Humanist concepts of renaissance and middle ages in the tre- and quattrocento

Author(s): M. L. McLaughlin
Source: Renaissance Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, A Tribute to DENYS HAY (OCTOBER 1988), pp.
131-142
Published by: Wiley
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Renaissance Studies Vol. 2 No.

Humanist concepts of renaissance and

middle ages in the tre- and quattrocento
M. L. McLaughlin

In the century and a quarter since Burckhardt published The Civilization of

the Renaissance in Italy (i860), the most comprehensive synthesis of 'the
Renaissance debate' was provided by Wallace Ferguson in 1948.1 Comment
ing on the instances of metaphors of 'rebirth' and 'enlightenment' found in
texts written between 1300 and 1600, Ferguson concluded: 'The actual
metaphor of rebirth does not occur [in Italy], but there is nearly always some
equivalent expression.'2 Twenty years later Denys Hay, observing analog
ous metaphors in Boccaccio, Palmieri and Vasari, reached a similar
conclusion: 'In the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio ... no word existed to
express the idea of a secular and non-theological rebirth, and it was not hit
upon until in the sixteenth century Vasari . . . used the expression "rinas
cita". It is clear that such an expression would have helped Palmieri in the
early fifteenth century, as a label summing up his picture of past and present.
The word, then, waited almost two centuries after the idea had emerged.'3 In
what follows I wish both to demonstrate that the verb ("rinascere") if not the
noun actually appears in and before Palmieri, and also to examine other
instances of this and similar metaphors in the period between Palmieri and
Vasari.

Applying the same philological method to the term 'Middle Ages',

N. Edelman could only find two examples of 'media tempestas' before the
late sixteenth century, both in a preface to Apuleius of 1469, but he concluded
that 'it seems plausible to imagine that the term was not entirely new, even
then'.4 However, I can adduce four more examples of the term in an Italian
This article began as a paper read first at the Denys Hay Medieval and Renaissance History Seminar at
the University of Edinburgh and later, in a slightly different form, at the Italian Renaissance Seminar in
Oxford in March 1987. I am grateful to the many people, including Professor Hay himself, who offered
valuable comments at these seminars.
ι Wallace Κ. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston,
Mass., 1948). To this standard survey of the whole subject should be added in particular Denys Hay (ed.),
The Renaissance Debate (New York, 1965), and Denys Hay, 'Historians and the Renaissance during the last
25 years', in The Renaissance. Essays in Interpretation (London/New York, 1982), 1—32.
2 Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, 28.
3 Denys Hay (ed.), The Renaissance Debate, 1.
4 N. Edelman, 'The early uses of Medium Aevum, Moyen Age, Middle Ages', Romanic R, 29 (1938),
3-25 (p. 22). Edelman's conclusions still appear in the standard textbooks, cf. Denys Hay, Annalists and
Historians. Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1979), 90; and in
J.-M. Dufays, 'La place du concept de "Moyen-Age" dans l'historiographie', Rev Bel PH, 6$ (1987),
257-73·

) ig88 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press

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 132 M. L. McLaughlin

context, three of them from the 1390s — at least seventy years before
Edelman's first instance — and one from 1473, very close to Edelman's earliest
date. As with the term 'renaissance', so with 'the middle ages' I wish to
document the earliest appearances of the term and to analyse the cultural
context in which it occurs.

Ideas of 'renovatio' in the late Middle Ages abound in political and

religious contexts.5 In Italy calls for political renewal are to be found in both
Dante and Petrarch, the former focusing his hopes on Henry VII and citing
Vergil's fourth Eclogue about the return of a Golden Age,6 the latter
enthusing about Cola di Rienzo's revival of a Roman Republic in 1347.
Petrarch's letter to Cola in 1347 proclaims: 'Italy, which languished as long as
its head (Rome) lay ill, has now raised herself on to her elbow . . . Camillus
restored Rome when its ruins were still new and smoking, but you, Cola,
have restored the city from ancient ruins of which we had long since
despaired.'7 But, unlike Dante, Petrarch establishes a link between political
and cultural regeneration. At the end of the letter he promises that he will
celebrate Cola's exploit in the more appropriate medium of poetry, 'having
first surrounded my head with the laurel wreath, ascended the lofty but
deserted Mount Helicon and recalled the Muses back from exile'.8
But in the course of Petrarch's life, as in the course of the humanist
movement as a whole, interest in political regeneration declines and only the
claim of a cultural rebirth remains. Mommsen showed that Petrarch was the

