The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World: Reflections on History and...

Rudolf Suntrup/Jan R. Veenstra (eds./Hrsg.)

Building the Past Konstruktion der eigenen Vergangenheit

Offprint Sonderdruck

2006

PETER LANG Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften

Contents / Inhaltsverzeichnis

Vorwort. Volker Honemann and Martin Gosman V

Introduction. Rudolf Suntrup and Jan R. Veenstra IX

1. Rediscovery of the Past Wiederentdeckung der Vergangenheit

The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World: 3 Reflections on History and Science, Then and Now. Cynthia M. Pyle (New York)

Von der Rückprojektion zur Tatsachenermittlung. Die Wiederentdeckung 33 der Vergangenheit in den oberitalienischen Kommunen des 13. und frühen 14. Jahrhunderts. Jörg W. Busch (Wiesbaden)

From Chronicle to History: Recovering the Past in Renaissance Scotland. 53 Roger Mason (St Andrews)

Thomas Wyatt's Epistolary Satires and the Consolations of Intertextuality. 67 John Scattergood (Dublin)

Das 'Ambraser Heldenbuch' und der Theuerdank. Mittelalterliche Epik 85 und ihre Wiederverwendung am Hof Maximilians I. Nine Miedema (Münster)

Die Königstochter von Frankreich des Hans von Bühel. Ein Beispiel nicht- 107 gelehrter Vermittlung historischen Wissens im Spätmittelalter. Maryvonne Hagby (Münster)

Transformations of Meaning in Medieval Architecture. 123 Kees van der Ploeg (Groningen)

2. Construction of National Myths Konstruktion nationaler Mythen

Re-Inventing the Goths: The Trajectory of an Idea. 167 Alan Swans on (Groningen)

Ancient Laws and Early Modern Identities: The Myth of the Lex Salica. 187 Kees Dekker (Groningen)

The Creation of the Myth of Creation in Modern Judaism. 213 WoutJac. vanBekkum (Groningen)

The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World:

Reflections on History and Science, Then and Now

Cynthia M. Pyle (New York) Offered to Ernst Mayr for his

One Hundredth Birthday July 5, 2004

1. Approaches / Modes of Thought

We are all capable of thinking analytically. We are all capable of thinking syn-thetically. Some of us are prone to emphasizing the theoretical (what has been called the rational) and to thinking deductively, moving from the general to the specific. Some of us are prone to emphasizing the empirical and to thinking inductively, drawing conclusions or constructing hypotheses from experience or observation. In the Latin Middle Ages analytical thinking was called resolutio, and such analytical thinking has been paired with the theoretical; synthetic thinking was called compositio, and such synthetic thinking has been paired with the empirical.1

Clearly, analytical thinking is neither necessarily nor only theoretical, nor is synthetic thinking necessarily or only empirical. Rather, these four modes of thought exist in different proportions in different individuals and as applied to different problems. And, further, it is probable that the proportions are functions, at least in part, of the components of an individual thinker's character - an extremely complex matrix, itself a function of that individual's physiology and context; that is to say that these ways of thinking occur (or even, in some cases and at some level, are chosen) in accordance with an individual's entire makeup.

Because one's genetic makeup is determined by the union of two gametes, one may then say that an individual's preferred permutations of thought are genetically defined, and then shaped by interaction with the environment. This is in fact what occurs in the course of the development of an entire individual, whose phenotype (an individual's observable features) expresses its genotype (an individual's genetic makeup), but is transformed as it rubs up against its en-vironment. And such a phenotype naturally includes, along with visible charac-

1 On the earliest western manifestation of these fundamental conceptual distinctions: M. Frede, 'Introduction' to: Galen, Three Treatises on the Nature of Science, transl. R. Walzer and M. Frede (Indianapolis, 1985). And see L. Edelstein, Ancient Medicine. Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein, eds. O. Temkin and C. L. Temkin (Baltimore, 1967); G. E. R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (London, 1970, repr. 1982); G. E. R. Lloyd, Greek Science after Aristotle (New York/London, 1973).

4 Cynthia Pyle

teristics, intellectual features and other invisible (though physiologically based) characteristics.

If this scheme of things is correct, then the spectrum of possible combinations of analytic / synthetic / theoretical / empirical types of thought is endlessly var-iable - as endlessly variable as the spectrum of genetic phenotypes we see around us, and live among and with.

As with all types of genetic and environmental situations, changing domi-nances appear in the course of time. (And with the word 'time' we step clearly into the realm of history.) In other words, dominances of types of thinking change as history unfolds (as, too, they do synchronically, in space, depending on their geographical and cultural contexts). Thus it is that we can discern char-acteristic modes of thought at different periods of human history. These different modes of thought, even when they contrast with one another, are never black and white. The various ways of thinking - be they the four we started out with, or many more - recur in various combinations, with certain modes dominating at certain times.

In the course of European civilization, we can discern changes in dominant thought modes - what I am calling in my title 'approaches' - creating vast intel-lectual and cultural periods that we call: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Within these swaths of time, there occur further breakdowns, due to changing cultural circumstances as events unfurl. We recognize different emphases in Greek and Roman thought, for example, and characterize (simplis-tically but nevertheless we do) the Greeks as more 'philosophical' or the Romans as more 'practical'; we characterize the Middle Ages as an age of 'faith', the Renaissance as an age of 'discovery', the eighteenth century as an age of 'reason', the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an age of scientific and technological development and industrialization.

There are of course many other ways of characterizing the dominances; our choice depends in part on our own period's dominant tendencies (fashions or trends, if you will), and on our own individual temperament and on the choices made by our particular personality.

1 believe I am justified in defining these and other types of thinking with the word 'approaches'. This word may seem as vague to some as the word 'men-talities', or mentalites, so favored by the historians of the Annates school and others devoted to more anthropological definitions of 'culture' than the one I have in mind when I speak of cultural and intellectual history. The uses and abuses of the term 'mentalities' have been most ably analyzed by G. E. R. Lloyd in his Demystifying Mentalities? But in the context of intellectual history, the similarly vague term 'intellectual approaches' may have its uses. For in the practice of intellectual history, we are dealing not only with systematic philos-

2 G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, 1990). See also S. Reynolds, 'Social Mentalities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism', in: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, series 6, vol. 1 (1990), pp. 21-41.

The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World 5

ophy; we are dealing with manners of thought, ways of thinking, ways of attack-ing problems. Nonetheless, this is not the same as what social historians mean by 'the history of mentalities': an anthropological, sociological and even psy-chological approach to historical phenomena, favoring studies of the humble over the powerful.3 The term 'intellectual approaches' addresses questions of reason alone; the history of intellectual approaches thus regards the history of the application of rational thought to the search for answers. It is not simply more specific than 'mentalities', it is quite different.

As is well known, the term 'mentalities', although used in what might be called a normal or expected way by historians like Herbert Butterfield and R. G. Collingwood, was later defined and came into historical parlance through what may now be seen as the far-too-separate field of social history - separate more for political than for intellectual reasons, reasons linked to the vast social experiments of the twentieth century. This temporary separation has been both a fortunate and an unfortunate occurrence, since the area has been enriched by studies of specific social phenomena, but has resisted and for a time over-whelmed and clashed methodologically with other areas of research. The rele-vance of social history to all historical work is clear, for we are social animals, operating in a social matrix. The re-integration of social and intellectual history is thus, inevitably, taking place at last, but the artificial division, while affording some new insights, has also had a somewhat detrimental impact on both fields. Jacob Burckhardt - who, following his own professor of Greek Antiquities, defined 'culture' as broadly as an anthropologist combined with an intellectual and cultural historian would today, in his Introduction to The Greeks and Greek Civilization - would not have understood this division. To quote from him:

'Greek Antiquities', as presented in my youth by August Boeckh in his great series of lectures, began with a geographical and historical survey, established the general character of the Greek people, and went on to treat of the different aspects of their life; first the State in general in its main outlines, then a number of particularly important states with details of their political, administrative and legal institutions, then the alliances and hegemonies established between states. There followed the arts of war on land and at sea, and private life including weights and measures, trade, industry, agriculture, housekeeping (with food, clothing and dwellings), marriage, the structure of the family, slavery, education, burial and rites in honour of the dead. Next came religion, with the cults and festivals, and the arts (further study of these was left to specialists in the history of art), gym-nastics, drama and music; finally there was a survey of the branches of learning cultivated by the Greeks. All this was treated by the antiquarian method, that is to say with a predetermined and constant degree of factual detail and completeness

3 See, e.g., the work of Marc Bloch, Rois et serfs (Paris, 1920); Idem, Apologie pour I'histoire ou metier d'historien, Cahiers des Annales 3 (Paris, 1949); F. Braudel, Grammaire des civilisations (Paris, 1963). See also 'Journee « Histoire des science et mentalites »', ed. J. Roger, in: Revue de synthese, 3e serie, 111-112 (serie generale, t. 104), (1983), pp. 267-415, including nuanced arguments across the spectrum from pro to con.

