IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ANCIENTS:

THE ORIGINS OF HUMANISM FROM LOVATO TO BRUNI

Ronald G. Witt

BRILL

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ANCIENTS

STUDIESIN MEDIEVAL AND

REFORMATION THOUGHTEDITED BY

HEIKO A. OBERMAN, Tucson, Arizona

IN COOPERATION WITH

THOMAS A. BRADY, Jr., Berkeley, CaliforniaANDREW C. GOW, Edmonton, Alberta

SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN, Tucson, ArizonaJRGEN MIETHKE, Heidelberg

M. E. H. NICOLETTE MOUT, LeidenANDREW PETTEGREE, St. Andrews

MANFRED SCHULZE, Wuppertal

VOLUME LXXIV

RONALD G. WITT

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ANCIENTS

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OFTHE ANCIENTS

THE ORIGINS OF HUMANISMFROM LOVATO TO BRUNI

BY

RONALD G. WITT

BRILLLEIDEN BOSTON KLN

2001

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Witt, Ronald G.In the footsteps of the ancients : the origins of humanism from Lovato to

Bruni / by Ronald G. Witt.p. cm. (Studies in medieval and Reformation thought, ISSN

0585-6914 ; v. 74)Includes bibliographical references and indexes.ISBN 9004113975 (alk. paper)1. Lovati, Lovato de, d. 1309. 2. Bruni, Leonardo, 1369-1444. 3. Latin

literature, Medieval and modernItalyHistory and criticism. 4. Latinliterature, Medieval and modernFranceHistory and criticism. 5. Latinliterature, Medieval and modernClassical influences. 6. Rhetoric, AncientStudy and teachingHistoryTo 1500. 7. Humanism in literature.8. HumanistsFrance. 9. HumanistsItaly. 10. ItalyIntellectual life1268-1559. 11. FranceIntellectual lifeTo 1500.

PA8045.I6 W58 2000808.094509023dc21 00023546

CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Witt, Ronald G.:In the footsteps of the ancients : the origins of humanism fromLovato to Bruni / by Ronald G. Witt. Leiden ; Boston ; Kln :Brill, 2000

(Studies in medieval and reformation thought ; Vol. 74)ISBN 9004113975

ISSN 0585-6914ISBN 90 04 11397 5

Copyright 2000 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................... vii

Abbreviations .............................................................................. xi

Chapter One Introduction ...................................................... 1

Chapter Two The Birth of the New Aesthetic ...................... 31

Chapter Three Padua and the Origins of Humanism .......... 81

Chapter Four Albertino Mussato and the Second Generation 117

Chapter Five Florence and Vernacular Learning .................. 174

Chapter Six Petrarch, Father of Humanism? ........................ 230

Chapter Seven Coluccio Salutati ............................................ 292

Chapter Eight The Revival of Oratory .................................. 338

Chapter Nine Leonardo Bruni ............................................... 392

Chapter Ten The First Ciceronianism ................................... 443

Chapter Eleven Conclusion .................................................... 495

Appendix .................................................................................... 509

Bibliography ............................................................................... 515

IndexesIndex of Persons .................................................................... 549Index of Places ....................................................................... 556Index of Subjects ................................................................... 558

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In memoriamPaul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999)

Sibi et post eum ascendere volentibus viam aperuit.

In the course of the twenty-three years since I first conceived oftaking up this project, I have depended heavily on the generosity of alarge intellectual community in multifarious ways, but because thisvolume embodies only half of the original design, I postpone men-tioning those who contributed principally to the still unfinished firstand earlier part. The present book could not have been written with-out the expert advice of Francis Newton and Diskin Clay of DukesDepartment of Classical Studies. In the case of Francis Newton, mydebt goes back to the beginning of my research on early humanismand before. James Hankins, John Headley, Kenneth Gouwens, Ric-cardo Fubini, Majorie Curry Woods, and Paul Gaziano read theentire manuscript, each at different stages of its development.Francesca Santoro LHoir, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Timothy Kircher,and Marcello Simonetta willingly gave their comments on chapters3, 5, 6, and 10 respectively. On specific points I had recourse to theexpertise and assistance of Felicia Traub, Patricia Osmond, RobertBjork, Peter Burian, Mark Sosower, Lucia Stadter, and EdwardMahoney. I am deeply grateful to all these scholars for the correc-tions and improvements they have made. A presentation of a lateversion of the manuscript in one of the Duke History DepartmentsConversations with Colleagues was extremely profitable, as was asimilar presentation to the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar.

I am deeply in debt to two decades of Duke University Staff mem-bers: Dorothy Sapp and Betty Cowan in the 1980s and Jenna Gol-nik, Andrea Long, and Deborah Carver in the 1990s. Without themI would never have gotten through the series of emergencies plaguinga sometimes absent-minded and technologically naive researcher. Ofthe dozens of libraries I have visited over the years, I would like tosingle out for special thanks the staffs of the Bibliothque nationale ofParis, the Biblioteca nazionale and Biblioteca riccardiana of Flor-ence, the libraries of the American Academy in Rome and HarvardsVilla I Tatti in Florence, the Newberry Library, the Biblioteca

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apostolica vaticana, and the Duke Library, especially the staff ofSpecial Collections. I would also like to thank Professor Heiko A.Oberman for accepting this book in his series Studies in Medieval andReformation Thought. Gera van Bedaf, my editor at Brill, was a pleasureto work with. Her professionalism, efficiency and tolerance in thisenterprise were remarkable.

In the last stages of compiling the bibliography, I relied heavily onthe research skills of my undergraduate assistant at Duke, RobertShibley. Christopher Ross, Walker Robinson, and Philip Tinarihelped with proofing. Mark Jurdevic prepared the indexes with intel-ligence and dispatch. I would especially like to express my deep ap-preciation for the work of Andrew Sparling, who served as thecopyeditor of the manuscript, but whose real contribution extendedmuch further, to the mode of presentation and to the ideas them-selves. The general argument, even if necessarily specialized atpoints, has been rendered far more accessible to a general audienceby his having taken it in hand. He could not have been more con-cerned with the quality of the final version had it been his own work.Finally, I want to thank my family: my three children for whom thedictates of writing such a book contributed significantly to the con-text in which they spent much of their youth performed over timevarious services too numerous to mention; and my wife of thirty-fiveyears, who has always stood in the front line when it came to testingout my ideas or exploring ways of expressing them. Over the yearsmy research has been generously supported by the National Endow-ment for the Humanities and by a number of foundations. A Gug-genheim Fellowship in 1978-79 and a summer grant from the Coun-cil of Learned Societies helped me in the initial stages of research.Subsequently, I received a National Endowment for the Humanitiesfor a semesters study in 1983 at the National Humanities Center inthe Research Triangle; a second for a semester at the NewberryLibrary in l991 and a third (with a generous salary supplement fromDuke) for a years residence at the American Academy in Rome. AFulbright-for-Research-in-Two-Countries supported me for a year inRome and Paris in 1985-86. Five grants from the Duke UniversityResearch Council were used for the purchase of microfilm. I can onlyhope that the results of this study and the one forthcoming will insome measure justify the expenditure of these precious resources.

I dedicate this book to the memory of Paul Oskar Kristeller, whosemagisterial writings instilled in me the fundamental principle guiding

acknowledgements

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all my work: that an appreciation of the distinctiveness of the ItalianRenaissance cannot be had apart from an understanding of the me-dieval culture out of which it developed. Mine is only one of manytestimonies to Kristellers enormous contribution to the study of me-dieval and Renaissance culture. Those of us in this field can fittinglyattribute to his achievement the assessment Boccaccio rendered ofPetrarchs in his letter to Jacopo Pizzinga in 1372: He has openedthe road for himself and for those who want to ascend after him.

R.W.Durham, North CarolinaFebruary 2000

acknowledgements

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ABBREVIATIONS

ASF Archivo di Stato, FlorenceBAM Biblioteca ambrosiana, Milan.BAV Biblioteca apostolica, Vatican City.BCS Biblioteca columbaria, Seville.BL British Library.BLF Biblioteca laurenziana, Florence.BMF Biblioteca magliabechiana, Florence.BMV Biblioteca marciana, Venice.BNF Biblioteca nazionale, Florence.BNN Biblioteca nazionale, Naples.BNP Bibliothque nationale, Paris.BRF Biblioteca riccardiana, Florence.DBI Dizionario bibliographico italiano.DGI De gestis Italicorum post Henricum VII Cesarem,

in Mussato, Opera, q.v., fasc. 2, 1112.FSI Fonti per la storia dItalia.HA Historia augusta or De gestis Henrici septem

Cesaris, in Mussato, Opera, q.v., fasc. l, 194.

IMU Italia medioevale e umanistica.LB Ludovicus Bavarus ad filium, in Mussato, Op-

era, q.v., fasc. 3, 110.LI 1 Il letterato e le istituzioni, in Letteratura italiana,

ed. A. Asor Rosa, vol. 1 (Turin, 1982).LI 5 Le questioni, in Letteratura italiana, vol. 5 (Tu-

rin, 1986).LI 6 Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici, in

Letteratura italiana, vol. 6 (Turin, 1986).LI 7.1 Storia e geografia: Let medievale, in Letteratura

italiana, vol. 7.1 (Turin, 1987).Megas, Kuklos Padouas Anastasio Megas,

y (Lovato Lovati AlbertoMussato) r j v L.A. Seneca(Salonica, 1967).