first to use the term 'medium tempus' (Epistule Metrice 111.33.$), the first to
adumbrate the concept of a Dark Age (Familiares xx.8), lasting the thousand
years from 312 ad to Petrarch's own time (Familiares vi.2), and that he also
was aware of standing on the borderline between an epoch of darkness and
one of enlightenment (Rerutn Memorandarum Libri 1.19, Africa ix.446—'77).9
But other passages, not cited by Mommsen, also relate to cultural renewal:
elsewhere in the Africa Petrarch sees himself as a second Ennius halting the
Muses' flight from Italy (11.443-45) or rather recalling them to Italy after
their long exile (ix.222—31); and Petrarch regards himself as a protagonist in
this renaissance partly because of his revival of the laurel ceremony in 1341

5 Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, 306-11.

6 'ceu Titan preoptatus exoriens, nova spes Latio seculi melioris effulsit. Tunc pleique . . . tam
Saturnia regna quam Virginem redeuntem cum Marone cantabant . . . Tunc hereditas nostra . . . nobis
erit in integrum restituta' (Dante, Opere minori, ed. P. V. Mengaldo et al., 11, Milan/Naples, 1979, $64).
7 Petrarch, Variae 48 in his Opera Omnia (Basle, 1581), 535-40 (pp. 537-8). There is a similar mention
of Rome's 'renovata gloria' under Cola in Petrarch's letter to the Roman people (Sine Nomine, Ep. 4, ibid.
715)·
8 'Apollinea fronte redimitus, disertum [sic] atque altum Helicona penetrabo, illic Castalium ad
fontem, Musis ab exilio revocatis, ad mansuram gloriae nostrae memoriam sonantius aliquid canam, quod
longius audietur' (ibid. 540).
9 T. Mommsen, 'Petrarch's conception of the Dark Ages', Speculum, 17 (1942), 226-42.

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 Humanist concepts of renaissance and middle ages 133

'after a gap of 1,200 years'.10 Petrarch thus implies that his revival of Latin
poetry and his recovery of ancient texts, underestimated by his own age,
may be properly appreciated by future generations.
Petrarch was also the first Italian writer to use the metaphor of rebirth in a
literary rather than political or religious context: in Familiares 1.1.6 he tries to
claim that Italian vernacular poetry, which first developed in Sicily in the
duecento, is nothing other than ancient Graeco-Latin rhythmic poetry
reborn: 'This genre of poetry, which was famous amongst the very ancient
of the Latin and Greek writers, was reborn (renatum) in Sicily a few centuries
ago, so it is said, and it soon spread throughout Italy and even further
afield.'11 This passage, although in factual terms inaccurate, is nevertheless
significant as the first use of the metaphor of rebirth in Italy; and although it
has been ignored by scholars, perhaps because it makes a false claim for the
paternity of Italian vernacular poetry, it is an important programmatic
statement, since it connects with the poet's other statements about renewal
and confirms that Petrarch (and his successors such as Poliziano) wanted
poetry in the volgare to rival classical poetry.
Dante too had hinted at a revival of poetry in the Divina Commedia. His
poem is clearly in some sense a vernacular rewriting of the Aeneid\ and when
Vergil appears in Inferno to guide Dante he is described as 'Chi per lungo
silenzio parea fioco' (1.63): the implication is that in Dante's poem Vergil
after his long silence is able to speak to us again.12 Another line from the
beginning of Purgatorio, 'ma qui la morta poesi resurga' (1.7), lent itself to
broader interpretations: although it refers to the dead poetry of Inferno
giving way to poetry about those who have been saved, it is no doubt the
source of Guido da Pisa's phrase about Dante: 'Per istum poetam resuscita est
mortua poesis'; but Guido clearly elaborates the metaphor in order to suggest
a more general renaissance of poetry under Dante: 'Dante truly revived the
art of poetry and made the ancient poets live again in our minds . . . for he
brought dead poetry out of the darkness into the light.'13
Boccaccio, apart from his famous image about Giotto and painting
('avendo egli quella arte ritornata in luce', Decameron Vi.5), also used
analogous metaphors for the achievements of both Dante and Petrarch. He

ίο 'morem ilium . . . ultra mille ducentos annos obsolevisse', in C. Godi, 'La Collatio Laureationis del
Petrarca', Italia Medievale e Umanistica, 13 (1970), 1-27 (p. 17).
11 'Quod genus, apud Siculos, ut fama est, non multis ante seculis renatum, brevi per omnem Italiam
ac longuis manavit, apud Grecorum ac Latinorum vetustissimos celebratum' (Familiares, 1.1.6, ed\
V. Rossi and U. Bosco, 1, Florence, 1933, 4).
12 Hence Giovanni del Virgilio calls Dante a second Vergil (Eclogue m.33-4: 'Alter es aut idem', in
Dante, Opere tnittori, 676).
13 Cited by P. O. Kristeller, 'Humanism and scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance', now in his
Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. M. Mooney (New York, 1979), 273 n. 3.