6 Cynthia Pyle

for each separate aspect of ancient life, as the groundwork for future specialized study; it was and still remains indispensable for the classicist [...].4

And, we might add, for the historian working on any age.

2. History

As is clear, my particular view of history is dependent on biology. This is compatible with my training and experience as a biologist; only later was I trained in intellectual and cultural history. The particular area of thought that I concentrate on is the development of methodologies to deal with texts and arti-facts and methodologies to deal with the life sciences in the Renaissance, and more especially historical and natural historical methods of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The term 'history' bears some thought. The term was used by Aristotle in his Historia artimalium (Peri zoon historia in Greek - Inquiry Concerning Animal Life), and we are all familiar with Pliny's use centuries later in his own Natura-lis historia. In the Greek, this word carries significant semantic overtones, for it can be defined as 'inquiry, investigation, science', as well as what we normally think of as 'history' - an unfurling of events over time. For example, the third Century CE work of Aelianus, Peri zoon idiotetos (On the Peculiarities of Animals) did not retain historia in its title, but his Poikile historia (Various [or Changeful] History - on human life and history) does keep it, in a sense closer to our normal senses of 'history' - a sense also applicable to the development of plant and animal species over time.

The word historia seems to have been dropped from such works (works about what we today call natural history) written in the Middle Ages. Vincent of Beauvais uses Speculum naturale, Thomas of Cantimpre uses De rerum natura, and Albertus uses simply De animalibus. The term historia in this context was picked up again, perhaps first in the modern era by the sixteenth-century poly-math Conrad Gessner of Zürich (philologist, town physician, clearing house for European natural history in the sixteenth century, who in fact edited Aelian in 1556). Gessner, certainly aware of the word's semantic overtones in Greek, used it in the title of his great Historiae animalium, and of his largely unpublished Historia plantarum (now published in facsimile from the Erlangen manuscripts, in addition to the one volume of Basel, 1541).5 It is widely familiar today in the

4 J. Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. O. Murray, transl. S. Stern, (New York, 1998), 'Introduction', p. 3. It is interesting to note that the 'new subject of art history' existed as a discipline in 1839, when Burckhardt began to study in Berlin with Boeckh: ibidem, 'Editor's Introduction', p. xii.

5 Historia Plantarum et vires ex Dioscoride, Paulo Aegineta, Theophrasto, Plinio & re-centioribus Graecis, iuxta elementorum ordinem (Basileae, Apud R. Wynter, 1541); Conradi Gesneri Historia Plantarum. Faksimileausgabe, eds. H. Zoller, M. Steinmann and K. Schmid,


names of countless museums of natural histoiy. And an apt term it is, in all its etymological senses, for the development of plant and animal species, their gradual change or 'evolution', occurs as a story (the Latin historia) unfolding in time; and natural history museums are also notably places of inquiry, of research into the natural world.

Human history too, of course, unfolds, or evolves, over time. We can say this without implying any value to its evolution at all, without thinking, that is, in terms of progress or regress. The events of human history, like those of natural history, take place in time; they are shaped by many, many forces, from clima-tological to geological to territorial to political to economic to epidemiological. Once again, the environment, broadly construed, puts its stamp on developments occurring at least in part by chance. And, as in the case of the natural environ-ment, so too the historical environment (always a complex matrix) is in part produced through the actions and ideas (including plans and desires) of human beings.

3. History as Science

History can be studied synchronically only with great difficulty since the per-spective gained from distance is beyond one's reach, as are many protected sources. Because it unfolds over time, it cannot be experimented on. As evidence for events in history, we must make use of the documents, manu-scripts, texts and other artifacts we manage to locate; there is no changing them, no removal of some variables (except theoretically, in the choices of topics to emphasize) to search our object of study for how it might have been if ... (though some historians are playing with this today in the 'what if styles of history). On the other hand, as in science, conjecture is open to us; we can hypothesize and expose our hypotheses to known facts (yes, facts: established occurrences of whose existence and reality we can be as sure as we can about being alive here and now) - we test our hypotheses, then, against facts about events and developments that have occurred over time. Simply, we cannot choose our means of proof; we must take what we get in the way of documents, texts and artifacts, and do the best we can with them.

This is not what most people in today's world have been trained to think of as a scientific undertaking. The expectation these days when the word 'science' occurs is of experimental, laboratory sciences or quantitative or statistical analyses. Yet the doing of history is by no means as different from all sciences as we might at first think (this time, pace Burckhardt himself, whose differences

10 vols. (Dietikon/Zürich, 1972-1980, 1987-1991). Cf. H. H. Wellisch, Conrad Gessner. A Bio-Bibliography (Zug, 1984), pp. 34-35, at p. 111. On the spelling, 'Gessner': C. M. Pyle, 'Conrad Gessner on the Spelling of his Name', in: Archives of Natural History 27 (2000), pp. 175-186.

8 Cynthia Pyle

with the philologist Wilamowitz about history as a science - in a somewhat different sense from the one I use here - are known6). There are, in the domain of the natural sciences, besides the mathematically-based and more theoretical sciences, and besides the experimental physical sciences, other categories. Some, like geology and natural history, can clearly be termed 'historical natural sciences'. These sciences in fact deal with physical phenomena as they unfold over time. There are also what we may call primarily 'observational' sciences, such as meteorology and histology (a sort of microanatomy). Some sciences fall into both the observational and the historical domains, like astronomy - which involves observing heavenly bodies and their motion, understanding their place in the time-scale of the universe, quantification of data, and conjectural ex-perimentation using computer simulation - or paleontology and natural history -which involve observing specimens and understanding their place in the scale of evolutionary history, as well as their life histories, ecology, anatomy and taxonomy. These sciences make use of what can be called the 'comparative method' of scientific analysis, on which I like to quote Ernst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist:

The difference between the experimental and the comparative method is not as great as it may appear. (...) In the (...) observational sciences the observer studies experiments of nature. (...) In the artificial experiment one can choose the conditions and (...) thus (...) test the factors that determine the outcome of the experiment. In an experiment of nature, whether it is an earthquake or the pro-duction of an insular fauna, it is our main task to infer or reconstruct the conditions under which this experiment of nature had taken place. By searching for the right constellation of factors, it is sometimes almost possible in a 'controlled' observation to reach the reliability of a controlled experiment. (...) It is important to emphasize the scientific legitimacy of the observational-com-parative method because the experimental method is inapplicable to many scientific problems.7

So too with history. Our ideal of history has become that of investigation, rather than narration, of the past (though both are of course necessary to create what people generally think of as histories). And that kind of investigative

6 Murray, 'Introduction' to Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization (see n. 4), pp. xi, xxxiv. Butterfield and Collingwood both wrestled (unsuccessfully, I believe) with the relationship between history and science, within remarkably similar intellectual frameworks. Both worked in the tradition of John Bury (below, n. 27); both were convinced of the importance of Christianity to a concept of history; both published in the fields of history, philosophy of history, and historiography of science; both were unable to complete their last works on the philosophy of history which were published posthumously by disciples. See H. Butterfield, The Origins of History, ed. A. Watson (London, 1981); R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1946, repr. 1977).

7 E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 30-32. Now see his What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (Cambridge, 2004).


history can appeal to a scientist. It is the side of the Greek word 'historia' that I mentioned above, which refers to the inquiry or research into history, rather than the writing or telling of it. So that, although doing history is not always like doing science, or not like doing all types of science, it has some of the same goals as science: notably, an attempt to understand reality (which I define, referring in part to A. R. Hall, as a definite phenomenon or structure of the universe independent of ourselves as observers8). Taking a departure from ob-servations of documents or artifacts, the historian makes hypotheses - much as the scientist makes hypotheses taking a departure from observations of phenomena or experience. It is then the task of the historian, as of the scientist, to test those hypotheses.

Here is where the laboratory may come into play for the physical scientist. In a laboratory the scientist can control the variables, testing, in a systematic way, one facet of the phenomenon under study at a time. The historian, very much like the archaeologist - though neither can change events or control historical variables - can test hypotheses against increasing accumulations of records, texts, or artifacts, gradually obtaining enough evidence to either confirm the hypothesis or undermine it.

And here is the crux of the matter. As Popper and Lakatos,9 notably, re-cognized, the crucial test is the ability to expose one's hypothesis to all the available evidence, including evidence which has the potential to destroy it if it is not valid. This is a risky business. And this is where courage comes into play in history as in science. As the scientist exposes hypotheses to a confrontation with variable conditions in the laboratory, or, in the non-laboratory sciences, to a confrontation with the scientist's own or other people's data, so too in history one exposes one's hypotheses, one's ideas, to their potential falsification by documentary or other evidence (as well as to the scrutiny and criticism of other historians and, first of all, of course, to one's own). Besides exposing our hypo-theses to available evidence, we ourselves must be free to apply the necessary doubt in our quest for the apposite answers to our puzzles, and if we do not see what is dubious, we must be open to learning it from others. I will return to the question of doubt further along. Let me first say a little on continuities and discontinuities in the periods under question.

