Readers who come to David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) equipped only with the taxonomies provided by modern histories of philosophy - “British empiricism” versus “continental rationalism,” scientific versus scholastic, ancients versus moderns - are likely to be taken aback at the way Hume in his first chapter, “Of the Different Species of Philosophy,” anatomizes the philosophy of his time. He distinguishes first a moral philosophy that “considers man chiefly as born for action,” which regards virtue as the most valuable of objects and “paint[s] her in the most amiable colours, borrowing all helps from poetry and eloquence,” treating the subject “in an easy and obvious manner.” Moral philosophers of this kind “make us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments; and so they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.” But there is a second species of philosophers who “consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavor to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners.” This kind of philosopher does not address the generality of men but “aim[s] at the approbation of the learned and the wise,” seeks “hidden truths” rather than an improvement in the behavior of mankind. Hume claims the first species of philosophy, being “easy and obvious,” will always be preferred to the “accurate and abstruse,” as is shown by the relative popularity of the first: “the fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed. La Bruyere passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.”

Humanism as a form of culture

It is apt to be forgotten by students of the Renaissance that the abstract noun “humanism,” with its cognates in Latin and the modern languages, is not attested for the period of the Renaissance itself, but began to be widely used only in the early nineteenth century. It was in the latter period, under the influence of Hegel, that the modern addiction to reifying ideologies and social trends using nouns formed from -ismos, the Greek suffix indicating nouns of action or process, began to take hold. Humanismus, humanisme, and umanesimo, the German, French, and Italian forms of the word respectively, eventually embraced two broad families of meaning. The first family understood humanism in the sense of classical education: the study of ancient literature in the original languages. It was in this sense that Georg Voigt in his seminal work, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859), retrofitted the word to signify the Renaissance movement to revive classical studies. In Italy the word umanesimo broadened its meaning somewhat to include Italy’s literary production in the Latin language from Petrarca to Pietro Bembo.

The following short biographies have been reprinted, with permission, from the 139 biobibliographies published in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (1988). Some minor changes have been made and the bibliographical information included there has been omitted.

acciaiuoli, donato b. Florence, 1429; d. Milan, 1478. Italian humanist and philosopher. Educated in Florence; strongly influenced by John Argyropoulos. Florentine statesman and ambassador. Wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, Physics, and De anima. Translated Plutarch’s lives of Scipio and Hannibal.

agricola, rudolph (Rudolphus Frisius; Roelof Huysman) b. Baflo near Groningen, 1443/4; d. Heidelberg, 1485. Dutch humanist. Studied at universities of Erfurt and Louvain, where he graduated MA, 1465. Traveled to Italy 1469–79 with interruptions, studying at Pavia and Ferrara. Returning to northern Europe in 1479, he promoted Italian humanism and lectured at Heidelberg, 1484–5. Wrote the influential De inventione dialectica (1479), as well as commentaries (Boethius, Seneca the Elder), humanistic orations, poems, letters, and translations from Greek.

agrippa, henricus cornelius (Agrippa von Nettesheim) b. near Cologne, 1486; d. Grenoble, 1535. German philosopher. Studied at University of Cologne. Traveled widely (France, Spain, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland) as soldier, physician, teacher. Served as doctor and astrologer to queen mother of France in Lyons, 1524; then as historian and librarian to Margaret of Austria in Antwerp, 1528–30. Returned to Cologne, then to France.

Since the 1930s, when it first emerged as a distinctive field of research, intellectual history has always been fascinated with the Renaissance. Intellectual historians are concerned with unearthing the deep, often half-conscious patterns of thought that govern the way individuals understand and act within nature and society. They examine how traditions of thought situate themselves within changing linguistic and cultural settings. Lately they have begun to focus on the history of learned disciplines, intellectual routines, and practices. Above all they are concerned with the question of why large groups of human beings change their beliefs over time. This being the case, it is easy to see why the Renaissance attracts the intellectual historian. It was a period when fundamental changes occurred in Western societies across a wide range of beliefs, religious, scientific, political, historical, and anthropological. Christendom disintegrated and sovereign states emerged. The Catholic Church lost much of its authority and new Protestant churches and sects appeared. Religious divisions and wars led to the first tentative expressions of the need for tolerance and freedom of expression. Educational ideals and practice were transformed. Humanists arose to challenge the hegemony of scholastic culture. Christian culture underwent a major reorientation in its attitude to the pagan culture of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Republicanism and absolutism crystallized into distinct traditions of political thought. Major changes occurred in how Europeans saw and analyzed human nature, the cosmos, and natural processes. The sciences grew less interested in contemplating nature and more interested in controlling it. A New World was discovered full of societies, flora, and fauna utterly unknown to Western learned traditions.

I am afraid I shall have to bore the reader slightly by relating, in the first part of this essay, some dull but necessary information about the context, content and reception of two orations by Leonardo Bruni: the Laudatio Florentinae urbis and the Oratio in funere Ioannis Stroze. As is well known, these are the two most widely cited texts in modern discussions of Florentine civic humanism. Together with the De militia (On Knighthood), they are practically the only texts by Bruni read by historians of political thought. After that I hope things will get rather more interesting. I want to show in some detail the relationship between the rhetorical form and the historical (or rather unhistorical) character of these texts. My contention will be that both texts have been misunderstood because modern readers have not sufficiently appreciated the rhetorical conventions they assume and have not troubled to situate them in the context of Bruni's other works. This done, it will be clear, I believe, why the old dichotomy, “civic humanist or professional rhetorician?” that has bedeviled Bruni scholarship since the 1960s is fundamentally anachronistic. In closing, I shall question whether “civic humanism”, at least as it has been defined by Hans Baron and J.G.A. Pocock, is the best term to describe Bruni's humanism.

When in 1925 the young German historian Hans Baron, in a short review in Meinecke's Historische Zeitschrift, coined the term “civic humanism” (Bürgerhumanismus), he could not possibly have imagined the extraordinary celebrity and influence this expression, and the political ideal it expressed, would come to enjoy by the end of the twentieth century. The term became well known to historians in English-speaking countries only after 1955, when Baron (now fifty-five years old and an American citizen) published his classic work, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. In this study, possibly the most important monograph in Renaissance history written since the Second World War, Baron depicted a Florentine Renaissance that had been inspired to achieve cultural greatness through its devotion to ideals of patriotism, popular government, and public service. These ideals, inherited from ancient Greece and the Roman republic, had been rediscovered and popularized by a politically committed movement of intellectuals and educators whom Baron labeled “civic humanists.” Twenty years later, J. G. A. Pocock, in his equally famous work, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, reinterpreted civic humanism (or “classical republicanism”) as a distinct tradition in early modern political thought. According to Pocock, civic humanism constituted a distinct political discourse which (via a “Machiavellian moment”) had passed from Renaissance Florence to Oliver Cromwell's England, and thence to colonial America, where it formed the ideological matrix of the American Revolution.