well.  As Lorna Hardwick notes in Reception Studies, Greece and Rome, New Surveys in the Classics, 33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2, the image of the chain was common enough in works on the classical tradition, but it was given new life in a reception context by Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Roman Literature and Its Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), who notes that “our current interpretations of ancient texts, whether or not we are aware of it, are, in complex ways, constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected” (7). Martindale’s little book has continued to shape thinking in this field, as evidenced by “Redeeming the Text: Twenty Years On,” a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal 5/2 (2013) edited by Lorna Hardwick. Also useful are the essays in Reception and the Classics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition, ed. William Brockliss, Pramit Chaudhuri, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, and Katherine Wasdin, Yale Classical Studies, 36 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).  The fundamental works, from which countless articles and books on reception theory have sprung, are Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Responses (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Information on the Classical Receptions Journal may be found at https://academic.oup.com/crj (accessed 11 January 2018).

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be different from the Virgil of antiquity, and that today’s Virgil might be different yet. But as Wilson-Okamura’s hesitations show, reception theory has not completely replaced the assumptions that underlie the classical tradition model, nor is reception theory as it is normally practiced a sufficient underpinning for what Wilson-Okamura observed. It is one thing to acknowledge in theory that readers cooperate in creating meaning, but it requires at least one more step to accept a Neoplatonic reading of the Aeneid like that of Landino as equal in validity to a philologically oriented reading of the same poem today. In the best case scenario, we tend to privilege chains of reception that are compatible with our own reading of a poem, while in the worst case scenario, we may not even see an incompatible reading, especially if the chain that carried it broke off somewhere in the past. At the point when he was writing, Wilson-Okamura did not have a theoretical model that would allow him to embrace with equanimity the otherness that he so acutely observed and honestly reported. Such a model now exists, so I shall begin where he left off and show how a new way of doing reception can help us see, and feel comfortable with, a Renaissance Virgil that is even more radically other than the one that Wilson-Okamura described. *** A group of scholars at the Humboldt University in Berlin, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as Collaborative Research Centre 644, has been studying the problem I have described for several years now.⁷ Their project is titled “Transformations of Antiquity,” and the title is important: instead of staying with the label ‘reception,’ these sixty or so scholars, supplemented now by a half dozen sympathizers from my university, have been referring to what goes on as ‘transformation.’ The change in terminology is designed to make it easier to depart from linear concepts of unidirectional influence. Transformation posits that an object or phenomenon from the reference sphere [the earlier culture] is not static or simply established but rather is altered, generated anew, even ‘invented’ by the specific medial conditions attending any given process of transformation. Furthermore, in the act of transformative incorporation, the reception sphere itself is altered. Thus this act of incorporation cannot be understood as a simple borrowing, adoption, inscription, or documentation but rather as a constructive act that follows the rules and impulses of a specific time and culture.⁸

 Information on this project may be found at http://www.sfb-antike.de/index.php?id=248&L=6 (accessed 24 April 2015).  Lutz Bergemann, Martin Dönike, Albert Schirrmeister, Georg Toepfer, Marco Walter, and Julia Weitbrecht, “Transformation: Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels,” in Transformation: Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Lutz Bergemann, Martin Dönike, Albert Schirrmeister, Georg Toepfer, Marco Walter, and Julia Weitbrecht (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), 40, with a translation made by Patrick Baker for this volume. More extended descriptions of the transformation types referenced below, with non-Virgilian examples, may be found in this essay as well.

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Central to the concept of transformation is the idea of reciprocity, in the sense that the agents of transformation, “by selecting, adopting, or otherwise incorporating an aspect of the reference sphere, modify the reception sphere while at the same time construing the reference sphere.” Our German colleagues have created a new term, allelopoiesis, to describe what goes on here, by joining the Greek roots allelos (mutual, reciprocal) and poiesis (creation, generation). To my mind, this paradigm offers several advantages over the reception model as it is currently practiced. For one thing, the label ‘transformation’ makes it impossible to continue seeing the relationship between antiquity and the Renaissance as a passive handing over of cultural material: transformation foregrounds change and invites the scholar to investigate what is added from the reception sphere and how the change takes place. Second, the transformation paradigm focuses on a basic principle of modern historiography in the days after Hayden White, that there is no objective vantage point from which the past can be viewed, and draws out the consequences of this principle for the humanist enterprise. Each postclassical age recreates the classical past as part of its effort to see back into it, so it is best to acknowledge this explicitly and investigate how the process works. Since each postclassical age brings its own set of values, different from those of other ages, to the reading of classical texts, it stands to reason that the hybrid products that result will be different, so that otherness will be a fundamental characteristic of one period’s Virgil when viewed through the prism of a later period. It also stands to reason that no one product, including that made by us, will have a privileged ontological standing, which allows us to embrace otherness rather than be troubled by it. And finally, the transformation methodology offers specific categories through which cultural change can be understood. I would like to emphasize before taking up these categories that neither my German friends who have worked out the types of transformation, nor I, wish to impose the list that follows, or any other one, as normative. My Texas A&M colleagues were in Berlin in December of 2014 for a workshop, at which we discussed several options for collapsing the fourteen types that will be discussed next into a small number of mega-categories or for eliminating several types completely. The types are a heuristic and are valuable, I would maintain, only to the extent that they help explain observable phenomena from the past. I am not much enamored of theories that do not offer practical benefit, so that in the end, discussing transformation instead of reception only makes sense if it helps us understand humanism more thoroughly. That said, my goal in this essay is to see how the transformation categories as we now have them can help us in our thinking about the Renaissance Virgil. The fourteen types are divided into three groups, according to whether the relationship between the reception and reference spheres consists primarily of inclusion, exclusion, or recombination. I intend to take each type in turn and give an example of Virgilian transformation in Renaissance humanism that illustrates this type. I will conclude

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with a couple of observations about the method in general, as it has been applied in this test case. *** Types of inclusion involve the taking up, in various ways, of ancient material by Renaissance culture. The simplest type—the one on which the concept of ‘the classical tradition’ rests—is encapsulation, where something from the past is taken over unchanged and integrated as a self-contained whole into something else in the receiving culture. There is some uncertainty on the theoretical level as to whether this can ever really happen, but I find the category useful. The funeral catafalque of Philip II in Seville, for example, contains a line from the Aeneid: “Imperium sine fine dedi” (“To them, no Bounds of Empire I assign,” Aen. I.279).⁹ The text has been taken up verbatim by the later culture, where it is encapsulated in an object from that culture. And as Cécile Arnould and Pierre Assenmaker have shown, Renaissance rulers regularly added quotations from Virgil to the coins they had minted, as a means of legitimizing their authority and linking their rule to that of Rome.¹⁰ Even here, however, we really should be speaking of transformation instead of reception or the classical tradition, for on Philip II’s catafalque, the same object (lines from Virgil’s poem) has been transferred from divine approval of Rome and its civilizing mission to Spain, the new Rome that has taken over her divinely sanctioned imperial activity. When a reference object is detached from its original context and incorporated, largely preserved, into the reception sphere, we move from encapsulation to appropriation. A good example of this type is the humanist edition of a classical text. At the turn of the fifteenth century, for example, Virgil’s poetry was regularly printed in folio editions that contained five commentaries, those of Servius, Donatus, Antonio Mancinelli, Domizio Calderini, and Cristoforo Landino.¹¹ Two of these commentaries come from late antiquity, but even they were composed several centuries after Virgil’s poetry, and they transform him, respectively, into a model of grammar and of rhetoric. The other three commentators were Renaissance humanists, who by necessity imposed on the text they were annotating their own interests and ideas, ranging from correct linguistic usage to Florentine Neoplatonism. Virgil never appeared in his

 Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 204. The Latin text of Virgil’s poetry used throughout this essay is from P. Vergili Maronis opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). English translations, unless indicated otherwise, will be from the most influential early modern version, that of John Dryden (1631– 1700), taken from The Works of Virgil (London: Jacob Tonson, 1697), which is EW1697.1 in Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil, 1469 – 1850 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2012), 149.  Cécile Arnould and Pierre Assenmaker, “‘Vergilius in nummis’: Virgilian Quotes on Medals and Tokens Issued in the Low Countries during the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Virgil and Renaissance Culture, ed. Luke Houghton and Marco Sgarbi, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 510 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017), 63 – 83.  These folio editions are listed in Kallendorf, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions, 4– 10.

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own day accompanied by these particular commentaries, nor for that matter did he ever appear in printed book format.¹² In these Renaissance editions, Virgil’s poetry was appropriated, with the text recopied but within a Renaissance environment, both physical and intellectual, that changes it while it stays the same. When elements of the reference sphere are integrated so completely into the context of the reception sphere that they are fused together, we move from appropriation to assimilation. In its purest form, assimilation can be so complete that it becomes almost impossible to recognize the ancient material in its new Renaissance environment. This is what has happened in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Virgilian elements on the micro-level have long been seen there, from Ferdinand’s greeting of Miranda with a Virgilian line, “Most sure the goddess” (The Tempest, I.2.424; cf. “O dea certe,” “Oh goddess, surely,” Aen. I.328) to the infamous ‘widow Dido’ exchange in Act 2, Scene 1. Yet as recently as 1975, Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare omitted the Aeneid from its list of sources and analogues to The Tempest. Since then a number of scholars have shown that in fact, the Aeneid is a fundamental intertext for this play that has to be taken into account in any extended interpretation of The Tempest. ¹³ When Prospero lands on the island, he must struggle to overcome the furor within himself and establish himself as a worthy leader. In this he resembles Aeneas, but the role of alter Aeneas is divided, in that it is his son Ferdinand who falls in love with Miranda and replays with her the encounter between Aeneas and Dido. In this case their love is consummated after marriage, so that passion is properly restrained by reason. Something similar happens to Prospero, who learns to control the passion within himself and become a good leader, first on the island and later, we presume, upon his return to Milan. Shakespeare provides in both cases the positive outcome that Virgil did not, but in transforming the Aeneid, he retains a very Virgilian perception of the fragility of what has been accomplished.¹⁴ When something from the reference sphere is dressed in a form that belongs to the reception sphere, or when something from the reception sphere is endowed with a form belonging to the reference sphere, then we have an example of disjunction. As Panofsky showed many years ago, the disjunction between form and content is much more typical of the Middle Ages than the Renaissance,¹⁵ but examples occur in the

 As I have shown elsewhere, the physical form in which Virgil’s poetry is encountered has an effect on how that poetry is interpreted; see The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics, Classical Presences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).  Robert Wiltenburg, for example, concludes that “the Aeneid is the main source of the play …, the work to which Shakespeare is primarily responding, the story he is retelling” (“The ‘Aeneid’ in ‘The Tempest’,” Shakespeare Survey 29 (1987): 159).  Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 102– 26.  Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, The Gottesman Lectures, Uppsala University, 7 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960), 84.

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later period as well. One such example can be found in a woodcut that illustrates the beginning of Book 11 of the Aeneid in a Giunta edition of 1536 – 1537.¹⁶ This woodcut shows the armies of the invading Trojans and the defending Latins outside the walls of a town. The content is obviously classical, but the form is not: the soldiers wear early sixteenth-century armor, and the town does not resemble any known ruins from antiquity. One might be able to object that this picture does not reflect a Renaissance aesthetic because it was redrawn from the woodcuts in the Brant-Grüninger edition of 1502, and that this edition had been published in a part of Europe in which the Renaissance had not fully arrived.¹⁷ This would also explain the lack of perspective, which is more typical of medieval art than of that which follows. But labelling this woodcut ‘medieval’ does not bring the form into conjunction with the content, and besides, the same problem continued into woodcuts that clearly display a Renaissance aesthetic. The woodcut that occupies the same position in an Italian translation that was published in 1586 by Giacomo Cornetti in Venice, for example, depicts a town with houses that contain towers like the ones that were built on Renaissance homes in Italy to defend the inhabitants from their enemies.¹⁸ Here the content (Virgil’s poetry) is ancient, but the form in which it is presented (the illustrated edition) is Renaissance in style – disjunction. Another type of inclusion is substitution, a transformation that exchanges one cultural complex for another. As an example here, let us take the conversion of Virgil the ancient poet to Virgil the Renaissance rhetorician. Gilbert Highet claimed in the seventies that Virgil seems to have had an aversion to the techniques of formal rhetoric,¹⁹ but his Renaissance readers did not see things this way. Philipp Melanchthon, for example, analyzed the opening lines of Anna’s speech to Dido at the beginning of Book IV of the Aeneid as if they were an oration. Next to line 31, Melanchthon writes “peroratio,” indicating that this is the introduction to the speech. The marginal note next to the following line is “obiurgatio vice propositionis,” indicating that this is a complaint in place of a proposition, which follows up on Melanchthon’s opening observation that Book IV is about emotions. When Anna asks Dido whether she thinks

 Publii Virgilii Maronis poetarum principis opera … (Venice: Lucantonio Giunta, 1536 – 1537), f. 317v. A full description of this book may be found in Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil, 1470 – 1599, Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, 124 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1991), 91– 93 (nr. 68).  The woodcuts in the Brant-Grüninger edition have been described in Werner Suerbaum, Handbuch der illustrierten Vergil-Ausgaben 1502 – 1840, Bibliographien zur klassischen Philologie, 3 (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2008), 131– 57 with bibliography, and reproduced in Vergil, Aeneis, ed. Manfred Lemmer, trans. Johannes Götte (Leipzig: Heimeran, 1979).  L’opere di Vergilio … (Venice: Giacomo Cornetti, 1586), f. 221v. This book is described fully in Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil, Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, 136 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 79 – 81 (nr. 84). The interpretive issues raised by the illustrated editions of Virgil are treated more fully in Kallendorf, The Protean Virgil, 121– 51.  Gilbert Highet, The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 282 (“although Vergil knows the power of oratory, he has little praise for it”); cf. 278 – 79.

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that the shades care about matters like this (l. 34), Melanchthon writes that this argument rests in one of the rhetorical commonplaces, the “confutatio ab inutili” (“refutation from the lack of utility”).²⁰ This approach lay at the basis of the widespread Renaissance reading of the Aeneid through the filter of epideictic rhetoric, in which Aeneas was praised as a model of virtue and his opponents were condemned for the vices they exhibited.²¹ In a passage that typifies the Renaissance understanding of Virgil, Maffeo Vegio, to whom we shall return below, writes Nam cum Virgilius sub Aeneae persona virum omni virtute paaeditum, atque ipsum nunc in adversis, nunc in prosperis casibus, demonstrare voluerit, ita per Didonem feminas etiam, quibus vitam rationibus instituere deberent vel praemio laudis vel metu infamiae ac tristissimi demum interitus, omni illa sui poematis editione admonere studuit. Quae nam enim audiens illam condendis tantae urbis moenibus intentissime vacantem, iuraque et leges populis iustissime moderantem, marito etiam extincto fidem ac pacta tori conservantem, cum summa laude sua et veneratione finitimorumque omnium timore, non eius exemplo moveatur atque ad virtutis studium magnopere incendatur. (For while Virgil in the character of Aeneas wished to show a man endowed with every virtue, now in unfavorable circumstances, now in favorable ones, so also did he take pains throughout his entire poem to admonish women through Dido about the grounds through which they ought to order their lives, either for the reward of praise or in fear of a bad reputation and finally of a wretched death. For who could hear of Dido while she had time to build the walls of such a great city so earnestly, while she was administering laws for her people so justly, while she was preserving the marriage covenant faithfully even though her husband was dead, earning for herself the greatest praise and respect and the fear of all her neighbors—who, I say, would not be moved by her example and greatly aroused toward the zealous pursuit of virtue?)²²

Once the goal of epic poems was reenvisioned as the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice, the speeches in the poem became the vehicles by which this was accomplished. In other words, the techniques of one field, rhetoric, were substituted for those of another, epic poetry. The final types of inclusion are reconstruction, attempts at restoring a lost or fragmentarily preserved whole, and supplementation, where the reference elements are completed; often the two go together, as they do with the Book XIII that was written

 Melanchthon’s notes are found in Publii Vergilii Maronis opera (Lyons: Sébastien Gryphius, 1534), 193. This book, which is LW1534.1 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions, 13, survives in only one copy, which is found in a private collection in which I have been working for the last several years. Melanchthon’s commentary was reprinted regularly in the Renaissance, but often anonymously so that the presence of a work by one of Europe’s most infamous Protestants could escape the notice of the censors in Catholic countries. I am currently at work on identifying all the early printed editions of Virgil that contain this commentary, as part of my contribution to the Virgil volumes of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum.  On this critical approach, see Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989).  Maffeo Vegio, De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus, ed. M. W. Fanning and A. S. Sullivan, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1931– 1936), 1:87– 88.

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by the same Maffeo Vegio whose epideictic interpretation of the Aeneid was just quoted. The ancient biographies indicate that Virgil left the Aeneid unfinished at his death. This is generally understood now to mean that the half lines, for example, would have been filled out in revision but that the broad outlines of the poem were intended to stand as we now have them. Renaissance readers, however, approached the matter differently. If the poem, as the prevalent epideictic reading suggested, was designed to praise virtue and condemn vice, then Virgil left some key ethical loose ends to be tied up after Aeneas killed Turnus. Vegio’s Book XIII did this, by describing how Aeneas accepts the surrender of the Latins with grace and offers them generous terms, after which Turnus is buried, Aeneas marries Lavinia, and the way is paved for the foundation of Rome. Vegio’s supplement makes a clear distinction between the virtue of Aeneas and the ethical failings of Turnus, which suggests not only that the readers who kept this thirteenth book in print throughout the Renaissance believed that the plot line of the Aeneid needed completion, but that its ethical framework did as well.²³ Transformation can proceed by exclusion as well as inclusion; there are four easily identifiable types here. The first involves focalization / obfuscation, in which the agent’s interest is concentrated on a specific object while other aspects surrounding it are neglected or obfuscated. The Christian reading of Eclogue 4 is a clear example of this. The poem reads in part: Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto. tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, casta fave Lucina: tuus iam regnat Apollo.

(lines 4– 10)

(Now hath the last age come, foretold by the Sibyl of Cumae; Mightily now upriseth a new millennial epoch. Justice the Maid comes back, and the ancient glory of Saturn; Now is the seed of man sent down from heavenly places. Smile on the new-born Babe, for a new earth greets his appearing; Smile, O pure Lucina; the iron age is departing, Cometh the age of gold; now reigns thy patron Apollo.)²⁴

 Book XIII can be read in Maffeo Vegio, Short Epics, ed. and trans. Michael C. J. Putnam, with James Hankins, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 15 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2– 41, with bibliography. Vegio’s was not the only supplement, with other efforts made by Pier Candido Decembrio (1419; only 89 verses), Jan van Foreest (1651), and C. S. Villanova (1698). See Kallendorf, In Praise, 204, n. 19.  The translation here is that of Thomas Fletcher Royds, Virgil and Isaiah: A Study of the Pollio, with Translation, Notes, and Appendices (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1918), with the translation of Eclogue 4 on 74– 85.

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Virgil died in 19 BC, which makes a Christian interpretation of these lines less than obvious. However for a culture in which it was difficult, if not impossible, not to see the world through the lens of the Bible, many readers thought either that Virgil was somehow able to see through the glass darkly into the coming Christian order, or that the poem contained a Christian truth that he did not see but that his Renaissance readers did. Scholars today would agree that the poem participates in a general yearning for a better world that gripped Mediterranean culture during the time immediately before and after Christ’s birth, but the Christian interpretation of this poem, which Francesco Petrarca, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Antonio Mancinelli all accepted to some extent, goes well beyond what modern scholarship finds acceptable.²⁵ This interpretation represents a focalization around certain lines accompanied by an obfuscation of evidence to the contrary. Sometimes this process went further, to the point that the agents of transformation refused to acknowledge certain things. An example of ignorance can be found in Erasmus’s reading of Eclogue 2. The poem begins, “Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin” (“Young Corydon, th’ unhappy Shepherd Swain, / The Fair Alexis lov’d, but lov’d in vain”; l. 1), and toward the end the point is made explicitly again: “me tamen urit amor: quis enim modus adsit amori?” (“I wish for balmy Sleep, but wish in vain: / Love has no bounds in Pleasure, or in Pain”? l. 68). The intervening lines depict Corydon’s effort to woo Alexis with everything from protestations of affection to generous gifts. Today this poem is widely considered to describe a homosexual relationship, but that was not the prevalent reading in the Renaissance. Erasmus, for example, argued that it offered a picture of friendship, where gifts were given and sentiments exchanged between men without any sexual overtones.²⁶ It is hard to say whether this ignorance is conscious or unconscious, but in either case, Erasmus’s interpretation results in a sanitized reading that avoided making Virgil a proponent of relationships that were forbidden by Renaissance Christianity. Another example of exclusion is creative destruction, where elements from the reference sphere were deliberately destroyed to allow for the creation of something new. An example of how this works can be seen in the base line reading of Virgil’s poetry in the Renaissance, the way in which readers were taught in school to appreciate the poems. If we look at the marginal notes printed in the Renaissance editions of Virgil and at those added by hand by readers from this period, we see that they are searching for brief passages that were memorable for their moral content or stylistic

 The Christian interpretation of Eclogue 4 is discussed at greater length in Kallendorf, The Protean Virgil, 48 – 58.  Erasmus’s was not the only attempt to neutralize the sexual overtones of this poem; see WilsonOkamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 113 – 15. Steven Orgel, however, offers a fascinating account of a teacher who appears to have been more open-minded in his interpretation than Erasmus and whose remarks were recorded by his students in a copy of the 1507 Cologne edition of the Bucolics (LE1507.1); see The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30 – 35.