8 C. M. Pyle, 'Renaissance Humanism and Science', in: Studi umanisticipiceni 11 (1991), pp. 197-202, and in Res publica litterarum 14 (1991), pp. 197-202 (I am grateful to Marian Cosic for having pointed out this second, duplicate, appearance to me), esp. n. 7. Cf. A. R. Hall, 'Discussion: Philosophical and Theological Backgrounds', in: The Nature of Scientific Discovery. A Symposium Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, ed. O. Gingerich (Washington, D. C., 1975), p. 372.

K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1975, '1959); I. Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, eds. J. Worrall and G. Currie (Cambridge, 1978).

10 Cynthia Pyle

4. Continuities and Discontinuities

Much work has been done over the past thirty years or more to show us the con-tinuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance periods. And we have all understood these continuities and seen many of them to be real, many instances of them to be well-founded. They enable us to see the complexity of the fabric of history, to see that there are never black and white characteristics of a given historical period - only ascendencies or dominances.

One of the many things Paul Oskar Kristeller accomplished in his long career was to investigate the medieval roots of certain humanist practices, and to pro-mulgate their further investigation.10 As we recognize this fact, however, we must not forget that he devoted most of his career to the study of the Renais-sance and humanistic thought of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the vast proportion of which was based in one way or another on the newly rediscovered classical sources. We can delve into the thirteenth-century origins of certain facets of humanistic practice (for example, the grammatical and rhetorical origins), discovering there elements of a remarkably finely tuned use of the classics by a Lovato dei Lovati or an Albertino Mussato - practices in some cases consistent with the spirit of a Cicero or a Quintilian or a Vergil.11 We can appreciate with medievalist historians of science the finesse of what I like to call 'medieval theoretical physics' among the Oxonians and their Parisian cor-respondents in the debate.12 We can look at the mind of a Roger Bacon or an Abelard, and see its enormous critical capacities.13 And all these phenomena date from what we think of as the 'Middle Ages' (what the fifteenth-century historian, Biondo Biondi, first called media aetasH) - the ages between 'then' and 'now', between antiquity and modernity. We can even, if we gaze with a fine enough glass (losing sight of the total picture), begin to doubt that there is a real difference between the way people thought in the so-called 'Middle Ages' and in the so-called 'Renaissance' - why, we can even doubt the use of such

10 P. O. Kristeller, Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning (New York, 1974, 21992). 11 R. G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients. The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to

Bruni (Leiden, 2000). 12 P. Duhem, Le systeme du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Piaton ä

Copernic, 10 vols. (Paris, 1913-1959); A. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford, 1953); E. Sylla, 'Aristotelian Commentaries and Scientific Change: The Parisian Nominalists on the Cause of the Natural Motion of Inanimate Bodies', in: Vivarium 31 (1993), pp. 37-83.

13 J. Hackett, ed., Roger Bacon and the Sciences. Commemorative Essays (Leiden, 1997); J. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997).

14 R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, ed. R. O. Rubinstein (Oxford, 21988), p. 66. Cf. Biondi Flavii Forliviensis, De Roma Triumphante Lib. X [...] Romae instauratae Libri III [...] (Basel, Froben, 1559), published with his Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum, Libri XXXI (Basel, Froben, 1559). On Biondi's name, see Pyle, 'Renaissance Humanism and Science' (see n. 8), n. 12, pp. 200-201.


terms as 'Middle Ages' and 'Renaissance'. Though, interestingly and little noticed, even those who decry the use of the term Renaissance retain and recognize a division by calling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the 'Early Modern Period', and nobody seems to question the validity or at least the con-tinued use of the terms 'medieval' or 'Middle Ages', to which some are per-fectly happy to relegate the Renaissance.

Yes, the terms do mean something to us, whether we define them purely chronologically or typologically as well.15 As I said earlier, we commonly refer to their characteristics, which, however broad, we do perceive as characteristic, as identifiable modes of behaving and of thinking. There is something there. I study the Renaissance because I feel the period to be compatible with my own way of looking at the world - that is in fact why I decided to work in Renais-sance studies: I felt that Leonardo and Alberti had understandings of and approaches to the world that I (even I as a scientist) recognized in my inner being. I read them and looked at their works, and discovered that their mode of thinking was akin in deep ways to our dominant mode of thinking in the West today (and that discovery has not been disproven so far - though some may say, overlooking the crucial first moment in any recognition of kindred thought and values, that I am finding only what I am looking for).16

The term 'whiggish' may come to the minds of some historians as they re-flexively (and, at first glance, justifiably) react against what may seem to be reading the present into the past. The term bears closer inspection. In fact, one can define the term whiggish on two levels.17 The first, the more obvious, centers on an anachronistic approach - indeed, looking at a past period, not for itself, but with an overlay of illusion, reading our own prejudices, even our own

15 A chronological definition of the Renaissance as 1350-1600 may be valid, especially for those of us who deal primarily with Italian materials. But we come up against the time needed for the diffusion of the type of approach we are here dealing with. In Great Britain of course the 'Renaissance' begins and ends later, ending perhaps as late as 1650 in the opinion of some. The typological definitions, especially of the long period between classical antiquity and its Renaissance, are even more difficult, when one realizes that the quite real roughly 200-year period of cultural fragmentation and isolation we term the 'dark ages' actually occurs at somewhat different times in different parts of Europe. I thank A. Demyttenaere for having raised this last point in the course of discussing a version of this paper at the University of Amsterdam, April 15, 2003.

16 For a subtle discussion of these questions, see E. Garin, 'Etä buie e rinascita: un pro-blema di confini' (with appendix), in his Rinascite e rivoluzioni. Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bari, 1975, 21976), pp. 5-47. Garin sums up (p. 46): 'I momenti luminosi della storia, le vere rinascite, si attuano quando torna a fiorire la vita, quando si afferma la natura, quando esplode e trionfa il furore, quando la liberta si realizza e crea'. See also his Italian Humanism. Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, transl. P. Munz (New York, 1965): translated from the revised Italian edition of 1958, q.v.; originally published as Der italienische Humanismus (Bern, 1947). Of especial relevance here is Garin's 'Introduction', pp. 1-17.

Cf. C. M. Pyle, 'Renaissance Humanism and Science' (see n. 8), pp. 198-199.

12 Cynthia Pyle

interests and desires, into the artifacts and expressions of an earlier period. This of course is extremely un-scientific, and extremely un-historical.18 One cannot help but be reminded of how the people of the Middle Ages in Rome saw the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius as a statue of the first Christian emperor Constantine, and that for that reason, and for that reason alone, it was preserved. Medieval thought is, in fact, unabashedly whiggish. (And this may be why so many medievalists are hypersensitive to the phenomenon.) In fact, as we begin examining differences between the medieval and Renaissance outlooks, the attempt on the part of the humanists to move away from this anachronistic aspect of a whiggish point of view, easily found in many cases in the Middle Ages, is one major distinguishing characteristic of humanist thought.

There is a distinction to be made here. We are unquestionably allowed to be interested in the past because of our present condition; this has been recognized by many historians as a valid impetus to the study of the past, in the wake of (and surely even before) Hegel's realization that we see through the eyes of our own present. It suffices to think of Werner Heisenberg's words: 'When we celebrate the 500th birthday of Copernicus, we do it because we believe that our present science is connected with his work'.19 We find Charles Schmitt advocating the study of Renaissance university philosophy and science for its 'positive value for the future [i.e. later] development of modern science and philosophy'.20 And even Herbert Butterfield himself (the original castigator of whiggism in a famous essay which many do not realize was written in his youth21), in later years, did not hesitate to entitle his signal mature work The Origins of Modern Science, which title could itself be misconstrued as implying a purposeful development, not to mention the posthumously published work, The Origins of History, in which he speaks of early peoples 'hankering' after the historical sense!22 Instead, he clearly perceived a difference between seeking origins of phenomena, and seeking to ascribe, with hindsight, a purpose to those origins, much less a progress from them to the phenomena.

What we are not allowed to do, in other words, is to read our own ideas into the past, a practice which is often translated into looking down our noses at the past or even laughing unsympathetically at the objects of our study - and one sees this committed even by some of the most virulent 'anti-whigs' in the field

18 Though apparently now being experimented with: see the review by Jonathan Clark in the Times Literary Supplement, March 14, 2003, pp. 3-4, of A. Patterson, Nobody's Perfect. A New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven, 2003, not seen).

19 W. Heisenberg, 'Tradition in Science', in: The Nature of Scientific Discovery (see n. 8), p. 219.

20 C. Schmitt, 'Philosophy and Science in Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities', in: The Renaissance. Essays on Interpretation (London/New York, 1982), p. 297.

