AHR forum. Perceiving the past: Renaissance humanism after the "cognitive turn"

American Historical Review

Volumn 103, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 55-82

  Gouwens, Kenneth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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EID: 4143124496     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2650775     Document Type: Review

References (206)

1. Bouwsma has long been recognized as a leading authority on Renaissance humanism. Among his more important publications are Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley, Calif., 1968);
2. A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, 1990);
3. and an AHA pamphlet entitled The Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism (Washington, D.C., 1959), reprinted in 1966 and again in 1973
4. (AHA pamphlet no. 401, now under the title The Culture of Renaissance Humanism).
5. "Humanism" appears only in the titles of the works cited in the notes to Bouwsma's address, "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History," AHR 84 (February 1979): 1-15.
6. Over the past quarter-century, the field of cognitive psychology has burgeoned in both its theoretical sophistication and therapeutic applications, a development that has gone mostly unnoticed among historians and literary critics, many of whom still give pride of place to Freudian and Lacanian approaches or their variants. For an overview of cognitive psychology, see John R. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 4th edn. (New York, 1995);
7. John B. Best, Cognitive Psychology, 4th edn. (Minneapolis, 1995);
8. and Robert L. Solso, Cognitive Psychology, 4th edn. (Boston, 1995).
9. Its arrival as a subdiscipline has been marked recently by the appearance of guides such as The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology, Michael W. Eysenck, et al., eds. (Oxford, 1991);
10. and Ian Stuart-Hamilton, Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology (London, 1995).
11. For an example of the field's possibilities, see the provocative collection Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition, Stephen McAdams and Emmanuel Bigand, eds. (Oxford, 1993).
12. One recent study has applied the category to the theories of cognition in medieval Europe: Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, Conn., 1996).
13. Eysenck, Blackwell Dictionary, 61, provides a useful starting point for approaching the field: "Cognitive psychology is concerned with information processing, and includes a variety of processes such as attention, perception, learning, and memory; it is also concerned with the structures and representations involved in cognition. The greatest difference between the approach adopted by cognitive psychologists and that followed by the Behaviorists is that cognitive psychologists are interested in identifying in detail what happens between stimulus and response."
14. While Eysenck favors a mechanistic view, this essay will draw extensively (albeit not uncritically) on the more humanistic theories of Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Bruner himself wishes to move beyond the "cognitive revolution" (to which he has made numerous influential contributions) to advocate a "cultural" approach that, in contradistinction to more mechanistic/ computational variants of cognitive psychology, emphasizes the vital role of intersubjectivity along with affect in the processes of cognition and meaning formation.
15. See the review by Clifford Geertz, "Learning with Bruner," New York Review of Books 44 (April 10, 1997): 22-24.
16. Bruner, Culture of Education, x.
17. Bruner, Culture of Education, 4.
18. Bruner, Culture of Education, 14, elegantly states this position: "Interpretations of meaning reflect not only the idiosyncratic histories of individuals, but also the culture's canonical ways of constructing reality. Nothing is 'culture free,' but neither are individuals simply mirrors of their culture. It is the interaction between them that both gives a communal cast to individual thought and imposes a certain unpredictable richness on any culture's way of life, thought, or feeling."
19. Edward Muir, "The Italian Renaissance in America," AHR 100 (October 1995): 1095-1118. The generation in question consists of the "students on the other side of the lectern in the late 1960s who later happened to become historians of Renaissance Italy" (Muir, 1106), whose accomplishments garner most of Muir's praises. While surveying recent developments in social, economic, and political history, Muir omits mention of the contemporaneous pioneering work of intellectual historians such as Arthur Field (Indiana), Anthony Grafton (Princeton), James Hankins (Harvard), Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (Columbia), Nancy Struever (Johns Hopkins), and Ronald Witt (Duke). I single out these scholars from the many intellectual historians of the Renaissance who have published internationally influential books and essays within the past quarter-century because all six are affiliated with institutions that Muir includes in his listing of the top twenty-eight graduate schools of history (Muir, 1107, n46).
20. Bruner, Culture of Education, 36: "What characterizes human selfhood is the construction of a conceptual system that organizes, as it were, a 'record' of agentive encounters with the world, a record that is related to the past (that is, 'autobiographical memory,' so-called) but that is also extrapolated into the future - self with history and with possibility. It is a 'possible self' that regulates aspiration, confidence, optimism, and their opposites. While this 'constructed' self-system is inner, private, and suffused with affect, it also extends outward to the things and activities and places with which we become 'ego-involved' - William James's 'extended self.'"
