Renaissance Essays 9781472599735

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Principal William Robertson by Raeburn

Frontispiece

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Engraved portrait of Flavio Biondo

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Engraved portrait of L.A. Muratori

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Title page of Muratori's Annali, vol. 1

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John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's by Torrigiano

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Hermitage Castle, Liddesdale, from the South West

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La Piazza del Popolo, Rome

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Title page of Guicciardini's La Historia di Italia (Florence,1561)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The articles in this volume initially appeared in the following places>. They are here reprinted by the kind permission of the original publishers. 1 2

Studies in Church History (1982), pp. 1-18. Scottish Historical Review, xxx (1951), pp. 15-29.

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Proceedings of the British Academy, xlv (1960), pp. 97-128. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxxv (1962), pp. 111-27.

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L.A. Muratori Storigrafo: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Muratoriani (Olschki, Florence, 1975), pp. 323-39.

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n Rinascimento: Interpretazioni e Problemi (Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1979); The Renaissance (Methuen, London, 1982), pp. 1-32.

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Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, edited by A.Molho and J .A. Tedeschi (Sansoni, Florence, 1971), pp. xiii-xxix. From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingley, edited by C.H. Carter (Random House, New York, 1965), pp. 113-44. Itinerarium Italicum, edited by H.A. Oberman and T.A. Brady (Brill, Leiden, 1975), pp. 305-67. History, liii (1969), pp. 35-50. Rendiconti dell' Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 175 (1972), pp. 3-17. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 4 (1954), pp. 91-109. Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society Transactions, xxxi (1954 for 1952-3), pp. 145-66.

PREFACE It will be evident from the contents of this book that the 'Renaissance' of the title refers to a period of time rather than a cultural change in European style, which was what the word used mainly to mean. For the rest how may one excuse the assembling of such a miscellany of pieces, chosen by the publisher from my scattered writings? Perhaps I may be allowed a semi-autobiographical approach. I mention below that as an undergraduate I was forcibly discouraged from taking the Renaissance option, and as a result concentrated on medieval history; but my reason for interest in especially Italian history in the period between Petrarch and the Sack of Rome goes back to school days. I had the great good fortune to go to the Royal Grammar School at Newcastle upon Tyne. Among several good history masters was a remarkable teacher called R. EI. Bunn, who later moved on to Manchester Grammar School. I think it was he who urged me to read Burckhardt's Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy. I was lucky enough to get as a school prize in 1933 a copy (remaindered!) of the beautifully illustrated Middlemore translation (1929) which has been with me ever since ..Read at first with devotion, re-read in fury, I finally accepted it for its seminal character. If the chauvinistic direction of my Oxford tutor V. H. Galbraith headed me off the Renaissance it was he who suggested I might consider Polydore Vergil, when I was looking around for a research topic. And so I did, with interruptions due to the War, until I finally edited a text of the most recent part of his original MS, now in the Vatican Library. My work on this began with the 'Rome transcripts' in the P.R.O. and then was based (fortunately) on photostats of the MS. I say fortunately because when I first saw the MS after the War I was shaken to see the crumbling state of the paper. The photostats which I obtained, paid for by a fund administered by Sir Maurice Powicke, are now in the Bodleian Library. During the War I was for a time seconded to Cabinet Office as a War Historian, which involved me in a fresh interest in historiography, reflected in some of the pieces reprinted here. I once had the ambition to write a big book on the history of historiography. It has alas been my fate to write little books on big subjects, partly the result of a great deal of