21 H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965), first published in 1931.

22 H. Butterfield, The Origins of History (see n. 6), p. 42.


of the history of science, in what may be an attempt to ally themselves with the scientific protagonists who are the objects of their studies.23

Most of us who practice historical work try our utmost to look at the evidence for what it itself has to say. When it does not corroborate our hypotheses, we change the hypotheses to fit the evidence. This is a largely empirical approach, acquired in my case through the study and practice of twentieth-century biology. This empiricism can be seen in work done on manuscripts, treating them as objects of study, dissecting them (in the sense of performing codicological analyses on them), learning the story they have to tell;24 so too in work with archival documents to confirm, for example, the spelling of Conrad Gessner's name (with two s's).25 Had my hunch on this point, my hypothesis, been proven wrong, I would have been disappointed, yes, especially because I was in the midst of an argument with a mentor about the question, but I would have bowed to the evidence, and lost the argument.

I like to think that this approach is in keeping with the critical tradition the fifteenth-century humanists of the West were founding - or re-founding - on the basis especially of what they were learning anew about the world of classical antiquity, including particularly Greek antiquity through renewed contact with Byzantium, which had retained a certain continuity with its ancient past.26 True, they may have boasted of achieving more than they did, even made the picture rosier than it was (this is not uncommon in human comportment), and true, they had not yet achieved the heights of philological sophistication that would be achieved in Germany and Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the clear beginnings are visible, and it is hard (even whiggish) to blame them for not having discovered all there would be to know four centuries later. From Petrarca's De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (1367-1368) on, humanists were certainly explicit about rebelling against scholastic thought, and, while we may

23 On these questions, now see N. Jardine, 'Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of the Sciences', in: History of Science 38 (2000), pp. 251-270.

24 E.g. the many detective stories appearing over the years in Scriptorium, or chapters 2, 3, and 5 of my own Milan and Lombardy in the Renaissance: Essays in Cultural History, Istituto di Filologia Moderna, Universita di Parma: Testi e Studi, Nuova Serie: Studi 1 (Rome, 1997).

25 See above, n. 5. 26 On Byzantium in general, see W. Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and

Society (Stanford, 1997). On its science, see A. Preus, Aristotle and Michael of Ephesis on the Movement and Progression of Animals (Hildesheim, 1981), and the short treatment in D. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science. The European Scientific Tradition in Philos-ophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago/London, 1992), pp. 161-166. On philosophy: B. Tatakis, La philosophie byzantine (Paris, 1949), recently translated with useful bibliography as Byzantine Philosophy, transl. and intr. N. J. Moutafakis (Indianapolis, 2003), though the original French is still relevant. See also Byzantine Philos-ophy and its Ancient Sources, ed. K. Ierodiakonou (Oxford, 2002). I am grateful to K. Ierodiakonou for the references to her book and the translation of Tatakis.

14 Cynthia Pyle

find many elements of it in their own thought (what rebellious youth does not bear the stigma of his or her parents' despised characteristics?), it is largely their newly freed critical and doubting spirit which will lay the foundations for our own scientific outlook of today (while it may last).

The second level of my definition of whiggism centers on teleology. What those people who present themselves as particularly sensitive to whiggism are really reacting against is a form of the idea of progress. This idea, influential, comfortable and as potentially pernicious as it is productive, certainly held sway in the historical thought of the nineteenth century and before.27 Its best antidote, or filter, to my mind is the realization that no progress can occur without a goal (telos), and conversely, that progress can occur towards a goal. Unless events or ideas can be proven to be moving deliberately (i.e. purposely) toward an end, they cannot be said to 'progress'. This qualification of necessity eliminates the course of history from being so labelled, once history is seen as an evolution (in the strict sense) rather than a teleology. History itself, in other words, as a sequence of events, can never be said to 'advance'. It can only be said to unfold, or evolve, in time.

We ourselves, on the other hand, can advance consciously toward a goal, even in the course of history. Kant expressed an ideal of world government.28 That goal has actually been approached, by fits and starts, through wars and treaties, but closer than one might have imagined, in the creation, first, of the League of Nations, and then of the United Nations, which, for all its weaknesses, can be seen as a partially successful attempt at world government - and democratic world government, at that.

5. History and Philology in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Once we have established our criteria for science and for history, where does that leave us in terms of the fifteenth-century rediscovery of the classical approach to the world? And how does the fifteenth-century approach differ from the approach of the Middle Ages?

Because of my training, experience, and inclination, I tend to focus on the history of the life sciences, rather than on the more commonly studied history of the physical sciences, physics, astronomy (in its more theoretical aspects) and

27 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (1920), introd. C. A. Beard (New York, 1955); on Bury's thought, see the remarkable study by N. H. Baynes in his A Bibliography of the Works of J. B. Bury (Cambridge, 1929). The recent collection of articles on the subject is indispensable: The Idea of Progress, eds. A. Burgen, P. McLaughlin and J. Mittelstraß (Berlin/New York, 1997), in particular for the present topics the essays by W. Burkert, A. Crombie, A. Garcia-Bellido and G. Wolters.

28 Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. L. W. Beck, transl. L. W. Beck, R. E. Anchor, E. L. Fackenheim (Indianapolis, 1977), esp. 'Introduction', p. 10, and 'Perpetual Peace', pp. 85-135.


optics. Perhaps that is why the scientific nature of humanist activities first struck me as a graduate student in the late 1960s. I was approaching them from the point of view of empirical science, and could immediately see how similar the humanists' methodologies were to those of empirical and observational science - an empiricism, that is, increasingly free of the ideological constraints of the

i . 29 media aetas.

In exercising an empirical approach, as we have seen, one must still construct - from experience, observation, or other forms of perception - hypotheses, which are then confirmed or undermined by empirical facts. A scientific 'hunch' is based on experience (conscious or unconscious), and must exist before any form of experiment can be imagined or designed.

We see this not only in the natural sciences, but in the work of the fifteenth-century humanist, philologist, poet, Angelo Poliziano as well.30 Poliziano's 'hunches' are based on his vast and careful reading in the classical texts, some known, some newly discovered. From this experience, he intuits a particular author's preferred usages, and applies this intuitive knowledge to reconstructing a text by that author. Poliziano also exhibits a pronounced concern for historical truth (which I define as the actual succession of past events ascertainable from documents contemporary, or as nearly contemporary as possible, to those events31 - 1 am speaking here of history as it unfolds in time, that history whose

29 These constraints on empirical thought are recognized by medievalists, for example, E. Grant, 'Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme on Natural Knowledge', in: Vivarium 31 (1993), pp. 84-105, p. 86.

30 What follows is based on the detailed discussion in C. M. Pyle, 'Historical and Philo-logical Method in Angelo Poliziano and Method in Science: Practice and Theory', in: Poli-ziano nel suo tempo. Atti del VI Convegno Internazionale (Chianciano-Montepulciano 18-21 luglio 1994) (Firenze, 1996), pp. 371-386. It should be noted that the ground-breaking work on Poliziano's methodology was done by S. Timpanaro, Genesi del metodo di Lachmann (Padova, 1985, 11963); S. Rizzo, II lessico filologico degli umanisti (Roma, 1973); and V. Branca, 'II nuovo metodo filologico e un capitolo della Centuria Secunda' (from 1974), now in his Poliziano e I'umanesimo della parola (Torino, 1983), pp. 157-181. This work (except for Branca's contribution) was synthesized and some new points made in English by A. Graf-ton, 'On the Scholarship of Politian and its Context', in: Journal of the Warburg and Cour-tauld Institutes 40 (1977), pp. 150-188, later included in other of his works.

31 Edward Grant has found in the 'quest for reality' a distinguishing element between the modern period and the Middle Ages; when put together with Hall's definition of reality as a phenomenon or structure independent of ourselves (cf. n. 8, above), this seems an acceptable criterion for a very difficult distinction. See Grant, 'Late Medieval Thought, Copernicus and the Scientific Revolution', in: Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962), pp. 197-220, esp. pp. 214-215, 219; also A. I. Sabra, 'The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement', in: History of Science 25 (1987), pp. 223-243, esp. pp. 227, 241. Cf. Pyle, 'Renaissance Humanism and Science' (see n. 8 above), esp. p. 197 and n. 7, and now see E. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge, 1996), and Lind-berg (see n. 26), pp. 144-145,195.

