The Prehumanism of Benzo D'Alessandria

Extract

Any discussion of the intellectual life in fourteenth-century Italy is inevitably directed by the personality and achievement of Petrarch. Although we no longer believe that a whole new age begins with him, although we recognize considerable medieval elements in his work, we still regard him as the father of the strongest movement in the Renaissance–humanism. After his long years of succesful work, that was at once well publicized and well remunerated, there could be no inversion of the hour-glass. From him there proceeded the splendid parade of Boccaccio, Salutati, Guarino, and Bruni. There can be no quarrel with the general truth of this Petrarchan primacy, but, as in all historical abstractions, there are some unfortunate results. These are particularly prevalent in the decades before Petrarch. His shadow is over the whole period. We have difficulty in appreciating his predecessors as anything but precursors. If we resist the temptation to dismiss them all as unimportant, we are nonetheless constrained to deal with them as relative to a later Petrarch, as the very term prehumanism implies. The period is obscure enough without adding this element of ambiguity to it. Unable to jettison the term, we can still underline its inadequacy and establish the substantial nature of the movement, even without reference to Petrarch.