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felicity. At the beginning of Aeneid V, for example, an early reader of a 1567 Frankfurt octavo edition has marked off “superat quoniam fortuna, sequamur / Quoque vocat, vertamus iter” (“’Tis Fate diverts our Course; and Fate we must obey”; V.22 – 23; f. 114v, p. 378), and a little farther on he has underlined “Tum vero exarsit iuveni dolor ossibus ingens” (“Cry’d out for Anger, and his Hair he tore”; V.172; f. 117r, p. 384). The anonymous early reader continues the process further on by underlining figures of speech and adding their names in the margin in ink, as when he wrote “comparatio” next to Aen. V.588 – 91 (f. 124r), when the maneuvers of the Trojan youth are compared in complexity to a Cretan labyrinth. One of his favorites was “hypallage,” in which a description is transferred from the word it should describe to another word, as in “multa grandine nymbi / culminibus crepitant” (“A ratling Tempest, and a Hail of Blows”; V.458 – 49; f. 122r, p. 395).²⁷ Readers like this were following the widespread Renaissance practice of reading for commonplaces, phrases that could be isolated, removed, and retained as gems of wisdom or stylistic felicity.²⁸ These phrases in turn were collected into commonplace books, in which lines from Virgil’s poetry were listed below headings like ‘love,’ ‘courage’, and ‘anger.’ Some of these commonplace books mixed Virgilian phrases in with lines from other works of literature, but a dozen collections with titles like Versuum ex Virgilio proverbialium collectanea, Thesaurus rerum et verborum Virgilii collectus, and Publii Virgilii Maronis versus proverbiales were published during the Renaissance.²⁹ Here transformation could only take place in an act of creative destruction, in which the artistic unity of Virgil’s poetry was sacrificed to the values of the reception sphere. The resulting fragments may strike us as of little value today, but for many Renaissance readers, they were Virgil. Similar to creative destruction is negation, a transformation process of active and explicit exclusion, where the object is rejected but remains present through the negative relationship. The best example I can think of here involves the Priapeia, a group of poems dedicated to the Roman god of sex that are part of the Appendix Virgiliana. These poems are quite obscene, and their appearance within a collection that many scholars in the early Renaissance at least considered Virgilian caused a real problem for editors and readers of the period.³⁰ A series of folio editions printed in the latter

 Publii Vergilii Maronis poemata … (Frankfurt: Georg Rab the Elder, the heirs of W. Han, and S. Feyerabend, 1567), LW1567.3 in Kallendorf, A Bibliography, 23. This book is very rare, with one copy in institutional hands, unfortunately damaged by a fire in 1959, at the Ratsbücherei in Lüneburg and another at the Bibliothèque humaniste de Sélestat. I have used a copy in a private collection, to which references have been placed in the text.  On reading for commonplaces, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Mary T. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).  Short-title references to Renaissance Virgilian commonplace books can be found in Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Early Printed Editions, 321– 23.  The Priapeia are found in sixty-eight of the 132 editions of Virgil published in the Veneto up to 1600, for example, and attracted eight commentaries, including one by Joseph Justus Scaliger; see Frank-Ruther Hausmann, “Carmina Priapea,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medi-

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half of the sixteenth century by Giovanni Maria Bonelli and Pietro Dusinelli included the Priapeia, but it is very difficult to find a copy of any of these editions that still contains these poems. They appeared on the Index during this period, and at some point—perhaps after they were bought, but perhaps while they were still in the bookshop—these books were expurgated, with the offending pages being removed.³¹ Pages in printed books, however, were numbered by this time, so that the missing pages remain present in their absence. A copy of a 1548 Sébastien Gryphius edition from a private collection in which I have been working also has most of the Priapeia pages ripped out, but here the first page of the offending verses is covered with a piece of paper glued over it, so that the text on the preceding page would not be lost.³² The first lines of the Priapeia, however, remain legible through the page that covers them, remaining present in spite of the early censor’s effort to remove them. Virgilian elements could also be recombined, which, like exclusion, contains four transformation types. In hybridization, new cultural configurations are formed from elements of the reference and reception spheres, including intersections, characteristic syncretisms, and fusions. A good example of this involves the incorporation of Virgilian material into Renaissance chivalric romances like Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Renaissance literary theory generally recognized the continuation of the epic line from antiquity into poems like Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, with poems like Ariosto’s and Spenser’s being considered romances, with more diffuse plots, greater openness to the marvelous, and a role for love relationships that goes beyond what epic will allow.³³ Yet the chivalric romances used Virgilian material as well, weaving it into a generic fabric that was quite different from epic even while, for example, rewriting Virgil’s characteristically ambiguous ending.³⁴ The results were true hybrids. aeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. Edward Cranz and Paul O. Kristeller, 10 vols. to date (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1980‐), 4:426 – 28. Doubts about the attribution of these poems to Virgil, however, began with Giovanni Andrea Bussi, the editor of the editio princeps of Virgil, and grew stronger through the Renaissance. See Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice, 84– 90; and Kallendorf, “Canon, Print, and the Virgilian Corpus,” Classical Receptions Journal 10 (2018): 149 – 69.  Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice, 130 – 39.  Publii Virgilii Maronis opera (Lyons: Sébastien Gryphius, 1548), with the pasted-over page on which the Priapeia begins being 582. For more on the censorship of the Priapeia, see “Commentaries, Censorship, and Printed Books: Neo-Latin in a Transnational World,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Vindobonensis: Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Congress of Neo‐Latin Studies, ed. F. Römer, S. Schreiner, and A. Steiner-Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 392– 401.  On the differences between epic and romance, see the now-classic work of Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); on how this generic difference has affected Virgilian reception, see David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).  On the adaptation of the ending of the Aeneid by Ariosto, see Joseph Sitterson, “Allusive and Elusive Meanings: Reading Ariosto’s Vergilian Ending,” Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 1– 20; on Tasso,

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In montage/assembly, various elements from antiquity were put together with other elements to create a new relationship among them. A good example of this type is the Virgilian cento, which flourished in the Renaissance. Proba’s cento, in which lines and parts of lines from Virgil’s poetry were rearranged to teach Christian truth, was reprinted dozens of times in the Renaissance. Strictly speaking this was a carryover from an earlier period, but there were plenty of Virgilian centos written during the Renaissance: we have, for example, Lelio Capilupi’s condemnation of monastic abuses; Giulio Capilupi’s cento written for Pope Paul IV; Pasquino Romano’s on the present state of religion in the Belgian provinces; two centos by Heinrich Meibom, on the battle between David and Goliath and on the ministry and decapitation of John the Baptist; two more by Samuel Baumgarten, on the fall of the human race and on the captivity and suffering of Christ; and so forth.³⁵ Many of these Virgilian centos contain Christian content, making them hybrid montages. Translation involves the transposition of content from ancient culture into the Renaissance; it can involve translation as we generally use the term, but the depiction of the various schools of philosophy in Raphael’s School of Athens falls into the same category. Translation proper, however, shows more clearly how this category works. Between Gavin Douglas in 1513 and John Dryden in 1697, more than fifty British writers translated Virgil, which suggests that they turned to his works because like them, he wrote about a great nation in transition from one form of government to another.³⁶ Douglas was a Scot, so that his translation got caught up in the maneuvering between England and Scotland.³⁷ A number of these translations contain discernibly Protestant or Catholic overtones, and careful readings of them reveal that they comment on other contemporary political issues like the colonization of Virginia or the possibility of a marriage between the rulers of England and Spain. And as

see Lauren Scancarelli Seem, “The Limits of Chivalry: Tasso and the End of the Aeneid,” Comparative Literature 42 (1990): 116 – 25.  Information on the wide variety of Renaissance Virgilian centos may be found in Kallendorf, A Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions, 307– 20; and in George Hugo Tucker, “Virgil Reborn, Reconfigured, Reinvented in the Early Modern Verse-Cento,” in Virgil and Renaissance Culture, ed. Luke Houghton and Marco Sgarbi, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 510 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017), 181– 201.  William Frost, “Translating Virgil, Douglas to Dryden: Some General Considerations,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 271– 86; and Sheldon Brammall. The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555 – 1646, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Literary Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).  For bibliography on Douglas’s translation, see Craig Kallendorf, “Virgil in Renaissance Thought,” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, http://www.oxfordbibliographies. com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301- 0284.xml?rskey=1I8yYI&result=227 (accessed 29 April 2015).

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Lawrence Venuti has shown, translating Virgil became a way of declaring one’s political allegiance during the Interregnum in England.³⁸ Finally revaluation / inversion describes a transformation that leaves elements of the reference sphere recognizable as such but creates semantic shifts. Cristoforo Landino’s allegorization of the Aeneid, which was very popular at the end of the fifteenth century, illustrates this process. Landino was a Neoplatonist, and he thought that Virgil must have been one too, so that for him, Aeneas’s journey took him from the sensual pleasures of Troy through the active life, represented by Carthage, to the contemplative life in Italy. On this journey he begins with the civic virtues, then purges himself from everything human, then finally contemplates and practices divine things only. The various scenes in the Aeneid are subordinated to this overarching moral scheme, so that Palinurus, for example, represents the appetite that obeys the senses alone rather than the one that is properly subject to reason; the Harpies represent avarice, which causes us to give minimal assistance to those whom law, nature, and the bond of human society demand that we assist; and so forth.³⁹ The Virgilian material is still present—Landino is writing a commentary, after all—but the semantic field has shifted to something that is anchored in fifteenth-century Florence, not first-century Rome. *** If we think back over the transformation types discussed here, I think it is impossible to continue envisioning Virgilian reception as something passive. Even in encapsulation, which comes the closest to what was thought to have been happening in past generations of scholarship on the classical tradition, there is some cultural change, and in most of the other categories, change is foregrounded. When Virgil becomes a teacher of rhetoric, or when the Aeneid is felt to require a Book XIII for completion, or when Virgil’s poems are broken apart into commonplaces, this is change—transformation, not reception and certainly not the classical tradition. And once we focus on this process of change, we have a way to describe fully the otherness that Wilson-Okamura perceived in the Renaissance Virgil and to analyze it in detail. When Eclogue 4 was read as a prophecy of Christ’s coming, and when Virgil’s poetry was broken apart and reassembled to tell of John the Baptist’s decapitation or to praise Pope Paul IV, then we are able to use Roman poetry to see how thoroughly Christianity penetrated humanist culture. When Jupiter’s prophecy appears on Philip II’s catafalque, it feels different from when it is read in its original context; the same is true when the Aeneid is given a royalist reading as it was translated in the English Interregnum. Virgil undoubtedly knew something of Plato’s philosophy, as

 Lawrence Venuti,”The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 197– 219.  On Landino’s Virgilian criticism, see Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas, 129 – 65.

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the section from Aeneid VI on the transmigration of souls shows, but when he is dressed in Florentine Neoplatonic garb, he has been transformed. The transformation methodology also stresses the idea that this process of cultural change helps to create the culture with which it is in dialogue. This is often said in theory but seldom applied in practice, because, I think, it is difficult to find clear examples of how it works. The Renaissance transformation of Virgil, however, provides us with some of these examples. For us, in our more permissive culture, Eclogue 2 seems to be about a homosexual relationship, but this was not an approved option for the Renaissance church. For this reason, Renaissance readers like Erasmus simply could not see this possibility. Similarly the Priapeia could not be Virgilian; through negation, they had to be removed from Renaissance editions of Virgil’s collected works. The antiquity that these Renaissance readers of Virgil constructed was therefore a sanitized one, purged of references to sexual practices that they themselves were uncomfortable with (at least officially). In the end, than, Wilson-Okamura was right: the Renaissance Virgil is indeed different from ours. As we have seen, however, he is even more radically different than we had thought. As the methodology of transformation predicates, this difference is an inevitable part of the process by which Virgil’s humanist readers constructed the understanding of the classical past that they thought they were simply recovering. But once we recognize that the past is never simply recovered, but is invariably transformed as it is encountered anew, then we can embrace the differences we see as poets like Virgil are reborn again, and again, and again.

Jill Kraye

Renaissance Humanism and the Transformations of Ancient Philosophy In this chapter, I will present a survey of the different ways in which Renaissance humanists transformed ancient philosophy from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. To do so, I will review the scholarship produced over the past forty years or so on Renaissance Aristotelianism, Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism in light of the types of transformation set out in the classification devised by the members of Sonderforschungsbereich 644, “Transformationen der Antike.”¹ My aim is to see whether pouring old historical wine into new terminological bottles can help to highlight the contributions made by humanists, not merely to the passive transmission of ancient philosophy, but also to its active transformation. Recognition of the role played by the humanists in Renaissance philosophy has long been hindered by the conventional wisdom that humanism and philosophy were two very distinct enterprises, carried out by scholars with different training who deployed different methods to achieve different goals, and for whom moral philosophy was the only common ground. I want to give a very brief explanation of the background to this paradigm. In a seminal article entitled “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,”² Paul Oskar Kristeller set out his famous and much repeated formulation that “the studia humanitatis were considered as the equivalent of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.”³ This attempt to downgrade humanism to a “limited place within the system of contemporary learning” was in response to what he described as “the modern and false conception that Renaissance humanism was a basically new philosophical movement.”⁴ Countering an interpretation current in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century that humanism was “the new philosophy of the Renaissance, which arose in opposition to scholasticism, the old philosophy of the Middle Ages,” Kristeller main-

 Lutz Bergemann et al., “Transformation: Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels,” in Transformation: Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels, ed. Hartmut Böhme et al. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011), 39 – 56. For the English equivalents of the German terminology, I have relied on the translation by Patrick Baker, “Transformation: A Concept for the Study of Cultural Change” in this volume.  P. O. Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” Byzantion 17 (1944– 1945): 346 – 74; reprinted, with updated notes, in his Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 92– 119 and 150 – 63, to which I shall henceforth refer; and in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 4 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956– 1996), 1:553 – 83; and his Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 85 – 105 and 272– 85.  Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism,” 110.  Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism,” 110 – 11. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-010

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tained instead that humanists were “professional rhetoricians” whose works “have nothing to do with philosophy even in the vaguest possible sense of the term” and whose “treatises on philosophical subjects … appear in most cases rather superficial and inconclusive.” The Italian humanists, he insisted, were “neither good nor bad philosophers, but no philosophers at all.”⁵ Like everyone working on Renaissance humanism and philosophy, I have enormous respect for Kristeller’s achievements in both fields; nevertheless, I believe that his influential determination to keep those fields separate has made it difficult to appreciate the extent to which they interacted in the Renaissance, if not so much on the institutional level of university teaching, then at least in the wider cultural and intellectual context. It is also important to bear in mind that the boundaries between Renaissance humanists and philosophers were often blurred and porous. So, for a humanist, Justus Lipsius was a pretty good philosopher – though not perhaps, as a present-day practitioner of the discipline has remarked, “a philosopher’s philosopher”;⁶ while Marsilio Ficino’s linguistic and scholarly abilities as a humanist were the bedrock of his philosophical achievements. Paolo Beni was a professor of philosophy in Rome, but in Padua he held a chair of humanities. Pierre Gassendi taught philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Provence and hobnobbed with the leading philosophers and scientists of his day; yet his writings are not part of the modern canon of seventeenth-century philosophy primarily on account of his emphatically humanist approach and manner of presentation.⁷ In what follows, therefore, rather than limiting myself to dyed-in-the-wool humanists, I also consider thinkers, whatever their party allegiance, who possessed the skill set associated with Renaissance humanism. Charles Schmitt never tired of reminding us that Aristotelianism remained the dominant philosophical tradition, above all in universities, throughout the Renaissance and that it came in many varieties, one of which was humanist Aristotelianism.⁸ Since the humanist transformation of Aristotle’s philosophy is a vast subject, I will concentrate on a single strand of this complex phenomenon: the recovery of the Greek commentators on Aristotle. Although a handful of their works were known in the Middle Ages through Latin translations or through reports in Arab commentators, from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, virtually all the commentaries extant in Greek became available in print, both in the original language and in Latin. The role of humanists as editors and translators of

 Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism,” 99 – 101.  John M. Cooper, “Justus Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism in Late Sixteenth-Century Europe,” in New Essays on the History of Autonomy: A Collection Honoring J. B. Schneewind, ed. N. Brender and L. Krasnoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7– 29, at 28, n. 11.  Margaret J. Osler, “Becoming an Outsider: Gassendi in the History of Philosophy,” in Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. G. A. J. Rogers et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 23 – 42.  Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), chap. 1: “Renaissance Aristotelianisms.”

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these works is well known;⁹ but their involvement should not be relegated solely to the category of translation (Übersetzung),¹⁰ since it entailed other types of transformation as well. In the first place, appropriation (Appropriation)¹¹ was certainly in play. The Greek commentaries, detached from their original context, stretching from late antiquity to the early Byzantine era, were incorporated into the philosophical culture of the Renaissance, where they fulfilled much the same function as they had in their own time: assisting philosophers to interpret and assess critically the text of Aristotle. Beyond this, however, humanists recontextualized the Greek commentators by enlisting them in their war against scholasticism. For the Quattrocento humanist Angelo Poliziano, the Greek commentators were yet another stick with which to beat the benighted scholastic philosophers, whose reliance on the tongue-tied and nit-picking medieval Latin expositors of Aristotle he ridiculed. At the same time he trumpeted his own privileged access, on account of his knowledge of Greek and the generosity of his patron Lorenzo the Magnificent, who put the Medici library at his disposal, to interpreters who not only had an authentically ancient pedigree but were also “members of Aristotle’s family.”¹² Poliziano’s friends, the Venetian humanists Girolamo Donato and Ermolao Barbaro, likewise recontextualized their translations of the Greek commentators by inserting them into their own anti-scholastic polemics. In the preface to his 1495 Latin version of Book I of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s De anima, Donato lashed out against the British, French, and Italian commentators of recent centuries who philosophized by means of quibbles and piffling questions. Readers of Alexander, by contrast, would imbibe no turgid ostentation and nothing useless, but only the

 See, e. g., Charles Lohr, “Renaissance Latin Translations of the Greek Commentaries on Aristotle,” in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 24– 40; Robert B. Todd, “Themistius,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum …, ed. Virginia Brown, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 57– 102; Edward P. Mahoney, “Neoplatonism, the Greek Commentators, and Renaissance Aristotelianism,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982), 169 – 84.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 53.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 48.  Angelo Poliziano, Praelectio de dialectica, in his Opera omnia (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1498), f. bb1v: “Et ego …, si ex me quaeratis qui mihi praeceptores in Peripateticorum fuerint scholis, strues vobis monstrare librarias potero, ubi Theophrastos, Alexandros, Themistios, Hammonios, Simplicios, Philoponos, aliosque praeterea ex Aristotelis familia numerabitis, quorum nunc in locum (si diis placet) Burleus, Erveus, Occan, Antisberus, Strodusque succedunt. Et quidem ego adulescens doctoribus quibusdam, nec his quidem obscuris, philosophiae dialecticaeque operam dabam, quorum alii Graecarum nostrarumque iuxta ignari literarum, ita omnem Aristotelis librorum puritatem dira quadam morositatis illuvie foedabant, ut risum mihi aliquando interdum etiam stomachum moverent. Pauci rursus, qui Graeca tenebant … nihil tamen omnino afferebant quod non ego aliquanto antea deprehendissem in iis ipsis commentariis, quorum mihi iam tum copia fuit, huius beneficio Laurenti Medicis, cuius totum muneris hoc est, quod scio, quod profiteor.”

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pure sap of philosophy.¹³ Barbaro, in the dedicatory prefaces to his 1481 version of Themistius’s Paraphrases, described the Greek commentator as an “elegant philosopher from Aristotle’s family” and adduced his own translation as proof that any subject, even natural philosophy – the most uncouth, unkempt, and inept discipline of his day – could be rendered in good classical Latin.¹⁴ Barbaro also hammered home the point, which he would defend four years later in the celebrated exchange of letters with his friend Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, that philosophy must be combined with eloquence.¹⁵ Instead of discussing the well-known impact of the newly available Greek commentaries, especially Alexander of Aphrodisias’s De anima and De fato,¹⁶ on philosophical debates in the Renaissance concerning the immortality of the soul and

 See the “Praefatio” to Alexander of Aphrodisias, Enarratio de anima ex Aristotelis institutione, trans. Girolamo Donato (Brescia: Bernardinus de Misintis, 1495), reprinted with intro. by Eckhard Kessler (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2008), ff. a3v-a4r: “Recentiores proximioribus seculis in Britania et Galliis atque Italia religionibus addicti magis ex religione quam ex Aristotelia doctrina acutissime philosophati sunt; et qua parte Aristotelem sequuti sunt, omnia complevere non tam interpretationibus quam titillantibus argutiis, quippe qui per cavillamenta et questiunculas philosophiam tradidere…. Tantum sciat qui Alexandrum legerit, se nihil inanis ac vento quodam turgidae ostentationis, sed meros philosophiae succos imbibiturum.” See also F. Edward Cranz, “Alexander Aphrodisiensis,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum …, ed. P. O. Kristeller, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960), 77– 135, at 85 – 86.  Ermolao Barbaro, Epistolae, orationes et carmina, ed. Vittore Branca, 2 vols. (Florence: Bibliopolis, 1943), 1:6 – 18; see, e. g., the dedication to Pope Sixtus IV, at 8: “… Themistium, e familia Aristotelis elegantem philosophum, ad te in latinum sermonem converti, ratus non ingratissimam tibi rem me facturum, si philosophia ea, quae de natura est, latinis litteris, quanta modo legitur in scholis, contineretur. Videbam nihil incultius, horridius, ineptius quam partem istam litteraturae haberi. Placuit periclitari in Themistio an istaec quoque proprietatem et lucem romanae linguae reciperent”; the dedication to Giorgio Merula, at 13: “ … scribendo interpretandoque probare causam meam viris doctis, ut ipsa mihi res testimonium afferat nullam esse omnino materiam quae genus illud dicendi pressum ac floridum aeque recipiat atque historiam naturae”; and the dedication to Francesco Tron, at 14: “Scio … quam sit ardua ratio, primum interpretari graeca, deinde physica, tum hoc aevi, quo omnes scientias invasit barbaries….” See also Carlo Dionisotti, “Ermolao Barbaro e la fortuna di Suiseth,” in Medioevo e Rinascimento: studi in onore di Bruno Nardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 1:217– 53.  See the conclusion to his dedication to Sixtus IV, in Barbaro, Epistolae, 10: “… doctissime Pontifex, susceptum abs te patrocinium litterarum ne desere; cum dico litteras philosophiam intelligo, quae coniuncta cum eloquentia sit”; and the dedication to Giorgio Merula, at 12, where he bemoans: “… persuasio illa exitialis et monstrosa …: philosophos iureconsultosque non posse eosdem esse et eloquentis.” See also Jill Kraye, “Pico on the Relationship of Rhetoric and Philosophy,” in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. Michael Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13 – 36.  Alexander of Aphrodisias, Praeter commentaria scripta minora, ed. Ivo Bruns, Supplementum Aristotelicum, 2 (Berlin: Typis et impensis Georgii Reimer, 1887– 1892), Pars 1: De anima cum mantissa; Pars 2: De fato, 164– 212.

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the nature of fate,¹⁷ I would like to mention two further transformations, both involving thinkers who cannot be readily classified either as humanists or philosophers, since their humanist training and inclinations were essential features of their philosophical activity. It has been plausibly argued that the French scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, after meeting Barbaro in Venice in 1491, took over the format and title of Themistius’s paraphrases for the series of popular introductory Aristotelian textbooks that he began publishing the following year.¹⁸ If this hypothesis is correct, as seems likely, then we can see this as an appropriation of the ancient genre of philosophical paraphrase, which was incorporated in the curriculum of the Renaissance university, preserving some elements but modifying others to cater to the intellectual level, linguistic skills, and religious orientation of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century students. A more complex transformation of a Greek commentator was performed by Giovanni Pico’s nephew Gianfrancesco, in whose hands the legacy of Renaissance humanism was turned into a weapon of mass destruction for all human knowledge, but targeted mainly at Aristotle, the chief representative of secular learning. As Charles Schmitt showed, Gianfrancesco used his knowledge of Greek to read the as-yet-unpublished commentary of John Philoponus on the Physics, singling out the Platonist commentator’s lengthy attacks on Aristotle’s doctrines of space and the void as a means of undermining the foundations of his entire philosophy. Gianfrancesco’s transformation of Philoponus comprised not only a highly selective appropriation, in that he paid attention solely to the commentator’s criticisms of Aristotle, but also creative destruction (Kreative Zerstörung)¹⁹ or, to introduce a new type of transformation, creative self-destruction (Kreative Selbstzerstörung), since, as indicated by the title of his 1520 treatise, An Examination of the Futility of Pagan Learning and the Truth of Christian Teaching, his ultimate goal was to bring his readers to an unquestioning acceptance of the Bible by persuading them to abandon all pagan philosophy as erroneous and useless.²⁰ Although himself a Christian, Philoponus’s

 See Eckhard Kessler, “The Intellective Soul,” and Antonino Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence and Human Freedom,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 485 – 534 and 641– 67, esp. 653 – 60. See also Dilwyn Knox, “Immortality of the Soul,” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton et al. (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 475 – 81; and Pietro Pomponazzi, Il fato, il libero arbitrio e la predestinazione, intro. and trans. V. Perrone Compagni, 2 vols. (Turin: Nino Aragno, 2004), 1:LXVII-CIX.  Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Totius philosophiae naturalis paraphrases (Paris: J. Higman, 1492). See also Eckhard Kessler, “Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century: The Lefèvre Enterprise,” in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 1– 21.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 51.  Charles B. Schmitt, “Philoponus’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics in the Sixteenth Century,” in Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, ed. Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1987), 210 – 30.