16 Cynthia Pyle

truth we historians attempt to discern; I do not refer to written history in which that evolution is interpreted or narrated). For this reason, Poliziano is thus of necessity deeply concerned with evidence - in this case the most reliable manuscripts of any given text. He developed criteria for determining (more or less) the age of a manuscript - to wit: the type of script (which in his experience could range from Uncial to Carolingian to Beneventan); the appearance of the parchment; the style (vocabulary and syntactic preferences) of a given ancient author; a comparison of the various sources of an author to obtain the most likely reading (made possible by his vast knowledge and retention of classical authors); and even, and most significantly, as brought out by Silvia Rizzo, the hypothetical archetype manuscript of a text.32

Elsewhere, I have summed up Poliziano's modus operandi as follows: (1) a conscious collection of all available data originating as closely as possible to the date of origin of the text in question: i.e. the oldest manuscripts, to the best of his knowledge; (2) an understanding of the necessity to discriminate among these manuscripts; (3) the development of a method for discriminating among them, by (4) using his knowledge of an author's preferences of vocabulary and syntax (again, the author's 'style'); (5) the development of an understanding of the genealogy of various manuscripts of a text, by careful collation (which had been done before) and the perception of the implications of what he found in the course of that collation (which had not); (6) the determination, from the evidence of the best manuscripts (as above), of a particular word's usage in different contexts, and of its usage by the author in question; and (7) a strict adherence to that evidence in making his own emendations, which were not made (as had often been the case) only conjecturally, without firm bases in manuscript testimony.33

Developing these criteria for his work as he went along, Poliziano turned to the establishment of critical editions in the first half of 1480 when he was still 25. By early 1489 at 34, he had also created a first Centuria of Miscellanea, or scholarly essays, which he published at that time. By the time of his death less than six years later, he had created some two-thirds of a second Centuria, in which these methods are further employed to analyze other questions arising about early texts. In these cases, authoritative sources are handled comparative-ly, sometimes even with the added juxtaposition of his own experience along-side that of his sources, as in Miscellanea 11.46, Elephanti, on the question of whether elephants can bend their legs. Poliziano reads in Basil and Ambrose that the elephant cannot bend its knees. He hesitates in the face of this assertion, but then concludes, partly on the basis of his own experience of other quadrupeds, partly on the basis of the comparison of widely disparate texts known to him, including the Greek Aristotle (Historia animalium, II), which he recommends

32 Rizzo, II lessico filologico (see n. 30), p. 315. 33 Pyle, 'Historical and Philological Method in Angelo Poliziano' (see n. 30), p. 379,

where I give pertinent sources.


over Theodore of Gaza's (or even his own) Latin version, that elephants pro-bably can indeed bend their legs. His conclusion is the epitome of scientific reasoning: 'Which [authors] therefore speak more truly, for my part, since I have never seen live and real elephants, I hardly dare to judge. So much will I con-tribute: if Aelian, Pliny, Aristotle, more experienced [in] that type of thing than Ambrose, assert truer [things] (and Theodore, one who may have seen an elephant, reports [it]), the error seems to have come in any case from those [things] that Caesar writes in the Commentary on the Gallic Wars, Book VI, about elk in the Hercynian wood'.34

Poliziano's juxtaposition and comparison of several sources, alongside his own experience, and one possible eye-witness account, are extremely signifi-cant, for in this process, we see him able to doubt and examine all his sources. He then makes a choice, on the basis of analogy with other animals within his own experience (admitting his own lack of direct experience of elephants per se), and on the basis of what he considers the most reliable text on animals, that of Aristotle (a perceptive choice), to accept as truth that elephants do bend their knees. Furthermore, he comes up with the probable literary source of the error. Poliziano neither accepts the word of the Church Fathers, nor blindly chooses Aristotle because he is The Philosopher, but looks at them all critically, selecting Aristotle as the most reliable student of the natural world, more reliable than even the Church Fathers, Ambrose and Basil. He is weighing the evidence, and coming down, as it happens, on the side of a consummate biologist.35

The admission into this critical process of the subjective element - very much a part of modern laboratory science as well - is a crucial development, perhaps the crucial development, in the fifteenth century. It can be traced back through Petrarca's subjectivism to isolated cases in the Middle Ages, and bespeaks a trust of one's own intuition and thought processes over those of the ancient or semi-ancient Auctoritates less critically viewed in the centuries immediately preceding Petrarca. The resurgence of this faith in one's own judgment is one of the most significant characteristics of the European Renaissance.

Earlier in the fifteenth century we find even the derivative humanist, Pier Candido Decembrio, in his De animantium naturis (1460), preferring in some instances to believe his own eyes rather than the textual sources.36 This pro-

34 Politianus, Miscellaneorum Centuria Secunda, eds. V. Branca and M. Pastore Stocchi, 4 vols. (Florence, 1972), vol. 4, pp. 81-83: Utri ergo verius dicant, equidem, quando elephantos vivos verosque vidi nunquam, minime ausim iudicare. Tantum illud afferam: si veriora Helia-nus Plinius Aristoteles perhibent, rerum id genus peritiores quam Ambrosius (narrat et Theo-dorus, unus qui fortasse viderit elephantum), videtur tamen error exortus ex iis quae de alci-bus in Hercinia sylva sexto gallici belli commentario Caesar scribit [...]. (He then quotes in full Caesar, De Bello Gallico, VI.27.)

35 D'Arcy W. Thompson, 'On Aristotle as a Biologist', in: Toward Modern Science, ed. R. M. Palter, 2 vols. (New York, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 58-81.

36 C. M. Pyle, Das Tierbuch des Petrus Candidus, Codex Urbinas Latinus 276, Eine Ein-

18 Cynthia Pyle

cedure will become current in the next century with the great naturalists like Pierre Belon, Guillaume Rondelet and Conrad Gessner, and, famously, with the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, the reception of whose work will be impeded by forces whose world-view is too fragile to withstand the findings of empirical research. Poliziano, in keeping with his empirical bent, and with the increasingly critical spirit of his age, through his widely diffused and methodologically sound Miscellanea, has made such an approach more available to the thinkers and observers who will follow him.

6. The Fifteenth-Century Birth of Archaeology

Further examples of the newly ascendent empirical/critical bent are to be found in what may legitimately be termed, with that exemplary scholar Roberto Weiss,37 the archaeological activities of the humanists, which were on the in-crease from the time of Petrarca on. Whereas some scholars seem to consider such activities merely 'antiquarian', they are surely some of the earliest signs of a conscious and willed investigation of the past, in the form of its architecture and artifacts, with a clear desire to understand that past - the workings and attributes of ancient cultures - on its own terms. Just as we find Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano devising methods for discovering the ancient approach to the world through texts in manuscripts, so too some of the very people who investigate manuscripts are found developing methods for the investigation of ancient monuments and structures. Not only do they study the monuments' forms and measurements (itself an important step in the history of the refine-ment of data), but they begin looking at their inscriptions in a way geared to learning more about the people who inscribed them - and in reaction to what, as noted earlier, we can appropriately term the 'whiggishness' of the medieval approach to the material evidence of history.

This newly liberated curiosity is the key to much that occurs in the fifteenth-century intellectual ferment. The relatively unconstrained exercise of an un-leashed faculty (a faculty inherently available to the human mind in all ages and cultures, but suppressed by social, political and religious pressures in some) is what animates the discoveries: not just manuscript discoveries, but geographic and scientific ones as well. For curiosity is obviously what moves people to delve beyond their ken. Needless to say, curiosity was present in the Middle Ages, it was simply channelled in other directions. The new curiosity instead is aimed, first, at the past, and then, in emulation of the past - in activities that can

fuhrung, Codices e Vaticanis Selecti 60 (Zürich, 1984), pp. 51, 134; eadem, 'The Art and Science of Renaissance Natural History: Thomas of Cantimpre, Pier Candido Decembrio, Conrad Gessner and Teodoro Ghisi in Vatican Library MS Urb. lat. 276', in: Viator 27 (1996), pp. 265-321, esp. pp. 270, 316.

37 Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (see n. 14), p. 207 and passim.


be seen as akin, even analogous, to the literary and artistic device of imitatio (a competitive, active imitation, vying with the past or with nature) - it is aimed at acquiring new knowledge of the workings of the world around us, in a mode of thinking, an approach, which is the converse of whiggishness.

The examples of the archaeological activities unleashed by the new curiosity are too numerous and too complex to examine in detail here, but Weiss traced their development from the time of Petrarca's own unsystematic interests in monuments and inscriptions through an increasing dominance in the work of early fifteenth-century figures like Ciriaco D'Ancona (d. 1455) who concen-trated on the antiquities in Greece; and Poggio Bracciolini who, besides making important manuscript discoveries, used the texts in these manuscripts as guides in his own study of monuments and edifices; as well as the deeply involved Biondo Biondi in his Roma instaurata composed in the 1440s.38

Also from the 1440s is Leon Battista Alberti's Descriptio Urbis Romae. Here, Alberti immersed himself in the examination and measurement of the monu-ments of Rome and their relative locations; he thus undertook the construction of a preliminary map of ancient Rome on the basis of the remains he could see. (There was as yet little excavation for the intended purpose of archaeological discovery.) Much as Poliziano would lean on and surpass his predecessors in developing criteria for establishing the validity of manuscripts, so Alberti stretched the efforts made by his predecessors and contemporaries, including Poggio Bracciolini, Biondo Biondi, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, toward the development of critical criteria for distinguishing monuments of antiquity: types of stone, mortar, styles of sculpture, dimensions, inscriptions, and where possible, descriptions of Greek antecedents found in ancient texts.

