slogging through a long Latin or Greek text, it is bracing, it is thrilling to come
across a poem like the one I am just about to share, where you see that passion
for these highly valued and in some cases newly discovered things. Consider, for
example, this laudatory poem dedicated to Virgil by the quattrocento Italian
poet Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini:
To Virgil:
As Greece applauded famous Homer so morrow
Latin crowds praise you. That’s proper.
You the Italians’great adornment, he the Pelasgians’,^3 among his race he’s
famous.
Famed are you to yours, oh if both had lived a thousand years.
What famous strife we have and marvellous strains, even now, I might believe
you both recite your verse to Gods if indeed those reed-like souls have any wit.
He placates Jove, while Quirinus you quiet, and Caesar himself is made calm by
your lyre. Why not send down from heaven some poems, which bear the feats of
Jove or Great Caesar? Once the heavenly one sent shields. Why couldn’t it be your
songs sent with heaven’s momentum?^4This epic-loving poet, who adored Virgil and requests divine poems about
pagan lore, eventually became pope, reigning as Pius II. And by taking that
name he sought to sacralize his classical Virgilian epithet: Pius Aeneas became
Pius II. Many other such examples come to mind. For instance, Alison
Knowles Frazier, inPossible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy,
shows how Italian humanists were not only lovers of Roman republicanism
but also directed their philological studies and textual editing skills to their
robust interest in saints and in composing and compiling new saints’lives.^5
Frazier’s book shows a much closer connection between medieval piety and
Renaissance humanism than scholars have thought likely. We do not typically
think of humanists engaging in this particular kind of writing. Another
Renaissance scholar, Gur Zack, has recently discovered a similar appropri-
ation of older spirituality by humanism in Petrarch.^6 To cite another example,
in England, thefirst printer William Caxton produced renditions of Ovid’s
Metamorphoseslooking ahead to a Renaissance favourite, but also looking
back to that medieval staple Voragine’sGolden Legend. We must even recon-
sider Pico della Mirandola, so often seen as the harbinger of modernity in his
oration on the dignity of man.^7 To our modern ears it does indeed sound
(^3) Pelasgians is a poetic name for the ancient Greeks.
(^4) ‘In Virgilium’,inEnee Silvii Piccolominei(postea Pii PP.II Carmina), edited with commen-
tary by Adrianus van Heck (Rome: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1994), 5.
(^5) Alison Knowles Frazier,Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy(New York:
Columbia University Press), 2005.
(^6) See Gur Zack,Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 2010.
(^7) On the problems with this view, see Jens Zimmermann,Humanism and Religion: A Call for
the Renewal of Western Culture(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 110.
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 175