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 134 M. L. McLaughlin

echoes Guido da Pisa (and Purgatorio 1.7) when he says of Dante: 'Per costui la
morta poesia meritamente si puo dire resuscitata';14 and on reading
Petrarch's Africa he writes a Latin poem in praise of the epic, reusing
Petrarch's ideas about the return of the Muses from exile.15 Boccaccio was
also so impressed by Petrarch's coronation with the poetic laurel that he too
notes that this is the first time a poet has been crowned since Statius in 80 ad
and feels that this event will usher in a golden age of poetry.16 But
Boccaccio's most mature statement of these ideas is in a late letter to Jacopo
delle Pizzinghe in 1372.17 There he describes Dante as having found the
spring of the Muses which had been forgotten for centuries, though he had
found it by a kind of diversion, not the ancient route (presumably meaning
that Dante had written the Comedy in the vernacular, not in Latin); but after
Dante Petrarch had begun to travel along the old road ('vetus iter' -
probably Petrarch's greater use of Latin), he had opened up the path to those
coming after him and had been rewarded with the laurel crown which the
people of Rome had not seen for over a thousand years. Boccaccio ends the
passage by quoting Vergil's fourth eclogue about the dawn of the Golden
Age. Towards the end of the trecento, then, ideas of a Golden Age revival
concern literature rather than politics and Petrarch is beginning to
overshadow Dante as the renewal of poetry comes to mean the rebirth of
Latin poetry.
In 1395 the foremost humanist of the time, Coluccio Salutati, wrote a
letter to Cardinal Bartolommeo Oliari in which he uses the adjective
'medius' in a way which anticipates but does not completely correspond to
our adjective 'medieval'. In a survey of Latin writers he rehearses the
orthodox humanist view that the age of Cicero represented the peak of Latin
literature; while the second period, including writers from Seneca and Livy
down to the time of Cassiodorus, revived or rather kept alive something of
Ciceronian eloquence. But after Cassiodorus came the watershed in Latin
writing: authors such as Ivo and Bernard of Chartres, Hildebert of Lavardin,
Peter of Blois, Abelard and John of Salisbury, 'are not worthy to be com
pared to those ancient writers nor even to those intervening authors: they are
even more remote from them in style than in time'.18 Here 'mediis illis
dictatoribus' refers to the writers between the age of Cicero and that of the
twelfth century, that is, those that he had listed from Seneca to Cassiodorus
— what we would call not medieval but Silver Age or Late Antique writers.
He goes on to suggest that there is a fourth age, his own time, in which
14 Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, ed. A. Solerti (Milan, 1905), 13.
1$ In G. Boccaccio, Le opere latine minori, ed. A. F. Massera (Bari, 1928), 100-5.
16 Ibid. 241.
17 Ibid. 191-7, esp. 195-6.
18 Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. F. Novati, m (Rome, 1896), 83-4.

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 Humanist concepts of renaissance and middle ages 135