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anti-Aristotelian arguments were firmly embedded in a philosophical discourse. Gianfrancesco, however, detached these arguments from their reference culture (Referenzkultur)²¹ and subsumed them in a polemic intended to destroy the whole notion of philosophical discourse and to create a new reception culture (Aufnahmekultur),²² in which biblical fundamentalism would reign supreme. Petrarch’s glosses on Chalcidius’s partial translation of and commentary on the Timaeus have attracted scholarly attention and can now be appreciated as a good example of how early Renaissance humanists transformed Platonism. These annotations, mostly in the form of “notabilia, short comments and cross-references,”²³ illustrate transformation by encapsulation and recontextualization (Enkapselung und Rekontextualisierung),²⁴ since they were among the recycled building blocks that Petrarch employed, like spolia from some ancient architectural monument, to construct, first, his Rerum memorandarum libri and, later, his treatise On His Own Ignorance. ²⁵ Discussing Renaissance Platonism without mentioning Ficino would be something like performing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark; but instead of confronting Ficino head on, I will approach him indirectly, by way of one of his later detractors, the erstwhile Jesuit Paolo Beni, who is useful for my purposes because, as mentioned above, he had professional credentials both as a philosopher and as a humanist, not to mention a fashionable sideline in Italian literary criticism.²⁶ As we would expect, given his dual academic commitments, Beni’s massive commentary on the Timaeus combines solid humanist erudition with a thoroughly grounded knowledge of ancient philosophy.²⁷ He takes Ficino to task on several occasions, mainly for his uncritical acceptance of pagan doctrines and for his promiscuous blending of them with Christian dogma. After carefully sifting through the evidence, for instance, Beni dismissed the view, held by Ficino among others, that Plato had

 Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 53.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 53.  James Hankins, “The Study of the Timaeus in Early Renaissance Italy,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 77– 119, at 80.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 49.  Sebastiano Gentile, “Le postille del Petrarca al Timeo latino,” in Il Petrarca latino e le origini dell’umanesimo. Proceedings of the Convegno internazionale, Florence, 1991 [= Quaderni petrarcheschi 9 – 10 (1992)]: 129 – 39.  Giancarlo Mazzacurati, “Beni, Paolo,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 8 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1966), 494– 501; and Paul Diffley, Paolo Beni: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).  Paolo Beni, In Platonis Timaeum sive in naturalem omnem atque divinam Platonis et Aristotelis philosophiam decades tres (Rome: Paulus Parisius, 1594) and Platonis et Aristotelis theologia (Padua: Typis Io. Baptistae Martini & Livii Pasquati, 1624); see Diffley, Paolo Beni, 43.

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been familiar with the books of Moses when writing the Timaeus. ²⁸ While Beni believed that some aspects of Platonic philosophy were compatible with Catholic doctrines and were therefore fair game for appropriation by Christian philosophers, he strenuously rejected what he saw – not entirely without justification – as Ficino’s assimilation (Assimilation)²⁹ of Platonism: his indiscriminate fusion of a pagan philosophical system with Christian theology. In this classic clash between a splitter and a lumper, Beni’s point was that Ficino would have been both a better philosopher and a better Christian if he had split more and lumped less. Moving on now to Stoicism, I will focus on two of the most renowned Northern humanists of the sixteenth century: Erasmus and Lipsius. It is particularly interesting to compare their transformations of Stoic philosophy because while Erasmus moves from assimilation to appropriation, Lipsius travels in the opposite direction. A study of Erasmus’s notoriously slapdash and bungled 1515 edition of Seneca’s philosophical works³⁰ has recently shown how, in the preface, the Dutch humanist happily toed the standard line, sanctioned by St. Jerome, that Seneca was the only non-Christian who deserved to be read by Christians, because “he alone calls the mind away to heavenly things, exalts it until it despises the world of everyday, implants a loathing of all that is mean, and kindles with a love of honor; in a word, sends his reader away a better man.”³¹ By the time of his much improved second edition of 1529, Erasmus had changed his tune. He is still prepared to appropriate the stirring rhetoric with which Seneca “inflames one with enthusiasm for moral virtue”;³² but he now abandons his earlier unquestioning assimilation of Seneca to the Christian faith, insisting that “it is more profitable to read him as someone who was ignorant of our religion; for if you read him as a pagan, he wrote like a Christian; if, however, you read him as a Christian, then he wrote like a pagan.”³³

 Jill Kraye, “Ficino in the Firing Line: A Renaissance Neoplatonist and His Critics,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. M. J. B. Allen and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 377– 97, at 390 – 94; and Diffley, Paolo Beni, 45 – 47.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 48.  Jan Papy, “Erasmus’ and Lipsius’ Editions of Seneca: A ‘Complementary’ Project?” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 22 (2002): 10 – 36.  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906 – 1958), 2:51– 54 (Ep. 325), at 53: “Et Senecam tanti fecit divus Hieronymus ut … hunc unum dignum iudicarit qui non Christianus a Christianis legeretur.… Solus hic animum avocat ad res coelestes, erigit ad rerum vulgarium contemptum, inserit odium turpitudinis, inflammat ad amorem honesti; denique meliorem dimittit, quisquis hunc … sumpserit in manus.” The translation is from Erasmus, The Correspondence: Letters 298 to 445, 1514 to 1516, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 64– 68, at 66.  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, 8:25 – 39 (Ep. 2091), at 33: “Inter omnes virtutes, quas et multas et eximias in Senecae scriptis esse fatetur Quintilianus, nulla potior quam quod lectorem miris aculeis ad honesti studium inflammet….”  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, 31: “Equidem arbitror magis in rem esse lectoris ut Senecae libros legat velut hominis ignari nostrae religionis. Etenim si legas illum ut paganum, scripsit Christiane; si ut Christianum, scripsit paganice.”

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He goes on to list all the issues on which Seneca’s views are anathema to Christians: his polytheism and pantheism; his indifference to the immortality of the soul; and his conviction that the self-sufficient Stoic wise man is the equal, if not the superior, of the gods.³⁴ In his earliest work on Stoic philosophy, the best-selling treatise De constantia, first published in 1584, Lipsius sought to remove the barriers that prevented his contemporaries from appropriating ancient Stoic ethics as a practical means of coping with public calamities. He therefore sought to alter the perception, articulated by Erasmus, that much of Stoicism was not in agreement with Christianity. But he was also careful to point out differences between Stoicism and Christianity: the Stoics, for instance, wrongly subjected God to fate, whereas Christians knew that fate was controlled by divine providence; and whereas there was no room for free will in the deterministic Stoic universe, the Christian God had granted freedom of choice to mankind.³⁵ By 1604, when Lipsius published two handbooks on Stoic philosophy, based on twenty years of intensive research, he was “more certain of the common ground between Christianity and Stoicism,” now citing Epictetus on the immanent providence that governs the world and maintaining that the Stoics regarded fate as the offspring of this divine providence, which set it in motion.³⁶ There are always, however, limits when it comes to the Christian assimilation of a pagan philosophy; and for Lipsius, the Stoic doctrine that the wise man was permitted, and in some circumstances morally obliged, to commit suicide remained beyond the pale: “The Stoics,” he asserted, “do not get my vote on this matter.”³⁷ Despite such reservations, Lipsius did become more willing to assimilate Stoicism to Christianity as he studied it in greater depth, which suggests that, contrary to expectations, increased knowledge of an ancient philosophical system did not necessarily produce a more discriminating approach to it. Lipsius’s Politica, written in the form of a cento, is treated in the classification of SFB 644 as an example of transformation by montage / assembly (Montage / Assemblage).³⁸ It is worth mentioning here that he adopted the same literary technique in his two handbooks of Stoic philosophy. These works also belong to the category of

 Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, 31: “ … nusquam magis discrepat a Christiana philosophia quam quum ea tractat quae nobis sunt praecipua.”  Lipsius, De constantia I.20, in his Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Wessel: Typis Andreae ab Hoogenhuysen, 1675), 4:558 – 60.  Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 160, 164– 65, and 169 – 71.  Justus Lipsius, Manuductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam libri tres: L. Annaeo Senecae et aliis scriptoribus illustrandis (Antwerp: Ex officina Plantiniana, apud Ioannem Moretum, 1604), 199 – 209 (III.22 – 23), at 209: “Nec Stoicis me, hac parte, suffragium dare.” See Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, 169; and Jan Papy, “Lipsius’s Neostoic Reflections on the Pale Face of Death: From Stoic Constancy and Liberty to Suicide and Rubens’s Dying Seneca,” Lias 37 (2010): 35 – 53, esp. 43 – 53.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 51.

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reconstruction (Rekonstruktion),³⁹ since in them Lipsius gathered together all the extant Stoic bits and pieces scattered throughout the corpus of ancient Greek and Latin literature, both pagan and Christian, with the aim of restoring the fragmentarily preserved philosophy of ancient Stoicism.⁴⁰ I will begin my consideration of the humanist transformation of Epicureanism with some reflections on the recovery, through discovery (Entdeckung)⁴¹ and translation, of the two most important ancient texts transmitting direct knowledge of Epicurean philosophy: Lucretius’s De rerum natura, found by Poggio in 1417; and Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, translated between 1424 and 1433 by Ambrogio Traversari and containing, in Book X, a sympathetic biography of Epicurus along with three of his letters and a list of his principal doctrines – the main primary sources, even today, for his thought. Given that ad fontes was the watchword of Renaissance humanists, the availability of both works, first in manuscript and then in print,⁴² should, in principle, have dramatically transformed their perception of Epicurean philosophy. In fact, however, the humanists continued to rely for the most part on second-hand reports in Cicero, Seneca, and Church Fathers such as Lactantius; and it was not until over two centuries after the recovery of Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius that a radical revamping of Epicureanism, based on these texts, took place.⁴³ I only have space to give a tiny sample of the evidence for this time lag; but since Erasmus has already been mentioned in relation to Stoicism and since few sixteenthcentury humanists could match his knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin texts, it seems sensible to bring him in again here. In his colloquy “The Epicurean” of 1533, Erasmus, following in the footsteps of Lorenzo Valla,⁴⁴ inverted the naturalistic and hedonistic ethics of Epicurus; but, unlike Valla, he did so by redefining pleasure in terms of the everyday joys experienced by godly Christians. Having transformed Epicureanism throughout the colloquy into a thinly disguised version of his own moral program of imitating the pious, righteous, and humble way of life lived and

 Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 52.  Lipsius, Manuductio, ff. *3v-*4r (“Ad Lectorem”), at f. *4r: “Habebis a capite Sectarum divisiones et initia, item Stoicae, tum praecipua huius dogmata et maxime decantata illa Paradoxa. Reliqua in Physiologiam, ne confusio sit, sunt dilata. Haec eruere et disponere (nemini adhuc factum) arduum fuit, fateor….”  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 44.  James Hankins and Ada Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy in the Renaissance: A Brief Guide (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 34– 36, 62– 63.  Kraye, “Revival,” 102– 06; and my “Epicureanism and Other Hellenistic Philosophies,” in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, ed. P. Ford et al., 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 1:617– 29.  Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure / De voluptate, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella de Panizza Lorch (New York: Abaris Books, 1977). See also Maristella de Panizza Lorch, A Defense of Life: Lorenzo Valla’s Theory of Pleasure (Munich: Fink, 1985); and Riccardo Fubini, “Ricerche sul De voluptate di Lorenzo Valla,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 1 (1987): 189 – 239.

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preached by Christ in the Gospels, Erasmus could justifiably claim that “no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of the Christian philosophy.”⁴⁵ Although there is not a great deal of Epicureanism in Erasmus’s “Epicureus,” what there is comes not from Epicurus’s own account of his ethical doctrines in Diogenes Laertius, but from Cicero’s De finibus,⁴⁶ a standard source of information on Epicurean philosophy since the Middle Ages. As for De rerum natura, there is no doubt that it was widely read by the humanists: over fifty manuscripts survive from the fifteenth century, together with four incunable editions,⁴⁷ including one published by Aldus Manutius, who in his preface dismissed the content of the poem as out of step with both Christianity and the rest of ancient philosophy, but praised the poet’s ability to put Epicurus’s precepts into verse.⁴⁸ Although De rerum natura was printed a number of times in the sixteenth century, it tellingly attracted only a handful of commentaries,⁴⁹ which tended to dwell on its outstanding artistic merits or to resolve the philological problems of the text, while either avoiding or attacking Lucretius’s controversial Epicurean message.⁵⁰ The humanist attitude can be summed up as: great poetry, shame about the philosophy, or, using the terminology of transformation: Lucretius was appropriated as a Roman poet but not as an Epicurean philosopher. The trajectory of Ficino’s interest in De rerum natura, which is testimony to his humanist tastes, has recently been traced from his youthful enthusiasm for Lucretius’s philosophy, rather than the poetry, to his mature rejection of Lucretius’s atom-

 Erasmus, “Epicureus,” in his Colloquia, ed. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, and R. Hoven, in Erasmus, Opera omnia, vol. 1.3 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1972), 721– 33, at 731: “nemo magis promeretur cognomen Epicuri, quam adorandus ille Christianae philosophiae princeps”; for the translation, see Erasmus, “The Epicurean,” in his Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 535 – 51, at 549.  Mariantonietta Paladini, Lucrezio e l’epicureismo tra Riforma e Controriforma (Naples: Liguori, 2011), 1– 39; and Lisa Piazzi, Lucrezio: il ‘De rerum natura’ e la cultura occidentale (Naples: Liguori, 2009), 112– 13, n. 75.  Michael D. Reeve, “The Italian Tradition of Lucretius,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 23 (1980): 27– 48, and his “The Italian Tradition of Lucretius Revisited,” Aevum 79 (2005): 115 – 64. For the incunable editions, see Cosmo Alexander Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius, ed. E. J. Kenney (London: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1985), 49 – 52, and the website of the “Incunable Short-Title Catalogue,” accessed 19 October 2015, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/index.html: “[Brescia]: Thomas Ferrandus, [about 1473 – 1474]”; “Verona: Paulus Fridenperger, 1486”; “Venice: Theodorus de Ragazonibus, 1495”; and “Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1500.” See also Luigi Balsamo, “Revisiting Early Printed Books at Brescia: ‘Thoma Ferrando auctore’ (1471– 4),” in Incunabula: Studies in Fifteenth-Century Printed Books Presented to Lotte Hellinga, ed. Martin Davies (London: The British Library, 1999), 7– 26.  Aldo Manuzio editore: dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, ed. Giovanni Orlandi, 2 vols. (Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1975), 1:33 – 34.  Gordon, Bibliography, 52– 59 (editions), 76 – 87 (commentaries).  Jill Kraye, “Lucretius Editions and Commentaries,” in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, ed. P. Ford et al., 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 2:1038 – 40.

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ist materialism as a serious threat to his own program of Christian Platonism.⁵¹ Here the movement is from appropriation, in his commentariola on Lucretius, which he later destroyed, and in other early works, to negation (Negation)⁵² in his Platonic Theology, in which the Epicurean poet’s materialist conception of the soul is present solely through its robust repudiation. Only in the middle of the seventeenth century was Epicurean philosophy securely appropriated; and the agent of this transformation was Pierre Gassendi, who, like Ficino, was both a Catholic priest and a philosopher, but whose qualifications as a humanist were better than Ficino’s. This is evident in his learned Life of Epicurus of 1647 and in his 1649 Observations on Book X of Diogenes Laertius, an impressive work of philological erudition, in which he established the Greek text, made a new Latin translation, and added a substantial commentary, quoting countless classical texts, including almost every line of De rerum natura. ⁵³ Gassendi also displayed his humanist colors by seeking to provide an ancient alternative to the Aristotelianism that still dominated the university curriculum, while his choice of Epicureanism reflected his desire to serve the contemporary scientific and philosophical community, of which he was an active member, by removing the obstacles that prevented the appropriation of Epicurean atomism.⁵⁴ Over the past decades, scholars have amply demonstrated that to do this, Gassendi modified many Epicurean doctrines, at times beyond recognition, so as to bring them into line with Christian beliefs: he replaced Epicurus’s corporeal gods and his denial of divine interference in human affairs with a single, incorporeal, and providential divinity; he substituted Epicurus’s infinite and eternal atoms with a finite number created ex nihilo by God, whose providence, rather than the random swerve of atoms, was responsible for the design of the universe; and he converted Epicurus’s rational, but material and mortal, human soul into an immaterial and immortal one, endowed by God with free will. Although this Christian renovation of Epicurus’s philosophy undermined the foundation of his ethics, which were premised on eliminating the fear of divine intervention and of the afterlife, Gassendi nonetheless preserved key elements such as the calculation of pleasure and pain, now inter-

 James Hankins, “Ficino’s Critique of Lucretius,” in The Rebirth of Platonic Theology, Proceedings of a Conference Held at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence, 2007, ed. James Hankins and Fabrizio Meroi (Florence: Olschki, 2012), 137– 54.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 52.  Pierre Gassendi, Opera omnia, 6 vols. (Lyon: Laurent Anisson and Jean Baptiste Devenet, 1658), 5:1– 166 (Diogenis Laertii liber decimus De vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri) and 167– 236 (De vita et moribus Epicuri).  Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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preted, however, as part of the special providence by which God governed the human race.⁵⁵ Both in his works with a humanist stamp – the biography of Epicurus and the edition of Book X of Diogenes Laertius – and in his Syntagma philosophicum, posthumously published in 1658,⁵⁶ Gassendi produced a revaluation / inversion (Umdeutung / Inversion)⁵⁷ of Epicureanism, reformulating many Epicurean concepts and principles so radically that they barely resembled their original source. Yet since he retained some essential features of Epicurus’s philosophy, particularly his atomism and his rationalist hedonism, Gassendi’s assimilation of Epicureanism to Christianity can also be seen as hybridization (Hybridisierung),⁵⁸ in which contrary and contradictory elements from the reference and reception cultures were transformed into a novel configuration. My last ancient philosophical school is skepticism; and I will not consider the Academic variety, but only the Pyrrhonian, which, being based on Greek rather than Latin sources, provides a more fruitful ground for examining transformation. While Diogenes Laertius’s “Life of Pyrrho,” in Traversari’s frequently printed Latin translation, had little impact in the fifteenth century, the treatises of Sextus Empiricus, which remained untranslated and unpublished until the 1560s,⁵⁹ were mined by Poliziano for information about classical culture. Ignoring the epistemological issues at the heart of Sextus’s philosophy, Poliziano copied out large portions of the text into notebooks, together with passages from other Greek authors, as part of his project to construct an encyclopedia of the arts and sciences.⁶⁰ This humanist transformation of Pyrrhonian skepticism involves encapsulation and recontextualization, since the doxographical material that Poliziano took from Sextus was not only integrated into his encyclopedia, a new object in the reception culture, but also put in an antiquarian rather than a philosophical context.

 See esp. the following articles by Margaret J. Osler: “Fortune, Fate, and Divination: Gassendi’s Voluntarist Theology and the Baptism of Epicureanism,” in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 155 – 74; “Ancients, Moderns, and the History of Philosophy: Gassendi’s Epicurean Project,” in The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz, ed. Tom Sorell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 129 – 59; and “Early Modern Uses of Hellenistic Philosophy: Gassendi’s Epicurean Project,” in Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30 – 44. See also Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).  Gassendi, Opera, vols. 1– 2 (Syntagma philosophicum).  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 53 – 54.  Bergemann et al., “Transformation,” 50.  Jill Kraye, “The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 323 – 52, at 338 – 40.  Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, “Sesto Empirico e una dispersa enciclopedia delle arti e delle scienze di Angelo Poliziano,” Rinascimento 20 (1980): 327– 58.

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The first Renaissance thinker to deploy Pyrrhonian skepticism for skeptical purposes was Gianfrancesco Pico, who in his treatise on The Futility of Pagan Learning made extensive use of Sextus Empiricus, whose works, like Poliziano, he consulted in a Greek manuscript. Gianfrancesco made particular use of the mode of suspension of judgement from dissension in order to show that pagan philosophers disagreed with each other on every conceivable issue. When examined in depth, however, it can be seen that his objective was not to produce the tranquility and peace of mind that, according to Sextus, resulted from suspending one’s judgement, but instead to prove the superiority of the Christian faith, which, because it depends on divine revelation rather than human reason, is invulnerable to such skeptical arguments.⁶¹ As with Philoponus’s anti-Aristotelianism, Gianfrancesco was effecting an appropriation: he was employing Pyrrhonian skepticism, which was inimical to dogmatism, to bring about its own replacement by dogmatic fundamentalist Christianity. Two sixteenth-century French humanists, the Calvinist Henri Estienne and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Gentian Hervet, translated Sextus’s treatises into Latin, making them available to a wide readership, which famously included Montaigne.⁶² The point I would like to emphasize is that Estienne, Hervet, and Montaigne, despite their differing religious affiliations, shared with each other and with Gianfrancesco Pico the conviction that Pyrrhonian skepticism could be safely appropriated in the service of Christianity, which, as divinely revealed rather than humanly devised, was not susceptible to its doubt-inducing strategies.⁶³ They can hardly be blamed for failing to foresee that, in letting the Pyrrhonian genie out of the bottle, they made possible its eventual appropriation by cultural forces that would turn it against religion. To sum up: the types of transformation classified by SFB 644 have indeed helped us to take a fresh look at familiar material and to identify instances of transformation that have not previously been recognized as such. In addition, this classification has brought to light how many different kinds of transformation humanists employed in their engagement with ancient philosophy. Some larger issues have emerged, too, such as the time lag between the discovery and / or translation of a text and the appropriation of the philosophy it contains, which, as with Epicureanism, could be very lengthy. It seems, moreover, that when the humanists appropriated ancient philoso-

 Gian Mario Cao, Scepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco Pico as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2007). See also Charles B. Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469 – 1533) and His Critique of Aristotle (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967).  Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniarum hypotypōseōn libri III, trans. Henri Estienne (Geneva: Henri Estienne, 1562), and his Adversus mathematicos, trans. Gentian Hervet (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1569). See also Ann Hartle, “Montaigne and Skepticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, ed. Ullrich Langer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 183 – 206; and Manuel Ignacio Bermúdez Vázquez, The Skepticism of Michel de Montaigne (Cham: Springer, 2015).  Jill Kraye, “The Revival of Hellenistic Philosophies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97– 112, at 107– 10.

