The lost Italian Renaissance humanists, historians, and Latin’s legacy

233 Pages·2006·7.27 MB·English

by  Celenza, Christopher S.

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(Jhristopher Qelen^a
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UN IVERSITY PRESS
BALTIMORE AND LONDON
This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the
Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader's Digest Publications Subsidy and the
Craig and Barbara Smyth Fund for Scholarly Programs
and Publications.
© 2004 THE J O H N S H O P K I N S U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS
All rights reserved. Published 2004
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
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www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Celenza, Christopher S., 1967-
The lost Italian Renaissance:humanists, historians, and Latin’s legacy /
Christopher S. Celenza.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-7815-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Renaissance —Italy. 2. Renaissance —Italy—Historiography. 3. Humanism—
Italy. 4. Humanism—Italy—Historiography. 5. Italy—Civilization—
1268-1559. 6. Italy—Civilization—1268-1559 — Historiography. 7. Histori­
ography—Italy—History—To 1500. I. Title.
DG445.C38 2004
945'.05'072 —dc2i 2003012858
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
For Ronald G. Witt
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Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: A “Lost” Renaissance and a “Lost” Literature xi
C H A P T E R ONE
An Undiscovered Star: Renaissance Latin and the Nineteenth Century 1
C H A P T E R TWO
Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Twentieth Century:
Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller 16
C H A P T E R T H R E E
A Microhistory of Intellectuals 58
C H A P T E R F OU R
Orthodoxy: Lorenzo Valla and Marsilio Ficino 80
C H A P T E R F I VE
Honor: The Humanists of the Classic Era on Social Place 115
C H A P T E R SIX
What Is Really There? 134
Appendix: The State of the Field in North America 151
Notes 157
Index 205
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Preface and Acknowledgments
t h e r e e x i s t s a wealth of relatively unstudied Latin material
highly relevant for the history of Renaissance Italy in all its aspects.
There are some classificatory handbooks and new publishing initiatives focus­
ing on these texts, and scholars have been examining and commenting on them
for some time. Still, there is no one resource that offers an understanding of
how this material came to be comparatively understudied, what it can teach us
about the Italian Renaissance, and why it is unique and worthy of sustained at­
tention now. This book is intended to meet that need and, in addition, to move
beyond concerns specific to Renaissance studies. Emphasizing as it does the way
nineteenth-century nationalist assumptions shaped the study of the fifteenth-
century Italian Renaissance, the book makes an important (though by now un­
surprising) point about scholarly disciplines across the board: they are heavily
indebted to tradition, achieve a taken-for-granted status within one or two gen­
erations, and sometimes need reexamination and refocusing so that they can
remain vital.
Parts of chapter l were published in the Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001):
17-35. Parts of chapter 4 appeared in Modern Language Notes 119 (2004); in Italian
Renaissance Cities: Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation, edited by S. Campbell
and S. Milner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and in Marsi-
lio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, edited by M. J. B. Allen and
V. Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2002). I thank the editors of the two journals, the Syndics
of Cambridge University Press, and Brill for permission to reprint.
In writing this book, I have benefited considerably from the generosity and
encouragement of institutions and people. Michigan State University, to which
I here record my thanks, provided an intellectual home and financial support
from 1996 onward. I conceived the book while a fellow, in 1999-2000, at Villa I
Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence,
to which I owe thanks for that remarkable year. While I was there, its then
Director, Professor Walter Kaiser, read and critiqued early drafts, as did my col­