MGH Monumenta Germaniae HistoriaeMiss. Archivio di Stato, Florence, Signoria,

Carteggi, I Canc., Missive.

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Mussato, Opera Albertini Mussati: Historia augusta Henrici VIICaesaris et alia quae extant opera, LaurentiiPignorii vir. clar. spicilegio necnon FoeliciOsii et Nicolae Villani etc. (Venice, l636).

Petrarch, Familiar Letters Francesco Petrarch, vol. 1, Rerumfamiliarium libri IVIII (Albany, N.Y., 1975);vol.2, Rerum familiarium libri IXXVI: Letterson Familiar Matters (Baltimore and London,1982); vol. 3, Rerum familiarium libri XVII-XXIV: Letters on Familiar Matters (Baltimoreand London, 1985); all vols. trans. Aldo S.Bernardo. English text of Petrarch, Rerumfamiliarium.

Petrarch, Familiari, 14 Francesco Petrarch, Le familiari, 4 vols.;vols. 13 ed. Vittorio Rossi, vol. 4 ed.Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco;Edizione nazionale di Petrarca, vols. 1013(Rome, 193342). Latin text of Petrarch,Rerum familiarium.

Petrarch, Letters of Old Age Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age (Rerumsenilium libri IXVIII), 2 vols., ed. A Ber-nardo, S. Levin, and R.A. Bernardo, (Balti-more, 1992).

Petrarch, Prose Francesco Petrarch, Prose, ed. G. Mar-tellotti, P.G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E.Bianchi (Milan and Naples, 1955).

PL Patrologia latina.Prosatori Eugenio Garin, Prosatori latini del Quattrocento

(Milan and Naples, 1952).RIS Rerum Italicarum Scriptores.Sabbadini, Scoperte Remigio Sabbadini, Le Scoperte dei codici

latini e greci ne secoli XIV e XV, 2 vols. (Flor-ence, 1905 and 1914); reprographic rpt.,ed. E. Garin (Florence, 1967).

Salutati, Epist., 14 Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. F.Novati, 4 vols., in FSI, vols. 1518 (Rome,l8911911).

SCV l Storia della cultura veneta: Dalle origini alTrecento (Vicenza, 1976).

SCV 2 Storia della cultura veneta: Il Trecento (Vicenza,1976).

abbreviations

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SCV 3 Storia della cultura veneta: Il Quattrocento(Vicenza, 1980).

Vergerio, Epist. Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. L. Smith(Rome, 1934), in FSI, vol. 74 (Rome,1934).

Witt, Hercules Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads:The Life, Works, and Thought of ColuccioSalutati (Durham, 1983).

Witt, Salutati and His Letters Ronald G. Witt, Coluccio Salutati and HisPublic Lettters (Geneva, 1976).

abbreviations

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1CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

From the twelfth to the early sixteenth century, the major lay intel-lectuals of western Europe were in Italy. Whereas elsewhere on thesubcontinent ecclesiastics controlled educational institutions and in-tellectual life generally, in Italy, primarily in the northern and centralparts of the peninsula, laymen played a major role from the earlytwelfth century and became dominant after 1300. Lay intellectualswere largely associated in earlier centuries with legal studies, but after1300 there emerged an intellectual movement, Italian humanism,which ultimately established laymens lives as equal in moral value tothose of clerics and monks. The methods and goals of humanisteducation, already well-defined by the early fifteenth century, were tobecome the underpinnings of elite education in western Europedown to the nineteenth.

Despite the central importance of the humanist movement for theevolution of western European society, the present study maintainsthat our current understanding of the first century and a half of itsdevelopment has been misconceived in a number of significant ways.A serious re-examination of humanisms early history makes it possi-ble to understand its genesis, its subsequent development to the mid-fifteenth century, and the distinctive characteristics that set it off fromits earlier analogue, usually referred to as twelfth-century Frenchhumanism. A brief chronology of my own thinking on the subjectshould serve to explain the reasons for my dissatisfaction with con-temporary scholarship on the origins and early stages of humanismand to illuminate the approach that I have taken to the problem.

My original interest in the issues of humanisms origins andgrowth was sparked by Paul Oskar Kristellers classic definition of theItalian humanists as essentially rhetoricians and heirs to the traditionof the medieval dictatores. In contrast with the tendency of previousscholars to speak generally of humanism as offering a philosophy oflife, Kristeller developed a definition of humanism based on the pro-fessional role of the humanists in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century

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Italian society.1 He argued that the humanists usually worked asteachers of rhetoric and grammar or served as notaries and lawyers.The latter two professional groups were charged with writing lettersand making speeches on behalf of political powers. They were notphilosophers but instead specialized in rhetoric, grammar, history,and ethics, areas of learning reflected in the kinds of issues they wroteabout.2 According to Kristeller, perhaps the only philosophical ideathat they all shared was a belief in the dignity of the human being,and this conviction usually emerged only as an implicit assumption intheir work.3 Professionally, Kristeller maintained, the humanists ofthe Italian Renaissance played the same role in their society as didthe dictatores of the Middle Ages in theirs: they were rhetoricians whoserved as public officials in princely and communal chanceries andtaught grammar and rhetoric in the schools. Concerned as were theirpredecessors primarily with the art of letter writing and the composi-tion and delivery of speeches, the humanists differed from their me-dieval counterparts, nevertheless, in relying on models drawn fromclassical texts.4

Over the last fifty years, Kristellers analysis of humanism hasadvanced scholarly discussion of the movement by stressing the im-portance of understanding the medieval intellectual culture out ofwhich humanism arose, especially the traditions of the disciplines inwhich the humanists worked and of the genres of writing that theyemployed. Kristellers definition failed to account for Petrarch andBoccaccio, the two great leaders of Trecento humanism, who neithertaught nor served as public officials; it also excluded from considera-

1 His original statement of the thesis is found in Humanism and Scholasticism inthe Italian Renaissance, Byzantion 17 (194445): 34674, most recently published inRenaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. M. Mooney (New York, 1979), 85105. Myreferences will be to the latter version.

2 For Kristellers enumeration of the basic studia humanitatis, see his The Human-ist Movement, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, esp. 22, and in the same volume,Humanism and Scholasticism, 92 and 98. For his detailed discussion of humanistachievements in these disciplines, see esp. 2531 and 9298.

3 Kristeller, The Humanist Movement, 32.4 He recognizes that humanism had an important grammatical component and

suggests that the medieval French grammatical tradition was one of its sources. Heparticularly stresses the role of the French practice of textual commentary: EightPhilosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 1964), 16062. Cf. Humanism andScholasticism, 91 and 9697. Nevertheless, he insists that professionally the human-ists were rhetoricians and the successors of the medieval dictatores: The HumanistMovement, 2324. Cf. Humanism and Scholasticism, 9293.

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tion the many private individuals after 1400 who never used theirhumanistic training to earn a living.5 The studies of Charles Trinkausand others on the religious and philosophic interests of the human-ists, moreover, have accented the humanists philosophical and reli-gious interests more than did Kristellers works.6 In WilliamBouwsmas opinion, the narrow focus of Kristeller on the humanistscontribution to specific areas of the traditional educational curricu-lum has tended to have the unintended effect of reducing our per-ception of its rich variety and thus of limiting our grasp of its histori-cal significance.7 Nonetheless, Kristellers characterization of thehumanists, the scope of their interests, and their role in society hassurvived largely intact because it integrated most of the phenomenaassociated with the movement.

Kristeller was more interested in describing humanism than inexplaining its etiology. In fact, he only suggested in passing two possi-ble causes for its origin: the influence of grammatical interests im-ported from France late in the thirteenth century and the revival of a

5 Kristeller, Humanism and Scholasticism, 93, recognized that the two did notfit his definition, but in Petrarcas Stellung in der Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit,Italien und die Romania in Humanismus und Renaissance: Festschrift fr Erich Loos zum 70Geburtstage, ed. K.W. Kempfer and E. Straub (Wiesbaden, 1983), 104, he partlyjustifies his position by pointing out that Petrarch occasionally performed tasks asso-ciated with a professional dictator for the Visconti, Carrara, Colonna, and perhapsalso the Correggio families.

6 Among the early humanists, these scholars single out Salutati and Valla ashaving philosophical interests. Among the writings of Charles Trinkaus on the sub-ject, see especially Coluccio Salutatis Critique of Astrology in the Context of HisNatural Philosophy, Speculum 64 (1989): 4668; and Lorenzo Vallas Anti-Aristote-lian Natural Philosophy, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 5 (1993): 279325. Seealso Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla, Umanesimo e Teologia (Florence, 1972); andmy Hercules, 31354.

Kristeller states his position most clearly in The Philosophy of Man in the ItalianRenaissance, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains (NewYork, 1961), 138: The humanistic movement which in its origin was not philosophi-cal provided the general and still vague ideas and aspirations as well as the ancientsource materials. The Platonists and Aristotelians, who were professional philoso-phers with speculative interests and training, took up those vague ideas, developedthem into definite philosophical doctrines, and assigned them an important place intheir elaborate metaphysical systems.