literature has emerged again first in the writings of Albertino Mussato and
Geri d'Arezzo, then in the works of Dante in the vernacular, and Petrarch
and Boccaccio in Latin. Salutati clearly regarded the twelfth-century authors
as those who intervened between the last vestiges of Ciceronian eloquence
and the trecento revival: here a 'medieval' concept is being employed,
although the adjective 'medius' is not used of this group of writers. But in
another of Salutati's correspondents we find not one but two instances of
'medius' corresponding precisely to our use of the term 'medieval'.
Filippo Villani wrote a first version of his De Famosis Civitatis Florentie
Civibus in 1382 and in that first edition he describes Domenico Silvestri's De
Insulis as listing the names that have been given to the various islands 'in
ancient, medieval and modern times'.19 In 1395, the year of Salutati's letter
to Oliari, Villani rewrote his work in better Latin after receiving the critical
comments of the Florentine Chancellor himself. In the later edition Villani
added a sentence about Salutati having included in his De Laboribus Herculis
everything that was written about Hercules 'by ancient and medieval poets
and historians'.20 The point here is that we find the expressions 'mediis
temporibus' and 'medii poete' in the same work, the second instance being
approved by Salutati who himself used the adjective 'medius' and the
concept of a medieval interregnum, in a letter from the same period.
Examining in more detail the context in which Villani uses this term, one
notices that in his introductory letter he expresses repeatedly his dissatisfac
tion with his own time, 'this shipwreck of a century which is going from bad
to worse'.21 Filippo Villiani's use of the concept of a middle age seems to be
linked to a fin-de-siècle spirit of crisis, which has its roots in a Petrarchan
contempt for the present age.
Leonardo Bruni's Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum22 are more ambivalent
about the present age, on the one hand condemning its loss of classical texts,
as Petrarch and Villani had done, but on the other hand suggesting that
despite the extinction of scholarship elsewhere, a few seeds have remained in
Florence, which will soon bring forth great enlightenment. In his History of

19 'describens . . . quibus nominibus [insulae] priscis mediis modernisque temporibus fuerint variatae'
(F. Villani, Liber De Civitatis Florentiae Famosis Civibus, ed. G. C. Galletti, Florence, 1847, 20).
20 Ibid. 18-19 contains the first version of the passage; the second version ('amplius quicquid medii
veteresque poete hystoricique de Hercule vel Herculibus scripserunt, quod latinis licteris mandatum sit, et
omnia que de laudibus Herculis ficta sunt cum allegoriarum lumine multo conquisita labore copiose
ornateque ibidem congesta sunt') is in Salutati, Epistolario, iv (Rome, 1911), 492.
21 F. Villani, De . . . Famosis Civibus, 3-5.
22 Bruni's Dialogi are in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan/Naples, 1952), 44-98. For
the controversy over the interpretation of the two books, see H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian
Renaissance, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 22ôff; J. E. Seigel, 'Civic humanism or Ciceronian rhetoric?',
Past Present, 34 (1966), 3-48; H. Baron, 'Leonardo Bruni: professional rhetorician or civic humanist?', ibid.
36 (1966), 21—37; D. Quint, 'Humanism and modernity: a reconsideration of Bruni's Dialogues', Renaiss
Q, 38 (1985), 423-45

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 136 M. L. McLaughlin

Florence, Bruni is explicit about the existence of a middle age in political

terms: in the case of Florence, the middle ages lasted over 200 years from the
destruction of the City by Totila until its restoration under Charlemagne,
although throughout this 'middle age' ('per medium illud tempus') Florence
was never without some inhabitants.23 Bruni thus employs both the concept
and the terminology of a middle age, though in his History he is more
concerned with political than with cultural decadence and revival. But in his
Vite di Dante e di Petrarca (143 5)24 the link between politics and culture is
articulated into a republican theory of culture.
In discussing Petrarch, Bruni in 1435 now claims that Petrarch was the
initiator of the revival predicted in the Dialogi and which is now at its peak,
'nella présente altezza' (Baron, p. 64). Here Bruni launches into a digression
about the development of Latin literature which restates the canonical
supremacy of Cicero's age but in Bruni's characteristic republican key: Έ
puossi dire che le lettere e gli studi della lingua latina andassero parimenti con
lo stato della repubblica di Roma; perocché insino all'età di Tullio ebbe
accrescimento' (ibid.); but under the Empire both liberty and literature
declined. Bruni reiterates the fact that the Lombards ruled Tuscany for 204
years and that after their demise Tuscan and other cities recovered their
liberty and began to renew themselves culturally, although this cultural
revival was initially concerned with vernacular poetry rather than with
writing in Latin. After this digression, he expands his earlier statement on
Petrarch as initiator of the literary revival:

Francesco Petrarca fu il primo, il quale ebbe tanta grazia d'ingegno che riconobbe e
rivoco in luce l'antica leggiadria dello stile perduto e spento. Ε posto che in lui
perfetto non fusse, pur da sé vide ed aperse la via a questa perfezione, ritrovando
l'opere di Tullio e quelle gustando e intendendo, adattandosi, quanto poté e seppe, a
quella elegantissima e perfettissima facondia. (pp. 65—6)

