It was the fourteenth-century crisis of faith in institutions and human virtue
that brought into being thefirst phase of the humanist movement. The hope
of Petrarch, his followers Boccaccio and Salutati, and later generations of
humanists was that the sufferings of the present world could be remedied by
recovering the virtue of the ancient world they admired so much, and prin-
cipally the ancient pagan world. They believed the character of ancient men
and women could be revived in the present age through the study of antiquity.
In the humanist vision, human nature had been damaged by eight centuries of
barbarism following the fall of the Roman Empire and its educational system,
its customs, and mores. Human beings had losthumanitas, they had descend-
ed to the level of beasts, because they had lost the civilizing influences that
came from the study of ancient literature and philosophy. Those studies, the
studia humanitatis, or humanities, needed to be revived if Western Christen-
dom was to have a rebirth of its ancient glory, or at least peace and order and
freedom. But humanists from the very beginning were aware of the potential
for disharmony between pagan and Christian values—an old problem for
Christian educators.^3 They claimed, and were committed to the claim, that
the new elite education in the classics they championed was directed to the
improvement of the human condition in this life. Their goal was to produce
better leaders, men of virtue and eloquence, who would reform society by the
power of their example and their language.‘Such as are the leading men of
city, such is the rest of the city; and whatever change in the moral behaviour of
leaders takes place, the same follows in the populace. If leaders are illiterate,
the rest will be crude and ignorant.’^4
Humanist educators thus began by defining a cultural space between
theology, oriented to salvation and the next life, and the professions such as
law and medicine, practical studies whose task was to remedy the physical and
civil ills of mankind. The humanities by contrast were liberal, intended for free
men and women not bound to banausic tasks, meant to improve character and
wisdom. The humanists built their own‘immanent frame’, in other words,
within Christian culture by claiming that their educational goals were directed
to temporal ends and were not in competition with the transcendent goals of
Humanism’, in Martin Eisner and David Lummus (eds),A Boccaccian Renaissance, Devers Series
in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press,
forthcoming).
(^3) John Marenbon,Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to
Leibniz(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
(^4) Niccolò Perotti (1429–80), preface to his translation of Polybius, quoted from Jeroen de
Keyser’s article on Polybius, forthcoming in Greti Dinkova-Bruun (ed.),Catalogus translationum
et commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries,vol.11
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies):‘Est enim ita comparatum ut qualescunque
summi civitatis viri fuerint, talis quoque sit reliqua civitas, et quaecumque morum immutatio in
principibus exterit, eadem semper in populo sequatur. Quoniam ergo illiterati principes erant,
caeteri quoque rudes erant atque indocti.’
56 James Hankins