7 William J. Bouwsma, The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinian-ism in Renaissance Thought, Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance inthe Mirror of Its European Transformations: Dedicated to Paul Oskar Kristeller on the Occasion ofhis 70th Birthday, ed. Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden, 1975),3. Cf. Kenneth Gouwens, Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after theCognitive Turn, American Historical Review 103 (1998): 58.

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concern with ancient literature and history occurring at the sametime in the Veneto, particularly at Padua. To his mind, humanismappeared to have resulted from the Italians combination of a domes-ticated French grammatical tradition with an evolving local rhetori-cal orientation.8

Kristellers reluctance to be more precise about the origins of hu-manism is not untypical of scholarship on the Renaissance over thelast fifty years. Impressed with the complexity of major historicalchanges, modern scholars have largely refrained from making morethan modest suggestions about which factors may have given rise toa movement of humanisms scope. The search for humanisms ori-gins, moreover, blends easily into the wider pursuit of the origins ofthe Italian Renaissance as a whole, the broader problem on whichthe narrower one intimately depends.9 Before such a challenge, hu-mility would seem the proper attitude. My own account does notoffer an explanation for the Renaissance but rather is concerned onlywith the development of humanism. My argument is that the adventof humanism was intimately connected with the broad, longtermchanges in Italian political, economic, social, and cultural life thatwere creating the first early modern European society. The move-

8 Kristeller, Humanism and Scholasticism, 97. Kristeller describes France asexercising leadership in the Middle Ages in the study of ancient Roman literature, inthe composition of Latin poetry, and in theology. Until the late thirteenth century, inhis view, Italy focused its scholarly concern on practical subjects like law and medi-cine. The Italian rhetorical interests of the medieval period were likewise practical,focusing on the composition of speeches for political occasions and letters devoted tobusiness. Kristeller considers humanism as arising from a fusion between the novelinterest in classical studies imported from France toward the end of the thirteenthcentury and the much earlier traditions of medieval Italian rhetoric (ibid., 97, withnotes). B.L. Ullman, Some Aspects of the Origin of Italian Humanism, in hisStudies in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1973), 2931, places the contact a fewdecades later, emphasizing the importance of Avignon in bringing Italians into con-tact with French classical culture. Without specifically focusing on Italian humanism,J. Nordstrm, Moyen ge et Renaissance: Essai historique, trans. T. Hammar (Paris, 1933),stresses the general influence of French art and the French language, chansons de geste,romances, and goliardic poetry on thirteenth-century Italian culture. Cf. PaulRenucci, Laventure de lhumanisme europen au moyen ge (IVeXIV sicle) (Paris, 1953),138172. Franco Simone, Medieval French Culture and Italian Humanism, in TheFrench Renaissance, trans. H. Gaston Hall (London, 1969), 27990, stresses the impor-tance of Avignon as a center for the transmission of French culture to Italians.

9 An example of a contemporary effort to deal with both problems at once isGeorge Holmes, Florence, Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1986). Al-though skillfully relating artistic and intellectual developments with a focus on thefirst decade of the fourteenth century, Holmess account is essentially descriptive.

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ment served, first of all, to promote the transformation and second,to validate the new societys achievements.

Coming to Europe in the fall of 1978 on a Guggenheim Fellow-ship in search of humanisms origins, I spent most of the followingyear of research continuing my study of the writings of the dictatores:manuals of letter writing (artes dictaminis), which date from the lateeleventh century, and manuals of speech composition (artes arengandi),beginning in the early thirteenth century. Included in my reading aswell were the remnants of other writings by dictatores, together with aselection of handbooks for composing sermons (artes predicandi), whosecomposition dates in Italy from the early thirteenth century.

By the end of the year, it became clear to me that the connectionbetween fourteenth-century humanists and dictatores of the previouscentury lay in the stylistic continuity of public rhetoric: humanistswho wrote official letters and gave speeches continued to use medi-eval rhetorical forms.10 In fact, until the late fourteenth century, intheir professional work as chancery officials or teachers of rhetoric,humanists carried forward medieval rhetorical traditions of expres-sion and, in some cases, they even composed treatises on arsdictaminis.

In contrast, significant stylistic changes in the direction of imitatingancient rhetoric occurred in those writings composed by humanistsas private individuals. Even here, though, change did not happensimultaneously across all genres of prose composition. Not surpris-ingly, the last to be reformed were the oration and the public letter,genres of primary concern to dictatores. While Kristeller was right topresent the humanists as professionally the heirs of the dictatores, thecontinuity that the humanists forged, at least until about 1400, restedon their persistent embrace of medieval rhetorical forms. Insofar asthey were humanists, these fourteenth-century chancellors and teach-ers owed little or nothing to the tradition of ars dictaminis.11

On my return from France, my reading of Quentin SkinnersFoundations of Modern Political Thought, which argues that a change inItalian ars dictaminis led to the birth of humanism, helped me clarify

10 For the meaning of public, see below, n. 19.11 At the most, experience with dictamen would have served to guide Tuscan and

Bolognese dictatores to focus on translations of ancient prose rather than poetry andsharpened their sensitivity to language and expression.

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my own thoughts.12 Skinner argues that French medieval classicismaffected French ars dictaminis and in turn Italian dictatores. The argu-ment rests on a series of misconceptions about the relationships ofFrench to Italian dictamen and of Italian dictamen to Italian human-ism.13 My critique of his analysis led me to define more clearly theinterrelationship (or more properly, the lack of one) between human-ism and the two schools of dictamen.

By 1981, besides having concluded that humanism had not arisenas an offshoot of dictamen, I had arrived at three further conclusions:first, that humanism did not invade all literary genres simultaneously,but rather successively coopted one genre after another over almosttwo centuries; second, that the order of penetration was not a matterof happenstance, but that for reasons both intrinsic to the genre andarising from cultural precedent, the first genre affected was poetry;and third, that, because it began in poetry, the origins of humanismwere to be found not in rhetoric but in grammar, the traditional

12 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (New Yorkand London, 1978).

13 Skinner, Foundations, 1:3539, maintains that contact with French ars dictaminis,heavily influenced by twelfth-century French classicism, led Italian dictatores (he men-tions Jacques de Dinant and Latini as examples) living in France to reform thepractical rhetoric of Italian dictaminal tradition. Latini is specifically designated asencountering Ciceros rhetorical writings there for the first time, an encounter thatconvinced him to introduce a far more literary and classical flavour into his ownwritings in Ars Dictaminis (37). The introduction of this classical rhetoric, Skinnerclaims, led students, among them Mussato and Geri dArezzo, back to the ancienttexts (3738). First of all, Jacques de Dinant was not Italian, and the Ciceronianrhetorical texts that Skinner mentions, the De inventione and Ad Herennium, had circu-lated in Italy throughout the medieval period. Although Latini has long been recog-nized as influenced by Vincent of Beauvais Speculum when writing his encyclopedicTresor, there is no evidence that he was influenced by French dictamen practices.Aristide Marigo, Cultura letteraria e preumanistica nelle maggiori enciclopedie delDuecento, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 68 (1916): 142, and 289326, dis-cusses Latinis sources. Pons of Provence in the mid-thirteenth century was the lastimportant French dictator and he gave short shrift to the ancients. Subsequently,Italian authors, Faba, Bene, and Boncompagno, dominated the moribund ars inFrance. Thus, the influence of the dictaminal traditions was the reverse of thatmaintained by Skinner. As for the effect of Latinis French classical experience ondictamen, until after 1350 (and even then rarely) it would be difficult to find ancientauthors cited in dictamen texts. Stilus humilis dominate Italian dictamen after 1250.Skinner never explains how Mussato and Geri relate to dictamen, but in any case, weshall see that Lovato, a member of Latinis generation, was the major contemporaryinfluence on Mussato, and Lovatos genre was poetry. By contrast, I will suggest amuch earlier influence of French classicism, beginning in the 1180s. By Latinis time,Italians were moving away from French influences.

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domain for poetry.14 I only gradually understood the tremendoussignificance of this fact for the interpretation of the movement. Ac-cordingly, over the next seven years I sought to trace the grammati-cal tradition in medieval Italian culture. The preliminary results ofmy investigation, published in 1988 in an article entitled The Ori-gins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal, were as follows:15

As historically defined in western Europe, grammar and rhetoricconstituted two very different centers around which to organize edu-cation and ultimately a way of life. The two disciplines first emergedin the Greco-Roman system of education. As it existed in the goldendays of the Roman Empire in the first century B.C.E. and the firstcentury of the Christian era, the curriculum of the schools treatedrhetoric as the superior discipline in the educational hierarchy. Thetask of the grammarian was to prepare the student to pass on to theschool of rhetoric, where he could learn the subject that would en-able him to participate fully in the political life of the state. Althoughsubordinate, grammatical studies provided students with skills thatextended beyond the requirements for entering the school of rheto-ric; in this way, the grammarian managed to promote some of hisown intellectual interests.16

The grammarian began his educational program on the assump-tion that his charges had learned the elements of reading and writingfrom the ludi magister, the elementary school teacher. The grammari-

14 Two articles of John OMalley, Grammar and Rhetoric in the Pietas ofErasmus, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 8198, and Egidio daViterbo, O.S.A. e il suo tempo, Studia augustiniana historica 9 (1983): 6884, bothdealing with the distinctive concerns and interests of the grammarian and rhetoricianin the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, helped clarify my views. Although the text ofthe first article was only published in 1988, Prof. OMalley made it (initially preparedfor another journal) available to me years earlier. This work also brought to myattention O.B. Hardisons The Orator and the Poet: The Dilemma of HumanistLiterature, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (1971): 3344, which elaborateson the contrasts between the poet and the orator.

