The Renaissance in Italy

One thing is clear when we look at the cultural world of the early Rinascimento. There were no humanists. And the supposedly central cultural accomplishment of the period, humanism, was unknown. It simply did not exist. The term was coined only in the nineteenth century by a German teacher in the Gymnasium, as the great twentieth-century scholar of the subject Paul Oscar Kristeller pointed out long ago. The label “humanist,” however, did begin to be used in the late fifteenth century, apparently first by university students to refer to professors who focused on the studia humanitatis – that is, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy – rather than on theology and law.

Less obvious, but in many ways more significant, is the way the search for humanism and humanists in the early Rinascimento, before they existed, has skewed the way scholars have looked at the cultural world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Perhaps most importantly, it has created a canon of works and writers who are deemed to be pre-humanistic or even simply humanist that seriously distorts the range and complexity of the cultural world of the day. Moreover, many writers and thinkers have largely been overlooked (or consigned to the Middle Ages, a kind of humanist hell) by scholars because they do not fit into the anachronistic and rather procrustean mold of an imagined humanism. In turn, many luminaries who have made it into the canon have become curiously disjointed by a scholarly desire to highlight their supposed humanistic writings at the expense of their broader oeuvre.