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phy, they almost always recontextualized it as well, usually by putting it to a new purpose. The case of skepticism has shown that transformations, like virtually all historical events, could have unintended consequences. Finally and most importantly, we have seen that the assimilation of a pagan philosophical school to Christianity was not only the necessary prelude to its Renaissance revival, but was also regarded by most, if not all, of the scholars discussed here as a valid and even essential part of their humanist remit. Almost thirty years ago, Anthony Grafton claimed that Lipsius’s “desire to make ancient experience accessible” to his contemporaries was a betrayal “of the core of the humanistic enterprise, the effort to understand the past on its own terms.”⁶⁴ Perhaps now it is time to reconsider whether the transformation of the past was also at “the core of the humanistic enterprise.”

 Anthony Grafton, “Portrait of Justus Lipsius,” American Scholar (summer 1987): 382– 90, at 389.

Ada Palmer¹

The Effects of Authorial Strategies for Transforming Antiquity on the Place of the Renaissance in the Current Philosophical Canon Introduction: How Humanists Hide Their Philosophy In a manuscript preserved in Utrecht, the renowned fifteenth-century philologist Pomponio Leto embarks upon a short discussion of what differentiates the human animal from other beasts. Critiquing Aristotle, he claims that a human is not defined by Reason (ratio) since, he says, most people do not labor actively in philosophy and are thus ignorant of what Reason consists of, so it is instead only the possession of speech that differentiates humans from brute beasts (“solo sermone a brutis differet”).² This alternative to the traditional ‘rational animal’ definition of humanity would certainly make a respectable entry in a survey of the history of natural philosophy, as would Leto’s subsequent discussion of the relative roles of heat, moisture, force (“vis”), life (“vita”), and passion or desire in the generation of living things, examined through the influences of Venus, Mars, and Vulcan. But for these ideas of Leto’s to have a chance of entering broader discussions of natural philosophy, either  I wish to thank the Transformationen der Antike research project at the Humboldt University in Berlin and my colleagues in the Classical Transformations group at Texas A&M who organized the three immensely stimulating conferences whose papers and discussions combined to produce this chapter; editors Craig Kallendorf and Patrick Baker, whose feedback helped me lick the raw draft into this much expanded final form, as Pliny would say a fresh-born, shapeless bear cub needs; my colleague in philosophy here at the University of Chicago, Agnes Callard, who very generously offered me the perspective of her discipline; the Franke Institute for the Humanities, whose Faculty Fellowship Program made our interdisciplinary collaboration possible; the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Institute for Italian Renaissance Studies, where much of the initial reading and research was done; James Hankins and Alan Charles Kors, who between them introduced me to most of the works and thinkers treated here; and Jo Walton, Lauren Schiller, Mack Muldofsky, and Natalie Parrish, who aided my research.  Manuscript notes in the hand of Pomponio Leto, preserved on the flyleaf of Lucretius, De rerum natura (Verona: Paulus Fridenperger, 28 September 1486), ISTC il00333000, Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Litt. lat. X fol. 82 (Rariora). Full text and translation appear in Ada Palmer, “The Use and Defense of the Classical Canon in Pomponio Leto’s Biography of Lucretius,” in Vitae Pomponianae, biografie di autori antichi nell’Umanesimo romano (Lives of Classical Writers in Fifteenth-Century Roman Humanism), proceedings of a conference hosted by the Danish Academy in Rome and the American Academy in Rome, 24 April 2013, Renaessanceforum (Forum for Renaissance Studies, Universities of Aarhaus & Copenhagen) 9 (2015): 87– 106, accessible at http://www.renaessanceforum. dk/rf_9_2015.htm, consulted 11 October 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-011

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in the Renaissance or later scholarship, they must overcome one critical barrier: the fact that Leto himself took intentional steps to make it extremely difficult to read them. These discussions appear in Leto’s thousand-word discussion of the Roman Epicurean Lucretius, a text that is traditionally described as a vita or biography of the poet, and thus better known to historians of biography and poetry than of philosophy, although barely a fifth of the text treats Lucretius and the majority focuses on questions of natural reproduction. Leto begins the short passage with the following declaration, written, like many humanist opening sentences, in unnecessarily complicated Latin, ostentatiously displaying Leto’s mastery of rare vocabulary and unusual grammatical forms: Marcus [Terentius] Varro, father of Roman letters, taught that three things must be treated for all subjects: ancestry (origo), merit (dignitas), and skill (ars). In the present work, since we must discuss philosophy, it may seem necessary to treat each of these topics; yet since the ancients, both Greek authors and [we Latins], did not know whence understanding began, we cannot address these issues historically, as their precept and ours demands.³

In other words, Leto introduces Varro’s precept of treating “origo,” “dignitas,” and “ars” in order to say immediately that he cannot follow it, and he never returns to Varro again. The passage seems like filler, added to pad out Leto’s introduction and advertise his mastery of the passive periphrastic, but it is in fact something more manipulative yet: it is a deception. By hailing Varro as the “father of Roman letters,” Leto gives the impression that this “origo,” “dignitas,” and “ars” passage must come from some important discussion of language and philosophy in Varro’s De lingua Latina, an extremely rare work at the time, to which Leto – editor of the 1471 edition – had privileged access. In fact, the passage has been quoted deceptively out of context and comes from a completely irrelevant section of Varro’s De re rustica, in which he proposes to discuss the “origo,” “dignitas,” and “ars” of different methods of animal husbandry.⁴ Leto’s manipulation of the passage intimidates the reader by making Varro sound like a more important source than he is and by sending the reader on a wild goose chase, in which he or she searches De lingua latina for a passage that does not exist and is left feeling intimidated and awed by Leto’s superior knowledge. And this exercise in intimidation and self-promotion, couched in gratuitously difficult Latin, is only the first of thirty-seven classical references which the reader must struggle to get through within the thousand words of Leto’s discussion in order to tease out his comments on natural philosophy.

 Palmer, “The Use and Defense,” 98: “M. Varro, Romanae linguae parens, tria observanda rebus omnibus tradit: origo, dignitas, et ars. In praesenti opere, quum de philosophia nobis dicendum esset, necessarium videri potuit de singulis disserere; et quoniam unde coepit sapientia veteres ignoraverunt, et qui apud Graecos et qui apud nos scribunt, historice de ea re loqui, ut auctoritas illorum vel nostrorum poscit, non possumus.”  De re rustica II, i, 1.

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Leto’s critique of Aristotle here is one example out of thousands in which an original humanist contribution to philosophy is hidden, almost inaccessibly, in the web of the humanist’s own style. Intentionally difficult Latin prose, intimidatingly dense classical references, and innovative ideas hidden within a commentary on a classical author are three components of a set of self-fashioning techniques that humanists used to impress patrons, intimidate rivals, and differentiate their community – trained in classical literature and a signature classical Latin prose style – from scholastics and other intellectual competitors. Yet, as a consequence of such strategies, the body of original contributions to philosophy that the humanists generated is veiled and difficult to penetrate, especially since the humanists often deny that their own innovations are innovations by ascribing them to classical sources. More is at stake here than style. Perhaps nothing has shaped later attitudes toward humanist contributions to philosophy as much as the fierce denunciations of earlier Renaissance thought advanced by the seventeenth-century philosophical movements led by Descartes and Francis Bacon. Yet if Descartes and Bacon employed their most powerful rhetoric to characterize their scholastic and Renaissance predecessors as slavish, error-ridden, and valueless, the humanists had done exactly the same thing, employing their most powerful rhetoric to denounce scholasticism. In fact, the two periods in the history of European thought that are studied least by philosophers today – the pre-scholastic Middle Ages and the pre-seventeenth-century Renaissance – are both victims of the same self-fashioning technique, in which innovators define their movements as a break from the recent past: first the ‘Dark Ages,’ as conceived and demonized by Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and their peers;⁵ and then the Renaissance, similarly denounced by Descartes and Bacon. If Bacon and Descartes scored a long-term victory – jumpstarting a new age of philosophy that is still widely studied and responded to by philosophers today – humanist thought, while victorious in its own time, did not. Key to this difference in longterm influence are the techniques of authorial self-fashioning in the two movements, especially the way they balance their claims to originality with their obvious reuse of earlier material, especially classical material. After all, Plato is every bit as present in Descartes’ dualist model of the soul as he is in Marsilio Ficino’s, yet we do not call Descartes a Platonist. The stark differences between the self-fashioning strategies of these two movements, and the deep impact those strategies have had on the modern reception of early modern philosophy, become clear when works of Renaissance and seventeenth-century thinkers are interrogated using the concept of multi-directional or allelopoietic transformation. Authors of each movement used different signature transformation types to advertise or hide moments when they addressed or reused the ideas of their predecessors, especially the ancients, and these strategies have, in turn, played a profound role in shaping today’s philosophical canon.

 For an overview of this process, see Giuseppe Bisaccia, “Past / Present: Leonardo Bruni’s History of Florence,” Renaissance and Reformation 21.1 (1985): 1– 18.

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Periphrasis: A Glance at Today’s Philosophical Canon Before beginning my examination of transformation strategies, I want to step aside and present some actual data about how much attention different philosophical movements receive in current teaching and scholarship on philosophy. A glance at which thinkers and movements dominate the current philosophical canon will help show the real stakes of what I claim is more than simply a question of style. It is commonly acknowledged that philosophy of the earlier Renaissance (i. e., the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries) is comparatively underrepresented in the current study and teaching of philosophy, but it is a question worth examining with concrete data.⁶ I shall not attempt, in this periphrasis, to paint a deep and comprehensive portrait of the field of philosophy today, but I can provide a snapshot through two small samples: first, to examine teaching, a survey of the authors assigned as primary-source readings in fifty recent introductory courses offered by philosophy departments; and second, to sample research, a survey of the authors and time periods treated in academic books on philosophy published in the sample year of 2014. My data on book publication come from the 439 books listed in the 2014 catalogues of books designated as ‘Philosophy’ by the top ten academic presses in this field.⁷ Of these 439 books, sixteen, or 4 %, treat topics with no historical component, and forty, or 9 %, treat longue-durée questions involving philosophers from multiple, disparate periods. My data on teaching come from a survey of fifty syllabuses from introductory-level courses offered by philosophy departments at English-speaking colleges and universities between 2010 and 2015,⁸ including both survey courses  It is not possible to footnote “conversations with many people over breakfast or between panels at the Renaissance Society of America, 2008 – 2015,” but one of my aims in this paper is to examine, with the lens of transformation theory, questions about the status of Renaissance philosophy today that I have heard raised repeatedly by scholars of the Renaissance. The question of how Renaissance thinkers are viewed within the discipline of philosophy has much to teach us about the effects of form on the transmission of thought, the process of canon formation, periodization, and the relationships between philosophical adversaries. Yet this is a question that those who know the Renaissance well cannot approach in print without seeming to bemoan the marginalization of our particular specialty. I hope that the reader will take this paper as it is intended, as an analysis of what I believe is a telling and important aspect of intellectual transmission, and not as a criticism.  Oxford University Press (184 books), Cambridge University Press (114 books), Blackwell (twentyone books), Harvard University Press (seventeen books), MIT Press (four books), Routledge (fiftyeight books), Princeton University Press (twenty books), Cornell University Press (two books), University of Chicago Press (ten books), and Yale University Press (nine books). I selected these ten presses by comparing several review articles on the state of the publishing field and accepting their consensus on the top outlets.  My choice to include only courses from Anglophone institutions necessarily biases the study toward figures in the English tradition, and an examination of courses conducted in other languages –

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and topical courses offered at the introductory level, on topics such as ethics, political philosophy, or religious thought.⁹ The philosophical merit of individual authors is not my concern when examining syllabuses, since anyone who has designed survey courses knows that there are always many more worthy topics than weeks; rather the question is what patterns emerge in the eras and authors that are kept or cut when philosophy faculty do the painful work of trimming long lists to short ones and sorting what is appropriate for beginning students from what is better left for advanced courses. Simple percentages make clear the preeminence of Plato, Aristotle, and post1600 philosophy, both in scholarship and on syllabuses. In the course readings, Hellenistic sources do not appear, since they comprise less than 1 % of assigned texts, while no non-scholastic medieval sources of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts appeared on the fifty syllabuses at all.¹⁰ It is important to remember that most of these introductory philosophy courses do not have historical or geographic coverage among their goals. Instructors often select readings, not as samples of times or places, but in order to introduce questions that are still seen as ‘live’ in contemporary philosophy, so the resulting selections are less surveys of past philosophy than surveys of contemporary questions examined through the first texts that introduced them. The philosophers treated in published books can be represented in parallel form if we temporarily exclude the 12 % of books on longue-durée and time-independent topics, and consider only those focused on specific philosophers or narrow periods.

especially Italian – would certainly demonstrate different patterns, but I chose to examine only Anglophone institutions, partly in order to have a more homogenous sample, and partly because the prominence of English as a language of international scholarship means that the canon taught at English-speaking institutions exerts a unique international influence. The majority of syllabuses were gathered online, especially those from public institutions that are often required by law to make syllabuses public, but I am grateful to the many faculty who helped or sent me theirs directly: Bernhard Nickel (Harvard), W. James Simpson (Harvard), Thomas Pogge (Yale), Shelly Kagan (Yale), Jonathan Pittard (Yale), Joel Revill (Brown), Tobias Albert Fuchs (Brown), Charles Larmore (Brown), Iain Laidley (Brown), Rafeeq Hassan (Williams), Andrew C. Dole (Amherst College), Justin B. Shaddock (Wesleyan), Steven P. Gerrard (Williams), Jana Sawicki (Williams), and Daniel Z. Korman (University of Illinois).  Thirty-two of the courses sampled were titled “Introduction to Philosophy,” while fourteen were topical and four were temporally bounded introductions, either to “Ancient and Medieval,” to “Early Modern,” or to “Modern” philosophy; both “Modern” courses began with Descartes. I did not include non-western, geographically specific courses, such as introductory Chinese philosophy, although my investigation showed that such courses are rarely offered at the introductory level. Excluding contemporary thinkers, the only non-western authors assigned in any of these courses were Confucius and Mencius.  Here, and in the corresponding pie chart about publications, I include the few treatments of ancient China with the pre-Socratics for chronological reasons. No other non-western thinkers are treated sufficiently to affect the percentages.

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Diagram 1: Syllabus Pie Chart.

Diagram 2: Book Publication Pie Chart.

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The general patterns are very similar, although contemporary and eighteenthcentury authors receive somewhat less attention in scholarship than teaching, and the nineteenth century receives more attention. Hellenistic, non-scholastic Medieval thought, and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are present in scholarship, and scholastic thought receives substantially less attention in publication than in teaching, largely reflecting how frequently St. Anselm’s ontological proof is assigned as a companion reading to Descartes.¹¹

Diagram 3: Vertically-oriented Bar Chart.

 Among these 439 books, 90 % treated exclusively Europe, Europe and America, or Europe and the Middle East. Philosophy outside the western tradition was treated in seven books on Chinese philosophy, six books on Indian philosophy, six specifically on Middle Eastern philosophy (rather than on Europe and the Middle East), five on other parts of the world, and twenty-two on global or international questions, almost exclusively modern.

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A more detailed breakdown of reading and scholarship by century treated exposes deeper patterns.¹² The absence of the Renaissance is even more visible here, as is the absence of the pre-scholastic Middle Ages, although this chart does not include the four books published in 2014 on topics in medieval philosophy that cannot be assigned to a single century. Except for selections from Dante in a topical course on “Revolution, Reform, and Conservatism in Western Culture,”¹³ no author later than Thomas Aquinas appears on syllabuses before the sixteenth century, which is represented exclusively by works outside or critical of mainstream humanism and scholasticism: The Prince, Martin Luther, Luther’s debates with Erasmus, More’s Utopia, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene appear once or twice on various syllabuses, while a course exclusively on the Early Modern period included Montaigne and, extending into the seventeenth century, Galileo.¹⁴ As for research, while several longterm studies include the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among others, Cambridge University Press’s Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, edited by M. V. Dougherty, was the only book published in 2014 focusing on the fifteenth century that was marketed by its publisher specifically as a philosophy text.¹⁵ Philosophy books treating mainly the sixteenth century included seven on Machiavelli, one each on Erasmus and Thomas More, two on Montaigne, and, looking forward again, one on Galileo. As the labels above suggest, many of the more heavily represented centuries actually reflect the dominance of a particular individual. The fifty courses assigned primary source readings by 165 different authors,¹⁶ including ninety-two representatives of earlier eras of philosophy, and seventy-three figures from contemporary philosophy, comprising 44 % of all the readings.¹⁷ In comparison, of 212 philosophers who

 Here authors whose output spanned two centuries are assigned to the century in which they produced more or exerted more influence; to the century in which they produced the particular work assigned, as in the case of Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, twentieth century) and Machiavelli (The Prince, sixteenth century); or, in marginal cases, to the later century. Books spanning multiple centuries are omitted from this chart, unless they focused on a single author.  Offered at Harvard University by W. James Simpson.  “Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy,” offered at Brown by Charles Larmore.  Harvard University Press did include the author’s own Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (2014) in its philosophy listing, although it was published in the I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance series, marketed mainly in history, and treats the sixteenth century as well as the fifteenth.  The fifty courses among them included 522 reading assignments, averaging 10.44 readings per course. When multiple works from one author were assigned in one course, I counted them as separate readings if they were read at separate points in a syllabus (for example, if two different works by John Locke were assigned a month apart), but as a single reading if several excerpts or short works were read together or in close succession (for example, a collection of several Platonic dialogues).  Since this study aims to group philosophers by the period of philosophical conversation in which they exerted the most influence, rather than counting only living philosophers as “contemporary,” I define as a representative of contemporary thought any author born after 1920 who lived past the year 1989. The latest authors I categorize as non-contemporary are Charles Hartshorne (1897– 2000), Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), Louis Althusser (1918 – 1990), P. F. Strawson (1919 – 2006), and Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961).

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were major subjects of philosophy books published in 2014, sixty-eight, or only 32 %, were contemporary philosophers.¹⁸ The range of contemporary and twentieth-century authors discussed and assigned is very broad, since recent philosophy has not yet undergone a process of canon-formation,¹⁹ and there is similar diversity in late antiquity, but the other centuries are usually dominated by one or a few figures:

Diagram 4: Scatterplot of Teaching.

As this makes clear, individual authors often monopolize the teaching of a particular century. Pre-Socratic, Roman, and early Christian thought are exceptions, represented by a range of authors.²⁰ In contrast, Augustine, Boethius, Maimonides, and

 By “major subject,” I mean that a philosopher was either the sole subject of a book, or one of two subjects in a book comparing two philosophers – for example, a book comparing Anselm and Descartes.  The most frequently assigned contemporary author was Peter Van Inwagen (assigned twelve times), followed by Thomas Nagel (eight times), Harry Frankfurt (seven times), James Rachels, Peter Singer, and Susan Wolf (six times each), Judith J. Thompson (five times), Robert Nozick and William Rowe (four times each), and Martha Nussbaum, John Hick, and John Searle (three times each). The contemporary authors treated by the most books were Michel Foucault (seventeen) and Jacques Derrida (fifteen), followed by Gilles Deleuze (fourteen), John Rawls (seven), Williard Van Orman Quine (seven), Emannuel Levinas (five), and Thomas Kuhn (five); no other contemporary philosopher was the subject of more than four books.  On syllabuses for general courses, the Roman period is represented only by representatives of Greek schools, such as Agrippa the Skeptic, Epictetus, and Sextus Empiricus, while Cicero, Seneca, and other Roman authors, as well as Christians before Augustine, appear only in topical courses, such as those on political or religious thought. Pre-Socratic authors assigned in courses include Heraclitus and Parmenides in survey courses, and Sophocles and Euripides in courses on moral thought or reform. One reading from Confucius was assigned in a course on “Philosophy as a Way of Life” offered at Wesleyan by Stephen Angle, which is also the only syllabus to include Lucretius and Seneca. Other Roman and early Christian assignments include Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, all in W. James Simpson’s “Revolution, Reform, and Conservatism in Western Culture” course at Harvard; Cicero

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Aquinas are the only representatives of their centuries, and St. Anselm’s ontological proof is accompanied solely by the response to it by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. Anselm usually accompanies Descartes – the most popular author on syllabuses after Plato²¹ – who accounts for 35 % of seventeenth-century readings,²² while Hume and Kant each account for 29 % of the eighteenth-century readings,²³ and John Stuart Mill almost matches Aristotle in popularity, accounting for 37 % of nineteenth-century material.²⁴ While the patterns by century remain, disparities between teaching and research are marked in the case of several individuals:

Diagram 5: Scatterplot of Publications.

Aristotle is assigned much less universally than Plato, but is the subject of more publications. St. Anselm and John Stuart Mill are assigned much more often than they are studied, and both Descartes and Thomas Aquinas also stand out more in and Sallust in Harvey Mansfield’s “Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy” course at Harvard; and Origen, Athenagoras of Athens, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian in a “Christianity and Philosophy” course at Wesleyan (instructor not listed). Roman-era authors treated in published books include Aenesidemus of Cnossus, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Plotinus.  It is worth observing that the Republic constituted 37 % of the Plato readings assigned, with all other dialogues totaling 64 %.  Locke accounts for 18 % (ten courses use the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and three assign other works by Locke), Pascal 13 %, Hobbes 10 %, and Francis Bacon 4 %.  Of the remainder, English thought accounts for 25 % (readings from George Berkeley, William Paley, Thomas Reid, and, assigned once each, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, and Edmund Burke), and the French Enlightenment for 16 % (works by Rousseau and Baron D’Holbach were assigned four times each, Candide twice, and an excerpt from Montesquieu once), while one introductory survey (offered at Texas A&M University by Patrick Anderson) includes Thomas Jefferson.  Nietzsche accounts for 15 %, William Kingdom Clifford’s 1877 “The Ethics of Belief” 13 %, and other nineteenth-century authors, including William James, Marx, Kierkegaard, Bentham, Hegel, Thoreau, and Mark Twain, for the remaining 35 %.

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class readings than research. Kant is assigned only slightly more than Hume, but is the subject of more than twice as many publications, outstripping even Aristotle. Finally, a number of favorites of current scholarship – Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida – are virtually absent from introductory philosophy courses.²⁵ The most acute disparities are highlighted in the graph below, which shows all philosophers who were the subjects of more than ten books, or who stood out as very frequent presences on syllabuses:

Diagram 6: Research vs. Presence in Classes Double Bar Graph.