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SCHOLARSHIP, RELIGION AND THE CHURCH N choosing this subject (on which many speakers have touched in talking to this Society) I started by intending to be more precise in my topic, as well as to introduce the question of church reform. The scholarship I had in mind was classical scholarship and all that went with it in eloquence, enjoyment and Wlderstanding of ancient authors. Against this I wished to pit those proponents of a religious life who rejected antiquity and all it stood for. Not of course all of either kind, but some representative examples drawn from the later Middle Ages. In the event the task I had chosen proved much more intricate that I had supposed it would be, the emerging picture more blurred. This, as we all know, is a fairly familiar phenomenon. And as for reform it figures, I am afraid, rather incidentally in what follows. I was also impressed at a recent committee meeting by the remark of a former president-a very just remark, I believe. He simply pointed out that our society is the ecclesiastical history society and not the religious history society, and hinted gently that some of us tended to forget this. Of course it is true that while the church, the ecclesia of our title, .is distinct from religion, the two overlap and mingle. The institutions of the church are often the framework within which the faith and its manifestations operate. Yet the fact remains that faith, devotion, prayer, exaltation and despair-religion, in short-are not institutionalised in any obvious way and are, indeed, both difficult to identify and to defme. The church as a machine can offer opportunities and consolations, as when it enables sinners to confess and depends upon its priests to administer effective sacraments and to absolve, even when such priests are themselves not in a state of grace. But even the greatest and most solemn moments in life have no need of the intervention of church and clergy. Birth, marriage and death are part of the natural order. No priest is needed to baptise, to marry or to throw a handful of earth on the corpse in the grave. Anyone can baptise in an emergency; in matrimony the priest is a mere witness Wltil in the

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2 THE HISTORIOGRAPHER ROYAL IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND

HE following pages are intended to suggest how the office of T Historiographer Royal may be used as evidence for past attitudes to historical writing and thinking. Before dealing with this, a short explanation of the origin of the appointment is given, together with an analysis of the nebulous rights and duties of the Historiographer. A list of the Historiographers and a brief Bibliography are provided in the appended notes. PREHISTORY

At all times rulers have been concerned with contemporary annalists. The ruler, of cours~, sets the pace, while the historian only narrates what is over and done with. Chronicles must come after Kings (as they do in an inspired quarter), but kings are never tired of trying to mould the myth. Hot news, we may say, is malleable. Ancient history would furnish many examples of the process, but it will be more to the present purpose to recall the close connection between the great monastery of St. Denis and the Capetians and the similar link between the English crown and St. Albans. Over and above a patronage of scholars and literary men, the kings of France and England maintained a direct interest in the national chronicles, at once a quarry for precedents and an instrument of propaganda: Matthew Paris was a friend of Henry III, while Edward I bolstered his Scottish pretensions from the St. Albans' as well as other chronicles. Such a direct connection between action and the recording of action is a necessity of government; but in the middle ages it was erratic in its operation. Barbour at the Scottish Court and Froissart in England were by no means the servants of particular princes or policies. For the origins of such a rigid association we must turn to renaissance Italy. The medieval Latin word ' historiographus • meant at first a painter of historical paintings. Later it re-acquired its meaning

3 FLAVIO BIONDO AND THE MIDDLE AGES

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NE of the paradoxes of historical writing is that even its ablest practitioners are soon neglected. Indeed, where their ability has been literary they suffer at the hands of posterity even more than their fair share of oblivion, ending up (in our own day) in the limbo of the prescribed books for public examinations or the pit of postgraduate theses. Yet, even unread, certain historians exert an influence over later ages which ensures them a kind of anonymous immortality. Their immediate successors transmit an interpretation which, in the hands oflater exponents, is divorced from its first begetters. This is particularly true of historiography prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, prior to the monograph and the learned journal. Nowadays we are all obsessed with our indebtedness to others and ransack the scholarly literature of our immediate predecessors for parallels to observe and precedents to quote. And we are as suspicious ofliterary graces as earlier critics were offended by their absence: it can become almost insulting to say that a contemporary writes well. It is, in short, easier far to assure oneself a niche in a bibliographical Pantheon by a gnarled and ungracious investigation into some small and intricate historical problem than by a survey, however delightful, of a big subject. These reflections are pertinent to a consideration of the writer on whom I am privileged to lecture today. Flavio Biondo in a sense stands at the threshold of a world where, for the first time, history could be presented either as art or as science. His reputation in his own day was to some degree determined by his response to this question; and more recently he has been singled out for praise because he is supposed to have chosen erudition at the expense of artistry. My purpose in what follows will be to examine in some detail Biondo's most famous work, the Decades, a history covering the period from the fall of Rome to the middle of the fifteenth century. It can be stated confidently that it is talked about more often than it is read, as is the case with the works of all the main Renaissance historians.