15 The article was published in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy,ed. Albert Rabil, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1988), 1:2970.

16 S.F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny(Berkeley, 1977), 189ff., especially 250. See also H.I. Marrou, A History of Education inAntiquity, trans. G. Lamb (New York, 1956), 22342 and 26781. Bonner, 21819,suggests that ancient grammarians may have used prose works to provide studentswith initial exercises in composition, but that they did not indulge in the detailedanalysis of prose as they did for poetry. G.A. Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece(Princeton, 1963), 269, acknowledges some overlap but considers the study of poetsto have belonged principally to the school of grammar and that of the prose writersto the school of rhetoric.

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ans own task was to give the student a good understanding of Latingrammar, an appreciation of literature, and initial training in the artof composition. At the outset, detailed study was devoted to theletters of the alphabet, the syllables, and the parts of speech. Selec-tions from the poets served as the basis for a minute examination ofsyntax and provided the students with an introduction to literaryanalysis. In the course of a line-by-line study of a poem, the gram-marian discussed the authors biography, the historical and mytho-logical references found in the work, the metric, the etymology of thevocabulary, and the various figures of speech that the poet used. Hetaught the student to search for truth hidden beneath a veil of im-agery. Close study of the text incidentally revealed discrepancies indifferent copies and thereby encouraged the grammarian to engagein textual criticism.

The student left the grammar school with some experience inreciting poetry and composing short pieces of prose, but delivery andlonger prose composition were to be the main objectives of his train-ing from then on. The rhetor set his students to imitating the greatprose writers of the culture, especially the orators. Students learnedto declaim, debate, and deliver orations of their own making. Successat such assignments augured well for their future standing in eliteancient society.

The educational programs of the grammar and rhetorical schoolswere linked. The rhetor presupposed grammatical training in hisstudents: the rules of prosody learned earlier facilitated the masteringof prose metric required for orations, and appropriate citations fromthe poets proved a vital ingredient in making an impressive speech.The grammarian, for his part, used some prose texts in his instruc-tion, and interpretation of the poets could not have been made with-out help of the colores rhetorici borrowed from the rhetor. Students hadto understand the figures of thought and style, tropes, and common-places in order to interpret clearly both the outer and inner meaningsof poetry.

In his dependence on devices of rhetoric to accomplish his ends,the grammarian resorted to what George Kennedy calls secondaryrhetoric.17 For Kennedy, primary rhetoric is the art of speech-

17 G.A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient toModern Times (Chapel Hill, 1980), 45, establishes the distinction between primaryand secondary rhetoric. Marjorie Curry Wood, The Teaching of Writing in Medi-eval Europe, in A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Twentieth-

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making and develops out of the needs of public life. It includesspeeches, impromptu and written, and, I would add, at least for theancient and medieval periods, public letters that were delivered orallyand therefore qualified as speeches. From late antiquity, sermons alsoconstituted an important form of oratorical expression. Under sec-ondary rhetoric Kennedy groups all other literary genres, for exam-ple, history, private correspondence, poetry, and philosophical dis-cussion when it has literary pretensions. In this wider arena, rhetoricrelates to invention, arrangement, and especially to style in otherwords, to the particular selection of words and their order, chosen bythe author whether he is writing prose or poetry.

While I follow Kennedys division between two categories ofrhetoric in this book, I am unable to accept his terminology of pri-mary and secondary. Not only is it difficult to prove that primaryrhetoric historically preceded secondary rhetoric, i.e., that oratorycame before poetry, but also the claim, implicit in the terminology,that oration enjoyed a privileged position as a form of verbal expres-sion, while true for antiquity, cannot be extended to Europe in theMiddle Ages or Renaissance. Retaining Kennedys two descriptivecategories, consequently, I have preferred to label them oratoricalrhetoric and literary rhetoric. While I acknowledge that oratoricaldiscourse was also in a sense literary, I have chosen to make oratori-cal rhetoric a separate category, because unlike other genres ofrhetoric, it was a prose that aimed at public, oral expression.18

To privilege oration as essentially public and to imply that otherliterary genres are private is to claim less than might at first appear.

Century America, ed. James J. Murphy (Davis, Calif., 1990), 7794, points out convinc-ingly that Kennedys terminology as well as his description of the relationship of thetwo rhetorics implicitly subordinates secondary rhetoric to primary rhetoric. Shesuggests that the terminology be reversed and oratory be seen as a subset of whatKennedy defines as secondary rhetoric. Although the unique history of oratoricalexpression in early humanism cautions me against embracing this suggestion, thecogency of her critique of Kennedys terminology, which I had earlier accepted (seemy Origins, 31), has led me to develop another way of describing the tworhetorics.

18 The early Italian humanists did not make the distinction between two kinds ofrhetoric that I make here. Of the medieval Italian dictatores, only Boncompagno feltthe distinctiveness of oratory from other forms of verbal expression. In fact, heidentified oratory with rhetoric and resisted the efforts of the grammatici at transform-ing orations into literary compositions. He sharply distinguished between oratores,grammatici, and dialectici (see my Boncompagno and the Defense of Rhetoric, TheJournal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 [1986]: 713).

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All literary genres have the potential to inform opinion on issues ofpublic concern. It is obvious that even in a premodern world, wherepublic and private power intermingled and the institutions and tech-nology for the creation of public opinion were lacking, those mak-ing decisions for the whole community could be influenced by what-ever they read or heard.19 My justification for referring to oration asthe genre of public rhetoric resides primarily in the nature of theforums in which the author intended or imagined his work would bereceived and only secondarily in the purpose informing its writing.Always composed with its presentation before some kind of publicassembly in mind, the oration was usually but not necessarily concerned with some matter regarding civic culture or political af-fairs.20

Besides conceiving of rhetoric as oratorical or literary, I would addthat it can also be more broadly considered as a way of thought thatinforms both oratorical and literary rhetoric. It is a form of reasoningthat seeks conclusions by inference rather than by demonstration andwhose weapon is more often the enthymeme than the syllogism.21 As

19 Since the publication of Jrgen Habermass Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit: Unter-suchungen zu einer Kategorie der brgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1962), thediscussion of the creation of an authentic public sphere in eighteenth-centuryEurope has led to numerous analyses of the public and private spheres of life in themedieval and early modern periods. Among the most important are Public and Privatein Social Life, ed. S. I. Benn and G. F. Graus (London, 1983); G. Duby, Ouverture:Pouvoir priv, pouvoir public, Historie de la vie prive, ed. Georges Duby and PhilippeAris, 5 vols. (Paris, 198587), 2:1944; Dena Goodman, Public Sphere and PrivateLife: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Re-gime, History and Theory, 31 (1992): 120; Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. CraigCalhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Anthony J. La Vopa, Conceiving a Public:Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Journal of Modern History 64 (1992):79116; and Giorgio Chittolini, Il privato, il pubblico, lo Stato, in Origini dellostato. Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed et moderna, ed. GiorgioChittolini, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera (Bologna, 1994), 55390.

20 For the ancients, all oration, even the funeral oration, was essentially connectedwith political and civic life. The revival of ancient oratorical forms by the humanistsin the Renaissance was accompanied by the same tendency. Prolusions to universitycourses perhaps constituted exceptions to the rule. Also, if sermons are considered tobe orations, they constitute a problem for that part of my definition concerning thefocus on public matters. Given the close connection between secular and ecclesiasti-cal affairs, the sermon criticizing not only secular but also ecclesiastical governmentcould be considered as speaking to public issues, but most sermons pertained to therelationship of the believers and their god.

21 The contrast here is between a means of proof in which probable premises areused in order to establish a probable conclusion and a means of proof in which twopremises are used to deduce a logical conclusion.

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such, rhetoric not only contrasts with Aristotelian dialectic but alsowith the grammarians favored pursuit of knowledge through etymo-logical distinctions, glosses of texts, analogy, and allegory.

While in reality interdependence must be acknowledged, it ismeaningful to see the grammarianpoet and the rhetoricianoratoras representing two poles of attraction, one or the other of whichcharacterizes the dominant tendencies operative in many individualwriters and movements. The contrast between the grammarian andthe rhetorician highlights two different approaches to knowledge and,potentially, two contrasting ways of life.

Outside the classroom, the grammarian in his own work remains astudent of texts, a philologist, a specialist in mythology. He findspleasure in treating the smallest details of a poem, eager to find therea word or phrase that can unveil a general truth of natural, moral, ortheological import. He delights in allegory. The poet is himself agrammarian who feels the need to express the movements of hisemotions and thoughts through verbal images. Whether as creativeartist or as philologist, the grammarian requires the quiet of the studyor of solitary places. He leads a private life, a vita contemplativa, and theaudience for his work ranges from a group of specialists to a relativelysmall elite with literary tastes.

By contrast, the life of the rhetorician is the vita activa, aimed ide-ally at the achievement of practical goals. Essentially an orator, hebest realizes his objectives in public assemblies or the marketplace.Admittedly, to exercise his profession he needs the technical prepara-tion that the grammarian provides, but grammatical learning, prima-rily knowledge of the poets, provides only raw material for hisspeeches. He remains uninterested in obscure meanings or hiddenmessages: his concern is clarity and his goal is action.