These comparisons reveal many fruitful details, but, as we return from this periphrasis to the question of the place of the Renaissance in the philosophical tradition, two findings in particular stand out. The first is the confirmation that the pre-seventeenth-century Renaissance, and humanism in particular, are indeed virtually silenced. Machiavelli receives substantial attention, while Pico, Thomas More, Erasmus, Luther, Montaigne, and Galileo occasionally surface in the flow of scholarship, but all of these together comprise less than 3 % of scholarship and 2 % of readings, while there are eighteen philosophers who are individually subjects of more publications than the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries combined.²⁶ These  The presence of Foucault and Marx on this list – certainly authors widely assigned to students in other disciplines – is a valuable reminder of how specific the perspective offered by these philosophy department activities is.  These in order are Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, Locke, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Derrida, Aquinas, Leibniz, Marx, and Deleuze. Philoso-

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data also make clear the supremacy of seventeenth-century voices, which by themselves command almost as much attention as all pre-seventeenth-century thought combined. By far the most prominent representation of humanism in philosophy today is not the work of any humanist, but the seventeenth-century critique of humanism, especially by the preeminent Descartes. Both the earlier Renaissance and the seventeenth century saw themselves as periods of intense and exciting philosophical dynamism, and produced masses of new philosophical writings that their authors and audiences expected to echo forward through the ages. As for why the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries have been silenced and the seventeenth-century emerged victorious, the intentionally intimidating mode of expression used by Pomponio Leto in the passage above, which made it so difficult for us to access the philosophy hidden within, becomes more than a question of style: it becomes a question of survival. Authorial self-fashioning, Renaissance and post-Renaissance, has had a profound effect on the longevity of philosophical writing. And, if there is a single root from which the most consequential differences between humanist and seventeenth-century philosophical style spring, it is how both eras present their relationship to the legacy of antiquity.

Section 1: Innovation Masked Around 1433, Pomponio Leto’s teacher Lorenzo Valla completed a philosophical dialogue, some fifteen years in the making, called De summo bono, On the Highest Good, or, in another revision, De voluptate, On Pleasure. ²⁷ The dialogue examines the role of pleasure-seeking as a guide to human life, proposing it as a better alternative to traditional ideas of virtue. Through the interlocutor who dominates the first two sections, assigned the identity of the poet Maffeo Vegio, Valla advances the position that observation of human behavior shows that, contrary to the claims of Plato and the Stoics, people do not by nature love virtues, and the virtues practiced by famous philosophers like Socrates, Zeno, Cicero, and Seneca lead them to misery, not happiness.²⁸ Inverting the Aristotelian model of virtues as the mean between two vices, Valla has the Vegio character argue that nature seems to favor vices, having created two vices for each virtue: guile and folly to counter prudence, and prodigality and

phers assigned more often than all Renaissance readings combined (which really means all sixteenth-century readings) include Plato, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Aristotle, Mill, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Bertrand Russell, Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, and J. L. Mackie.  Letters indicate that Valla conceived the idea for a dialogue on the Highest Good around 1418, in response to the explorations of the sumum bonum by Leonardo Bruni, while a letter from Panormita to Valla, probably dated 1530, mentions the completed first draft; see Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure, De Voluptate, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch, Janus series, 1 (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 19, 22, 43 n. 10.  Valla, On Pleasure, 66 – 67.

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greed to counter generosity, which proves that what we call vices are actually the forces nature intends to govern human action.²⁹ The project – common to many classical sects and elements of the Christian monastic tradition as well – of achieving happiness through philosophical tranquility, using philosophical and ascetic exercises to free one’s self from grief, pain, desire, and other strong emotions, Valla characterizes as an unnatural and dehumanizing path that, like Medusa, turns people to stone.³⁰ Rather than leading people to destruction, pleasure-seeking by its nature leads people to do good and live well. Philosophy and study have their place in making pleasures richer and more sophisticated, since a philosopher’s pleasure in contemplating the heavens is greater than a non-philosopher’s, just as an educated viewer contemplating two statues takes greater pleasure in them than a child ignorant of art.³¹ Against the traditional objection that pleasure-seeking will lead to lawlessness and selfishness, the dialogue suggests that laws are sufficient to encourage beneficial deeds and discourage harmful ones, and that honor and nobility are themselves species of pleasure, since good deeds are rewarded, not by inner tranquility, but by praise and thanks.³² Valla’s presentation of these ideas is consciously transgressive, and he even has his main interlocutor praise adultery and criticize monastic celibacy,³³ in preparation for the third book of the dialogue, in which other interlocutors rein in these more extreme claims and demonstrate how this idea of pleasure as the natural governor of human action can be brought into line with Christianity. Even as Christian orthodoxy demands that Valla have other interlocutors rein in the firebrand character Vegio, the group concludes that there is no difference between voluptas and spiritual delectation, and that nature is designed to offer humanity the path to both.³⁴ Boethius’s struggles to understand Providence in the Consolatio Valla attributes to his false assumption, shared with Plato and the Stoics, that good people should always be happy and wicked people unhappy, since he did not understand that God and Providence provide the means by which pleasure can be generated, without guaranteeing that it will.³⁵ God is the efficient cause of all pleasure, not a guarantor that every potential pleasure will be achieved; that falls to the individual.³⁶ Many aspects of Valla’s innovative, naturalist, pleasure-centered Christian Providence and corresponding ethics are surprising in a work as early as 1433, in that they seem to anticipate the rehabilitation of self-interest associated with the seventeenth

       

Valla, Valla, Valla, Valla, Valla, Valla, Valla, Valla,

On On On On On On On On

Pleasure, 62– 63. Pleasure, 141. Pleasure, 201. Pleasure, 185, 187– 99. Pleasure, 119 – 21. Pleasure, 267. Pleasure, 271. Pleasure, 275.

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century and the rise of capitalism,³⁷ and even aspects of the radical libertinism associated with the approach of the Enlightenment.³⁸ Yet, in those histories of radicalism that do take a moment to acknowledge the De voluptate, Valla himself is not discussed as a contributor to the tradition, for a very simple reason: Valla lied about the source of his ideas. The staying power of this lie is perhaps best demonstrated by what is now earth’s most ubiquitous source on Lorenzo Valla: his Wikipedia page. In De voluptate (On Pleasure), [Valla] contrasted the principles of the Stoics with the tenets of Epicurus, openly proclaiming his sympathy with those who claimed the right of free indulgence for man’s natural appetites…. Here for the first time in the Renaissance the ideas of Epicurus found deliberate and positive expression in a work of scholarly and philosophical value.³⁹

From its beginning, Valla presents the De voluptate as a dialogue between an ‘Epicurean’ and a ‘Stoic,’ accompanied by a Franciscan, a doctor, and a few other representatives of fifteenth-century learned culture. Throughout the text, the Maffeo Vegio who voices Valla’s idea of a pleasure-oriented Nature calls himself an Epicurean and constantly invokes and claims to be following Epicurus. His primary opponent is labeled as a Stoic, and the whole debate purports to recapitulate the ancient rivalry between the Stoics and Epicureans. Yet, apart from the abstract concept of pleasure as the highest good, none of the major ideas voiced by the Vegio character has precedents in classical Epicureanism, or indeed in any classical philosophy, and he explicitly rejects those few Epicurean convictions that were widely known in the fifteenth century: denial of Providence, denial of divine intervention in Nature, and denial of the afterlife.⁴⁰ Valla’s Vegio is not an Epicurean, either by the rubric of a modern classics department or by the very vague understanding that a Renaissance lay reader had of Epicureanism. Nor is it plausible that Valla himself believed that all these ideas were genuinely Epicurean, since the dialogue itself frequently mentions points at which the ‘Epicurean’ Vegio disagrees with Epicurus. Furthermore, Valla himself  See Albert O. Hirschmann’s classic account in The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).  See Tullio Gregory, “Pierre Charron’s ‘Scandalous Book,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 87– 110; and Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), chapter 6.  Wikipedia, “Lorenzo Valla,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Valla, accessed 11 October 2015.  Vegio regurgitates Aquinas’s proof of Providence from design (Valla, On Pleasure, 75), argues for active gods who enjoy pleasure as humans rather than contemplative gods do (203), and is revealed to believe in a Christian afterlife (259 – 61). Epicurean denial of the afterlife was infamous, and even Dante singled out “Epicurus and his followers” as deniers of the afterlife (Inferno X, 13 – 15), while “Epicurean” was sometimes used as a synonym for denial of Providence, especially during the Reformation; on Renaissance stereotypes about Epicureanism, see Palmer, Reading Lucretius, 15 – 17, 21– 25.

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was working on the dialogue during the very years that the key Epicurean sources of antiquity – Lucretius’s De rerum natura and the Epicurean sections in Diogenes Laertius – were rediscovered, yet Valla seems to have made no effort to avail himself of these Epicurean sources, contenting himself with the references in Cicero and Seneca, and, above all, focusing on his own new ideas about what philosophy might follow from the principle that pleasure is the highest good.⁴¹ Valla did not attempt to reconstruct classical Epicureanism. De voluptate does not “[contrast] the principles of the Stoics with the tenets of Epicurus,” as Wikipedia proclaims, nor does it give “deliberate and positive expression” to the “ideas of Epicurus,” since the tenets of Epicurus are absent or overturned in the course of the narrative, and Boethius, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and many other thinkers are treated much more directly in the dialogue than Epicurus. Valla’s ‘Stoic’ similarly does not profess monism, determinism, or any of the signature tenets of real Stoicism, but stands generally for the many thinkers, influenced by ancient Stoic thought, who advocate self-mastery and the rejection of emotions and pleasures. ‘Epicureanism’ and ‘Stoicism’ here are labels, shortcuts for referring to the pleasure-as-the-highest-good thesis and for exploring the opposition between ascetic, pleasure-rejecting philosophy and a rehabilitated moral hedonism. They legitimize Valla’s radical project by invoking an antique precedent, but the names of the schools are actually masks for original ideas, transparent veils that the reader is intended to see through. Classical masks like the ones Valla employs are common in humanist writings, and yet later centuries have tended to take the classical trappings of such works at face value, seeing them as attempts to recreate ancient thought and – since they differ – failed attempts. It is an easy mistake to make, since the humanists themselves encourage us to make it. The most famous signature of Renaissance philosophy – then and now – is its revival of antiquity. In language, architecture, music, science, speech, and thought, the humanists strove to imitate the ancients; they profess this in every preface and oration, going to great lengths to advertise their debts to the classics and to deny any novelty in their creations. They had good reason to do so. In the fifteenth century, as enthusiasm for the classical revival convinced scholars and patrons across Italy and then Europe that the secrets of philosophy, virtue, good government, imperial stability, and even theology lay locked in the lost works of the ancients, a discovery of something novel from antiquity carried much more weight, and drew larger audiences, than anything conceived in the inferior

 Since it seems that Valla was working on De voluptate from around 1418 through 1433, as he wrote, he very probably would have heard that his then-friend Poggio Bracciolini and Poggio’s associate Niccolò Niccoli had the first recovered manuscript of Lucretius’ De rerum natura in Florence, yet Valla seems to have made no effort to visit it, nor to access the Epicurean content in Diogenes Laertius that was also available in Florence starting in the 1420s, thanks to a manuscript retrieved by Aurispa. Valla’s goal in the dialogue was not to reflect an authentic Epicureanism, but to reevaluate the term as a label for his original speculations about what might flow from the thesis ‘pleasure is the highest good’; see Valla, On Pleasure, 19, 22, 43 n. 10.

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present. Thus fifteenth-century humanists, when they did advance new ideas, tended to borrow the labels of past schools: Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and Epicureanism. This makes it easy to dismiss their works: why read a clumsy and distorted fifteenth-century digest of Plato or Epicurus when Plato and Epicurus themselves stand ready on our shelves? But the humanist debt to the ancients is as much an artifact of self-presentation as of reality. Scholasticism is certainly deeply indebted to classical thought, but despite its ‘slavish’ reuse of Aristotle, it does not present itself as derivative in the way that humanist thought does (and is therefore studied much more than humanist thought). Descartes, too, integrates elements from antiquity, notably Aristotelian ideas of a priori first principles and very Platonic concepts of dualism and the immaterial, immortal soul, into his philosophy. And while philosophers of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries – humanist and scholastic – continued Thomist and Scotist debates, Descartes also engaged closely with Anselm’s ontological proof and the long scholastic tradition of proofs of the existence of God. But while the content of Descartes’ Meditations is as close to Plato and Anselm as the content of Valla’s De voluptate is to Epicurus and Epictetus, Descartes’ strategies in how he presents his debts to antiquity are profoundly different. And it is here that transformation theory can help us differentiate the various strategies for transforming classical material that have had in turn such a profound impact on the way earlier Renaissance and seventeenth-century thinkers are perceived today.

Section 2: Strategies of Integration No philosopher has had such an absolute success in presenting his work as innovation ex nihilo as Descartes, so with him we shall begin. Descartes’ strategy in integrating old ideas – whether from Plato or Anselm – is one of complete assimilation, combined with the conscious erasure of his sources’ identities. He does not name Anselm, Plato, Aristotle, or any of the predecessors he is borrowing from. A reader familiar with them will recognize them, but Descartes places his unnamed assimilations within an intimate and narrative framing text, in the style of Montaigne, designed to incite a feeling of complicity in the reader. In approaching his Proof of the Existence of God in the Meditations, Descartes has the reader share the emotional and logical experience of his absolute doubt, and the steps from “cogito ergo sum” to a dualist universe, immaterial, immortal soul, and benevolent God. While these conclusions are recognizable as modifications of Plato, Aristotle, and Anselm, by making his readers feel the process of deriving them from nothing, Descartes makes their own emotional and experiential memory endorse his claim that his ideas are original; his readers accept that Descartes has derived these familiar concepts from nothing, rather than from predecessors, because they felt included in the process. Of course, Renaissance humanists like Leto and Valla, and indeed medieval scholastics too, also often reuse earlier philosophical material without naming the source. Yet their strategies, and their intentions in shaping their readers’ experiences,

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are different from Descartes’. In both the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, reading culture involved extensive memorization, and educated readers were expected to recognize phrases from authorities, which were encapsulated verbatim in the flow of text. Snippets of the Church Fathers and biblical phrases in the familiar Latin vulgate appear constantly in scholastic writings, and in many humanist texts as well, with the expectation that audiences will recognize them even if the source is not named. Attributed and unattributed phrases from classical authors likewise pepper both scholastic and humanist works, serving in both eras as a proof of the author’s general learnedness. When these passages are quoted without naming the source, the authors do not – as Descartes did – seek to erase or deny their sources. Their goal is rather the opposite: a reader’s ability to recognize quotations out of context was a test of his or her worth as a scholar. Even Pomponio Leto, who employs encapsulated quotations aggressively and even deceptively in texts like his Lucretius vita, presents them sometimes named, and sometimes unnamed, but with the expectation that his learned peers will recognize them, that students will rush to look them up, and that the ignorant will be justly shamed. Such encapsulated segments of earlier thought are valuable because they are borrowed, not despite being borrowed. While both humanists and scholastics encapsulated quoted phrases, scholastic authors tended to treat classical authorities interchangeably with other authorities, sometimes distinguishing Christian from pagan but paying little attention to the dates of an author’s life, and without a sense that works from a particular period – classical – were one united corpus that was somehow different in its potential and value from works of other eras. Humanist writings in contrast strove to make the reader constantly aware of when encapsulated passages, even unattributed ones, were classical, since these carried a different weight and reinforced the author’s allegiance to the humanist movement. The tendency of competitive humanists like Leto to use encapsulated classical passages as weapons, by deliberately quoting rare and obscure works,⁴² was only amplified by the advent of print culture, when competition for patronage and position was joined by competition for book sales, and editors of classical texts competed to outdo rivals by packing their editions with more citations, references, and supplements.⁴³ Scholastic cultures of textual encapsulation also became more intimidating in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as library-building projects and rediscovered texts increased the breadth of authorities read and encapsulated by Renaissance scholastics. All this means that, while Descartes’ strategy of assimilating classical content is inviting and comfortable, because he leaves it un-

 Perhaps the best snapshot of humanist competitiveness, exclusivity, and the penchant toward intimidation comes in the correspondence of Leto’s teacher Valla, recently collected in a beautiful edition by Brendan Cook, Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).  For example, over the course of the sixteenth century, editions of the De rerum natura were accompanied by increasingly elaborate introductory letters and vitae, each of which strove to mention more classical connections than previous editions; see Palmer, Reading Lucretius, chapters 4 and 5.

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named and explains the ideas he wants to use simply and clearly, the humanist strategy of encapsulating classical content intimidates and excludes readers who have not memorized large swaths of the classical Latin canon, and many Christian authorities as well. Humanists also tended to encapsulate on a macro scale, appropriating entire classical texts and putting them to wholly new purposes. Much like their medieval predecessors, humanists considered the commentary one of the most powerful scholarly forms, and often innovative, even radical ideas appeared for the first time in commentaries, which wrapped original material around entire books of classical thought while claiming simply to unpack the meaning of the original. Often the meanings unpacked were altogether different. We have simple examples, such as the 1563 commentary on Lucretius by Denys Lambin, which is actually a discourse on Aristotelianism, demonstrating how the many seeming Epicurean ‘errors’ can be brought into line with Aristotelian orthodoxies.⁴⁴ We have Marsilio Ficino’s many commentaries on Plato, Plotinus, and pseudo-Dionysius, in which he sets out an elaborate synthesis of Neoplatonism with Thomist Christian orthodoxy. Machiavelli’s Discourses, among the very few pre-seventeenth-century works that are frequently studied in philosophy departments today, take the form of a discussion on Livy. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is perhaps the best-known work of fifteenth-century thought and is frequently employed today as a sort of manifesto of humanism, but to seek Pico’s further development of the same ideas, one must look to such works as his 1486 Commento sopra una canzona de amore, which takes the form of a commentary on his poet friend Girolamo Benivieni’s poem about Ficino’s 1469 commentary on Plato’s Symposium – not an intuitive place to seek original philosophy.⁴⁵ Another facet of the humanist integration of antiquity is the practice of borrowing antique labels to disguise original work. Sometimes humanists knowingly inverted ancient labels, as in Valla’s ‘Epicureanism,’ or the moment when Giordano Bruno deceptively applied the label ‘Aristotelianism’ to his explicitly un-Aristotelian concept of Nature in the Camoeracensis Acrotismus. ⁴⁶ Other humanists presented themselves sincerely as members of a particular classical school, such as the many Aristotelians active at the University of Paris throughout the Renaissance and the famous

 See Karine Durin’s excellent work on heterodox content hidden in commentaries by sixteenthcentury Spanish humanists, and Tatiana Tsakiropoula-Summers, “Lambin’s Edition of Lucretius: Using Plato and Aristotle in Defense of De Rerum Natura,” Classical and Modern Literature 21.2 (2001): 45 – 70.  Paul Richard Blum, “Popular Platonism: Giovanni Pico with Elia del Madigo against Marsilio Ficino,” in Sol et Homo, Mensch und Natur in der Renaissance, ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer et al. (Munich: Fink, 2008) 421– 22.  Paul Richard Blum, “Giordano Bruno: l’Aristotele dissimulato,” in Verità e dissimulazione. L’infinito di Giordano Bruno tra caccia filosofica e riforma religiosa, ed. M. Traversino (Naples: Editrice Domenicana Italiana, 2015), 173 – 91.

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self-declared Platonist Marsilio Ficino. When humanist philosophers tell us that their powerfully original ideas are actually from Plato, Aristotle, or Epicurus, it is easy to believe them. The seventeenth century also reuses ancient labels, but here the selffashioning frame is different. The provocative title of Bacon’s Novum organum could not be a more overt classical reference, although it does not seek to revaluate Aristotle and present a new Aristotelianism, but to attack and replace Aristotle, an act of creative destruction. The techniques of humanists who buried their heterodoxy deep in commentaries are likewise used again by Pierre Bayle in his enormously influential Historical and Critical Dictionary, which hides its radical claims in enormous, interweaving footnotes. Bayle distorts the subjects he claims to define in his Dictionary every bit as much as Bruno and Valla distorted Aristotelianism and Epicureanism, but Bayle frames his classical materials as topics he is talking about, entries discussing Manichaeism or Pyrrho, rather than attitudes he is voicing or practicing, thus making his work seem more original than humanist philosophy. Bayle’s work is also, like Descartes’, intentionally penetrable, explicating all its references and building his new arguments out of the discussion, rather than leaving encapsulated references naked as a test of the reader’s learnedness. His explanations are quite transformative themselves, often bordering on obfuscation as he uses figures from Catullus to Rufinus as launching points for radical new analysis, but he still provides the reader with a sufficient sense of what he means by these terms, so a student can comfortably read Bayle with few footnotes beyond his own. Bayle is a good example of a figure who exerted enormous influence in his day, was largely forgotten in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and was later rediscovered and brought back into the forefront of scholarship.⁴⁷ Bayle’s strategy of hiding his originality in footnotes and periphrases to evade censors was effective in his own time, but detrimental later as his strangely structured works proved less approachable than the more direct digests of his peers. His revival has been facilitated by the fact that, like Descartes, his interwoven footnotes still explicate their references, a much easier format than an intentionally intimidating humanism saturated with an ever-multiplying array of encapsulated authorities.

Section 3: Strategies of Rejection The origin myths, as we may call them, of humanism and of the ‘new philosophy’ of Descartes and Francis Bacon are remarkably similar. Both defined themselves as revolutionary rejections of the methods and practices of the preceding generations, especially of scholasticism, which dominated the university system in 1600 as much as

 See the works of Elisabeth Labrousse, especially “Reading Pierre Bayle in Paris,” in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France and Germany, ed. Alan C. Kors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 7– 16.