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HISTORY AND HISTORIANS IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND DURING THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY!

IN THE TWO millennia which comprise our era the political connexions between France and England have usually been close and have often been intimate. Likewise cultural developments in each region have acted on one another so that there are centuries at a time when one is faced by a past which is Anglo-French rather than English or French, when one must study the history of one area largely through the writers of the other, and when the kind of historical writing being composed on both sides of the Channel is strikingly similar. These parallels and similarities are particularly notable in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and again in the seventeenth and eighteenth. The fifteenth century-although it was a time of intense mutual involvement, especially down to the fourteensixties-sees surprising differences in the historiography of the two countries. The following pages try briefly to establish what these differences were. The remarkable similarity in the writing of history north and south of the Channel in the early and central Middle Ages goes even deeper than might have been expected as the result of the common ancestry of medieval historical writing in Orosius and Bede, in a liturgical preoccupation with chronology and the resulting Easter Tables. Such influences are admittedly basic; for they were in time to produce those annales which, bodied out into chronicles such as that of Sigebert of Gembloux, underlie all twelfth- and thirteenth-century historiography in western Europe. All of this gave a frame of reference and of periodization (or, in later terms, of absence of periodization), just as it gave a body of historical information which subsequent writers could if they wished elaborate, but from whieh ,they had to begin. For the striking thing about the medieval chronicler in the palmy days of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is that for the lOriginally a paper read to the Franco-British Conference of Historians in Cambridge in September 1961. I gratefully incorporate a few points made in the subsequent discussion. An indebtedness of much longer standing, increased on this occasion, must be expressed to Mr. C. A. J. Armstrong.

5 MURATORI AND THE BRITISH HISTORIANS

I I must begin by apologising for a change in the title of my paper. On your programme it is stated to be about ' II Muratori e gli storici inglesi '. Now it should have been' Muratori and the British historians' or perhaps, , Muratori and the historians of England and Scotland '. I am myself partly to blame for this. I am so used in Italy to hearing all people from Britain described as ' Inglesi " and to having letters from Italy addressed to me at ' Edimburgo, Inghilterra " that I did not at first notice how peculiarly inappropriate the title was. Of the historians to be mentioned three were Scottish by birth and domicile, Hume, Robertson and Sir Walter Scott. Moreover I believe that it was no accident that history made such remarkable progress in Scotland in the later eighteenth century, but rather that there were particular features of the Scottish intellectual scene which favoured a reception of ideas from the Continent. In many ways the century running from 1750 to 1850 in Britain was dominated by Scottish intellectuals, many of whom left Scotland for the south of England, where (for example) they were extremely prominent as printers and publishers in London. Let us remember that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was originally edited by a ' society of gentlemen in Scotland " and was first published at Edinburgh in 1771.1 I shall therefore begin with a few brief observations on the likenesses and differences in the England and Scotland of the decades follow1 Gibbon's publisher was a Scot by then domiciled in London, William Strahan. In the late eighhteenth nad nineteenth centuries Scotsmen were very prominent in London as printers and publishers. The various titles Hume gave to his History as it came out reflect his and his contemporaries' awareness of the differences which it was hoped that the union might obliterate: The History of Great Britain (under the House of Stuart), Edinburgh, 1754-57; The History of England under the House of Tudor. Edinburgh, 1759; The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VIII, London, 1761.