Both within the system of education and in terms of the rewardsgiven by society at large, the rhetorician or orator of the first centu-ries before and after Christ was superior in standing to the grammar-ian, and that hierarchy endured in ancient culture long after thepolitical institutions that justified it had vanished. With the collapseof the empire and the disappearance of an extensive public capableof understanding an oration delivered in ancient Latin, the rhetori-cian lost his preeminence and the grammarian stepped out of hisshadow. The concern for rhetoric by no means disappeared. Theancient speech manuals especially the work of Ciceros youth, theDe inventione came to provide training in composition applicable to

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all forms of literary expression. But more than this, the Middle Agesinherited, particularly from the late empire, an interest in rhetoric asa way of reasoning, and after 1000, rhetoric became a part of thestudy of logic.

The Carolingian Renaissance of the late eighth and early ninthcenturies, directed by a ruler bent on raising the educational level ofhis people, represented a triumph for the grammarian. For Alcuin,the so-called schoolmaster of the empire, grammar was without adoubt the queen of the trivium: Grammar is the science of lettersand the guardian of right speech and writing.22 For him the artembraced not merely letters, syllables, words, and parts of speech,but also figures of speech, the art of prosody, poetry, stories, andhistory. Although Alcuin and his contemporaries acknowledged thattheology was the supreme field of study, the theologians, whosemethodology required the filiation of etymologies of terms and analy-ses of allegories, were of necessity practitioners of grammar.

The limited number of those who knew Latin necessarily restrictedthe role of oratorical or public rhetoric in Carolingian society. Ac-counts of school curricula indicate no serious training in eitherspeech writing or delivery. Sermons appear to have been largelyrepetitions of patristic homilies.23 Admittedly, Alcuin did compose adialogue on the art of rhetoric, Dialogus de rhetorica et virtutibus, eightyper cent of which derived from Ciceros De inventione. With Charle-magne as narrator, Alcuin presented a curious account of rhetoric,almost entirely focused on judicial oratory.24 The extent to whichLatin pleading was useful in a legal system based on custom is ques-tionable, as is the level of priority Latin would have had even forclerics. Perhaps, although conditions fostering Latin oratory in thesociety were absent, Alcuin wished to cover this art of the triviumwith a manual, as he had covered the other two. Lacking an orienta-tion dictated by contemporary needs, in making his exposition hemerely took over Ciceros focus on judicial oratory.25

22 Alcuin of York, Opusculum primum: Grammatica, in PL, ed. J.P. Migne, vol. 101(Paris, 1863), cols. 857d58a.

23 J. Longre, La prdication mdivale (Paris, 1983), 3454, discusses Carolingianreliance on homilies constructed by piecing together texts from the Fathers. There is,however, evidence of occasional originality (H. Barr, Les homliaires carolingiens delcole dAuxerre: Authenticit, inventaire, tableaux comparatifs, initia [Vatican City, 1962]).

24 Rhetores latini minores, ed. K. Halm (Leipzig, 1863), 52550.25 Luitpold Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne: Studies in Carolingian History and Literature

(Ithaca, 1959), 71, interprets the motive for the work otherwise: The Rhetoric is made

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Although the Carolingian Renaissance lost its impetus by the mid-dle years of the ninth century with the break-up of the CarolingianEmpire, a structure of education oriented around grammar contin-ued to dominate the schools of Europe for at least two more centu-ries.26 By the late twelfth century, however, the ascendancy of gram-mar in northern Europe was threatened by a new passion for thestudy of logic. Taught for the first time in a systematic fashion byGerbert at Rheims in the last quarter of the tenth century, the initialtextbooks of logic formed what came to be known as the logica vetus(the old logic). It was composed of the elementary works of AristotlesOrganon and a small collection of commentaries and introductorymanuals on logic by other ancient authors.27 Rhetorics independentstatus had already been threatened in the late ancient world, nowrhetoric came to be viewed as subordinate to logic as a species to agenus.28

By the middle of the twelfth century, the advanced works of Aris-totles Organon, the logica nova (new logic), began to circulate, and thecurriculum for teaching logic with rhetoric as an important compo-

up of rhetorical doctrine, not because Alcuin wanted to write a rhetorical textbook,but because Alcuin wished to describe the mores of Charlemagne as those that oughtto serve as examples to his subjects ....

26 On the role of the cathedral and monastic schools in France from the ninth tothe twelfth centuries, see J. Chtillon, Les coles de Chartres et de Saint-Victor, inLa scuola nellOccidente latino dell alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano distudi sullalto medioevo 19 (Spoleto, 1972), 795839; G. Par, A. Brunet, and P.Tremblay, La renaissance au XIIe sicle: Les coles et lenseignement (Paris and Ottawa,1933); L. Matre, Les coles piscopales et monastiques en Occident avant les universits (7681180), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1924); F. Lesne, Les livres, scriptoria et bibliothques du commence-ment du VIIIe la fin du XIe sicles (Lille, 1938), vol. 4 of Histoire de la proprit ecclsiastique;R.R. Bezzola, La socit fodale et la transformation de la littrature de cour: Les origines et laformation de la littrature courtoise en Occident (5501200), pt. 2, t. 1, Bibliothque de lcoledes Hautes tudes: Sciences historiques et philologiques, no. 330 (Paris, 1960), 1945; and P.Rich, Les coles et lenseignement dans lOccident chrtien de la fin du Ve sicle au milieu du XIesicle (Paris, 1979), 14147 and 17984.

27 R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1953), 175. As late asAnselm, however, argumentation was so closely dependent on grammar that M.Colish, Eleventh-Century Grammar in the Thought of St. Anselm, in Arts librauxet philosophie au Moyen ge (Montreal and Paris, 1969), 789, describes logic in thiscentury as Aristotelianized grammar. Cf. Charles M. Radding, A World Made byMen: Cognition and Society, 4001200 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 16686.

28 R. McKeon, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, Speculum 17 (1942): 1516.Carolingian writers had occasionally treated rhetoric as a part of logic, but the newconcern with logic from the late tenth century brought the nature of the relationshipto the fore. McKeon, 12 and 1415, also notes the tendency of rhetoric to be tied totheology as the art of stating truths certified by theology (15).

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nent assumed the general form it was to take down to the nineteenthcentury. The newly discovered texts further intensified the passion ofscholars for logic because of the promise they held for advances inscientific and theological investigation. By 1200, already on the de-fensive, spokesmen for the grammatical tradition were overcome bythe proponents of the new philosophical and theological disciplines,who could point to exciting discoveries produced by new methodolo-gies. Although we must avoid exaggerating the extent to which gram-matical interests declined after 1200, at least we can say that the richproduction of Latin letters and poetry emanating from the cathedralschools of twelfth-century France, Germany, and England came toan end. The most exciting intellectual achievements of northern Eu-ropeans in the thirteenth century were in logic, natural science, andtheology.

While in France rhetoric as a form of reasoning was studied as anauxiliary to logic, in northern and central Italy the reverse was true.Throughout the five centuries following the fall of Rome, northernand central Italy continued to depend on written documents asrecords of important forms of human interaction and, consequently,on lay and clerical notaries, who knew how to capture legal reality informulas. Broad strata of the general population had frequent contactwith documents, and elementary Latin literacy seems to have beenrelatively widespread.29 The evolution of the trivium in northern andcentral Italy cannot, in fact, be understood unless the culture ofbooks is studied alongside the culture of documents.

Beginning around 1000, a conjunction of demographic, political,and economic revivals compelled notaries to turn to Roman law(codified in the Justinian corpus) in order to resolve legal issues ofgreater complexity and to devise new formulas to meet the needs of

29 For some statistics on lay and clerical literacy in the eighth century in Italy, seeA. Petrucci, Libro, scritture e scuole, in La scuola nellOccidente latino dellalto medioevo,Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull alto medioevo, 19 (1972): 32325. See also G.C. Fissore, Cultura grafica e scuola in Asti nei secoli IX e X,Bullettino dellIstituto italiano per il medioevo e Archivo muratoriano, 85 (197475): 1751.Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in theEleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), 41, stresses the importance of theItalian notariate in the early medieval centuries, but within his general discussion,Italian precedence in literacy plays no particular role. See the brief observations onliteracy and semiliteracy in J. LeGoff, Alle origini del lavoro intellectuale in Italia: Iproblemi del rapporto fra la letteratura, luniversit e le professioni, LI 1:65152.

