be strained and pushed around from connotation to connotation to help us see
that collaboration indicates the fundamentally social nature of Renaissance
humanist study and poetry. This social aspect included practical networks and
friendly circles of scholars and poets, needs for audiences, both immediate and
in posterity. This need for a future audience was shaped by a Renaissance
sense of glory that letters as much as arms could bestow. Humanists found
their intensely expressed ideals for community in ancient sources such as
Horace’s poetry, and also, let us not forget, in examples andfigurations from
the apostles and the early church. Lucas Cranach’s portrait of Luther and his
fellow reformers arranged as if recreating the Last Supper is one obvious
example of such biblical figuration. To cite another, at one Paris college,
where the young Erasmus studied, there were twelve and only twelve faculty
members in order properly to represent the apostles. William Harrison in his
description of England, a great contemporary accounting of the country and
its customs, praises the great equality of Oxford and Cambridge. These
institutions seemed to him to be‘the body of one well-ordered common-
wealth, only divided by distance of place and not in friendly consent and
orders and speaking therefore of the one, I cannot but describe the other and
in commendation of thefirst I cannot but extol the latter’.^22 While perhaps a
little presumptuous, Erasmus also thought that libraries and literary commu-
nities constituted a commonwealth. Erasmus, in 1516, offered advice about the
continuance of Philipp Melanchthon’s studies:‘Perhaps he is thirsting for
Italy. But in these days England has its own Italy.’He willfind there, Erasmus
promises,‘more leisure for the pursuit of the humanities’.^23
This extreme sociability of the humanist movement and of early modern
educational environments generally can be seen in humanists’ frequent
recourse to the dialogue form. For example, the speakers of Thomas More’s
Utopiameet in a garden and discuss how best to converse at court and to
influence a prince who is surrounded by many, too many, different advice
givers.‘You must strive to influence policy indirectly, handle the situation
tactfully,’Raphael Hythloday is told.‘And thus what you could not turn to
good you may at least to the extent of your powers make less bad.’^24 There is a
palpably realistic strain in this passage, an admission of limited effect or
influence that prevails in challenging court contexts, but humanists wished to
(^22) William Harrison,A Description of Elizabethan England, in Charles Eliot (ed.), The
Harvard Classics, vol. 35, part 3 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14); Bartleby.com,
2001, http://www.bartleby.com/35/3/, accessed 10 February 10 2016.
(^23) Erasmus to his Friend Reuchlin, Calais, 27 August 1516, in James K. McConica (ed.),The
Collected Works, vol. 4:The Correspondence of Erasmus Letters 446 to 593 (1516 to 1517), trans.
R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press,
1977), 57.
(^24) Thomas More,Utopia, edn. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams, Cambridge Texts in
the History of Political Thought, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36.
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 181