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HISTORIANS AND THE RENAISSANCE DURING THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS surveying the problem of the Renaissance in the last twenty or thirty years must be astonished at the tenacity with which the categories established by Jacob ~ Burckhardt have survived criticism. Die Kultur der • Renaissance in Italien came out in Basle in 1860 and over a century later its main argument remains virtually unchallenged. True, Burckhardt's synthesis had been built on foundations which went back to the Renaissance period itself, to Petrarch and his successors, long before Vasari gave 'Rinascita' its definition as applied to the fine arts. How the concept of the rebirth of classical norms began to take over education and literature, both in revived Latin and Greek as well as in the vernaculars, has been told in the authoritative pages of Wallace K. Ferguson's The Renaissance in Historical Thought. l What Burckhardt (and Georg Voigt at much the same time, though on a much narrower frontJ2 did was to extend the concept of the Renaissance from the arts and belles-lettres to the wider world of society and of history in its broadest sense. Voigt explained how the humanities at the time of Coluccio Salutati were adopted by the Florentines; Burckhardt's essay began with a substantial survey of Italian history, which he entitled 'The state as a work of art' (though the phrase remains somewhat gnomic). In the rest of his modestly written book, Burckhardt applied as thoroughly as he could the aphorism invented by Jules Michelet: that the Renaissance witnessed 'the discovery of the world and of man'.3 This meant for Burckhardt that the Renaissance ushered in attitudes NYONE

1 Cambridge, Mass., 1948. There is an elaborate bibliography, much wider in scope than the title of the book suggests, in Carlo Angeleri, 11 problema religioso del Rinascimento (Florence, 1952), 163-203. See too the critical bibliography appended by Federico Chabod to his essay, 'The concept of the Renaissance', which I have used in the revised English translation, Machiavelli and the Renaissance (London, 1958), 201-47. 2 Georg Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des c1assischen Altherthums, reprint (Berlin, 1960); there is a poor and unreliable Italian translation of this by Zippel (Florence, 1888). 3 The title of Part IV of Burckhardt's book and the section in which he touched, inter alia, on the natural sciences.

7 THE PLACE OF HANS BARON IN RENAISSANCE HISTORIOGRAPHY

Renaissance scholarship has been transformed in the course of the last thirty-odd years. Among those who have contributed most to the change Hans Baron is certainly to be numbered. What are the ways in which he has influenced the development of historical scholarship in this field? To answer this question involves recalling the general state of Renaissance studies before the Second World War and this is far from easily done. I propose to meet the difficulty by using as a stalking horse the treatment of the subject in the two last volumes of the Cambridge Medieval History. In volume VII (published in 1932.) and in volume VIII (1936) there are chapters by Arthur A. Tilley, dealing respectively with 'The early Renaissance' and 'The Renaissance in Europe' 1. By the 1930S Tilley, a French don at Cambridge who had written extensively on the Renaissance. in France 2, was an elderly man but I believe that the synoptic chapters in the Cambridge Medieval History represent a fairly up to date (for the period) view of the subject. His bibliographies are not among the fullest in these uneven volumes 3, but one observes that he recorded Giuseppe Toffanin's Che cosa 1u I'umanesimo? (192.8) and clearly tried to keep abreast of the times. I shall now try to summarise his summary. « The early Renaissance» begins, in effect, with Petrarch, who was « the first modern man » and was rightly VII, 7P-776, VIII, 773-802. The Literature of the French Renaissance: An Introductory Essay (Cambridge, 188S); The literature of the Fren&h Renaissan&e, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1904); The Dawn of the Renaissan&e (Cambridge, 1918). a Cambridge MedietJal History, VII, 966·8; VIII, 1004-6. J

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8 THE EARLY RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND*