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a progressively more specialized urban society.30 The Roman lawyerappeared, and with him a new book culture, but a practically ori-ented one. Almost always a layman, he was both a practitioner and ateacher. In the latter capacity, he studied the Justinian legal corpus,interpreted legal passages for his students, and prepared them forcareers as litigators in the courts.31

Given the lawyers interests, Cicero proved a more useful guidethan Aristotle or Boethius. While Ciceros judicial eloquence wasbeyond their powers, his teaching in reasoning and oratorical tacticsfurnished invaluable help for constructing arguments. Cicero hadhad his own dialectic, but in it syllogism played a minor role, theemphasis being on inference, on a consideration of consequences,and on a fortiori arguments.32 Nevertheless, Cicero thought that asyllogism could at times be a useful tool for an orator, even whenarguing a practical point. At least into the thirteenth century, logicwas largely taught in connection with legal studies and probably inthe law classroom itself.33

As in their eleventh-century French counterparts, Italian cathedralschools north of Rome preserved Carolingian book culture, stressinginstruction in the ancient writers, especially the poets. Nor in thiscentury before the great flourishing of Latin letters in France did theItalians appear in any way inferior in their own poetic compositionsto the French. In contrast with the French cathedral schools, how-ever, the Italian ones had no monopoly on advanced education:whereas they controlled the teaching of ancient letters, Roman legalstudies fell largely to the lay lawyer teaching in his own school.34 In

30 Charles Radding, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence: Pavia and Bologna 8501150(New Haven, 1988), 37112, details the beginning of formal legal studies at Pavia inthe early eleventh century.

31 See Witt, Medieval Italian Culture, 3940.32 On Ciceros dialectic, see A. Cantin, Les sciences sculires et la foi: Les deux voix de

la science au jugement de S. Pierre Damien (10071072) (Spoleto, 1975), 38384.33 In an extensive reading of Italian chancery and notarial documents from the

eleventh and twelfth centuries, I have found only one reference to a dialectician,presumably a teacher. In 1140, Petrus dialecticus witnessed an episcopal document inMantua (LArchivio capitolare della cattedrale di Mantova fino alla caduta dei Bonacolsi, ed.Pietro Torelli [Verona, 1924], 26, doc. 18). It is revealing that the compilation ofarticles in Linsegnamento della logica a Bologna nel XIV secolo, ed. D. Buzzetti, M Ferriani,and A. Tabarroni, Studi e memorie per la storia dellUniversit di Bologna, n.s., 8 (Bologna,1992), makes no reference to the history of logic at Bologna before the second half ofthe thirteenth century.

34 Witt, Medieval Italian Culture, 4244.

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the next century, moreover, when, with the composition of GratiansDecretum around 1140, canon law became a subject for academicstudy, canon lawyers not uncommonly taught their courses inde-pendently of the cathedral.

By the end of the eleventh century, the development of a highlysimplified form of letter writing known as ars dictaminis further en-hanced the role of rhetoric in Italian education and created morecompetition for cathedral education. Composed in manual form, of-ten combined with a collection of letters illustrating the principlestaught in the text, ars dictaminis, with its simple rules, made letterwriting available to large numbers of people with but a few years oftraining in elementary Latin. Since the teacher or dictator needed onlya manual, ars dictaminis could be easily taught by independent mas-ters.

Read aloud, letters tended to be regarded as speeches, and writersof manuals naturally looked to the rhetorical manuals attributed toCicero for help. While authors of the medieval manuals made occa-sional references to the De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian AdHerennium, however, the ancient textbooks had very little stylistic ef-fect on ars dictaminis. Their main use in the classroom seems to havebeen to provide the student with training in the art of constructinglogical arguments.

A major casualty in Gregory VIIs program of ecclesiastical re-forms was the cathedral school, that institution in which the gram-matical curriculum of northern and central Italy had thrived. Withinthe last twenty-five years of the eleventh century, Italian cathedralchapters appear to have been riven by disputes over aspects of reformsuch as clerical marriage and lay investiture. Shattered by factionalstrife, schools disappear from the documentation of chapter life, insome cases for many decades. Although a few cathedral schools, likethat at Lucca, survived in the twelfth century as centers of liberal-artstraining, most others seem to have been committed to the modesttask of preparing the diocesan clergy for the performance of theirreligious functions.35 The withering of cathedral-school educationentailed the deterioration of the traditional program of grammaticaleducation going back to the Carolingian period.

The intellectual life of northern and central Italy in the twelfthcentury was largely driven by legalrhetorical concerns and directed

35 Ibid., 41.

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by dictatores and Roman and canon lawyers. Only a small number ofLatin poems, most of them patriotic epics, survive from this cen-tury.36 The extent of grammar training was generally determined bythe humble demands of ars dictaminis. In the case of the elite whowent beyond dictamen to legal studies, training in reading and writinglegal Latin formed part of many years instruction under a lawyersdirection.

The fortunes of grammar revived after 1180, when a massive inva-sion of French scholarly and literary influences transformed the intel-lectual life of Italy north of Rome. At the height of their glory nota hundred years later, when in decline, as is commonly thought French grammarians and poets made their major contribution to thebrilliant future of letters and scholarship in Italy.37 After almost acentury of playing an auxiliary role to rhetoric, grammatical studiesrequired decades to revive; but the burst of Latin poetic compositionin northern Italy by the middle of the thirteenth century shows theirvigorous development by that time.38

Because the earliest surviving humanist writings are the Latin po-ems written by Lovato dei Lovati in 1267/68, humanism appears tohave been a part of the advanced stage of the grammatical revival.Indeed, a careful reading of the poetic and prose production ofnorthern and central Italians in the decades after the appearance ofLovatos poems indicates that humanistic classicizing remained re-stricted to poetry until 1315, when Mussato wrote his first historicalwork in prose. Given the almost fifty-year lag between poetry andprose, the origins of Italian humanism are to be sought in develop-ments in grammar and not rhetoric. For decades while prose re-mained captive to medieval forms, humanists found an outlet in po-etry for their desire to emulate the ancient Romans.

Those were the principal conclusions that I had reached by 1988,and until 1993 I thought of expanding my article into a comprehen-

36 Francesco Novati, Le origini, continuate e compiute da Angelo Monteverdi (Milan, 1926),64749, vividly describes the povert and esilit artistica of twelfth-century Italy.Much of the poetry that survives for the twelfth century is published by U. Ronca,Cultura medioevale e poesia latina dItalia nei secoli XI e XII, 2 vols. (Rome, 1892). See aswell the comments of Kristeller, Humanism and Scholasticism, 27980, n. 47.

37 See n. 8, above.38 Witt, Medieval Italian Culture, 4450, describes the nature of this French

influence and its effect on various aspects of Italian intellectual life, including gram-matical studies.

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sive history of Latin culture in medieval Italy, leading into a study ofthe early development of Italian humanism. The project involvedtwo volumes, the first filling out the narrative that I have sketchedabove from the Carolingian conquest to about 1250 and the seconddealing with the evolution of humanism from 1250 to about 1420. By1993, however, realizing that my study of humanism had an integrityof its own, and eager to publish my views, I set the larger projectaside and concentrated on producing what would have been thesecond volume as a separate monograph.

Current scholarship on Renaissance humanism generally beginsthe study of the movement with Petrarch, tending to dismiss theprevious seventy years of humanistic endeavors as prehumanistic.Surprisingly, the massive reconstruction of the scholarly and literaryachievements of the prehumanists since World War II by RobertoWeiss, Giuseppe and Guido Billanovich, and other scholars whosework appears in the key philological journal, Italia medioevale etumanistica, has done little to change that approach. Although thosescholars have clearly shown that men like the Paduans, Lovato deiLovati (1240/411309) and Albertino Mussato (12611329), sharedscholarly and literary pursuits with Petrarch and had already mademajor advances in editing texts, in recovering lost ancient writings,and in developing a classicizing style, nonetheless, with the exceptionof Weiss, they have continued to label these ancestors of Petrarchprehumanists.39 Weiss alone claimed them as humanists, but, while

39 Evidence of this tendency is found in the few references to pre-Petrarchanhumanists found in Renaissance Humanism, an extensive survey of recent scholarshipon the European Renaissance largely by American specialists. Examples of the ten-dency are found in Benjamin Kohl, Humanism and Education, 3:7; DaniloAguzzi-Barbagli, Humanism and Poetics, 3:86; and John Monfasani, Humanismand Rhetoric, 3:176. Monfasani sets the phrase prehumanistic stage in parenthe-ses when speaking of pre-Petrarchan humanism as if referring to a commonly under-stood term, not necessarily reflecting his own terminological preferences. Generaltreatments of humanism vary. On the one hand, Donald R. Kelleys otherwiseexcellent Renaissance Humanism (Boston, 1991) begins the history of humanism withPetrarch, while, on the other, Charles Nauerts Humanism and the Culture of RenaissanceEurope (Cambridge, 1995) treats both Lovato and Mussato as prehumanists.

Italian scholars are prone to use the same terminology for humanism prior toPetrarch. Perhaps the best illustration of the practice is found in SCV 2, in whichearly humanism in the cities of the Veneto is consistently labelled prehumanistic.Guido Billanovich, who has done more than any other researcher to enhanceLovatos scholarly reputation, himself uses the term prehumanistic in characteriz-ing early Paduan humanism in his important Il preumanesimo padovano, SCV2:19110. He does not, however, define the term.

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drawing on the results of his research, most contemporary scholar-ship tends to ignore his conclusion.40 Moreover, Weiss did not seethat his position required a reassessment of Petrarchs role in themovement. One of the questions I hope to answer is this: What roledoes Petrarch play in the history of humanism as a third-generationhumanist?