Bruni adopts a critical perspective here in assessing Petrarch's Latin as not

perfect, for he sees the revival as being the return not just of eloquence but of
Ciceronian eloquence which reaches its peak in Bruni's own time.
The cult of Ciceronian Latin received a boost in 1421 with the discovery at
Lodi of a manuscript containing three cardinal works of the Roman orator:
the three books of De Oratore (hitherto incomplete), the full version of the
Orator (a defective version circulated before this) and the Brutus (completely
unknown to medieval scholars).25 The text of this manuscript was
23 Historiae Florentini Populi, ed. E. Santini, RIS xix, 3 (Città di Castello, 1914), 23-4.
24 References to Bruni's Vite in what follows are from Hans Baron (éd.), Leonardi Bruni Aretino,
Humanistisch-Philosophische Schriften (Leipzig, 1928), 50—69.
25 On the Lodi manuscript see R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne' secoli XIV e XV, 1
(Florence, 1905), 100.

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 Humanist concepts of renaissance and middle ages

deciphered largely by Gasparino Barzizza. When in 1422 a copy of the text

was finally transcribed and sent to Guarino in Verona, the latter thanked
Barzizza in a letter which began: Ί have heard that the complete Orator of
Cicero has — by divine aid I believe — returned from exile and from a long
period of obscurity . . . Cicero on his renaissance (renascens) to the upper
world fittingly chose you, Barzizza, as the first person on earth he would stay
with . . ,'26 Guarino here uses the actual metaphor of rebirth — as well as the
related images of enlightenment and return from exile — in the context of the
recovery of classical texts. Guarino shares Bruni's optimism that culture has
revived: when another work of Cicero is discovered in Verona Guarino talks

of'revivescentis disciplinae';27 and later, in 1452, Guarino sees the revival of

scholarship stemming from the twin rediscoveries of Cicero and of Greek.28
Guarino, like Salutati and Bruni, also discussed the evolution of Latin
literature, but his analysis is more detailed than Salutati's and less ideological
than Bruni's. Knowing more than Salutati about archaic Latin, he notes that
the age of Cicero was not the first but the third age of Latin: 'Then came the
third age in which Latin was now a beautiful, adult and harmonious
language . . . Later the fourth age, in which Latin was mixed with other
languages, emerged or rather it became submerged.'29 The application of
this human model of growth to a language is significant since it arose in the
context of the famous humanist quarrel in 1435 about the relationship
between Latin and the vernacular and it was soon transferred, as we shall see,
to the development of the vernacular in the quattrocento.
Another humanist who transcribed part of the Lodi manuscript was Flavio
Biondo.30 Biondo is better known as the historian of the decline of the
Roman Empire in his Decades: in that work the medieval period in political
terms is the millennium from the sack of Rome in 412 ad until 1412. But in
other works he is also interested in literary decline and revival: in a letter of
1443 he noted that for 1,200 years there had been few poets and no historians

26 'Ad nos perlatum est integrum Ciceronis Oratorem postliminio et e longis tenebris divinitus credo
rediisse . . . Renascens ad superos Cicero [te] primum in terris delegit hospitem', Epistolario di Guarino
Veronese, ed. R. Sabbadini, ι (Venice, 1915), 345.
27 Ibid. 452.
28 Ibid. 11, 583. Bruni also sees Chrysoloras' teaching of Greek as a turning-point, ending 700 years of
ignorance of Greek language and culture (Rerum Suo Tempore Gestarum Commentarius, ed. C. Di
Pierro, RIS, xix, 3, Bologna, 1926, 431). Later Poliziano claims that thanks to his own labours Homer at
last speaks to the West after a silence of a thousand years (cf. F. Simone, 'La coscienza délia rinascita negli
umanisti', La Rinascita, 2, 1939, 850-1).
29 'Successif tertia iam [aetas] formosa iam adulta iam concinna, quam recte romanam, idest robustam,
appellaverim . . . Quarta deinde mixta quaedam emersit seu potius immersit lingua' (Epistolario di
Guarino Veronese, 11, 506). On this whole question see Mirko Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare: Storia di
una questione umanistica (Padua, 1984).
30 On Flavio Biondo see Denys Hay, 'Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages', Ρ Br Acad, 45 (1959),
97-128.