T ewis Einstein wrote in the preface of his Italian Renaissance in

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England: "The history of the Italian Renaissance in the countries of Europe outside of Italy still remains a subject half explored.n He wrote this in 1902; sixty years later it is still broadly true for England and perhaps for other parts of Europe. There is no book to which one can tum for a general and authoritative survey of the Renaissance in England, apart from Einstein's own book, which has many of the structural faults of a pioneering venture and is marred by frequent errors of fact. It is true that what one may call the prehistory of the English Renaissance has been written, by W. F. Schirmer in 1931, and, even more completely for the fifteenth century, by Roberto Weiss (1940; new edition 1957). For a survey of the full flowering of the Tudor period we must consult Douglas Bush's little book, a quite remarkable performance if we remember it was composed of lectures delivered in 1939, but strongest on the Continental side and on Milton and in any case not pretending to be systematic or thorough. And ten years ago we had the brilliant, perverse volume contributed by the late C. S. Lewis to the Oxford History of English Literature, with its cumbersome title, English literature in the XVI century excluding drama (1954) -a title which conceals what by any reckoning is one of the finest pieces of critical writing of this century. It is noteworthy that the authors cited are literary men: Schirmer, Bush, and Lewis are historians of English literature; Weiss is a professor of Italian. Now this monopoly of English Renaissance studies by scholars of literature is not quite entire: if we were to list monographic studies of various aspects of the Renaissance in England, various articles and books devoted to individual humanists, we would find a sizeable number of studies by historians of art, of • A draft of this essay was read to the Renaissance Conference at Austin, Texas, in April. 1964.

9 ENGLAND AND THE HUMANITIES IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

The large subject of this study invites an answer~ however tentative, to some questions which naturally arise in the mind of anyone reflecting on the matter. By the end of the fifteenth century we have in Thomas More (born 1478) the finest 'humanist' produced by England. Why had he no predecessor of stature? Why was he relatively isolated in his own day? How did the situation change so rapidly in the next generation? These queries are the more tantalising when we remember that the new learning had borne handsome fruit in Italy by 1400, and that traffic in men and ideas between England and Italy was more intense after the Schism (1378-1417) than it had been for a hundred and fifty years. The new ideas of the Italians were to be absorbed by the literate English (as by the literate among other European peoples) by the end of the sixteenth century, and it is worth pondering why the process of absorption took so long. It is necessary to begin with some severe definitions if the argument is not to become vapid. Already the reader has encountered above two highly ambiguous expressions-humanist and literate. Any study which figures in a volume dedicated to Paul Oskar Kristeller must heed his strictures on the loose manner in which 'humanist' and 'humanism' are often used. 1 Humanist, either as noun or adjective, is less liable to abuse than humanism, at any rate by historians of the Renaissance period. a Certainly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in both Italy and the North the word was applied primarily if not exclusively to the new type of Latin grammarian, the teacher of the humanities, the professor of 'humanity' as he was (and is) called in Scottish universities. 3 The new curriculum was geared to the 'cycle of scholarly disciplines, namely grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, 1 Kristeller has touched on these words and their meaning on several occasions. See especially The ChllliGs anti Renaissance Thoughl (Cambridge, Mass., 1955),9-10 (reprinted as Renaiuan&e Thought, New York, 1961). II Note the temptation (especially in America?) to lengthen the adjective 'humanist' to the unnecessary Germanic 'humanistic' . • cr. below p. 230.

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THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES FACED with the general pre-eminence of the pope in the medieval Church and with the practical segregation of the clergy in England under the Crown, historians have naturally been brought to a consideration of the relationship between the two authorities. In its crudest form the problem may be stated as the way to translate the phrase ecclesia anglicana which begins to come into use in the twelfth century.l For the last two generations the established tradition has been to regard the phrase as meaning 'church in England' until the cataclysmic events of the 1530s, after which it may be translated as 'church of England', or even 'Church of England'. Such a view is to be found in the best authorities. For example in his recent book on The English Reformation Professor A. G. Dickens writes:

Nationalism within the English Church grew in strength throughout the medieval centuries . . . All the same, the common medieval term Ecclesia Anglicana never meant 'Church of England' in the postReformation sense of an independent national Church claiming parity with that of Rome. 3 Phrased as carefully as this the view is, perhaps, unexceptionable, though one must scrutinize carefully the notion of an English church 'claiming parity with that of Rome'. It is important, at any rate, not to read into 'parity' the notions that one Church had been abandoned after 1535, that men accepted in the modern way a plurality of churches. The title of the first Prayer Book of Edward VI (1549) runs: The Booke of the Common Prayer and Administracion of the Sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after the use of the Churche of England. It is true that the second Prayer Book (1552) drops the words 'of the Churche: after the use', thus leaving only 'the rites and ceremonies in the Churche of Englande', a gesture to the radical views then prevailing. But in both Prayer Books the faith of the Catholic Church is proclaimed, and by phrases such as 'the whole body of the Church' are to be understood the acceptance of a 1 See the clear and useful account of Charles Duggan in The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages, ed. C. H. Lawrence (London. 1965). hereafter ECP, p,P. 107-8. There are some interesting and pertinent re8ections in I. P. Shaw. Nationality and the Western Church before the Reformation (London. 1959). 2 Op. cit. (London, 1964), p. 86.