Oddly, the term prehumanist has almost never been defined bythose who employ it, and when it has, the justification for using itseems strained. Perhaps the most extensive definition I have found isthat given by Natalino Sapegno in 1960. In introducing a short sec-tion devoted to the Paduans, Lovato and Mussato, in his Il Trecento,he writes:

It will not be out of place here to remember the prehumanists, the firstfathers of that great cultural movement of which Boccaccio andPetrarch become its masters .... The prehumanists move in a still uncer-tain atmosphere; they advance as if unaware of their new attitude, evenif some of them find themselves engaged in the first polemics against thedefenders of antiquity.41

Although these prehumanists are the first to engage in the defenseof reading the ancient poets, nonetheless, they are unconscious ofdoing anything new.

In them much more than in Petrarch and Boccaccio, one still sees thetie that attaches them to medieval civilization. They do not oppose it asmuch as advance a tendency, an impulse which, earlier left in shadowand now brought into the light and rendered substantial, will only

40 He did this specifically in The Dawn of Humanism in Italy (London, 1947); rpt.1970). He provocatively entitled his essays devoted to various pre-Petrarcan human-ists Il primo secolo dellumanesimo: Studi e testi, Storia e letteratura, 27 (Rome, 1949).Although Kristeller deals only cursorily in his writings with the earlier humanists, hebasically endorses the position that I would characterize as that of the philologists:Petrarcas Stellung in der Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit, 102: Ich ziehe es mitRoberto Weiss und anderen vor, sie als Humanisten gelten zu lassen, und Petrarcanicht als den ersten Humanisten anzusehen, sondern als den ersten grossenHumanisten .... In his important survey of Renaissance and Reformation Europeanintellectual life, Donald Wilcox, In Search of God and Self: Renaissance and ReformationThought (Boston, 1975), 59, recognizes the role of scholars of Mussatos generation ininitiating the humanist movement, but he does not mention Lovato.

41 Il Trecento (Milan, 1960), 15152. The Italian text reads: ... non parr stranoricordar qui i preumanisti, i primi padri di quel grande movimento di cultura, chenel Boccaccio stesso e nel Petrarca riconoscer pi tardi i suoi maestri. ... i preuma-nisti procedono in unatmosfera ancora incerta, avanzano quasi inconsapevoli dellanovit del loro atteggiamento, per quanto si ritrovino, alcuni di essi, a doversostenere le prime polemiche contro i difensori dellantico.

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slowly reveal its renovating power, its function as the yeast for moderncivilization. In them in a more apparent and open way, the scholar seesthe slow progress by which from grammatical studies, which had beenthe continuous patrimony of notaries, judges, and lawyers in precedingcenturies, the appreciation of a greater and wiser culture slowly arose.That appreciation had to be revived in human souls through the pains-taking conquest of its language and its art.42

The prehumanists are more medieval than Petrarch or Boccac-cio because, although they all build on the same medieval grammati-cal studies, they are chronologically prior and correspondingly lessappreciative of a greater and wiser culture.

At this point Sapegno expands the ranks of prehumanists to in-clude all those with grammatical interests over the previous two hun-dred years: Grammarians, teachers, notaries, jurists are indeed allrepresentatives of prehumanism.43 The term as a category loses anyserious meaning. But, now, as if to reclaim the term specifically forPaduans, Sapegno concludes:

And there is still, so to speak, something professional in their love ofancient poetry which is not found in Petrarch or Boccaccio. Neverthe-less, this love is already alive and conscious in them. They have alreadyrecognized the profound separation between present civilization andthe monumental one of Rome. It is this new animus which is reallyimportant in their work, beyond the external appearance, and even ifthe writings in which they tried to reproduce the spirits and forms of thegreat classical age remain for the most part quite distant from the greatideal of poetry to which they aspire, or rather, to speak more accurately,from any manner of poetry at all.44

42 The passage continues: In essi, assai pi che nel Petrarca e nel Boccaccio, visibile ancora il legame che li tiene attaccati alla civilt medievale; alla quale nontanto si contrappongono, quanto piuttosto ne continuano una tendenza, un impulsoaltra volta rimasto in ombra, e che ora recato in piena luce e divenuto essenziale soloa poco a poco riveler la sua virt rinnovatrice, la sua funzione di lievito nellamoderna civilt. In essi meglio appariscente e si rivela pi schietto allo studioso illento processo per cui dagli studi grammaticali, che pur nei secoli precedenti eranstati patrimonio continuato dei maestri, dei notai, dei giudici, dei legisti, sorge a pocoa poco la coscienza di una civilt pi grande e pi saggia, che si deve far risorgerenegli animi attraverso la conquista faticosa della sua lingua e della sua arte.

43 Grammatici e maestri, notai o giuristi sono appunto tutti i rappresentanti delpreumanesimo.

44 E qualcosa, a dir cos, di professionale ancora nel loro amore della poesiaantica, mentre non gi pi in quello del Boccaccio e del Petrarca. Pur tuttaviaquesto amore gi in essi assai vivo e cosciente, e raggiunta ormai la consapevolezzadel distacco profondo tra la civilt presente e quella grandissima di Roma. E questoanimus nuovo quello che veramente importa nella loro opera, al di l dellapparenza esteriore, e anche se gli scritti nei quali essi si sforzarono di riprodurre gli

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Apart from the unexplained qualification of their poetry containingsomething professional, Sapegno now seems bent on ascribing tothe Paduans self-conscious humanist attitudes.

If all that those who employ the term prehumanist mean is thatthese men were predecessors of Petrarch, then I have no quarrel withthem. The chronological priority of the Paduans is indisputable. Ig-noring their status as humanists by beginning the movement withPetrarch, however, distorts both their role and that of Petrarch him-self. Only when the latter is seen as a third-generation humanist canhis enormous contribution to humanism indeed, his single-handedrerouting of the movement be appreciated. Against the backdrop ofthis new interpretation of Trecento humanism, Quattrocento civichumanism will assume a new aspect as well.

I have endeavored in the early chapters of this book to combinethe results of contemporary research on early Latin humanism withthat of literary scholars on vernacular literature. Although Italianresearchers commonly work in both fields, the traditions of the twohave tended to militate against the formation of a composite pictureof the Latin and vernacular cultures of late Duecento and earlyTrecento Italy. It was not a coincidence that Brunetto Latini under-took his first Tuscan translation of Ciceros works and that Lovatowrote his first Latin poetry in the 1260s. Their work reflected differ-ent responses to a similar, deeply felt need on the part of Italianintellectuals for closer ties with their ancient Roman inheritance. Abrief analysis of the interplay between Tuscan vernacular and hu-manist writings in the century from 1250 to 1350 will serve to illumi-nate both linguistic traditions.45

I should say parenthetically that my analysis is limited to the por-tion of Italy north of Rome. Largely independent of the Carolingianempire, the south developed in the Middle Ages in a different wayfrom the northern half of the peninsula, and generalizations madeabout northern and central Italian intellectual and cultural life usu-ally do not fit conditions in the south.

In what follows, I have chosen to place more emphasis than is

spiriti e le forme della grande et classica rimangono per lo pi assai lontani daquellideale di poesia, cui essi aspirano, lontani anzi, a dir meglio, da una manieraqualsiasi di poesia.

45 I suggest that the parallel relationship in the development of Latin and vernacu-lar literature after Petrarch and down to the second half of the fifteenth century isreflected in their common focus on prose writing to the neglect of poetry.

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usual in accounts of humanism on changes in Latin prose style asprime gauges of the evolution of the movement from Lovatos toBrunis generation. In choosing to do so, I am taking up whereTrecento and Quattrocento humanists themselves left off. When au-thors from Salutati to Sabellico wrote the history of the movement,they largely focused on the progressive mastery of ancient Latin stylefrom one generation to another. In my own account, however, I haveno intention of ignoring the multidimensional character of humanis-tic activity, especially the increasing sophistication of humanists his-torical and philological research, together with their ethical and reli-gious concerns those aspects of humanism that occupy most of theattention of current scholarship.

My decision to center my discussion of humanism on stylisticchange derives not from an antiquarian loyalty to the earliest ap-proaches, but rather from my conviction that a litmus for identifyinga humanist was his intention to imitate ancient Latin style. At theleast, a dedication to stylistic imitation initiated the destabilization ofan authors own linguistic universe through his contact with that ofantiquity. As a consequence, I do not regard as humanists thosecontemporaries who were engaged in historical and philological re-search on ancient culture but who showed no sign of seeking toemulate ancient style, but rather I consider them antiquarians.

When a humanist set out to imitate ancient style, he confrontedancient models that evoked in him certain sympathies and antipa-thies. The experience of confrontation served, on the one hand, tolocate the pagan texts at a remote distance in the past, and, on theother, to render the mentality of the ancients to some degree accessi-ble to the imitators. The push and pull between the experience of thetext as simultaneously both remote and familiar resulted in a progres-sive reconstruction of antiquity as a cultural alternative, bringinginto relief the character of the humanists own world and revealingthe historically contingent nature of both societies.46 Imposed uponthe past, the resultant historicizing of experience, while enhancingthe imitability of the pagan writers by making them more human,also problematized their authority for the same reason. Projected

46 The phrase cultural alternative is borrowed from Thomas M. Greene, TheLight in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London,1982), 90.

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47 Gouwens, Perceiving the Past, 7677, speaks of the relation of the humanistswith the past as dialogic and stresses the importance of this relationship for thehumanists personal growth. In doing so, he draws on the insights of JeromeBrunner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1996), 62: ... thereis something special about talking to authors, now dead but still alive in theirancient texts so long as the objective of the encounter is not worship but discourseand interpretation, going meta on thoughts about the past.