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 138 M. L. McLaughlin

in Latin,31 and more extensively, in his Italia Illustrata, he commented on the

cultural revival in Italy. His interest in recent literary history is probably
connected with his transcription of Cicero's own literary history of the
preceding age in the Brutus. Given this Ciceronian background, it is not
surprising that Biondo is critical of both Petrarch and Salutati, claiming that
they lacked the Ciceronian eloquence that was now revived by scholars of his
own generation.32
Another contemporary of Bruni's is responsible for using the verb
'rinascere' in vernacular in the 1430s. Matteo Palmieri's Delia vita civile
(1435) shares the confidence of Bruni, Alberti and other humanists in the
1430s: he claims that literature, painting, architecture and sculpture have
now revived frilevate e tomate in luce et. . . facte perfecte') after a decline
of 'piu d'ottocento anni', he points to Bruni as the protagonist of the revival,
and he predicts to his contemporaries: 'Vedrete l'un di piu che l'altro fiorire
gl'ingegni de' cittadini vostri, pero che naturale è rinascere 1'arti perdute
quando vuole l'uso.'33
Perhaps one of the most glaring omissions from Ferguson's book was the
name of Lorenzo Valla: since 1948 much work has been done which now
allows us to appreciate fully Valla's outstanding position in the development
of quattrocento humanism.34 He is also a key figure in the promotion of a
renaissance programme of cultural revival. The preface to the first book of
his major work, the Elegantie Lingue Latine,35 emphasizes the link between
literature and the other liberal arts: in the preceding period along with the
Latin language, the study of philosophy and of law, as well as the arts of
painting, sculpture and architecture had degenerated and almost died out,
but now in Valla's age they are being reawakened and revived. His aim,
therefore, is to restore the Latin language, the basis of all other disciplines, to
its pristine purity. It is interesting that he portrays himself as a second
Camillus 'restoring the fatherland', the same image that Petrarch had used of

31 The letter to Alfonso of Aragon is quoted by Hay, 'Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages',
116.

32 'nec tamen [Petrarca] eum attigit Ciceronianae eloquentiae florem quo multos in hoc saeculo
videmus oranatos', Flavio Biondo, Roma Triumphans Libri X, Roma Instaurata III, Italia Illustrata, Historiae
Decades III (Basle, 1531), 346. Biondo goes on to specify that one reason for Petrarch's imperfections in
Latin was the lack of a complete edition of Quintilian and of the three Cicero works discovered at Lodi.
His criticism of Salutati (ibid. 304) is also based on Ciceronian criteria: 'Colutius vero Salutatus et si prius
didicerit, quam Ciceronianae imitatio eloquentiae sui saeculi adolescentibus nota esse coepisset, et
eloquens est habitus, et multa scripsit prudentiam magis quam eloquentiam redolentia.'
33 M. Palmieri, Delia vita civile, ed. G. Belloni (Florence, 1982), 44—6.
34 L. Valla, Antidotum primum in Poggium, ed. A. Wesseling (Amsterdam, 1978); Repastinatio Dialectice
et Philosophie, ed. G. Zippel (2 vols, Padua, 1982); Antidotum in Facium, ed. M. Regoliosi (Padua, 1984);
Epistole, ed. O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi (Padua, 1984).
35 The proems to the six books of the Elegantie Lingue Latine are in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, 594
630.

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 Humanist concepts

Cola a century earlier: now there is clearly only a hope for cultural rather
than political regeneration. In the prefaces to the other books of the Elegantie
Valla defines more precisely his periodization: he regards Servius, Donatus
and Priscian as the 'last triumvirate' of respectable grammarians, who are
followed by the 'mumblings' of Isidore of Seville, Everard of Béthune and
Uguccione of Pisa; in legal studies the old authors of the Digest are better
than moderns like Accursius, who write 'gothice potius quam latine'; and
amongst theologians Jerome and Ambrose are closer to Cicero than
'modern' (that is, late medieval) church writers. Valla is thus a figure of
supreme importance in disseminating a programme of cultural rebirth which
embraces all the 'artes sermocinales', including not only letters and the fine
arts but also the major disciplines of law, philosophy and theology.
After the death of Valla and others of his generation in the 1450s there was
a loss of direction in the humanist movement. In a letter of 1455 the
Florentine Alamanno Rinuccini speculates on the reasons for this period of
stagnation after the heroic decades earlier in the century. He claims that
literary studies have not become extinct, but they have gone into a dormant
and dark phase, which is particularly shameful since Florence now enjoys
greater peace than at the start of the century.36 This is a significant statement
since it illustrates that the renaissance of scholarship was not seen even by its
protagonists as a constant phenomenon without periodic interruptions.
But by the 1470s Florentine cultural confidence has been restored. In the
preface to his translation of Philostratus (1473), Rinuccini confidently
surveys the Florentine scene: there has been a revival in all the arts ('rursus in
lucem revocata'), starting with the more mechanical arts of painting,
sculpture and architecture; in grammatical studies he points to Valla and
Giovanni Tortelli as the foremost exponents of the new method; but he
differs from Valla in saying that there has been no renaissance in dialectic and
philosophy because these disciplines have always flourished, without
interruption ('numquam intermissa viguerunt'), and they are at present at a
new peak under Argyropoulos whose appointment to the chair of
philosophy and rhetoric at Florence had come about at Rinuccini's
instigation.37 This defence of medieval philosophy and logic reverses the
traditional condemnation of them found in Petrarch, Bruni and Valla, but it
is not without precedent: in 1462 Benedetto Accolti had championed the
achievements of Aquinas, Scotus and the medieval jurists in his Dialogus De