11 SIR THOMAS MORE'S UTOPIA: LITERATURE OR POLITICS? I accepted your kind invitation to address the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and its guests on More's Utopia in the hope that a specialist in later medieval history might perhaps be able to comment usefully on a text normally discussed by specialists in 'early modern' history (t). I chose the above title for my talk since there is still a temptation to regard Utopia as a jeu d'esprit, a mere literary exercise. Whatever the answer to the question I have posed, the book can still' sometimes confuse the reader not alert to the assumptions of its author. This remains true despite the very fine and prolific scholarship devoted to More in recent years (z). I shall begin by reminding you of the structure of the book and its contemporary influence, of the relationship of Utopia with the circumstances of More's own career. Second, I shall turn to Utopia in the perspective of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, dealing first with social and economic conditions, and then with some moral presuppositions underlying the book. 1. It may seem unnecessary to ask-for this in a way is what I am doingwhether More is serious in Utopia, or whether the book is a brilliant intellectual creation, intended to amuse a small coterie of friends. This question has, of course, been much debated, and not only in his own day, when (as we shall see) the only comfortable way of looking at Utopia was to regard it as a joke. In the nineteenth century and after, when his works were more

(I) I have left the lecture in the form in which it was delivered, adding some references and amplifying one or two statements. I have to thank dott. Giuseppe Roglia, Vice-Cancelliere of the Academy, for much consideration and kindness. (2) I signal out for mention the following, as especially relevant to this essay: The Yale University edition of the complete works, and especially vol. 4, Utopia, ed. and trans. by Edward Surtz S. J. and J. A. Hexter (New Haven and London, 1965), to which all my references will be made; R. W. GIBSON', Sir Thomas More: a preliminary bibliography to ... I750 (New Haven and London, 1961). Most recent work onMore finds a reflection in Moreana, inspired, edited and sometimes largely written by the Abbe Germain Marc'hadour at Angers since 1963. See especially Moreana 15 (1967) where several papers, contributed in honour of Miss E. F. ROGERS, discuss Utopia; and efr. below p.263land nn. 52,53.

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THE DIVISION OF THE SPOILS OF WAR IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

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HE desire for booty was a motive in all medieval warfare. The preoccupation of the soldier with spoils, with prisoners, horses, equipment and movable wealth in general, is, however, less evident in the surviving sources of early medieval history than in the records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Even a cursory knowledge of the period of Anglo-French hostilities between 1337 and 1453 leaves one under no illusions as to the overriding importance to the combatants of the winnings of war. Spoils mattered equally to the rank and file soldier, to the magnate and to the crown. The depredations of the chevaucMe in Languedoc in 1355 benefited everyone in the Black Prince's army. 'Chevaliers, escuiers, brigants, garchons' were loaded with 'leurs prisonniers et leurs richesses'.l Froissart makes Gloucester in 1390 object to a peace with France because of the ensuing discouragement of the 'poor knights and squires and archers of England whose comforts and station in society depend upon war'. 2 And he tells us also how the Sire d' Albret looked back over his military career and regretted the peace which alliance with France had given him. 'I'm well enough" he told an enquirer, 'but I had more money, and so did my retinue, when I fought for the king of England.' An army on the move, he explained, often gave the chance of capturing a rich merchant; hardly a day passed without its prize; thus one could afford the 'superfluitez et jolitez. . . . Maintenant nous est morto'3 The 1 Jean Ie Bel, Chronique, ed. J. Viard and E. Deprez (Societe de l'histoire de France, 1904-5), ii. 222. 2