48 Gouwens, Perceiving the Past, 64 and 67. Gouwens is also anxious to recog-nize a more comprehensive re-creation of ancient culture on the part of the hu-manists in that they incorporated ancient culture into their daily lives. For thispurpose he specifically discusses the role of ancient culture in the recreational activityof Roman humanists around 1500. For a general bibliography on cognitive psychol-ogy, see Gouwens, 5556.

49 The influence of Michael Baxandalls Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers ofPainting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford, 1971) on my thesis thatstyle exercised a formative influence on humanist thinking will be obvious through-out this book. His view that the imitation of ancient Latin style effected a reorgani-zation of consciousness in the humanists (6) strikes me, however, as leaning toomuch toward linguistic determinism. The theory that grammatical models fully de-termine the formulation and expression of human thought is better known as theWhorfSapir hypothesis. See the classic article, Language, Thought, and Reality,in Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B.Carroll (Cambridge, 1973), 24670.

forward, historical perspective pointed to a future replete with possi-bilities and encouraged human efforts at reform.47

The early humanists desire to imitate the ancients also effectedintellectual and attitudinal changes in the humanists themselves.Concerned with the transformative influence of the direct encounterwith the ancients, Kenneth Gouwens has highlighted the importanceof the dialogue with antiquity in the construction of a new sense ofhistorical perspective as well as a new kind of self-awareness. He hasalso noted in a general way the effects that imitation of ancientconcepts, styles, categories, and vocabularies had on the human-ists cognitive processes.48 In this work, I intend to develop the latterobservation by showing in detail how the humanists tireless study ofancient vocabulary and syntax and their struggle to capture the elo-quent diction of the classical authors not only unlocked the mentalityof those authors, but also nourished new linguistic patterns condition-ing the humanists ways of feeling and thinking.49 No humanist dem-onstrated an awareness of the pervasive influence of imitation on histhought processes better than Francesco Petrarch, who, after years ofstudying the pagan writers intensely, described his relationship tothem in this way:

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They have become absorbed into my being and implanted not only inmy memory but in the marrow of my bones and have become one withmy mind so that even if I never read them [Virgil, Horace, Boethius,and Cicero] again in my life, they would inhere in me with their rootssunk in the depths of my soul.50

Stylistic demands never exerted a pre-emptive influence on thoughtprocesses.51 A notable difference existed in this regard, however, be-fore and after 1400. In the earlier years, when humanists consciouslyavoided imitating any one ancient author, they borrowed idiosyn-cratically from a wide variety of pagan and Christian authors downat least to Augustine, with the result that the cognitive impact wasmodified by the fragmentary character of the imitative process. After1400, however, the focus on Ciceros style significantly limited awriters options. Although humanists in the early fifteenth centurydid not depend slavishly on the Ciceronian model, nonetheless, theirenshrining of Cicero as the basic model for eloquent prose meantthat writers were forced into constant one-to-one negotiation with hislinguistic constructions and lexicon. Years of training oneself to filterideas through a Ciceronian linguistic grid would ultimately effecthow the humanists thought and felt.

In their negotiations with the ancients, the first five generations ofhumanists reveal what may be called an anxiety of influence.52

While humanists all sought originality in their literary work and,beginning with Petrarch, held that style was a key reflection of per-sonality, they also nonetheless felt driven to bolster their own author-ity as writers by using a classicizing style and citing ancient authorsfrequently.

In practice, the process of conscious selection that the humanistsdeveloped as they bargained with antiquity had real limits. Thoselimits were set by a variety of factors, including the allurement thatancient Latin diction exerted and the impossibility of identifying allthe ingredients in the model that were to be brought over in the act

50 Petrarch, Rerum familiarium XXII.2, in Familiari 4:106: Hec se michi tamfamiliariter ingessere et non modo memorie sed medulis affixa sunt unumque cumingenio facta sunt meo. ut etsi per omnem vitam amplius non legantur, ipsa quidemhereant, actis in intima animi parte radicibus. Translation mine.

51 Conceptual and linguistic systems are not monolithic; alternatives are possiblewithin the systems. See, George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Catego-ries Reveal about the Mind (Chicago and London, 1990), 335, for bibliography.

52 The phrase is Harold Blooms: see his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry,2nd ed. (New York, 1997).

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of imitation. With classical modes of expression sunk, to para-phrase Petrarch, in the depths of their soul, ways of formulatingthought became ways of thinking. To attribute such a creative, con-structive role to style is to recognize its potential for illuminatingevery other aspect of humanist activity.53

Stylistic imitation in poetry and prose took a variety of forms. 54

(1) Imitation of genre. The advent of humanism can be traced to thelate 1260s, when the first Latin lyrical poetry was written in Italysince antiquity. Early in the Trecento, pastoral poetry reappeared,and the ancient conception of the private letter revived. For centu-ries, the manuals of ars dictaminis had not distinguished the privateletter from the official letter in form or tone. By the end of thefourteenth century, humanists began to reconceive oration alonglines set out in the Ad Herennium and De inventione.

(2) Imitation of technique. Medieval grammarians and rhetoriciansread the same ancient manuals of rhetoric and exploited the sameancient arsenal of colores rhetorici as the humanists did. Medieval writ-ers, however, often employed rhetorical colors to an extreme degree,whereas the early humanists, controlling their use of colores, morenearly approached ancient practice. They revived the simile, whichhad been neglected by medieval poets, and, by the 1360s, followingthe Ad Herennium, they introduced ekphrasis (description) in their ora-tions. Trecento prose writers differed in their approach to the medi-

53 Strikingly, all the current interest in rhetoric as a way of thought and method ofargumentation has done little to alter scorn for stylistic matters. Many scholars seemunable to overcome the prejudice that elocutio is merely ornamental.

54 On the concept of mimesis as an artistic imitation of reality. see RichardMcKeon, Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity, ModernPhilology 34 (1936): 135, and rpt. in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R.S.Crane (Chicago, 1952), 11745; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality inWestern Literature (Princeton, 1953); Hermann Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike: Nach-ahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck (Berne, 1954); Mimesis: From Mirror to Method: Augustine toDescartes, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols (Hanover, N.H., 1982); andAnn Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993). Formimesis as a technique of literary creativity, see the summary article by WilhelmKroll, Rhetorik, Paulys Real-Encyclopdie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, suppl. 7(Stuttgart, 1940), cols. 111317; and his Studien zum Verstndnis der rmischen Literatur(Stuttgart, 1924), 1478. General discussions of creative imitation in the Renaissanceare found in Hermann Gmelin, Das Prinzip der Imitatio in den romanischen Litera-turen der Renaissance, Romanische Forschungen 46 (1932): 83360; and Greene, TheLight in Troy. For difficulties in detecting imitation, see Johannes Schneider, Die VitaHeinrici IV und Sallust: Studien zu Stil und Imitatio in der mittellateinischen Prosa, DeutscheAkademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Schriften der Sektion fr Altertums-wissenschaft, 49 (Berlin, 1965), 614.

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eval cursus, that is the rules for using accentual meter to lend rhythmto the lines. While most humanist prose writers in the Trecentoceased to use it in other genres of composition, humanists throughoutthe century generally continued to observe the cursus in letter writing.Even Bruni in the early Quattrocento could not break entirely withthe medieval tradition of writing in cursus.

(3) Imitation of style.55

a. Sacramental imitation. This form of imitation, involving the literalcitation of the ancient text in the humanists composition, constituteda minimal gesture in the direction of the model. In this case, theancient original was merely appropriated as a sacred utterance, for-mally perfect and free of historical contingency because un-translatable in any other words. To the extent that an author treatedthe subtext liturgically, he short-circuited the potential reciprocityinherent in stylistic imitation, by ignoring the contingent character ofthe subtext in favor of affirming its status as an eternal exemplar.

b. Exploitative (reproductive) imitation. Common to all humanist po-etry, this approach to imitation involved employing a variety of an-cient sources in the form of echoes, images, or phrases in the poemsfabric. Against the complex pagan matrix, the new poem defined itsown identity while admitting or rather proclaiming its loyalty to itsantecedents. Having grasped the contingent and malleable characterof his subtexts, the humanist poet demonstrated his mastery by evok-ing associations with the ancient works while establishing his ownvoice.

c. Heuristic imitation. In this form of imitation, the author estab-lished a reciprocal relationship between his composition and a singleparallel text or a succession of texts. Because the resulting dialogue

55 Greene, Light in Troy, 3845, provides a brilliant analysis of Petrarchs Latin andvernacular poetry based on a hierarchy of categories arranged so as to emphasizeprogressively the intimate presence of the ancient subtext in the humanists compo-sition and the degrees of reciprocity between the two texts. He suggests four levels ofimitation sacramental, exploitative (reproductive), heuristic, and dialectical thelast of which I have not found in the early humanists. Dialectical imitation occursmost commonly in parodic compositions, where mood, tone, and intention may bediametrically opposed to those of the original text. Thus, the work asserts maximumindependence for itself while insisting on its indebtedness to the ancient model. Thefortune of this mode of interpretation lay in the future, with such writers as Erasmusand Scarron. The first three forms of stylistic imitation are taken fr