36 A. Rinuccini, Lettere ed orazioni ed. V. R. Giustiniani (Florence, 1953), 10-12. Page references in
what follows are to this edition.
37 J. E. Seigel, 'The teaching of Argyropoulos and the rhetoric of the first humanists', in T. K. Rabb
and J. E. Seigel (eds), Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ε. H. Harbison
(Princeton, NJ, 1969), 237-Ô0.

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 140 M. L. McLaughlin

Praestantia Virorum Sui Aevi;38 and in 1485 Pico della Mirandola, in a famous
dispute with Ermolao Barbaro, will also defend the Latin of these writers.39
Nevertheless when Rinuccini talks of the literary revival he adopts the
traditional humanist view:

Classical eloquence and the writing of incorrupt Latin arose shortly before our own
time, but in our age it has become so cultured and polished that Latin has never been
as flourishing as this since the time of Lactantius and St Jerome. That this is the case
can easily be understood by examining the writings of those who in the middle
period between these two ages (medii inter has aetates) achieved considerable
knowledge about many serious subjects, but who in their style of writing were
rather crude; and it is no surprise that this happened to those writers because the fact
that most of Cicero's works lay hidden in obscurity removed any possibility of
imitating Cicero's style, (pp. 107—8)

Despite Rinuccini's claim that dialectic and philosophy have not needed a
revival, 'medii' here applies to all writers between Lactantius and Jerome in
the fourth and Rinuccini in the fifteenth century, and in his view such
authors wrote before the renaissance of Ciceronian Latin.

Poliziano shared this more appreciative approach to post-Ciceronian

writers, though without ever defending medieval Latin. But in the age of
Poliziano and Lorenzo humanist attention embraces vernacular literature as
well and applies to the development of the volgare the terminology which
had evolved in humanist discussions about Latin. Lorenzo himself applies to
Tuscan the metaphor of growth used by Guarino to describe the evolution of
Latin: 'Massime insino ad ora si puo dire l'adolescenza di questa lingua,
perché ognora piu si fa elegante e gentile. Ε potrebbe facilmente nella
gioventu ed adulta età sua venire ancora in maggior perfezione.'40 In the
letter accompanying the Raccolta Aragonese (1476) Poliziano echoed these
views of the Tuscan language as 'abundante e pulitissima', pointing to the
flourishing state of vernacular poetry 'in questi nostri secoli'. In a brief
history of Italian poetry, prefaced by explicit quotation of Petrarch's claim
that the vernacular lyric was a renaissance of ancient rhythmic poetry,
Poliziano noted that only with the works of Cino da Pistoia, Petrarch, and
their successors in the quattrocento, did poetry in the volgare eliminate the
'rozzore' apparent in early trecento poets.41

38 In F. Villani, De .. . Famosis Civibus, 105-28. See also Robert Black, Benedetto Accolti and the
Florentine Renaissance (Cambridge, 1985), 184-223.
39 The exchange between Pico and Barbaro is in Prosatori, 804-22, 844-02. On the whole question see
J. E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom from
Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, NJ, 1968).
40 Lorenzo de' Medici, Opere, ed. A. Simioni, 1 (Bari, 1914), 21.
41 'Fu l'uso délia rima, secondo che in una latina epistola scrive il Petrarca, ancora appresso gli antichi
romani assai celebrato; il quale, per molto tempo intermesso, comincio poi nella Sicilia non molti secoli

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 Humanist concepts of renaissance and middle ages 141