Here we find the same sort of critical methodology being developed, one which enables people to place the ancient artifacts in their ancient context in order to better understand the truth of history. And, as in the case of Poliziano, we find something new in Alberti's methodologies as well, in keeping with his fondness for quantitative analyses: a new method for mapping by applying the techniques and principles associated with the astrolabe, an instrument of naviga-tion and astronomy, in combination with approximate measurements of dis-tances among monuments - embryonic forms of techniques used in the sur-veying of archaeological sites today.39 The resulting circular plan (which has

38 Biondi Flavii Forliviensis, Romae instauratae Libri III [...] (see above, n. 14, also for justification of this vernacular form of Biondi's name).

39 Joan Gadol presents a limpid analysis of Alberti's procedures in her Leon Battista Alberti. Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago/London, 1969), pp. 70-75 and 157-195 passim\ for the parallels with the astrolabe, see ibidem, especially pp. 171-172. J. R. Kuhn notes a similar context of surveying techniques in the development of perspective; see her 'Measured Appearances: Documentation and Design in Early Perspective Drawing', in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990), pp. 114-132, at p. 117, and notes. Weiss (see n. 14 above) is also revealing. See too L. Vagnetti, 'La Descriptio Urbis Romae,

20 Cynthia Pyle

been projected by modern analysts, in the absence of Alberti's own projection, on the basis of his text; see Plate 1 - note the calibrated radial arm to provide coordinates in conjunction with the calibrated circumference) covers a larger area than those grids used to map an archaeological dig today, but it is a significant change in methodology, on which will be based the development of increasingly refined archaeological techniques.

7. The Character of Renaissance Humanism

Renaissance humanism has been variously seen as a revolutionary and as a reactionary movement. It had numerous manifestations. Taken in its guise as a scholarly curriculum for the schools (the studia humanitatis), it is clearly an outgrowth of parts of the medieval curriculum, though deeply changed on the basis of the newly rediscovered classics and the outlook they epitomize. Whether or not the mere repetition of classical stylistic formulas taken from ancient texts as models is at the root of what is revolutionary in humanism, and whether or not such rote work should tar the entire movement as reactionary,40

the movement as a whole was itself an expression of deep change, and certainly brought about vast intellectual and cultural changes. It is clear that humanism did not spring full-blown from the forehead of Francesco Petrarca; it is equally clear, however, that his influence and the quality of his intellect did much to shape it and to diffuse it throughout Europe, even if his own version of human-ism was in places at odds with itself and with his own version of Christianity.

What begins to happen dramatically in Petrarca's century, nonetheless, is an increase in understanding of the epochs preceding the present and the immediate or visible past. After a long hiatus in interest in the classical past on its own terms, Greek and Roman artifacts and ideas begin to affect people's perceptions

uno scritto poco noto di L. B. Alberti; contributo alia storia del rilevamento architettonico e topografico', in: Universita di Genova, Facolta di Architettura, Istituto di Elementi di Architettura e Rilievo dei Monumenti, Quaderno 1 (1968), pp. 25-79/80; R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven/London, 1998). Compare the illustration at p. 14 in Tavernor's book with those originally published by Vagnetti, 1968 (above), p. 44, and in Convegno internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Anno 371, Quaderno 209 (Roma, 1974), between pp. 86/87. See also three recent editions: Leon Battista Alberti, Descriptio Urbis Romae, eds. M. Furno and M. Carpo, Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance 56 (Geneva, 2000); Alberti and Raphael, Descriptio Urbis Romae ou comment faire le portrait de Rome, transl. B. Queysanne, ill. P. Thepot (Paris, 2002); and Leonis Baptistae Alberti, Descriptio Urbis Romae, eds. J.-Y. Boriaud and F. Furlan, transl. J.-Y. Boriaud, C. Colombo, and P. Hicks, postface M. Carpo, in Albertiana 6 (2003), pp. 125-215. Thepot's projection of Alberti's data is reproduced here in Plate 1 with the kind permission of Bruno Queysanne.

40 As it was among even some outstanding historians of science in the past; one thinks of Marie Boas, A. R. Hall, George Sarton, among others. (See my 'Renaissance Humanism and Science', n. 8 above.)


and understandings of the present. The classics, less and less filtered through dogmas of an intervening era, begin to live again increasingly on their own terms, and to take a place in relation to contemporary culture. This interest in understanding and absorbing another epoch's standards of behavior, of aesthet-ics, and partly of style is new, or renewed. It is evident in the changes wrought in the fifteenth-century Italian educational system; in the changes in the liter-ature and theater41 of the day, which translate (almost in the literal sense) classical imagery and ideas into the vernacular (notably in Poliziano's own work), and in the art and architecture surrounding people especially in those centers of culture we call cities.

While perhaps originating in part in an earlier conservative curriculum of rote learning and imitation of classical authors, the movement as it grew was not only stylistic or even rhetorical. The humanist movement itself, driven by that relatively unfettered curiosity alluded to earlier, encompassed huge discoveries in various realms of endeavor, intellectual as well as material, and involved the imitation not only of styles, both continuously known and recently uncovered, but also of thought patterns and modes of investigation newly understood and appreciated. Once these new or renewed approaches were applied to a world which had not been seen through their lens for a millennium, everything changed. This change cannot be pinned to any one moment, for it occurred very gradually, but it must have been, in attenuated form, not unlike evolutionary change in nature. The closer the humanists got to their classical sources and to an understanding of their sources' outlook, the more different the world must have looked - and, as a result of applying this new world view, the more different things became. No, the Middle Ages did not disappear from the humanists' consciousness; no, the Roman Church did not cease to play a huge part in the lives of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europeans; no, chivalric codes and medieval music and art were not forgotten. But all these things were now seen through different eyes, and this jarring allowed dramatic revolutions in art, in music, in engineering, in behavior to occur. In looking at the minutiae of gradual changes, as has been so carefully done in recent years, we must not lose sight of the sea-change that resulted from them. In the crucible of humanism a new world - our world - was being forged, a new outlook was being framed, one that allowed for the advances in science which are still being built upon today. (In this case we may call them advances, because they have a goal: a more complete understanding and utilization of the mechanisms of the world and the universe, and that goal is, bit-by-bit, being achieved, by fits and starts, as usual, but achieved nonetheless, in one of the most remarkable successes of human intellectual development in history.)

41 See P. F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy. Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, 1989); and my Milan and Lombardy (see n. 24, above), esp. chapters 5, 8-11.

22 Cynthia Pyle

Those who would separate scientific thought from humanistic thought may not have fully appreciated the innovative aspects of humanistic thought (inno-vative in the spirit of imitatio, as we have defined it, like the most profound art, literature and thought of all time, building upon and responding to predecessors, in this case with a renewed reference to classical antiquity). One cannot separate an interest in those cultural artifacts that are texts - an interest manifested in textual history, analysis, criticism - from a similarly complex interest in other artifacts besides texts: sculptures, buildings, city plans, the very manuscripts in which the texts are found. Were we to draw such a distinction, we would then be forced to deny the underlying analogy between the two activities discussed above - archaeology and textual criticism - an analogy which is based on the development and application of critical methodologies. Surely those working on manuscripts - those trying to discern their age, their script, their provenance (and hence their validity as witnesses), those undertaking a sort of textual archaeology - were engaged in what, by the criteria here advanced, was as 'scientific' an enterprise as archaeology, tout court. Yet what we are here term-ing 'textual archaeology' - its goal being the establishment of reliable texts -has long been recognized as one of the most significant 'humanistic' activities. Surely Angelo Poliziano, the most important textual critic of his age - some of whose texts are still those adopted today - was deeply engaged in activities in many ways very like those of a Leon Battista Alberti. If one is to term one such activity merely 'antiquarian', as some have the archaeological activities of Alberti (as if they were precious and superficial, rather than seminal and an important part of the very activities I have termed 'scientific' in my attempts to define philological work as scientific work), one is logically obliged to term the philological activities of Angelo Poliziano 'antiquarian' as well. But the serious-ness and depth of their undertakings cannot be denied, nor can their contribu-tions to the intellectual history of the west.

It has been objected that those who have investigated the origins of humanism have concentrated on method rather than on rhetoric. This is true. In looking at the transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance it seems to me essential to concentrate on method. Those who study rhetoric are also looking at method, albeit from a different perspective, especially when they call rhetoric a way - i.e. a method - of thinking. There is certainly a distinction to be drawn between rhetorical and investigative work, but it must be recognized that both are among the most prominent humanistic activities.42 If a Leon Battista Alberti is to be found travelling to Rome to measure (to measure!) and view the ancient monu-ments, and later incorporating his findings into his own architecture, not to mention writing an ambitious and influential treatise on architecture, in imitation

42 Along with, inter alia, historiography: see F. Tateo, 'Poliziano e la storiografia umanis-tica', in: Agnolo Poliziano poeta, scrittore, filologo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Montepulciano 3-6 novembre 1994, eds. V. Fera, M. Martelli (Firenze, 1998), pp. 195-205, and bibliographical references therein.


of Vitruvius (Alberti's not incidentally first published by Poliziano in 148543) -surely this is humanist activity. Like others today, I would define humanism, partly on the basis of Campana's and Kristeller's definitions, in terms of the new curriculum called the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy), but also partly in terms of what we find humanists doing professionally: they are not only teachers (though some are); they are also historians, philologists, diplomats, chancellors (and one can include certain activities of artists like Piero della Francesca, Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci44). These are not uniform occupations, and their practitioners are all engaged in the active life and thought of their age. And Alberti - who, to me, can represent humanist practice because of his deep affinity with the classical world, and his attempt to understand (analyze) that world, and then to incorporate (synthesize) it into his contemporary world - is a shining example. Of course, it must be said that I am dealing with the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, whereas some who define humanism differently are dealing with earlier or later periods. What is of interest to me, however, is how fifteenth-century humanism feeds into and even affects later currents of thought, and specifically developing scientific currents of thought. Although the humanists were certainly interested in developing their Latin (and Greek) style, and in vying (through imitatio) with the authors of antiquity, there is a more revolutionary aspect to their thought.