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in 1350. If Petrarch managed to transform the Ciceronianism that was already being studied in centers such as Bologna and Arezzo into something that seemed novel and powerful, something that would launch idealists on dangerous voyages to seek lost manuscripts and persuade princes to fund said costly expeditions, he gained sufficient fame to do so largely through his fierce and widely publicized polemics against the scholastics. Similarly, if Descartes made educated Europe see his proof of the existence of God as new, instead of one more in a long tradition of such proofs, his work seemed different largely because of his claim to an absolute separation between scholasticism and himself. Both humanist and seventeenth-century claims to break with scholasticism are as much authorial self-fashioning as reality. The transformations of Plato and Aristotle in humanist commentaries are mitigated by the transformations of Plato and Aristotle in scholastic writings, just as much as by the earlier transformations of early Christians and late classical Neoplatonists. The records surrounding libraries like that of San Marco in Florence make it abundantly clear that the humanists were voracious readers of scholastic texts, but this is not mentioned in their own descriptions of their educational program and rarely acknowledged in basic treatments of humanism today.⁴⁸ For example, Ardis Collins and others have demonstrated how the ‘Platonism’ in Marsilio’s Ficino’s Platonic Theology is packed with unattributed proofs and premises taken from Thomas Aquinas.⁴⁹ Yet, much as Plotinus the ‘Platonist’ declared his allegiance to Plato and erased his nearly equal debt to the Aristotelian tradition, so Ficino and other humanists advertised their connections to the classics, but not their debts to scholastic authorities, in titles and manifestos. Of course, when Ficino wrote his Platonic Theology, Thomas Aquinas and other authorities were so ubiquitous that most of Ficino’s readers would have recognized Thomist arguments out of context, just as they recognized encapsulated quotations from Cicero or scripture. Yet, when humanists encapsulate both classical and later material, they advertise their encapsulations of antiquity with names and labels such as ‘Platonist,’ tags that declared their membership in the humanist movement. Elements from scholasticism were not so often flagged and tended to be completely assimilated and translated into new language rather than encapsulated intact, since humanism defined itself in opposition to scholasticism and had no incentive to advertise its link to its adversaries. When seventeenth-century opponents of scholasticism and humanism reused scholastic and classical material, they similarly did not name their sources, translating concepts entirely rather than encapsulating quotations, as

 The often-downplayed influence of Christian authorities on the humanists has enjoyed increased scholarly interest recently, as well as conspicuous calls for more research in this area, as summarized in Antony Grafton’s Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture, “Renaissance Humanism and Christian Antiquity: Philology, Fantasy, and Collaboration,” delivered at the Renaissance Society of America Meeting in Berlin, 27 March 2015.  Ardis B. Collins, The Secular is Sacred: Platonism and Thomism in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, 69 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

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when Descartes’ Meditations uses Aristotle and Anselm, presenting its sources in assimilated form. While Descartes and the humanists alike reused scholastic material while declaring themselves adversaries of scholasticism and denying their debts to it, their similar modes of transforming scholasticism were partnered with radically different strategies in expressing their opposition to it. In the case of Petrarch, in staple works like his Invectives and letters, his rejection of scholasticism can be characterized as an act of negation, an explicit and active repudiation in which he describes overtly the accurate but tedious Aristotelian proofs of the scholastics, and argues that the passionate rhetoric of antiquity is more beautiful and persuasive.⁵⁰ Staple texts like his De ignorantia are crammed with vivid characterizations of scholastics, such as “my judges are so captivated by their love of the mere name of Aristotle that they consider it a sacrilege to differ with whatever ‘He’ said on any subject,” or “Let all the Aristotelians everywhere hear me. You know how readily they will spit on this lonely, strange, and meager booklet, for their breed is prone to insults.”⁵¹ As a result, it is challenging if not impossible to describe Petrarch’s work and the origins of humanism without also describing scholasticism and humanism’s adversarial relationship with it. Thus while humanist rhetoric may sometimes create a false narrative in which humanism replaced scholasticism instead of coexisting with it, scholasticism, and the details of its questions and practices, are constantly present when one reads humanism’s foundational texts. Early humanist writing carries its adversaries with it and requires knowledge of them, even while making them seem worthless. This is likely much of why, even though Petrarch is recognized now and in the Renaissance as the main initiator of the humanist movement, his works are rarely used to teach humanism, and much later works like those of Pico, or Castiglione’s The Courtier, are preferred. Descartes, in contrast, is invariably used to teach and study Cartesianism, despite the reams of material produced by his followers. Descartes’ approach to his predecessors is less an act of overt negation than of creative destruction, framed as sweeping away something old to erect something new, much like tearing down an old building to raise a new one, a comparison Descartes makes at length in the opening of Part II of his Discourse on Method. ⁵² There, as in the Meditations, Descartes does not describe his opponents at length, but focuses on his project of beginning

 Petrarch, De ignorantia 22.  Petrarch, De ignorantia 104 and 106, trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 313 – 15.  Discourse on Method, Part II, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 44b-45a. Descartes presents his plan for the Discourse by beginning with his analysis of cities and architectural accumulation, observing that “ … there is very often less perfection in works composed of several portions, and by the hands of various masters, than in those on which one individual alone has worked” (44b), and that “many people cause their own houses to be knocked down in order to rebuild them …” (45a).

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the philosophical process from nothing. Contrast, for example, these passages in which Descartes criticizes humanism and scholasticism to the way that Petrarch voiced his criticisms: I considered that I had already given sufficient time to languages and likewise even to the reading of the literature of the ancients. For … when one is too curious about things which were practiced in past centuries, one is usually very ignorant about those which are practiced in our own time.⁵³ But in examining them I observed in respect to Logic that the syllogism and the greater part of the other teaching served better in explaining to others those things that one knows … than in learning what is new. And although in reality Logic contains many precepts which are very true and very good, there are at the same time mingled with them so many others which are hurtful or superfluous, that it is almost as difficult to separate the two as to draw a Diana or a Minerva out of a block of marble which is not yet roughly hewn.⁵⁴

So vague is Descartes’ sketch of what he is opposing that it can almost be called a silencing, or Ignoranz, so his rivals suffer a sort of damnatio memoriae, not just by passing unnamed – after all, Petrarch does not name particular Aristotelian adversaries – but by being described so vaguely that they do not seem to be particular people or movements. Someone who reads these passages without prior knowledge of humanism and scholasticism will not recognize that a specific adversary is being described. As a result, reading the Meditations or Discourse on Method today requires practically no knowledge of the movements they are rejecting. The sections of these canonical readings from Descartes that acknowledge established traditions are modularly positioned and easily skimmed over, as in the case of the Meditations’ opening address to the Dean and Doctors of the Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris, in which Descartes discusses the tradition of proofs of the existence of God but leaves it firmly behind before plunging into his rhetorically powerful opening image of razing cities to the ground to build anew. While Descartes’ personal rejection of past philosophy was broad-sweeping, targeting Plato and Aristotle as much as the humanists and scholastics, it was supplemented by the more focused vitriol of his followers, who attacked earlier Renaissance thought in particular with far more ferocity than Descartes’ own core texts. And within the English-speaking world, Descartes had another ally in his rival and contemporary Francis Bacon. Bacon’s attacks on what he characterized as the false idols and vacuous accumulated flotsam of earlier philosophy in his Great Instauration and Novum organum are far more vicious, vivid, and rhetorically ornamented than Descartes’ version of the same call for a break with the past. At times, Bacon even appropriates and redirects the rhetoric that Petrarch used to praise humanism and damn scholasticism, as when Bacon reuses the image of the ideal scholar as a hon-

 Discourse on Method, Part I, 43a.  Discourse on Method, Part II, 46b.

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eybee, gathering broadly from Nature for the good of humanity.⁵⁵ This image is classical in origin, used by Seneca, Horace, and Lucretius.⁵⁶ While Petrarch’s transformation of the honeybee image was an act of encapsulation, done with the expectation that his readers would identify it, for Bacon it is an act of assimilation and willful ignorance, using the image to attack the value, and deny the influence, of the very figures from whom he took it. While Bacon is not read or studied nearly as much today as Descartes is, Bacon’s claims of an absolute rejection of the past echoed forward through the English tradition and the French Enlightenment. Here too the rhetoric is often explicitly one of creative destruction, as in this vivid 1832 excerpt from a popularly reprinted letter from Sir David Brewster to Sir Walter Scott: Des Cartes did, indeed, at last, overthrow the Aristotelian system, but he substituted in its place one equally absurd; and it was not till the great Bacon arose, that the mists of ignorance, error, and prejudice began to be dispelled. He it was who first pointed out the true method of exploring the mysteries of nature, and laid the foundation for a correct and rational system of physical science. The immortal Newton raised the superstructure – a glorious temple, before which the Dagon of superstition has fallen prostrate, and is fast crumbling to dust.⁵⁷

This rhetoric remained powerful in the English tradition of teaching philosophy longer than Bacon himself, and already in 1733 Voltaire said of the Novum organum that “the best and most remarkable of [Bacon’s] works is the one which is the least read today,” since it was “the scaffolding by means of which modern scientific thought has been built, and when that edifice had been raised, at least in part, the scaffolding ceased to be of any use.”⁵⁸ Yet, still of use today – and especially of use to Bacon’s rival Descartes – is the lingering power of Bacon’s rhetoric of creative destruction, which lets students become excited about the seventeenth-century triumph over earlier errors without feeling any need to study those errors or their authors. The aftereffects of Bacon make it easy to teach and study Descartes without teaching Descartes’ predecessors, while Petrarch’s adversarial negation of scholasticism undermines the value of scholasticism while making it impossible to approach humanism without it.

 Novum organum Book 1 Aphorism 95; Petrarch, Familiares XXIII.19 (letter to Boccaccio, 28 October 1365).  Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium 84; Horace, Odes IV, ii, 27– 32; Lucretius III 11– 12. Lucretius would have been known to Bacon, but not to Petrarch.  “Letters on Natural Magic” addressed to Sir Walter Scott by Sir David Brewster, Family Library 32 (1832), reprinted in The Aberdine Magazine 2.24 (Dec. 1832): H4.  Voltaire, Letters on England, “On Chancellor Bacon,” trans. Leonard Woodcock (New York: Penguin, 1980), 58.

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Section 4: Systems without Authors For Sir David Brewster in 1832, much as for Voltaire in the 1730s, it was a flaw that when Descartes “did, indeed, at last, overthrow the Aristotelian system … he substituted in its place one equally absurd.” Yet Descartes’ system-building is one of the greatest interests of contemporary philosophers, who have been attracted to his techniques for building chains of reasoning and to the elements of his system that are still ‘live’ or viable today. Bacon, who laid foundations for the work of others without erecting an edifice, has been largely eclipsed by the authors who did erect systems: Netwton, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. That Bacon now lags behind, not only Descartes, but his own successors, reflects Pierre Hadot’s argument that many pre-modern philosophers were stripped from the philosophical canon when the current focus on philosophers as system-builders, whose achievements are to be sought in their formal written works, replaced the pre-modern tendency to see philosophy as a way of life, and thus to seek a philosopher’s achievements in his or her actions, biography, and more intimate or literary writings, all approaches favored in the preseventeenth-century Renaissance. A milder form of Hadot’s thesis posits that it is not only system-builders but also the creators of key questions, concepts, methods, and arguments who draw the interest of the modern discipline of philosophy, thinkers whose creations – whether Anselm’s ontological proof or Heidegger’s Dasein – can be removed from context and evaluated, debated, refuted, responded to, and recombined in part of the ‘live’ conversation of contemporary philosophy. Bacon’s shared credit in the systems of his successors, so celebrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is difficult to place in our current taxonomy of philosophy by author. But what if systems have no author at all? One factor that makes it particularly difficult to spot moments when a humanist has appropriated an ancient text or label to disguise original work is that the humanists themselves were not always conscious of the fact that they were innovating. This was true especially in the case of syncretists like Marsilio Ficino. Drawing on the models of biblical exegesis and late antique Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Ficino sought to unpack the hidden meanings in what were believed to be intentionally obscure and coded ancient philosophical texts.⁵⁹ Based on sources such as Boethius’s allegorical account in the Consolation of Philosophy of how Lady Philosophy, who after dwelling happily with early sages like Plato, was attacked by later “marauders” (i. e., later stages of ancient thought) who carried

 See the works of Michael J. B. Allen, especially Plato’s Third Eye: Studies in Marsilio Ficino’s Metaphysics and Its Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995); The Rebirth of Platonic Theology, ed. James Hankins and Fabrizio Meroi (Florence: Olschki, 2013); James Hankins, “Marsilio Ficino and the Religion of the Philosophers,” Rinascimento n.s. 48 (2008): 101– 21; Christopher Celenza, “Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino,” Renaissance Quarterly 52.3 (1999): 667– 711; and Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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off scraps of her robe, thinking they possessed the whole of her,⁶⁰ Ficino believed that the early ancients had possessed an original, nearly perfect (and quasi-Christian) philosophy. He saw his efforts as an attempt to reconstruct this by using the light of revelation and other later advances in truth to sort through the philosophical relics of antiquity and access the original perfect philosophy, which he believed had been passed down through a genealogy of sages from Moses through Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and others to Plato and later Plotinus.⁶¹ Ficino’s Platonic Theology aimed to demonstrate the compatibility of Plato and Christianity, and to heal flaws in contemporary theology using classical wisdom, but in order to do so, he created a radically original new system integrating, among other diverse elements, both a Christian afterlife and judgment and a highly modified form of Platonic or Pythagorean reincarnation. Neither Plato, Plotinus, nor modernity would call Ficino’s work authentic Platonism, yet Ficino sincerely believed he was reconstructing the ideas of others. Who, then, is the author of Ficino’s system? If a reader deduces from foreshadowing how an author may have intended an unfinished book to end, and suggests an ending, the reader feels it is the author’s ending, but the author did not actually create it. Just so, Marsilio Ficino’s attempts to unmask Plato’s true meaning are neither wholly Ficino’s nor wholly Plato’s, and impossible to tie to a modern concept of authorship or authenticity. This type of blurring of authorial identity is common in Renaissance works, and perhaps most clearly expressed in the (much denigrated) Renaissance practice of ‘repairing’ classical sculptures by grafting new limbs, heads, and even entire subjects onto antique torsos. These acts of supplementation create hybrid objects, like Benvenuto Cellini’s marble Ganymede, a Roman copy of a Greek original, which probably began as a Dionysius but had its subject changed to Ganymede by Cellini and Willem Danielsz van Tetrode. Cellini’s plan for the sculpture added more than a new head and limbs: it added a very unclassical new idea, reversing the power dynamic of antique Ganymede sculptures by having a powerful Ganymede tease a Zeus who seems to be overmastered by his appetites, depicting the power of human excellence over the divine in a way that is easy to tie in to the concept of the dignity of man, which is often the most celebrated element of humanist thought in modern discussions. Yet modern studies of Cellini rarely give the Ganymede more than a fleeting mention. A supplemented sculpture, with two subjects, two creation dates, and at least four creators – Greek, Roman, Italian, and German – is impossible to place in any chronological, topical, or national treatment and fails to satisfy ideas of authorial integrity and genius. Such hybrid objects, produced by the supplementation of antiquity, are even more common in Renaissance thought than in Renaissance art. Ficino’s Platonism,  Consolatio I.i.  Ficino’s specific genealogy of sages varied throughout his work, sometimes including Aglaophemus and Philolaus; see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1990) 2:643 – 44.

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Figure 1: Benvenuto Cellini and Willem Danielsz van Tetrode, “Ganymede” (Florence, 1540s), Marble, 106 cm, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

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Figure 2: Benvenuto Cellini and Willem Danielsz van Tetrode, “Ganymede,” detail (Florence, 1540s), Marble, 106 cm, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

Pico’s synthesis of all religions, Petrarch’s initial attempts to cobble together a moral system from Cicero, Seneca, and what rough translations of Platonic dialogues he had, even Lorenzo Valla’s inverted Epicureanism – which did, after all, reflect on what Valla knew of Epicurus – all of these are simultaneously ancient and Renaissance, derivative and original. Commentaries and exegeses have no single author,

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and even original treatises like Ficino’s Platonic Theology cannot be said to contain ideas with a single creator. Viewed this way, the majority of the most powerful fruits of Renaissance philosophy have no author, no date of origin, nor even any clear name, since they so often appropriate and revaluate classical labels. These philosophical achievements cannot fit into any modern taxonomy by author, geography, or even time. The hybrid authorship caused by supplementation was less of a difficulty in the Renaissance, when authors – scholastic and humanist – displayed their skill, not in originality, but in how brilliantly they transformed earlier authorities, and proved their membership in a philosophical sect, not by following its written precepts to the letter, but by living the life and honoring the virtues that the sect prescribes.

Section 5: Authenticity and Partisanship A final, related barrier that style places between us and Renaissance thought is one of how we perceive philosophical authenticity. Even if we judge Renaissance philosophers by their lives, and open space for text artifacts of complex authorship, humanists still often come across – to modern eyes at least – as hypocrites or failures in their attempts to lead philosophical lives, because their activities and works were so entangled in short-term political ends. The earmarks of partisanship, whether supporting a city, a region, a faction, or a particular patron, are extremely visible in almost all humanist writings, while the earlier and later authors most studied today tend toward a rhetoric that makes them feel neutral. For example, no one today would deny that Plato’s political thought reflects both his experiences of life in a Greek city-state and his anger over the death of Socrates. But the Republic presents Plato’s political ideas abstracted from their context, so they feel neutral in isolation, even if we see their political context by reading between the lines. In contrast, it is impossible to ignore the political when Paolo Giovio, in his dialogue on the virtues and virtuous people of his age, De viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus, suddenly breaks off after a string of one-paragraph portraits of famous women to crown the text with fifteen pages praising Vittoria Colonna, the patroness then paying his bills, who receives an entire paragraph for each of her sublime body parts and character traits.⁶² Similarly, Plato’s abstract philosopher-king feels like a legitimate philosophical concept, despite its political roots, but when Johann Reuchlin takes on the same topic – the flourishing of a state under a philosophically inclined ruler – in the

 De viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus (Notable Men and Women of Our Time), trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 502– 34. Paolo Giovio crowns his discussion of Vittoria Colonna by suggesting that her virtues make it more appropriate to judge her by the standards of men than women, touching on much the same question of whether the quality of the soul transcends the differences between the sexes which Plato embarks on in Republic V 554b, but, directed toward the author’s patroness, it cannot seem like anything but sycophancy.

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beginning of his De arte Cabalistica, he does so in a direct address to a patron, Pope Leo X, and in language that showers such hyperbolic praise on the Medici pope and his late father Lorenzo il Magnifico that it comes across as toadying and obsequious, making it feel philosophically compromised in a way that Plato does not: Philosophy in Italy was once upon a time handed down to men of great intellect and renown by Pythagoras…. But over the years it had been done to death by the Sophists’ wholesale vandalism, and lay long buried in obscurity’s dark night, when, by God’s grace, that sun that shone on every field of liberal study, your father Lorenzo de’ Medici, son of the great Cosimo, rose up as the chief citizen of Florence. We knew that his natural ability for affairs of state, his knowledge of such matters, and his wise handling of war and domestic policy, were such that no man in politics was more worthy of praise than he. But it must be said that when, in addition to this, his scholarly activities are taken into account, his birth seems heaven-sent…. Zealously he brought to his country learned men from every land, men familiar with the ancient authors, whose fluency equaled their scholarship…. Nothing flourished as did Florence then: all those dead arts were there reborn; no aspect of language or literature was left untouched…. Fruit born of the Laurentian laurel is most precious, not just for his people, but for the whole world. Holy Father … [n]o treasure could be richer than your reign, of which no tongue can speak; from it flow riches as water from the Pactolian depths, and the charm and graces of belles-lettres, all that is good in man. Your father sowed the seeds of ancient philosophy in his children. With his son they will grow to reach the rooftops …⁶³

As this passage shows, the directly political aims of humanist virtue politics, explored in James Hankins’ chapter in this volume, mean that humanist writings tend to be packed with direct references to patrons, titles, feuds, battles, towns, and dynasties. Improving the world by influencing powerful families was one of the central goals of the humanist project, but, for anyone not expert in the period, the constant references make these works off-putting in much the same way that humanist encapsulated classicism does. This baggage of petty politics is tolerated in Machiavelli, where we perceive it as the object of his study, but in some sense individual elite families and patrons were the objects of all humanist philosophy, in that their aims to be heard by and influence these political actors were both sincere and central to the project as a whole. In the seventeenth century, patronage was still the main source of income for philosophers, but the concise and courteous dedications that precede the Novum organum or Leviathan rarely recur in the body of the text. No one could claim that Francis Bacon, or indeed Peter Abelard, was not involved in politics, but patronage does not leave its mark on every chapter, as is so often the case in humanist works.

 De arte Cabalistica, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 36 – 39.

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Conclusion: Humanism’s Many Masks A crisis comes in Lorenzo Valla’s Epicurean masquerade when, toward the end of Book 1 of De voluptate, the Vegio interlocutor is pushed on the question of Providence. Even in 1430, before Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius had circulated beyond Florence, Epicurus’s denial of Providence was infamous,⁶⁴ so for Valla’s ‘Epicurean’ to attack it threatens the illusion that this is truly a debate between ancient sects at all. Valla’s justification – in Vegio’s voice – demonstrates a distinctly un-modern attitude toward the status of philosophy that touches on the heart of why humanist style conflicts with its philosophical content so much more than the style of other periods: It is nonetheless proper to derive support for one’s argument from whatever source one desires, as did your Seneca, a very keen supporter of this Stoic sect, who drew so many ideas from Epicurus himself that it sometimes seems that Seneca was an Epicurean or that Epicurus was a Stoic. This procedure should be allowed to me the more freely because I have been initiated, not into the rites of philosophy, but into the more significant and lofty ones of oratory and poetry. Truly, Philosophy is like a soldier or lower officer at the orders of Oratory, his commander and (as a great writer of tragedies calls her) his queen.⁶⁵ Cicero allowed himself to speak freely in philosophy without being tied to any sect; and this he certainly did with distinction. Nevertheless, I would prefer that he had claimed to deal with those arguments not as a philosopher but as an orator, and that he had exercised the same license – or rather, freedom – in firmly recovering from the philosophers all the oratorical trappings that he found among them (since everything that philosophy claims for itself is actually ours) and I would wish him to have raised against those sneak thieves of philosophers the sword he had received from Eloquence, queen of all, and to punish them as criminals. Truly how much more clearly, solemnly and magnificently the same subjects are dealt with by the orators than by the obscure, squalid, and anemic philosophers!⁶⁶

Here Valla’s deliberately provocative Vegio character draws a very specific and unexpected line between what he calls philosophy and oratory. Combining the spirit of Petrarch’s invectives against the emotionless, dry, and difficult scholastics with Boethius’s image of philosophical marauders who clutch stolen scraps of truth, Vegio’s philosophia encompasses scholasticism, sophism, faction-ridden Hellenistic squabbles, and all the dogmatic facets of the intellectual world, more invested in defending entrenched positions than in pursuing truth. Queen over such minor applications of the intellect is oratio, encompassing the syncretism and intellectual supplementa-

 In addition to discussions in Seneca and in Cicero’s dialogues, especially Academica, De fato, De finibus, De natura deorum, and Tusculanae disputationes, Epicurean doctrine was known through early Christian apologists, notably Lactantius, Divinae institutiones III.17; see G. D. Hadzits, Lucretius and His Influence (London: Longman, 1935), 216 – 27.  Euripides, Hecuba 816, another signature humanist encapsulation of antiquity; cf. Valla, On Pleasure, 327 n. 31.  Valla, On Pleasure, 75 – 77.

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tions characteristic of humanism, but also important are Cicero’s dialogues, which integrate and test the propositions of all available sects in the spirit of exploration and even philosophical skepticism. Oratory and eloquence are the signature domain of the humanists, and here Valla appropriates into that domain the open-minded and dynamic parts of philosophy, which humanists believed were not being practiced in university-dominated scholastic debates between Thomists and Scotists – as factional and irresolvable as those between Stoics and Epicureans. Humanist style – packed with rhetorical ornament, classicizing language, and encapsulated classical references – was not only a declaration of membership in a community, but a declaration of the type of intellectual inquiry a work will undertake: an inclusive, speculative project in the style of Cicero and Petrarch, and one with both earthly and spiritual goals instead of purely spiritual. Valla’s expression of this attitude through Vegio is unusually strong; a more modest expression of this association of the long-neglected, true practice of philosophy with what seem like purely literary humanist practices appears in Raffaello Maffei Volaterrano’s encyclopedic Commentarium urbanorum, when he finishes discussing all ancient “philosophers and theologians” and begins his subsequent catalogue of recent figures who have followed in their tradition with those who work on “Grammar, Poetry and Rhetoric, along with Mathematics and the study of philosophy,” naming Dante and Petrarch as the first true practitioners of philosophy since antiquity.⁶⁷ Humanism and its associated arts – grammar, rhetoric, oratory – were the signatures of a new philosophical method, seeking to distinguish itself from an entrenched philosophical mainstream, just like the ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth century or the philosophes of the Enlightenment. When humanists undertook original intellectual projects that we would classify as philosophy today, their efforts to define themselves in contrast with scholasticism involved a strategy of veiling their philosophical content. But today, when we run across figures celebrated as a ‘philosopher-poet’ or ‘philosopher and Platonist’ or who eschew the title of ‘philosopher’ altogether, and when we read treatises that veil their original content under revaluated or inverted ancient labels, or deny the originality of their works of multi-authored philosophical supplementations, it is easy to be deflected by the form and fail to see the innovative content. This barrier is worsened by the modern tendency to associate rhetoric and ornamented language with hypocrisy – an association that ampli-

 “Theologorum, philosophorumque turba, cum ipsis ordinibus repetita: nunc recentiores qui nomen aliquod adsecuti sunt: primum in artibus quas Graeci κυκλικὰ id est circulares vocant: videlicet Grammatica, Poetica, Rhetorica, cum Mathematicarum & philosophiae studiis. Qui nec admodum pauci, nec omnino despiciendi sunt. Nam ex illo quo literae tot barbarorum procellis ab Italia migraverunt, nulla gens prior quam Florentina hunc Ausoniae honorem restituit: si a Claudiano poeta initium faciamus, post quem rem literariam rursus ob philosophorum Theologorumque nostrorum negligentiam qui haec minime curaverunt, interpolaram, Dantes primum, pauloque post Petrarcha in lucem revocaverunt. Ab his igitur decet exordiri” (Commentarium urbanorum (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius, 1559), 577).

