baro, 305, Zabarella, 352), who base themselves on original Greek texts and
ancient commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias. (Hence the name
“Alexandrians” for opponents of the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle.)
The Humanists, by contrast, usually had careers as courtiers or church
politicians. Some of them were Greeks, fleeing the collapsing Byzantine Empire:
Chrysoloras, Pletho, Bessarion, Trebizond, Argyropoulos (231, 261, 274, 273,
287). After them came their pupils and followers: Valla, Piccolomini, Cusanus,
Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin. There were a few professional academ-
ics among them, notably Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino di Verona (263, 262),
but outside the older philosophy-theology positions. They acquired new chairs
in Greek or the classics at the northern Italian universities, or established new
schools: Da Feltre created a private school for children; Ficino was made head
of the Platonic Academy at Florence by Cosimo di Medici. In the next century
Peter Ramus was given a chair for his anti-scholastic logic at the new Collège
Royale at Paris; his method spread not so much in the universities as in the
secondary schools springing up as a form of alternative education. The most
famous humanists often had mixed careers—part courtier, part teacher of
classics. They were above all textual scholars, editors, and translators. Their
links to court circles gave an emphasis to literature and history from the Greek
and Roman classics, items of lay culture rather than abstract philosophy. By
around 1500, when the Humanist program was established in the northern
universities, it was centered on the arts course aimed at producing “the gradu-
ate destined for a civic or legal career (the articulate civil servant)” (Jardine,
1983: 253). When philosophy was brought in, it tended to involve a lay appeal
through occultism (pushed by Reuchlin, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Paracelsus,
Bruno, all of whom had mixed careers in and out of academic circles), or
through claims that ancient texts are the higher basis of religion, as in the
ambiguous Platonism—part paganism, part esoteric Christianity—of Pletho
and Ficino.
The humanists were most fruitful for philosophy where their networks
combined with the leading intellectual factions of the church. Nicolas Cusanus
owed his eminence to contacts which put together most of the sources of
cultural capital of the early and mid-1400s. He studied at the leading center
of mysticism, the school of the Brethren of Common Life while Thomas à
Kempis was active; then philosophy in the nominalist stronghold, Heidelberg;
canon law at Padua, where he also heard lectures of the preeminent Humanists
and made his Humanist reputation by recovering Latin literary texts. His
connections brought him into the center of church politics. He was active at
the Council of Basel in 1431 on the side favoring shared rule of the church.
When the conciliar faction proved unable to organize itself, Cusanus switched
sides. Diplomatic service with the papacy took him to Constantinople and fur-
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^499