8. Doubt and Humanistic Intellectual Approaches

What created this sea-change in motivations between the medieval and the Renaissance approaches to learning and to the world? What caused, or rather permitted, men like Alberti and Poliziano to subject the world around them to doubt, to apply what we today call a critical approach to the phenomena they

43 De re aediflcatoria, pref. Angelus Politianus (Epistola ad Laurentium Medicem) (Flor-ence, Nicolaus Laurentii, Alamanus, Dec. 29, 1485): Hain *419, H-C *419, GW I, 579. In 1976, I advanced a hypothesis regarding Poliziano as the possible borrower of the Gonzaga manuscript of Alberti's treatise: Politian's "Orfeo" and other "Favole Mitologiche" in the Context of Late Quattrocento Northern Italy (Dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1976), pp. 204-206. On Poliziano's relationship with Alberti's work, see the important sug-gestions and findings of Vittore Branca in his 'Angelo Poliziano e Leon Battista Alberti', in: Leon Battista Alberti. Actes du Congres International de Paris, Sorbonne, Institut de France, Institut culturel italien, College de France, 10-15 avril 1995, eds. F. Furlan, A. P. Filotico, I. Giordano, P. Hicks, S. Matton and L. Vallance, 2 vols. (Torino/Paris, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 865-870, and note esp. p. 869 for Poliziano's own gromatic interests.

44 See, for example, C. M. Pyle, 'Art as Science: Scientific Illustration, 1490-1670 in Drawing, Woodcut and Copper Plate', in: Endeavour 24/2 (2000), pp. 69-75; P. Delia Francesca, Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus, ed. C. Grayson, 3 vols. (Florence, 1995).

24 Cynthia Pyle

observed in the world? (And this long before the seventeenth-century rise of critical approaches considered revolutionary by Jean Jehasse and others.45)

Many things fed into this complex transformation of the intellectual and cultural framework. Certain are the fourteenth-century divisions in the principal unifying force during the Western Middle Ages - the Roman Church; to which must be added the devastating recurrence of plagues in the same period, adding to people's questioning of all they had held to be true; and lastly the territorial conflicts among landowners great and small (conflicts perhaps themselves re-sulting from the powerful, basic and deeply unsettling forces just referred to).46

All these factors contributed to shaking the foundations of belief and of civilized society in its medieval form. The resulting fissures in the intellectual and cultural framework both forced and enabled the rise of new concepts, new solu-tions, new curiosities. As in all iconoclastic events, the very threat to structures allowed new ideas to bubble forth, and to spread - gradually and unpredictably, as in any evolution47 - throughout European society and culture. These eruptions

45 J. Jehasse, La renaissance de la critique. L 'essor de l'humanisme erudit de 1560 ä 1614 (Saint-Etienne, 1976). See also S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996). It should be noted that the denomination 'scientific revolution', as applied to seventeenth-cen-tury intellectual approaches to inquiry about the natural world, often through quantifying tools and methods of investigation, is perhaps not so much inept as incomplete and a little late. Account is seldom taken of the fifteenth-centuiy humanistic movement as an early stage of what we think of as a modern approach to scientific questions. I am currently preparing a book on these questions.

46 One could perhaps also look at climatological and migrational changes (which latter, however, could be the result of the former, or even of the political forces, including eccle-siastical politics, mentioned). These questions remain to be investigated in depth for particular regions, in the tradition of climatologists like Leroy-Ladurie (Histoire du climat depuis I'an mil, 2 vols. [Paris, 1983]), and demographers like Seymour Phillips and Nicolas Sänchez-Albornoz who tackle the problems posed by early documentation, as represented in N. Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move. Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 1994). I am gratefiil to Klaus Bade for the reference to the Oxford book. David Herlihy also deals with demographic changes: see, e.g., D. Herlihy and C. Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Fam-ilies. A Study of the Florentine Catasto of1427 (New Haven, 1985; French ed. 1978), esp. ch. 3 and 4; and on the plague, see Herlihy's posthumously edited lectures: The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. S. K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

47 Here one can perhaps even adduce an analogy with the recent hypothesis of punctuated equilibria in the natural world, whereby new speciations occur through isolation and may then be reintegrated into the mainstream and possibly favored by environmental conditions. These ideas, including their application to paleontology, were present in the work of Ernst Mayr, especially in his 1954 article: 'Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution', in: Evolution as a Process, eds. J. Huxley, A. C. Hardy, E. B. Ford (reprinted New York, 1963), pp. 188-213, esp. pp. 208-211, and were applied again to paleontology in N. Eldredge and S. J. Gould, 'Punctuated Equilibria: an Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism', in: Models in Paleobiology, ed. T. J. M. Schopf (San Francisco, 1972), pp. 82-115; now see the extensive section and literature in S. J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 745-1024.


created the fertile ground and the changed environment in which new ideas and new approaches to the world could take root and flourish.

One of these new approaches involved precisely the freedom to doubt in a relatively unrestricted manner alluded to earlier: a crucial basis for critical thought of any type. And doubt of course is closely allied to the more systematic philosophical approaches grouped under the term skepticism, approaches rediscovered in their ancient forms in the course of the fifteenth century.

Ancient, formal skepticism, while submerged in the Middle Ages (especially in its Pyrrhonian form, as Luciano Floridi has pointed out,48 but also in its Academic form), seems to begin reviving even in the work of Petrarca in the fourteenth century: Charles Schmitt found traces of Academic skepticism in Petrarca's De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia,49 and Angelo Poliziano cites Sextus Empiricus both in personal notes and in his first Centuria of Miscellanea, published in 1489.50

Skepticism, as others know better than I, is a slippery topic - as Floridi says, it can cut both ways - and I am still deepening my understanding of its function in the thought of the humanists.51 But it is there. And it is 'allowed in', so to speak, by the very historical factors that Petrarca was subject to from his birth in 1304. He was born in Arezzo, but educated from the age of eight in Avignon, and thus brings a French tradition of Latin culture to Italy when he returns to study in Bologna at sixteen, and again for long visits from the age of 22 on, finally residing permanently on Italian soil and retiring to Arquä as an old man. But he brings also a youth spent in the midst of a crisis which was to pain him all his life: the Avignon Papal Captivity (1309-1378). And he arrives in an Italy torn by wars and beset by outbreaks of plague. These catastrophes were bound to have effects on his thought, like the thought of his contemporaries. And it is clear even from his vernacular poetry that he was beset by doubt. His thought and work could be said to have been shaped by doubt, although he struggled against doubt until his death. Nonetheless, doubt works in mysterious ways.

48 L. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus. The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford, 2002).

49 Though he could not trace them directly to Cicero's Academica which, however, Petrar-ca knew: C. B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus. A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague, 1972), pp. 45-46, referring us to B. L. Ullman, 'Petrarch's Favorite Books' (1923), which is found in his Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome, 21973), pp. 113-133.

50 Angeli Politiani Miscellaneorum Centuriae Primae, in: Angeli Politiani Opera, quae quidem extitere hactenus, omnia (Basel, 1553); reprinted, ed. I. Maler, Monumenta Politica Philosophica Humanistica Rariora, series 1, no. 16, vol. 1 (Turin, 1971), p. 266, ch. 50. Cf. Lucia Cesarini Martineiii, 'Sesto Empirico e una dispersa enciclopedia delle arti e delle scienze di Angelo Poliziano', in: Rinascimento, series 2 ,20 (1980), pp. 327-358.

51 C. M. Pyle, 'Text as Body / Body as Text: The Humanists' Approach to the World Around Them and the Development of Science', in: Intellectual News 8 (2000), pp. 7-14.

26 Cynthia Pyle

Doubt itself can in fact be thought of as a sort of iconoclasm. Like icono-clasm, which contains within itself the renewing powers of death and destruc-tion, doubt has the power to destroy structures, allowing for their replacement or renewal. In the case of ideas, doubt can make inroads into the structures (or sys-tems) of belief. This is what we see threatening the Church in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This is also what allows the reform movements to occur, within the Church (Erasmus, the early Luther), then outside the Church (Zwingli, Calvin) and then again within (the Council of Trent). In these move-ments, people of conscience are struggling with the attempt to preserve structures of belief that they hold and feel a deep need for, but which they see as sullied or corrupted, either by particular dogmas or by earthly concerns (includ-ing a very mundane concern for defending the Church's territories and worldly possessions).

