In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.

On a cultural level, the Italian Renaissance lifted Europe into a new era of humanism that glorified humanity and shifted attention to the present needs and desires of people. Erasmus translated this humanistic attitude into scholarly pursuits that revealed the frailties and needs of the human authors of Scripture. All of these forces eroded the authority of the Church, leading to dramatic confrontation, both from inside and outside the Church. The Protestant Reformation took advantage of the rift between Christian monarchs and the papacy, successfully fragmenting the unity of Western Christendom. However, it was Copernicus who used the strategy and tools of reasoned arguments to arrive at his heliocentric theory of planetary motion. This bold assertion successfully demonstrated a truth arrived at through reason that differed from the conclusion supported by the authority of the Church. As a result, reason triumphed over faith, and the age of science began. While psychology remained obscured within philosophy and religion during this time, the enduring questions still perplexed scholars and were about to be addressed directly over two centuries of philosophical inquiries prior to psychology’s formal definition as a distinct science.

This chapter introduces readers to philology, defined as “making sense of texts,” and argues that it is a good way to view how certain thinkers in the Italian Renaissance read, interpreted, and worked their way through texts. It introduces the main themes of the book: that the available technologies of reading and writing – whether these are quills and animal skins or screens and the cloud – have great impact on what thinkers conceive as possible when it comes to their work; that authorship can be conceived as collective; that the use of the Latin language by Renaissance thinkers opened up meaningful possibilities even as it circumscribed their thinking within limits they did not always recognize; and that, especially for Renaissance thinkers, philosophy – defined as the search for wise way of life – and philology were inextricably linked. This chapter also suggests that recent work on history of women in the Renaissance – especially on women’s authorship – opens up new windows onto the intellectual history of the period. Finally, this chapter sets out one of this book’s guiding principles: to relate the episodes under consideration to problems in the humanities that have relevance today.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.

Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda - quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning subjectivity, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty - are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a common humanity, much less Christianity. This chapter argues that Griselda is not an inhuman monster; rather, through The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer imagines a different view of humanity, one engendered according to modes of virtue typically associated with women, including patience, pity, humility, steadfastness, and submission.

Three students of the classicist Piero Vettori turned to the study of vernacular language at midcentury and therafter: Benedetto Varchi, Girolamo Mei, and Vincenzio Borghini.Mei circulated his writings only in manuscript; he wrote especially on metrics and rhyme, and referred to the recently available writings of Aristoxenus of Taranto as well as Aristotle’s Poetics to discuss perception and judgment. Varchi acknowledged Bembo’s immense contributions but like Borghini, felt he had conflated the study of language with literature. Varchi used Aristotelian tools to analyze languages. They distinguished between literature as art and language as natural to humans; hence, its variation follows rules that are subject to rational analysis.Borghini devoted attention to the fourteenth-century vernacular, including an edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron that could withstand the Index of Forbidden Books.He also proposed a plan for teaching vernacular language in Florence’s schools.

This chapter analyzes the various avenues of the reception of the “Confessions” in the Middle Ages, based on extant manuscripts, medieval florilegia, and handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences. While the “Confessions” was one of Augustine’s best-known works, surprisingly there is very little evidence of direct reception, and Petrarch, who was an avid reader of the “Confessions,” rejected its basic premise of conversion in and devoting oneself completely to God, although the work did serve as a major source for medieval biographies of Augustine. The reception of the “Confessions” in the Middle Ages mirrored that of Augustine himself, whereby what we find upon close analysis is an ambiguous reception that is far less than the influence Augustine had in general.

Chapter 3 concentrates on translations commissioned by members of the Giustiniani family in Venice. The chapter first analyses the earliest Italian translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, authored around 1430 by the Augustinian theologian Antonio Colombella at the behest of Pancrazio Giustiniani. Based on the medieval Latin version of the Ethics, Colombella’s translation can be read as an attempt to adapt the academic study of Aristotle to the needs of vernacular readers. Of particular interest are the insights into coeval translation practice and theory offered by the prologue. The chapter looks then at the annotated translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On Virtues and Vices by the Dominican Lazzaro Gallineta, who dedicated it to Giustiniani’s son-in-law, Bernardo, in the 1460s. The work testifies to the permeability between scholastic traditions and new humanist trends; it also gives us some indication as to how a challenging text like the Ethics could be adapted to a lay readership. The chapter includes a discussion of Benedetto Cotrugli’s Libro de l’arte della mercatura (1458) and the mercantile milieu into which forms of patronage such as the Giustiniani’s belonged.

During the thirteenth century the political forces of an older feudal nobility and an emergent guild-based republicanism had begun to vie for control within individual cities. By the early fourteenth century one or the other had gained the upper hand within a given city, and these shaped the new urban politics within which a new generation of oral poets emerged. For courtly performers like Antonio da Ferrara and Francesco di Vannozzo, these feudal environments provided a more traditional patronage environment that held oral poets to older patterns of chronic itinerancy, hybrid forms of entertainment, and poetic activity subject to the priorities of aristocratic patrons. The public and socially fluid environments of the commercial republics fostered a different sort of canterino, one more rooted in place, communally engaged with socially heterogeneous audiences, and reflective of a rapidly growing vernacular literary culture. The outstanding figure here is the Florentine canterino, Antonio Pucci. A section devoted to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch reveals a surprisingly reciprocal engagement with oral poets, whose mixed orality made them important agents in the dissemination of the poetry and stylistic elements of the tre corone, while the literate culture of the time continued to be shaped by oral practice.

This little-known work of the great Florentine artist has only recently been re-identified (by me) as the portrait of a professional canterino. It is of great interest both for the status accorded to the sitter, a well-dressed individual in the preoccupied act of tuning his lira da braccio, as if about to perform, and for the Petrarch inscription etched into the back of the instrument which faces the viewer. It dates from the early 1480s, and so dates from a period when both civic and humanist practices of singing to the lyre were in full flood in Florence. The sitter could be a practitioner of either, or perhaps the distinction did not matter at the time. This short essay explores this ambiguity.