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fies the feeling of insincerity introduced by the humanists’ constant references to patrons – whereas the humanists in fact employed elaborated and ornamented rhetoric as proofs of sincerity, associating oratory and beauty with truth and virtue,⁶⁸ and naked argumentation with the stagnant scholastic adversaries whom the humanists labored to negate. Humanist stylistic choices intended to advertise openness and dynamism read to later audiences as the earmarks of inauthenticity and stagnation, especially with the advent of the powerful rhetoric of Descartes and Bacon. In contrast, seventeenth-century strategies of assimilating earlier material instead of encapsulating it intact, making only vague references to rivals in a rhetoric of creative destruction instead of keeping their foes alive through active negation, and the comparative paucity of references to everyday politics, make seventeenth-century sources easier to detach from their historical context. Is Francis Bacon a ‘philosopher and statesman’ or ‘statesman and philosopher’? During his years in office, Bacon’s fame as one of the highest officers in England vastly outstripped his intellectual reputation, which overtook it only gradually, so that even in his 1733 Letters on England, Voltaire still used the title “Chancellor” Bacon to remind his readers that the great man had been great in office as well as intellect. Just so, Renaissance philosophers usually won their initial fame under other titles than ‘philosopher,’ since their efforts to distinguish humanism from earlier movements, and to exert political as well as intellectual influence, made them intentionally position themselves in a complex relationship to the label ‘philosophus.’ The same process of historical digestion that came to categorize Bacon definitively with philosophers faced a much more complex challenge when categorizing Renaissance polymaths. Was Coluccio Salutati a statesman or philosopher? Valla a rhetorician or philosopher? Leto a philologist or philosopher? Leon Battista Alberti an architect or philosopher? Ficino a translator or philosopher? Poliziano a poet or philosopher? Pietro Bembo a literary theorist or philosopher? Few figures – Pico, Pomponazzi, Machiavelli – have come to be known as philosophers first and foremost. Yet, this is no surprise. The farther we move from an author’s life, the more we come to depend on the author’s own words, or the words of peers, as a window on the now-lost mind that crafted them. Humanist writings have a thousand artful ways of telling us that only classicism and rhetoric are to be found here, not innovation. It is not intuitive to imagine that a work might wrap itself in deception, pack denials of its originality into every page, express itself as a pastiche of out-of-context fragments and distorted old ideas, twist and obscure even its own authorship, and yet, cocooned within that dark and twisted mass of words, hide true philosophy.

 On humanist claims for the association between truth and persuasiveness, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29 – 35.

Contributors Giancarlo Abbamonte is Associate Professor of Classical Philology at the Federico II University of Naples. His research focuses on the ancient, medieval, and humanistic reception of classical texts. Professor Abbamonte’s Ph.D. dissertation dealt with the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Boethius on Aristotle’s and Cicero’s Topics and their medieval tradition. He was a member of the international team that published the critical edition of Niccolò Perotti’s Cornu copiae, and in 2012 he published Diligentissimi uocabulorum perscrutatores on humanistic lexicography (Edizioni ETS). He then examined the transmission of Statius’s Silvae and its fifteenth-century commentaries written by Italian humanists, focusing on the unpublished commentaries of Niccolò Perotti (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 6835) and Aulo Giano Parrasio (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. V.D.14). In the last few years Professor Abbamonte has studied the humanistic Latin translations of Plutarch, publishing with Fabio Stok the critical edition of Iacopo di Angelo’s (1360 – 1410/11) translations of Plutarch’s De Alexandri fortuna aut virtute and De fortuna Romanorum (Edizioni ETS, 2017). He has received fellowships from the Warburg Institute and the Beinecke Memorial Library at Yale University, along with research grants from the Universities of Girona (Spain) and Strasbourg (France), where he has taught several times as well. He has been a guest twice at Baylor University (Waco) and Texas A&M University (College Station) in the United States, and he recently edited (with Craig Kallendorf) a book entitled Classics Transformed (Edizioni ETS, 2018), which is concerned primarily with the transformation of classical themes in medieval and humanistic literature. Patrick Baker received his Ph.D. in 2009 from Harvard University and teaches medieval and early modern history at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Before that he was a senior lecturer in medieval Latin at the University of Münster and a research associate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His publications include Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing (Brill, 2017, editor), and Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance (De Gruyter, 2016, edited with Johannes Helmrath et al.). In addition he has edited (with Christopher S. Celenza) and translated Salvatore I. Camporeale’s Christianity, Latinity, and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla (Brill, 2014). Other academic translations include Claudio Moreschini, Hermes Christianus: The Intermingling of Hermetic Piety and Christian Thought (Brepols, 2011) and Daniel Schäfer, Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Europe (Pickering & Chatto, 2011). Dr. Baker has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2013) and a Reader in Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2004– 2005).

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Roland Béhar is Associate Professor for Hispanic Literatures at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), with a special focus on the Renaissance and the Siglo de Oro. As a former fellow of the same institution, he carried out his doctoral research at Lille University and at Sorbonne University, and from 2008 to 2010 he was a scientific member of the Casa de Velázquez (EHEHI, Madrid). From 2010 to 2014, he taught at Lille and at Sorbonne University. Since his dissertation (Garcilaso de la Vega and the Rhetoric of the Image, 2010) about the Toledan author Garcilaso de la Vega, who passed the most important years of his poetic career in Naples, Professor Béhar has also studied the Neapolitan literature of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, in Neo-Latin (Beccadelli, Pontano, and Sannazaro), in Tuscan (N. Franco), and in the Neapolitan dialect. He has written several articles related to Naples in the Renaissance, especially in the collective work he co-directed on the Cities at the Crossroads of Languages (Droz, 2018, forthcoming). Professor Béhar has also studied Petrarch and the diffusion of his thought in Spanish and French, as well as the contacts of classical Spanish with other more northern languages, in Antwerp, in Hamburg, and, above all, in France, with a series of studies on the ancient translations of Spanish (poetry and prose, the sentimental novel translated by Maurice Scève, the pastoral novel, with multiple translations in France, and the writings of Teresa of Avila). Federica Ciccolella is Professor of Classics at Texas A&M University. Her research concerns the transition from paganism to Christianity in late antique Greek literature and the meeting between Byzantine and Western cultures in the Renaissance. She has published on Byzantine poetry (Cinque poeti bizantini, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2000), late antique epistolography (Italian translation and commentary of Procopius of Gaza’s letters, in Rose di Gaza, edited by Eugenio Amato, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2010), and the revival of Greek studies in the Renaissance (Donati Graeci: Learning Greek in the Renaissance, Brill, 2008; and Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance, edited with Luigi Silvano, Brill, 2017). James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the author of many books and articles on Renaissance humanism and philosophy. His monograph, Virtue Politics: Political Thought in Renaissance Italy from Petrarch to Machiavelli, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2019. Johannes Helmrath received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Cologne and is Professor of Medieval History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He was director of the collaborative research center “Transformations of Antiquity” from 2011 to 2016. His research focuses on the Late Middle Ages, ecclesiastical and conciliar history, political oratorics, Renaissance humanism, and the critical editions of sources. His publications include Das Basler Konzil (Böhlau, 1987), Wege des Humanismus (Mohr Siebeck, 2013), and Deutsche Reichstagsakten, vol. 19,2: “Reichstag von Frank-

Contributors

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furt 1454” (Oldenbourg, 2013, editor). The latter volume includes a critical edition of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s oration Constantinopolitana clades. Professor Helmrath has been editor in chief of the Acta Cusana since 2014 (vol. II, fasc. 1– 4). Craig Kallendorf is Professor of English and Classics at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on book history, the reception of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, and the Roman poet Virgil. He is the author or editor of twenty-four books, including three monographs from Oxford University Press (Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance, 1999; The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture, 2007; and The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics, 2015) and two edited collections of essays (A Companion to the Classical Tradition, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, and A Bibliographical Introduction to the Italian Humanists, Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2017). Professor Kallendorf is past president of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies and the Vergilian Society and has also served on the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Delmas Foundation, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. Along with Giancarlo Abbamonte, he edited Classics Transformed (Edizioni ETS, 2018), which contains sixteen essays by younger scholars that apply the transformation methodology to areas ranging from medieval Byzantium to modern cinema. Jill Kraye is an Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Philosophy at the University of London and an Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute. She has published on Renaissance humanism and Renaissance philosophy and is especially interested in the influence of classical thought from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. She is one of the editors of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. A collection of her articles, entitled Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy, was published in 2002. She was the associate editor of the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Among her recent jointly edited volumes are Forms of Conflict and Rivalries in Renaissance Europe (V&R Unipress, 2015), with Marc Laureys and David Lines, and Vernacular Aristotelianism in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century (The Warburg Institute, 2016), with Luca Bianchi and Simon Gilson. A Festschrift in her honour, Et amicorum: Studies in Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy, was published in 2018 by Brill. Peter Mack is Professor of English at the University of Warwick and Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Brill, 1993), Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cam-

198

bridge University Press, 2002), Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2010), A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380 – 1620 (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Rhetoric’s Questions, Reading and Interpretation (Palgrave, 2017). His current project is a book on the uses of literary traditions. He has been editor of the journal Rhetorica and Director of the Warburg Institute. Together with Rita Copeland he is the general editor of the five-volume The Cambridge History of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press). Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian who focuses on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in early modern Europe, especially in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and patronage networks. She is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and her first academic book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2014), explores the impact of the rediscovery of classical atomism on the birth of modern thought. Professor Palmer is also a science fiction novelist.

Index Absolutism 112 Academy, early 30, 52, 96, 104, 163, 195, 197 Accountability, political 109, 111, 113 f. Accursius, Bonus 36 f. Acron 6, 115 f. Actio 6, 80, 82, 86 – 88, 90, 92, 97, 99, 105, 175 Aeneas 63, 82 f., 86 – 91, 93 f., 137 f., 140 f., 146 Aenesidemus of Cnossos 172 Aeschylus 54 Aethicus Ister 93 Afterlife 21, 24 f., 92, 159, 176, 187 Agent 4, 7, 9, 14, 16, 19, 90, 136, 141 f., 159 Aglaophemus 187 Agricola, Rudolph 5, 60 – 67, 69, 88 f., 197 Agrippa the Skeptic 171 Aix-en-Provence, University of 150 Alexander of Aphrodisias 151 f., 172, 195 Alexis 142 Alfonso V, the Magnanimous, King of Naples 33, 92 Allegory 67, 128, 131 Allelopoiesis 4 f., 7, 9 f., 12 f., 25, 45, 48, 58, 86, 133, 136 Amplification 67, 127 f. Anacharsis 85, 107 Anchises 90, 122 Anguillara, Giovanni Andrea dell’ 54 Annas, Julia 81, 84, 88, 96 Anonimalle Chronicle 72 Anscombe, Elizabeth 96 Anselm of Canterbury 169, 171 f., 174, 178, 183, 186 Antonio de Obregón 130 Apocalypse of Peter 24 f. Apollo 22, 115, 126, 141 Apostolis, Michael 51 f., 58 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 109 Appius Claudius Caecus 99 Appropriation 4, 7, 10, 12, 17, 47, 71, 137 f., 151, 153, 155, 159, 161 A priori 178 Apronianus Asterius, Flavius Turcius Rufus 43 Apuleius 28 Arcadia 56, 58 Aretousa 56

Argumentation 60 – 63, 66, 80, 89, 105, 194 Argyropoulos, John 48 Ariosto, Lodovico 144 Aristotelianism 7, 23, 49, 149 – 151, 159, 161, 178, 180 f., 197 Aristotelians, political 112, 180, 183 Aristotle 6, 23, 52, 60, 65, 76, 96 f., 101, 104, 108 – 110, 112, 114, 128, 150 – 153, 161, 163, 165, 167, 172 – 174, 177 f., 180 – 184, 195 Armenis 55 Arnulf of Orléans 30 Artes arengandi 78 Ascetic (asceticism) 175, 177 Assembly 5 f., 18, 21, 71 f., 75, 78, 82, 91, 145, 156 Assimilation 7, 12, 17, 50, 53, 89 f., 138, 155 f., 160, 162, 178, 185 Assyrians 58 Athenagoras of Athens 172 Athenodorus 102 Athens 23, 50, 55 f., 91, 145 Atomism 10, 159 f., 198 Audience 6, 17, 37, 42, 55, 58 f., 62 f., 65 f., 74 – 76, 80 f., 83 – 88, 131, 174, 177, 179, 194 Augsburg, Diet of (1518) 60, 73 f., 92 Augsburg, Diet of (1525) 60, 73 f., 92 Augustine 171, 173 f., 177 Augustus (Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus) 45, 90, 117, 119 – 127 Aurelian, Emperor (Lucius Domitius Aurelianus) 99 Aventinus, Johannes 17 Bacon, Francis 8, 165, 172, 181, 184 – 186, 191, 194 Balbi, John, of Genoa 36, 38 Bancroft-Marcus, Rosemary 54 – 57 Barbaro, Ermolao 151 – 153 Barlaam of Seminara 46 Baron, Hans 1, 95, 172 Bartolini, Riccardo 74 Basel, Council of 34, 74, 81 – 84, 89, 193 Baumgarten, Samuel 145 Bayle, Pierre 181 Beni, Paolo 150, 154 f. Bentham, Jeremy 172

200

Index

Berdini, Alberto, da Sarteano 48 Berkeley, George 172 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint 85 Bessarion, Basilios, Cardinal 44, 48 f., 51, 92 Bible 38, 142, 153 – Acts 18, 54, 64, 75 f., 79, 88, 94, 127, 187 – Ezekiel 94 – Old Testament 94 Bienatus, Aurelius 36 Boccaccio, Giovanni 28, 46, 96, 99, 106, 108, 121, 185 Bodin, Jean 112 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 28 f., 32, 38, 171, 175, 177, 186, 192, 195 Bolzanio, Urbano, of Belluno (Urbano Dalle Fosse) 47 Bonelli, Giovanni Maria 144 Book of the Watchers 24 Bracciolini, Poggio 27 f., 100, 107, 177 Brandolini, Raffaele Lippo 110 Brewster, David 185 f. British Museum 18 Bruni, Leonardo 98, 113, 128 f., 142, 165, 174 Bruno, Giordano 23, 152, 180 f. Buonaccorso da Montemagno 98 Burke, Edmund 106, 172 Bussi, Giovanni Andrea 40, 144 Butler, Joseph 172 Byzantium 47, 50, 58, 126, 197 – Byzantine culture 50, 54 – Byzantine grammar 52 f. – Byzantine literature 53 – Byzantine scholars 46 f. Caesar, Gaius Julius 6, 17, 22, 102, 118 f., 125, 131 Calderini, Domizio 29 f., 39 – 41, 43 f., 137 Calepino, Ambrogio 38 Callimaco, Angelo 29, 30, 39 Callimaco, Orlando 30 Calpurnius, Titus 40 Campano, Giannantonio 83, 92 f. Candia 50 Canon formation 166 Capilupi, Giulio 145 Capilupi, Lelio 145 Capitalism 109, 176 Capitoline Hill 115, 118 f., 122, 126 f., 129 Carolingian period 2 Carthage 58, 146

Carvajal, Juan, Cardinal 86, 88 Casaubon, Isaac 49 Castiglione, Baldassare 106, 183 Catholicism 49 Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Elder 22, 55, 90, 102 Cato the Elder, Pseudo- 45, 47, 55 Cato Uticensis, Marcus Porcius, the Younger 22 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 28, 55, 181 Celibacy 175 Cellini, Benvenuto 121, 187 – 189 Celtis, Conrad 93 Cento 18, 21, 145, 156 Cépède, Pierre de la 56 Cephalus 57 Chalcidius 154 Chaldaeans 58 Charles VIII, King of France 73, 75 Charos 58 Chivalric romance 144 Chortatsis, Georgios 54 – 58 Christ 1, 3, 24 f., 86, 94, 142, 145 f., 158 Christianity 7, 25, 127, 142, 146, 156, 158, 160 – 162, 172, 175, 187, 195 f. Chrysoloras, Manuel 46 – 48, 52, 102 Church councils (see also Basel, Constance) 74, 83 Church Fathers 25, 38, 157, 179 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 4, 6, 28, 30, 38 f., 55, 59 f., 62, 65, 76, 85 – 94, 97, 99 f., 102 – 104, 107, 112 – 114, 125, 157 f., 171 f., 174, 177, 182, 189, 192 f., 195 Circe 90 Classical tradition 2, 4 f., 59, 66, 68 – 71, 134 f., 137, 146, 153, 197 Clement of Alexandria 172 Clifford, William Kingdon 172 Collins, Ardis 182 Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus 28 Comparison 35, 66, 68, 77, 85, 90, 102, 131, 170, 173, 183 Confucianism, modern political 97 Confucius and the Confucian tradition 95, 105, 167, 171 Conrad of Hirsau 17 Constance, Council of 31, 74, 153 Constantinople 48, 50, 83, 85 f., 90, 93 Copia 5, 33, 37 – 39, 67 – 69, 87 f., 103, 151, 195

Index

Corbinelli, Angelo 47 Cornetti, Giacomo 139 Cortes 72 f. Corts 72 f. Corydon 142 Costanzi, Antonio 31, 40 Creation ex nihilo 13, 159, 178 Creative destruction 8, 10, 20, 142 f., 153, 181, 183, 185, 194 Creative self-destruction 153 Crete 5, 50 – 54, 57 – Cretan chivalric poetry 56 – Cretan comedy 55 – Cretan culture 56 – Cretan education 50, 53, 57 – Cretan epic poetry 54 – Cretan interludes 54 – Cretan literature 54 – Cretan myth 46, 54, 56 – 58, 133, 144, 181, 197 – Cretan pastoral poetry 54, 56 – 58 – ‘Cretan Renaissance’ 50 f., 54 f., 57 – Cretan romance 54 – 56 – Cretan schools 50 f. – Cretan tragedy 54 f. Crusade, Fourth 50, 85 – 87, 92 – 94 Crusade, Second 85 – 87, 92 – 94 Crusius, Martin 53 Cultural transfer, theory of 5, 11, 47, 56 Cumaean Sibyl 141 Daedalus 57 Dante Alighieri 94, 96 f., 121, 170, 176, 193 David 47, 50, 71, 76, 96 f., 100, 108, 144 f., 160, 176, 183, 197 Decembrio, Pier Candido 141 De la Mare, Peter 72 Deleuze, Gilles 171, 173 Dellaportas, Leonardos 50 f. Democracy 111, 113 Demosthenes 52, 87, 128 Derrida, Jacques 171, 173 Descartes, René 8, 165, 167, 169, 171 – 174, 178 f., 181 – 186, 194 Descriptions 13, 16, 68, 124, 135, 182 Determinism 177 D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron 172 Dialectic 60, 63, 68 f., 197 Dido 138 – 140 Diets 72 – 74, 77, 81, 85 f., 92, 196

201

Diets, German imperial (see also Augsburg, Frankfurt, Regensburg, Vienna, Wiener Neustadt, and Worms) 5 f., 71, 73 f., 79, 81 – 83, 85, 92 Differentiae verborum 34 – 36 Diogenes Laertius 157 – 160, 177, 192 Dion of Syracuse 102 Discourse analysis 11 f. Discovery 2, 7, 13, 59, 99, 157, 161, 177 Disjunction 18, 138 f. Disposition 5, 65 f., 123 Dominici, Giovanni (Giovanni di Domenico Banchini) 47 Donato, Girolamo 151 f. Donatus, Aelius 27 f., 32 f., 36, 55, 137 Donatus, Tiberius Claudius 27 f., 32 f., 36, 55, 137 Donos, Andreas 52 f. Douglas, Gavin 145 Dryden, John 137, 145 Dualism 178 Dufay, Guillaume 110 Dusinelli, Pietro 144 East 5, 45, 48, 57, 169 Edward III, King of England 72 Elections 106, 111, 113 Elites 110 Eloquence 101, 103, 108 f., 152, 192 f. Emotions (includes moving) 59, 139, 175, 177 Encapsulation 18, 90, 137, 146, 154, 160, 179, 182, 185, 192 Enlightenment 99, 172, 176, 181, 185, 193 Epic 14, 22, 28, 140 f., 144 Epictetus 156, 171 f., 178 Epicureanism 7, 149, 157 – 161, 176 – 178, 180 f., 189 Epicurus 157 – 160, 176 – 178, 181, 189, 192 Epideictic rhetoric 90, 108, 140 Epigraphy 121 Equality 6, 96, 99 f. Erasmus, Desiderius 5, 60, 67 – 69, 142, 147, 155 – 158, 170, 173 Eros 55 Erotokritos 55 – 58 Esteve, John 37 États-Généraux (see also Tours) 73, 75 Euripides 54, 171, 192

202

Index

Europe 3, 5 f., 36 f., 46 f., 49, 52, 69, 77, 82, 92, 96, 123, 128, 131 f., 139 f., 150, 154, 169, 177, 182, 195, 197 f. Europeans 93 Euryalus 90 Examples 5, 10, 33, 38, 44, 49, 53, 65 – 68, 70, 72, 81, 83, 96, 99, 102, 127, 135, 138, 147, 180 Exclusion 16, 21, 69, 136, 141 – 144 Exposition 60 – 63 Felix V, Antipope 82 Ferettus, Nicholas 37 Ferrara 32, 48 f., 52, 60, 74, 128 Ficino, Marsilio 23, 150, 154 f., 158 f., 165, 180 – 182, 186 f., 190, 194 Flavio, Biondo 96, 98 f., 113, 131 Florence 27 – 29, 31 – 33, 39, 43, 46 f., 49, 92, 98, 108, 112, 115, 123, 125 f., 139, 146, 152, 154, 157, 159, 165, 177, 182, 186, 188 f., 191 f. Focalization 7, 19, 25, 141 f. Foreest, Jan van 141 Forster, Edward Morgan 113, 129 Foucault, Michel 12, 171, 173 Francesco da Fusce, Cardinal 89 Frankfurt, Diet of (1454) 46, 71, 74, 78, 81, 83 – 86, 88, 90 – 94, 143, 171, 197 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor 82 f., 86 Free speech 113 f. Freud, Sigmund 170 Fukuyama, Francis 110 f., 113 Galilei, Galileo 170, 173 Ganymede 187 – 189 Garin, Eugenio 1, 95 Gassendi, Pierre 150, 159 f. Gaunilo of Marmoutiers 172 Gaza, Theodore 46, 196 Gellius, Aulus 38 Gemelli Marciano, Laura 19 Germans 87, 91, 93 Gibbon, Edward 115 – 117, 131 f. Giovanni da Castiglione 84 Giovanni da Prato 48 Giovanni da San Miniato 47 Giovio, Paolo 127, 190 Giraldi Cinzio, Giovanbattista 54 Giunta, Lucantonio 139 Glarean, Heinrich 17