So too doubt creates the unease which causes us to seek answers to questions. Or perhaps one should say it allows the unease that causes us to seek answers. For out of such mental squirming can come great or at least significant ideas. And out of the need to ask come methods with which to do the asking. If we are too content in life, or mollified by faith or circumstances, we will not seek to change, we will not work, we will not strive; if there are no obstacles, we will not invent means to overcome obstacles. (And, conversely, of course, if there are too many obstacles, we will be overwhelmed by them, and paralyzed, driven to inaction - incidentally, another effect in common with skepticism, this time extreme skepticism). Thus it is that an element of skepticism is needed to create an intellectual method with which to successfully address questions of science, including natural science. (It was also, of course, present in the medieval enquiries into theological and natural questions, but within the limits of per-missible answers.)

I am not requiring, as perhaps Richard Popkin and Charles Schmitt would,52

that skepticism appear in its philosophically coherent form among the human-ists; they may well be right that humanists did not engage the true philosophical questions of skepticism until the sixteenth century. I am, however, interested in the fact that the Italian humanists were beginning to meet classical skepticism directly, in the texts both of Cicero's Academica and also in the Pyrrhonian Outlines of Sextus Empiricus, acquired in Italy by Francesco Filelfo between 1427 and 1441.53 They were becoming conscious, from Petrarca on, of the con-

52 R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1979); C. B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus (see n. 49).

3 When he mentions it in a letter to Giovanni Aurispa; cf. C. B. Schmitt, 'An Unstudied Fifteenth Century Latin Translation of Sextus Empiricus by Giovanni Lorenzi', in: C. H. Clough, ed., Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance. Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller (Manchester, 1976), pp. 244-261; R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne' secoli XIV e XV, ed. E. Garin (Firenze, 1967, J1905), p. 48; and see Floridi, Sextus Empiricus (see n. 48). On the Academica, Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus (see n. 49).


structive and of the destructive qualities of systematic doubt. And so one may, I think, be permitted the use of a vague word like 'approach' to define the crucial, if not yet organized, application to the world around us of thoughts and modes of thought absorbed from this direct confrontation with long-suppressed texts advocating doubt - an application which seems to me essential to the develop-ment of what we today call science.

9. Conclusion

Returning now to my intrepid opening sally on types of thought: it may be help-ful to recall with Richard McKeon (in his remarkable 1947 article on Aristotle's method54) that Aristotle - whom one must admire for his work as a practicing biologist, as did D'Arcy Thompson, who called him possibly the greatest biologist before Cuvier55 - Aristotle in many cases really saw it all. He realized that we require both the inductive and the deductive approaches to the world around us to be able to understand its truth (the goal of all natural and historical sciences, as of all science in the broadest sense as well). We must work from both ends - the analytical/theoretical and the synthetic/empirical - in order to understand. We must experience the world, hypothesize, test our hypotheses against the world's reality, and come up with conclusions that fit the world as it is, not just as we can superficially see it to be (the heavens rotating around our planet, for example). In its rigorous search for the real truth - the truth of reality - science can indeed be seen to have a goal, and thus to progress (with nuances). And, as we have discovered here, one need not advocate whiggism to see this. As science builds upon its past understandings (discarding some, confirming others), its picture of reality changes and evolves by means of what I like to think of as a 'ricochet' process, a dialogue or dialectic (yes) - an agon between theory and reality.

Aristotle himself saw this, in all its philosophical complexities, which are vast indeed. It is not clear to me (though it may be to some) that many of the thinkers of the Latin Middle Ages - who of course revered Aristotle (in a fashion which might not have totally pleased him)56 - that they allowed themselves, or were allowed, to see these complexities as he did, or as later scientists would.

54 R. McKeon, 'Aristotle's Conception of the Development and the Nature of Scientific Method', in: Journal of the History of Ideas 8 (1947), pp. 3-44, esp. pp. 7-34; reprinted in Roots of Scientific Thought. A Cultural Perspective, eds. P. P. Wiener, A. Noland (New York, 1957), pp. 73-89.

55 D'A. Thompson, 'On Aristotle as a Biologist' (see n. 35). 56 See E. Grant, 'Ways to Interpret the Terms "Aristotelian" and "Aristotelianism" in

Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy', in: History of Science 25 (1987), pp. 335-358; and the essays by E. Kessler and C. H. Lohr (and others) in: D. A. DiLiscia, E. Kessler and C. Methuen, eds., Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy of Nature. The Aristotle Commentary Tradition (Aldershot, 1997).

28 Cynthia Pyle

Instead, it seems to me that the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fif-teenth centuries were beginning once more to look at the world around them -largely, but not exclusively, in the form of manuscripts of ancient texts and arti-facts of ancient culture - in a way that Aristotle himself would have appreciated: that is, from the points of view both of Plato (who was certainly also prominent in the Middle Ages) and of the atomist Democritus, whose inductive approach Aristotle opposes to Plato's deductive one in the passages so beautifully brought out by McKeon.

The great Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino was himself beginning to see this when he commissioned, quite possibly from Leonardo da Vinci, his remark-able lost fresco of 'The Laughing and the Weeping Philosophers' (Democritus and Heraclitus) observing the globe between them in the 1470s - a painting Bramante later copied for the Milanese poet, Gaspare Visconti in the 1480's or 1490's, which latter version is now in the Brera in Milan (see Plate 2). This painting - indeed this topos (which moves out into vernacular culture, in literature as well as art, precisely at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries)5 - this painting and especially its frieze - based as it is both on ancient texts (including Parmenides) studied with the new understanding of Greek and the new philological methods, and on ancient monuments (in-cluding the Arch of Septimius Severus) studied with the new archaeological methods - seems to me to represent the very synthesis (to use the term loosely here in conclusion) essential to the work and thought of scientific endeavors in all their manifestations (including the art of scientific illustration, which I cannot even touch on here58). And this approach - Aristotle's own approach - was being addressed by the great philologist Angelo Poliziano in his last two years of life, when he discussed at the Florentine Studio Aristotle's Prior Analytics and wrote on his Posterior Analytics,59 I need not point out the proximity of Poliziano and Ficino, nor their close intellectual rapport, even if attenuated at the end of their lives.

57 Analyzed in never-enough-depth in the last chapter of C. M. Pyle, Milan and Lombardy in the Renaissance (see n. 24), chapter 11; and see the condensation in Intellectual News 2 (1997), pp. 11-17.

58 See above, note 44. 59 E.g. Miscellaneorum centuria secunda (see n. 34), vol. 4, p. 99: chapt. 53, 'Universale';

cf. P. Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli. Florentine Humanism in the High Renais-sance (Princeton, 1998), p. 120; I thank Brian Ogilvie for indicating this book's potential relevance to these questions. See also A. Poliziano, Lamia. Praelectio in Priora Aristotelis Analytica, ed. A. Wesseling (Leiden, 1986). Robin Smith considers the Prior Analytics to be the prefatorial synthesis of the earlier Posterior Analytics: 'Preface' and 'Introduction' to: Aristotle, Prior Analytics, transl. R. Smith (Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1989), pp. X, XIII-XIV.


This healthy amalgam, then, of skepticism, induction and deduction - this scientific approach to the world - had indeed been re-born by the end of the fifteenth century in Italy.60

60 This article was drafted and versions of it delivered as lectures while I was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 2002-2003. The lectures were offered at collo-quia at the University of Groningen, Feb. 22, 2003, the University of Amsterdam, April 15, 2003, and the University of Leiden, May 13, 2003. I am grateful to Endre Szecsenyi for reading an early draft of the paper and to Paul Elbourne for linguistic confirmations. I regret that my reconstrual of certain arguments in the first section occurred in proof, just too late for me to show the dedicatee this latest version.

Plate 1. Diagram of Rome by Patrick Thepot according to Leon Battista Alberti's Descriptio Urbis Romae (see n. 39).

Plate 2. Donato Bramante, Heraclitus and Democritus, Fresco, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

Local Elites and 'National' Mythologies in the Burgundian Dominions in 229 the Fifteenth Century. Graeme Small (Glasgow)

A Holy Crown for a Nation. The Symbolic Meaning of the Holy Crown of 247 Hungary and the Construction of the Idea of a Nation. Kees Teszelszky (Groningen)

Conflict of Image? The Most Christian King makes War on the Pope. 261 Jennifer Britnell (Durham)

Johannes Cincinnius, Van der niderlage drijer legionen (1539). Die 273 Varusschlacht in der Sicht eines westfälischen Humanisten. Mit einem Faksimile des Textes. Volker Honemann (Münster)

Index Nominum

Index Rerum

299

307

The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World: Reflections on History and...

Documents

Transcript of The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World: Reflections on History and...