Nauert - Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe

Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe

In this updated edition of his classic account, Charles Nauert charts the rise of humanism as the distinctive culture of the social, political, and intellectual elites in Renaissance Europe. He traces humanisms emergence in the unique social and cultural conditions of fourteenth-century Italy and its gradual diffusion throughout the rest of Europe from the late fifteenth century onwards. He shows how, despite its elitist origins, humanism became a major force in the popular culture and fine arts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the powerful impact it had on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. He uses art and biographical sketches of key figures to illuminate the narrative and concludes with an account of the limitations and eventual transformations of humanism at the end of the Renaissance. This comprehensive account of the development and significance of humanistic culture will be essential reading for all students of Renaissance Europe.

CHARLES G. NAUERT is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His major publications include several essays on pre-Reformation academic and religious controversies and The Age of Renaissance and Reformation (1977).

NEW APPROACHES TO EUROPEAN HISTORY

Series editors

WILLIAM BEIK Emory University

T. C. W. BLANNING Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

New Approaches to European History is an important textbook series, which provides concise but authoritative surveys of major themes and problems in European history since the Renaissance. Written at a level and length accessible to advanced school students and undergraduates, each book in the series addresses topics or themes that students of European history encounter daily: the series embraces both some of the more traditional subjects of study, and those cultural and social issues to which increasing numbers of school and college courses are devoted. A particular effort is made to consider the wider international implications of the subject under scrutiny.

To aid the student reader scholarly apparatus and annotation is light, but each work has full supplementary bibliographies and notes for further reading: where appropriate chronologies, maps, diagrams and other illustrative material are also provided.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe

Second edition

CHARLES G. NAUERT

University of Missouri, Columbia

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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Cambridge University Press 1995, 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1995

Reprinted five times

Second edition 2006

6th printing 2013

Printed in the United Kingdom by the CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-521-83909-9 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-54781-9 Paperback

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Contents

Illustrations

Preface

This book aims to present a comprehensive account of the development and significance of the humanistic culture of Europe (north as well as south) in the age of the Renaissance. It is based on the researches of more than a generation of scholars active since about the end of the Second World War. At that time, critical attacks on the traditional picture of Renaissance civilization established by Jakob Burckhardt had produced so much doubt about the meaning, and even the existence, of a Renaissance that many historians abandoned use of the term itself, a situation brilliantly demonstrated in Wallace K. Fergusons The Renaissance in Historical Thought (1948). In the aftermath of that historiographical demolition, I myself wrote a dissertation which systematically avoided use of the dread term Renaissance, and not a single member of my examining committee challenged or even mentioned the omission. Yet leaving the Renaissance and humanism out of the history of the Renaissance age was not a viable position, as I found when I undertook to revise my dissertation into a book that addressed the intellectual problems of the sixteenth century, and found in an even more pressing way when I faced the task of explaining the Renaissance to a class of college freshmen in a lecture of fifty minutes. Whether historians like the concepts Renaissance and humanism or not, the centuries to which those terms are conventionally applied really did exist and must be faced, since they contributed in important ways to the subsequent development of Western society and civilization.

In my teaching and in preparing this book, I have had the guidance of a host of scholars who have gone back to the sources and have created the materials out of which one can derive a credible account of the rise of humanistic culture and its historical significance. In my own thinking about the age, the crucial influences have been a handful of stimulating articles by Theodor E. Mommsen, whom I never met, and the publications and personal encouragement of Hans Baron, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and my own mentor, William J. Bouwsma. To go beyond this short list would be invidious, for I have learned from a whole generation of colleagues. Most of their names appear in the Bibliography, and I can only hope that I had the good sense to make constructive use of what their publications offer.

I owe special thanks to my colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia, especially for enabling me to have a year free from teaching to work on this book. I dedicate this book with love and thanks to my wife Jean and our sons Paul and Jon.