Goliath 145 Good Parliament 72 Grafton, Anthony 96, 153 f., 162, 182 Grammar 5 f., 27, 31 – 33, 36, 46, 52 f., 55, 67, 101, 137, 149, 193 Grammar school 59, 69 Greece 2, 45, 49, 58, 99, 122, 133 f. – Greek culture 45, 47 f., 51 – 53, 57 f. – Greek grammar 46 f., 52 – Greek language (demotic, dialects, koine) 5, 32, 50, 53, 57 – Greek literature 45, 196 – Greek poetry 57 – Greek revival in the Renaissance 46 – 48 – Greek rhetoric 48, 51 – Greek teaching and learning 46, 49, 50 – 52 Greeks 45, 47 f., 50, 56, 58, 63 f., 91 f. Greene, Thomas 2 Griffio, Giovanni 54 Grüninger, Johann 139 Gryphius, Sébastien 140, 144 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 46, 57 Guarino da Verona 32 Harpies 90, 146 Hedonism 160, 177 Hegel, Friedrich 172 f. Heidegger, Martin 173, 186 Heidelbeck, Wunnebald 81 Hellenistic 59, 102, 157, 160 f., 167, 169, 192 Hellenization 45 f., 57 Henry III, King of England 72 Hephaestio 44 Heraclitus 171 Herakles 56 Hermes 51, 116, 120 – 122, 195 Hermes Trismegistus 187 Hesiod 40 Hierarchy, justified 100 Highest good 174, 176 f. Highet, Gilbert 134, 139 Hinderbach, Johann 81 Hirschmann, Albert 109, 176 Histories 65, 96, 102, 105, 109, 113, 176 Hobbes, Thomas 172, 174, 186 Holton, David 51, 54 – 58 Holy Roman Empire 73, 82, 91, 117 Homer 30, 38, 46, 52, 103 Honor world 109

Index

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 30, 35, 38, 45, 55, 90, 122, 185 Howard, Philip K. 108 Humanism 1 – 3, 5 – 8, 28 f., 32, 37, 40 f., 44, 47 – 50, 71, 78 f., 82, 86, 92, 95 f., 106 – 108, 110, 114 – 117, 123, 128 – 130, 132 f., 136, 149 – 151, 153, 163, 170, 173 f., 180 – 185, 192 – 197 Hume, David 172 – 174 Hutcheson, Francis 172 Hutten, Ulrich von 92 Hyacinthus 22 Hybridization 20, 25, 144, 160 Hypallage 143 Hyperbole 67 Icarus 57 Ida, Mount 56 – 58 Ignorance 7, 20 f., 142, 154, 185 Ilicino, Bernardino 128 f. Imitation 2, 53 f., 89, 124 Inclusion 16, 29, 136 f., 139 – 141 Inscriptions 109 f. Interculturality 47 Invective 97, 106, 109, 183, 192 Invention 5, 13, 60, 65 – 68, 80, 96 Inversion 23, 146, 160 Isaac, Heinrich 110 Iser, Wolfgang 134 Islam 93 Italy 5 f., 9, 21, 28 f., 33, 36, 40, 46 f., 49, 52, 60, 63, 71, 99, 105 f., 108, 110, 117, 121, 129, 131, 139, 146, 154, 177, 191, 196 f. – Italian comedy (Renaissance commedia erudita) 55 – Italian culture 50, 54, 96 – Italian language 54 – Italian schools 27, 51 – Italian tragedy (Renaissance) 54 James, William 172 Jauss, Hans Robert 134 Jefferson, Thomas 114, 172 Jerome, St. 47, 155 John of Segovia 89 John the Baptist 145 f. Josquin Des Prez 110 Joyce, James 23 Joy (character in Cretan play) Juno 63

57, 157, 159

203

Jupiter 115 f., 118 – 120, 122 f., 127, 130, 132, 146 Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis) 28 f., 37 – 39, 41 f., 44, 90 Juvenalis, Guido 37 Kallergis (Calergi) family 56 Kant, Immanuel 97, 172 – 174 Karamanolis, George 48 f. Kierkegaard, Søren 172 Kigalas, Matthaios 54 Knossos 57 Kornaros, Vitsentzos 55 – 58 Kottounios, Ioannis 49 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 1, 6, 144, 149 f., 152 Kuhn, Thomas 171 Lactantius, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus 157, 192 Ladislaus, King of Bohemia 82 Landino, Cristoforo 98, 106, 135, 137, 146 Laocoön (sculpture) 19 Lascaris, Constantine 46 f., 52 Last Judgment 25 Latin culture 45 f., 57 – Latin comedy 55 – Latin language 4, 27, 32 – 34 – Latin literature see Literature, Latin Latium 45 Law, rule of 34 f., 41, 51, 97, 99, 102 – 104, 106 – 108, 111 – 113, 140, 146, 167, 175 Laws and legal culture 106 – 108, 111 – 113, 175 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques 153 Legitimacy 97, 111 Leonard of Chios 98 f. Leontius Pilatus 46 Leo X, Pope 131, 191 Leto, Pomponio 30, 39 – 44, 64, 163 – 165, 174, 178 f., 194 Levinas, Emmanuel 171 Lexicography 35, 37, 195 Liber scalae Mahometi 94 Libertinism 176 Liberty 1, 56, 95 f., 99, 156 Lipsius, Justus 21, 131, 150, 155 – 157, 162 Literature, Latin 4, 7, 20, 28, 37, 45 – 48, 51, 54 – 56, 58, 65 – 67, 69, 86, 89, 95 f., 99, 101 – 105, 110, 114, 128, 133 f., 143, 145, 157, 165, 180, 184, 191, 195 f.

204

Index

Littera antiqua 2 Livius Andronicus, Lucius 45 Livy (Titus Livius) 28, 65, 102, 104, 117 – 124, 126 f., 172, 180 Locke, John 170, 172 – 174, 186 Logic 66, 70, 184 Loschi, Antonio 89 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) 22, 28, 41, 44 Lucina 141 Lucretius Carus, Titus 28, 158 f., 163 f., 170 – 172, 176 – 180, 185, 192, 198 Luther, Martin 75, 170, 173 Lyceum 104 Machiavelli, Niccolò 1 f., 96, 105, 160, 170, 173, 180, 191, 194, 196 MacIntyre, Alasdair 96 Mackie, John Leslie 174 Maffei, Raffaello, il Volaterrano 193 Maimonides 171 Mancinelli, Antonio 31, 37, 40, 43, 137, 142 Manet, Édouard 23 Manichaeism 181 Mantua, Congress of 32, 82 – 84, 102, 131 Manuscript and printed books 31, 46, 88 Manutius, Aldus 37, 47, 103, 151, 158 Margounios, Maximos 49 f., 53 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 21 Marino, Gianbattista 54, 125 Marius, Gaius 99, 119 Mars 163 Marsi, Paolo 30 f., 39 Marsi, Pietro 30 f., 39 f., 43 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) 29 f., 38, 55 Martindale, Charles 134 Marx, Karl 172 f. Masselin, Georges 73, 75 Materialism 159 Mausoleum of Halicarnassus 18 May, Thomas 22 Mazzatosta, Fabio 39 Medici, Lorenzo de’, the Magnificent 151, 191 Mediterranean 58, 142 Meibom, Heinrich 145 Melanchthon, Philipp 139 f. Meritocracy 97, 111 f. Merula, Georgio 31, 152 Metaphor 1 – 3, 67, 80, 134

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni 20 Mill, John Stuart 160, 172, 174 Minos 57 Mithridates, King of Pontus 88, 90 Modernity, political 10, 111, 187 Mommsen, Theodore E. 1, 117, 126 Monarchy, elective 96, 113 Monasticism 17, 145, 175 Monism 177 Montage 18, 21, 90, 145, 156 Montaigne, Michel de 161, 170, 173, 178, 198 Monte Cassino 28 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de 96, 115 f., 132, 172 More, Thomas 169, 173 Moschopoulos, Manuel 52 Moses 155, 187 Muses 51, 101 Music 32, 96, 109 f., 177 Musurus, Marcus 48 f. Narcissus 22 Nashe, Thomas 68 Nature 2, 11, 13, 20, 23, 56, 59, 65 f., 69, 81, 98, 100, 104, 107, 114, 128, 146, 153 f., 174 – 176, 180, 185 Negation 8, 21, 23, 95, 143, 147, 159, 183, 185, 194 Nemesianus, Marcus Aurelius Olympius 40 Neoclassicism 19, 109 Neoplatonism 4, 137, 151, 180 Neoptolemos 93 Nicholas of Cusa 33, 47, 88 Nicholas V, Pope 83, 102 Nicodemus 1 – 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 172 f. Nike of Samothrace 21 Nisus 90 Nobility 79, 97 – 101, 105 f., 175 Obfuscation 19, 141 f., 181 Observer 2, 14 – 16, 25, 134 Odo, Peter, of Montopoli 39 f., 43 Odyssey 45 Optimates 100 Oratorics 5 f., 71, 75 – 77, 79 – 81, 94, 196 Oratory (see also rhetoric) 71 – 73, 75, 77 – 80, 82, 85 f., 91, 108, 139, 192 – 194

Index

Origen of Alexandria 172 Orpheus 187 Orthodoxy 49, 161, 175, 180 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 10, 28, 30 f., 38, 54, 57, 65, 122, 124, 171 Oxford 43, 52, 121, 134, 166 Padua 27 f., 33, 47, 49, 53, 124, 126, 150, 154 Painting 10 f., 14, 20 f., 23, 110 Palamedes 64 Paley, William 172 Palinurus 146 Panaetius of Rhodes 102 Pandimo, Antonio 56 f. Panofsky, Erwin 18, 138 Panormita, Il (Antonio Beccadelli) 174 Papias of Hierapolis 36, 38 Paris, Matthew 72 Paris, University of 22, 180 Parliament, English 71 f., 77 – 81 Parliaments 5, 71 f., 76 f., 79, 111 Parmenides 18 f., 171 Pascal, Blaise 172, 174 Pasiphae 57 Pastoral mode 56 – 58 Patrizi, Francesco, of Siena 105, 127, 129 Paul IV, Pope 145 f. Peloponnesus 56 Peragallo, Giovanni 89 Pericles 6, 99, 102 Perotti, Niccolò 33, 37 – 39, 43 f., 102 f., 195 Persius 28, 31 Persuasion 63 f., 69, 78, 80, 86, 106, 108 Peter, Saint 24 f. Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch) 22, 46, 97, 99, 106, 115, 118 f., 121, 123 – 130, 142, 154 Petronius Arbiter, Gaius 2, 28 Philip II, Emperor 137, 146 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 92 Philolaus 187 Philoponus, John 153, 161 Philosophy 1, 6 f., 14, 23, 29, 47, 96, 100 – 102, 104 – 106, 108 f., 114, 132, 145 f., 149 – 167, 169 – 178, 180 f., 184 – 187, 190 – 194, 196 f. Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius 5 f., 71, 74, 79, 81 – 86, 88 – 94, 98, 102, 131, 197 Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco 152, 161, 170, 186

205

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 152, 170, 180, 186 Platina, Bartolomeo 98, 100, 102, 106 Plato 4, 23, 25, 52, 55, 98, 102 – 104, 107 f., 146, 154, 165, 167, 172 – 175, 177 f., 180 – 182, 184, 186 f., 190 f. Platonism 7, 86, 106, 149, 154 f., 159, 178, 180, 182, 187 Plautus, Titus Maccius 28, 32 f., 38, 41, 55 Please 61 Pleasure 66, 142, 146, 157, 159, 174 – 177, 192 Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) 28, 35, 38 Plotinus 172, 180, 182, 186 f. Pocock, John Greville Agard 95, 115 f. Poetics 20, 54 f., 68 Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini, called Politian) 31 f., 124, 151, 160 f., 194 Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) 88 f., 92 Pontano, Lodovico 83, 96, 107, 196 Portos, Frankiskos 49 f. Priapeia 28, 143 f., 147 Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis) 27, 32, 34, 36, 41 Proba, Faltonia Betitia 145 Procris 57 Proof 152, 169, 172, 176, 178 f., 182 f., 186, 194 – Proof of the existence of God 178, 182, 184 Propertius, Sextus 30, 122 Proverbs 68 Providence 23, 153, 156, 159 f., 175 f., 192 Psalter 53 Pyrrho of Elis 160 f., 181 Pythagoras 102, 186 f. Quadriga 28, 34 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 30, 38, 55, 60, 65 – 67, 76, 80, 89

28,

Rabelais, François 68 Raimondi, Marcantonio 23, 125 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 23, 115, 145 Rawls, John 171 Reason 48, 51, 62 – 64, 88, 102, 105, 121, 132, 134, 136, 138, 146 f., 161, 163, 167, 176 f.

206

Index

Reception 2 f., 7, 9, 11 – 13, 16 f., 24, 27, 49, 71, 74, 89 f., 92, 122, 129, 133 – 138, 144, 146, 165, 195, 197 Reception culture 9 f., 12 f., 16 – 18, 20, 23, 92, 154, 160 Reception sphere 4, 6 f., 9 f., 13 – 18, 20, 25, 70, 90, 135 – 138, 143 f. Recombination 16, 136 Reconstruction 15, 22, 25, 117, 121, 131, 140, 157 Recontextualization 18, 21, 90, 154, 160 Reference culture 9 f., 12 f., 15, 18, 23, 154 Reference object 4, 13, 17, 19, 23, 137 Reference sphere 4, 6 f., 9 f., 13 – 17, 20 f., 25, 70, 90, 135 f., 138, 142, 146 Reformation 83, 92, 145, 161, 165, 176 Regensburg, Diet of (1454) 74, 81, 85, 87, 92 Regensburg, Diet of (1471) 74, 81, 85, 87, 92 Regulus, Marcus Atilius 99 Reid, Thomas 172 Rély, Jean de 75 Reproduction 164 Republicanism 95, 105 Revaluation 10, 18, 23, 25, 146, 160 Revelation, divine 161, 187 Rhetoric 5 f., 8, 20, 27, 32, 59 f., 62 f., 65 – 71, 74 – 77, 79, 82, 85, 87, 89, 101, 113, 137, 139 f., 146, 149, 152, 155, 165, 183 – 185, 190, 193 f., 196 – 198 Rhetorica ad Herennium 5, 60, 65 Robert, King of Naples 22, 28, 47, 138, 151, 171 Roman Calendar (Fasti) 30 Roman d’Alexandre 20 Romano, Pasquino 33, 145, 163 Romans 45, 90 f., 93, 98 f., 115 f., 121 Rome 1 f., 29 – 31, 33 f., 36, 39 – 43, 45, 52, 58, 77, 83, 85 f., 88, 90 f., 96, 99 f., 102, 106 f., 109, 112, 115 – 122, 124 f., 127, 129, 131 – 134, 137, 141, 146, 149 f., 154, 163, 195 – Empire 9, 45, 84, 93, 98 f., 102, 115, 137, 144 – People of 88, 190 – Republic 9, 22, 93, 95 f., 98 f., 105, 107, 110, 113 f., 121, 172, 190 – Senate of 23, 91 Römer (Frankfurt town hall) 81, 84, 144 Romulus 6, 115 f., 118 – 122, 127 Rottenauer, Ulrich 87 f.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 172 Rufinus, Tyrannius, of Aquileia Russell, Bertrand 174

181

Sabino, Angelo 41 – 44 Saint Peter’s Basilica, Old 20 Salerno, Gian Nicola 31, 101 f., 107, 127 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) 28, 38, 90 f., 104, 110, 172 Salutati, Coluccio 28, 47, 126, 142, 194 Sannazaro, Jacopo 56, 196 Scaliger, Joseph Justus 143 Schmitt, Charles 126, 150, 153, 161 Scholasticism 1, 149 – 151, 165, 170, 178, 181 – 185, 192 f. Scholastics, political thought of 104, 165, 178 f., 182 – 184, 192 Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor, Publius Cornelius 94, 102 Scotism 178, 193 Scott, Walter 185 Sculpture 10, 14, 20 – 22, 187 Scythians 93 Sejm 72, 79 Selection 15, 18, 28 f., 32, 95, 167, 170 Self-fashioning 90, 121, 165, 174, 181 f. Self-mastery, philosophical 177 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger 54, 100, 104, 155 – 157, 171 f., 174, 177, 185, 189, 192 Servius Honoratus, Maurus 28, 32, 34 – 36, 41, 44, 137 Sevastò, Maneas 53 Sextus Empiricus 18 f., 160 f., 171 Shakespeare, William 138, 198 Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius Asconius 28, 30 f., 39 f. Sinon 63 – 65 Sixtus IV, Pope 152 Skepticism 7, 149, 160 – 162, 176, 193 f. Skinner, Quentin 95, 112 Soarez, Cypriano de 89 Socrates 100, 174, 190 Sonnenberger, Ulrich 84, 88 Sophocles 4, 54, 171 Soul 19, 24, 85, 133, 147, 152 f., 156, 159, 165, 178, 190 Speaking culture 5, 75 Spectacula 24 f. Speech act 5, 72 f., 75, 77, 79 f.

Index

Spenser, Edmund 144, 170 Spinoza, Baruch 173, 186 Spolia opima 119 – 124, 128 – 130, 132 State, formation of 9, 14, 30, 61, 69, 77, 84, 95, 97 f., 103 f., 106 f., 110 – 113, 115 f., 119, 129, 145, 151, 166, 190 f., 195 Statius, Publius Papinius 28, 30 f., 38, 195 Stoicism 7, 23, 149 f., 155 – 157, 177 f. Stoics 104, 156, 174 – 177, 193 Studia humanitatis 48, 101, 149 Substitution 7, 22, 58, 67, 139 Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius 30, 121 Supplementation 7 f., 22, 140, 187, 190, 193 Swift, Jonathan 172 Syllogism 184 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 28, 33, 59, 65, 93, 106 f., 113 Tarentum 45 Tasso, Torquato 54, 144 f. Teach 1, 27, 30, 39, 46 f., 51, 53, 61, 67, 95, 106, 142, 145 f., 166, 174, 179, 183, 185, 195 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 28, 33, 39, 55, 65, 68 Tertullian 172 Teutoburg Forest, Battle of 93 Themistius 151 – 153 Thesaurus linguae Latinae 39 Thomism 182 Thoreau, Henry David 172 Thucydides 52, 99 Tibullus, Albius 28, 55 Topics 5, 59 f., 62, 66 – 68, 89, 164, 166 f., 170, 181, 195 Torso Belvedere 2 Tortelli, Giovanni 33, 38 f. Tours, États-Généraux of (1484) 73, 75 Tranquility (ataraxia) 161, 175 Transfer, cultural 5, 45, 47 f., 56 – 58 Transformation 2 – 25, 27, 44 f., 49, 71, 75, 82, 84 – 86, 88, 90, 114 – 117, 121, 124 f., 127, 130 – 133, 135 – 137, 139, 141 – 144, 146 f., 149 – 151, 153 – 163, 165 f., 178, 182, 185, 195 – 197 Translation 7, 10, 19, 23, 40, 45 – 49, 52, 54 f., 60 f., 67, 84, 88, 99 f., 102 f., 107, 128 – 130, 134 f., 137, 139, 141, 144 – 146, 149 – 152, 154 f., 157 – 161, 163, 189, 195 – 197

207

Transnationalization 47 Trapezuntius, Georgius 48, 82, 89 Traversari, Ambrogio 157, 160 Triumph 6, 109, 115 – 118, 121 f., 124 – 132, 185 Troilos, Ioannis Andreas 55 Tron, Francesco 85, 152 True nobility 97 – 99, 106 Türkenrede 83, 92 Turks 46, 83 – 87, 90 – 93 Turnus 141 Twain, Mark 172 Tyranny 1, 95, 97, 106 f., 112, 114 Ugutio of Pisa 36 Ullman, Berthold Louis Ulysses 23, 64 Urban II, Pope 85

1 f., 28

Vacca 41 Valerius Maximus 65, 122 Valla, Lorenzo 4 f., 27, 30, 32 – 44, 60, 127, 157, 174 – 181, 189, 192 – 195, 197 Van Inwagen, Peter 171 Van Orman Quine, Willard 171 Varro, Marcus Terentius 28, 125 f., 164 Vatican Library 30, 37, 39, 43, 87, 195 Vegio, Maffeo 7, 140 f., 174 – 176, 192 f. Venice 30 f., 37, 39 – 41, 50, 54 f., 57, 89, 102, 128, 131, 133, 139, 144, 151, 153, 158, 197 Venus 163 Vergilius Mediceus 43 f. Vergil, Polydore 17, 139 Verginius Rufus, Lucius 99 Vernacular languages 47, 74 Verse, political 42, 56, 67, 122, 124, 129 f., 141, 144 f., 158 Vespasian, Emperor (Titus Flavius Vespasianus) 99, 116, 123 Victorinus, Marius 33 Vienna, Diet of 79, 89, 92, 126 Villanova, C. S. 141 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 4, 7, 25, 28, 31, 34 f., 38 f., 41, 43, 54 f., 90, 122 – 124, 133 – 147, 171, 197 Virtue 6 f., 14, 57, 95 – 110, 112 – 114, 116, 131, 140 f., 146, 155, 174, 177, 190, 194 Virtue ethics 96 f., 100 Virtue politics 6, 95 – 97, 100, 103 – 106, 110 – 114, 129, 191, 196

208

Index

Vittorino da Feltre (Vittorino Rambaldoni) 32, 49 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 185 f., 194 Vulgate, Latin 179 Walter of Châtillon 20 Warburg, Aby 21, 71, 119, 195, 197 f. Weber, Max 111, 144 West 5, 45 – 49, 52, 56 – 58, 83, 85, 105, 126 – Western culture 48, 51, 54, 170 f., 196 – Western intellectuals 49 f. White, Hayden 20, 116, 136 Wiener Neustadt, Diet of (1455) 84 f.

Williams, Bernard 96, 167 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott 133 – 135, 142, 146 f. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 173 Worms, Diet of (1521) 75 Zeno of Citium 19, 174 Zeus 56, 187 Zincgref, Julius Wilhelm 21 Zoroaster 187 Zorzi Pronotarios 53