But after the Italian wars at the end of the century this confident
perspective on vernacular literature is reversed by Pietro Bembo. He
modifies the growth metaphor that had become commonplace at the end of
the fifteenth century and substitutes for it the model of Golden Age -
Decline - Revival which had been standardized by quattrocento humanists in
their consideration of Latin literature. In his Prose della volgar lingua (1525) he
claims that the trecento is the Golden Age of Italian literature, the
quattrocento a period of decadence and the cinquecento the moment that is
ripe for revival.42 Bembo thus reverses the Laurentian view of the vernacular
at the end of the quattrocento: where Lorenzo and Poliziano saw a language
about to burgeon into full maturity, the Ciceronian Bembo sees only the
symptoms of linguistic and literary decline requiring a purist revival. In the
political and cultural turmoil of the time, Bembo's linguistic and literary
reform carries the day in Italy.
What conclusions may be drawn from all this? First, it is clear that the
concept and the terminology of 'Middle Ages' and 'Renaissance' appear
earlier and more frequently in Italy than has hitherto been recognized,
although since the sources I have drawn on are literary, this does not answer
the larger questions of whether the renaissance referred to in these passages is
anything more than an intellectual revolution that informs the arts, literature
and disciplines such as law, philosophy and theology. But the notion of
something more complex than the straightforward contrast between
ancients and moderns clearly develops in the 100 years from the time of
Petrarch to the age of Lorenzo. Petrarch begins this, like so many other
processes, by defining historical periods more precisely than any of his
predecessors; Filippo Villani and Salutati at the end of the trecento take the
logical step, probably influenced by fin-de-siècle eschatological considera
tions, of moving from a bipartite ancient/modern opposition to a tripartite
ancient/medieval/modern division. This tripartite division becomes com
monplace in the course of the quattrocento, when humanists consider the
development of Latin literature from antiquity to their own time, although
the duration of the Middle Ages and the extent of the Renaissance differ
depending on the perspective of the author.
Secondly, even the metaphor of renaissance in the literary sources
examined here varies in its terms of reference and reflects the shifting
intellectual interests of the period. In the trecento the revival begins as the
rebirth of vernacular poetry with Dante, then expands to include the revival

avanti a rifiorire, e quindi per la Francia sparto, finalmente in Italia, quasi in un suo ostello, è pervenuto'
(Lorenzo, Opere, I, 6). For the attribution of the letter to Poliziano rather than Lorenzo see M. Santoro,
'Poliziano ο il Magnifico?', G Ital Filologia, ι (1948), 139-49. The Petrarch passage is cited above, n. 11.
42 P. Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. C. Dionisotti (Turin, 1971), 121-31.

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 i42 M. L. McLaughlin

of Latin poetry and prose — largely because of Petrarch's Latin works and his
revival of the laurel ceremony in 13 41. In the quattrocento the emphasis
shifts to prose43 and the renaissance metaphor is applied to the recovery of
Cicero's works at first and then of Ciceronian Latin, as written by the best
humanists of the century. In considering literature in the volgare, the
metaphor of growth from infancy to maturity becomes established by the
time of Lorenzo, but in the early cinquecento Bembo transfers the Golden
Age — Decline — Revival model from Latin to vernacular literature.
One final point that this analysis highlights is the importance of that
discovery of the Cicero manuscript at Lodi in 1421. From that moment on
the literary revival is particularly associated with the recovery of Cicero and
the emergence of Ciceronianism. The fact that the three works in the codex
all dealt with questions of literary history illustrates why quattrocento
humanists begin to develop an interest in writing literary histories of their
own times. We may no longer accept Burckhardt's claim that the Renais
sance is about the discovery of man, but at least in Italy the Renaissance is
very much about the re-discovery of literary criticism.44
University of Edinburgh

43 See the letter of Pietro Tommasi to Francesco Barbaro in 1430 which talks of the early revival of
poetry ('ut mille probe dixisses Virgilios mox resurrecturos') giving way to the flourishing Latin prose of
the time (in E. Walser, Poggius Florentinus. Leben und Werk, Leipzig/Berlin, 1914, 434).
44 On the emergence of literary history in quattrocento Italy see M. L. McLaughlin, 'Histories of
literature in the quattrocento', in P. Hainsworth, V. Lucchesi, C. Roaf, D. Robey and J. R. Woodhouse
(eds), The Languages of Literature in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1988), 63—80.

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