21. Within the vast bibliography on the topic, see esp. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston, 1948);
22. Vito R. Giustiniani, "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of 'Humanism,'" Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 167-95;
23. and Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Humanist Movement," in Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York, 1961), 3-23 (quotation from 22).
24. The best recent synthesis is that of Ronald G. Witt, "The Humanist Movement," in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1995), 2: 93-125.
25. See also Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston, 1991);
26. Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996);
27. and Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995).
28. Kristeller, "Humanist Movement," 19-21.
29. On the importance of Cicero, see also Hans Baron, "Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 22 (1938): 72-97;
30. and The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. edn. (Princeton, N.J., 1966).
31. William J. Bouwsma, "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought," in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brady, Jr., eds. (Leiden, 1975): 3-60, at 3.
32. On the other hand, as Kristeller has noted ("Humanist Movement," 20), "Any particular statement gleaned from the work of a humanist may be countered by contrary assertions in the writings of contemporary authors or even of the same author." Scholars of humanism who emphasize one of its philosophical dimensions, be it political, moral, or religious, have found a need to elaborate on Kristeller's strict definition.
33. On political thought, see Baron, Crisis;
34. and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978).
35. On the humanist use of eloquence to direct people toward the good, see Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497-514.
36. On humanist religious thought, see the following outstanding contributions: Salvatore I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e Teologia (Florence, 1972);
37. John F. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore, 1983);
38. Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1970);
39. John W. O'Malley, S.J., Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality and Reform (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1993);
40. Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, Mass., 1963);
41. Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, Ind., 1985);
42. and Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, N.C., 1983).
43. For a recent rethinking of the broader analytic categories in which the debates about Renaissance humanism have long been embedded, see Randolph Starn, "Who's Afraid of the Renaissance?" in John Van Engen, ed., The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame, Ind., 1994), 129-47.
44. Bouwsma's own suggested solution, that Stoicism and Augustinianism should provide interpretive foci for understanding Renaissance humanism, has not gained much assent. The publication a decade ago of a three-volume collection of essays, most of which exemplify the Kristellerian approach to humanism, has by no means put an end to controversy: Albert Rabil, Jr., ed., Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1988).
45. See Bouwsma's trenchant rejoinder in Church History 59 (1990): 65-70.
46. For genre studies, see John W. O'Malley, S.J., Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 (Durham, N.C., 1979);
47. George W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton, N.J., 1991);
48. and John M. McManamon, S.J., Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989).
49. For exemplary intellectual biographies, see John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976);
50. O'Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought (Leiden, 1968);
51. and Witt, Hercules.
52. On reception, see Julia Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (Oxford, 1993);
53. James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1990);
54. and Eugene F. Rice, Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md., 1985).
55. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
56. For an informative, if scathing, account of Garin's interpretation of Renaissance humanism, see Robert Black, "Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspectives and Continuing Controversies," Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 315-34, esp. 316-19. For example, Garin wrote glowingly of the impact of humanist education: "The school created in fifteenth-century Italy was . . . an educator of man, capable of shaping a child's moral character so as not to be preconditioned but free, open in the future to every possible specialization, but before all else humane and whole, with social links to all mankind and endowed with the prerequisites for the mastery of all techniques but in full self-control" (translated by Black, "Italian Renaissance Education," 317).
57. I appropriate the phrase "raw and bleeding" from E. P. Thompson's review of Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, where it is deployed somewhat differently: "the concepts are not cut, raw and bleeding, from the side of context and applied to 17th-century England." Thompson, "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context," Midland History 1, no. 3 (1972): 47.
58. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983-93);
59. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991);
60. and Commerce with the Classics (Ann Arbor, forthcoming).
61. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance.
62. I draw the term "cultural capital" from Pierre Bourdieu, whose work has influenced (albeit often only indirectly) much recent American scholarship, for instance, Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, Md., 1993), esp. 244-45.
63. See Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
64. Bourdieu's approach to aesthetic taste leaves little room for pleasure as a motivation to consumption, excepting the rather hollow charms of one-upmanship and of delight in the cachet that certain items might be thought to bestow upon their owner. This is, in effect, a reduction of aesthetic appreciation to the level of that bottom-dwelling cultural critic, StarKist's Charlie the Tuna, who collected artifacts he imagined "tasteful" so as to increase his own desirability, yet did so with no regard for whether or not he might actually enjoy them. (I should note in passing that upon reading this essay, my colleague Lawrence Rhu alerted me to the fact that the Shakespeare scholar Michael Bristol has similarly drawn the StarKist analogy in discussing the concept of cultural capital. While I have yet to see Bristol's account, I am gratified that another Renaissance scholar concurs in finding something fishy about Bourdieu's reasoning.) Compare Bruner, Culture of Education, which highlights the more useful aspects of Bourdieu's approach to culture, albeit with insufficient acknowledgment of its pitfalls.
65. See the criticisms of Bourdieu's assumptions in James D. Tracy, "Erasmus among the Postmodernists," in Erasmus' Vision of the Church, Hilmar M. Pabel, ed. (Kirksville, Mo., 1995), 1-40, at 23-24.
66. On the tendency of "serious" scholarship to underestimate or disregard the significance of aesthetic pleasure, see the observations of Randolph Starn, "Pleasure in the Visual Arts," in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside; A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), Irving Lavin, ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 151-62.
67. For a measured and careful corrective to Grafton and Jardine's searing assessment of the goals and impact of Italian humanist education, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, Md., 1989), esp. 407-10. According to Grendler (408), "there seems no reason to doubt that teachers and theorists who asked students to compile notebooks of moral and civic sententiae tried to teach these values." Moreover, "[t]he fact that Italian intellectuals and others clung to and repeated the values of the citizen-orator in the midst of the disasters of the Cinquecento argues that they took these commonplaces seriously, and that the values taught in humanistic schools had some impact." Granted, humanists' methods of teaching introductory Latin to schoolchildren, which Grafton and Jardine have greatly illuminated for us, was not always the sort of dialogic encounter with texts and discussion among equals that psychologists such as Bruner advocate. On the other hand, we may find instructive the parallel that Grendler draws between drilling in Latin grammar and performing athletic or musical exercises, in which drudgery is in the eye of the beholder and in which rote learning and repetition may help to prepare the way for creative efforts later on. Thus Grendler argues (407): "Learning to write and speak fluently a non-native language, especially one as complex as classical Latin, requires an enormous amount of drill and practice. Renaissance schoolboys put forth this effort because society valued these skills highly and rewarded those who mastered them. And many Renaissance men loved Latin and the civilization that its mastery unlocked."
68. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, promises to address these issues at length.
69. See also the thought-provoking assessment of the hermeneutics of reading in Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, esp. 1: 18-26, "Towards a Typology of Reading in the Fifteenth Century."
70. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism," provides the classic and still authoritative statement of the place of persuasion to the good in humanists' ideal of eloquence.
71. Petrarch, "On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others," in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1948), 49-133, at 105.
72. Desiderius Erasmus, "The Godly Feast" (Convivium religiosum), in The Colloquies of Erasmus, Craig R. Thompson, trans. (Chicago, 1965), 46-78, at 65.
73. As a corrective to Grafton and Jardine's rather cynical take on Erasmus's expressions of aesthetic and moral values, see Tracy, "Erasmus among the Postmodernists," 24-28.
74. Morton F. Reiser, Memory in Mind and Brain: What Dream Imagery Reveals (New York, 1990).
75. See also the provocative (if controversial) case studies of "flashbulb" memories (memories vividly impressed upon the mind by emotional intensity), such as Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of "Flashbulb" Memories, Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser, eds. (New York, 1992);
76. and Martin A. Conway, Flashbulb Memories (Hillsdale, N.J., 1995).
77. For a recent evaluation of the contrast from a very different perspective, see Caroline Walker Bynum, "Wonder," AHR 102 (February 1997): 1-26, the text of her AHA Presidential Address.
78. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, 115-43, takes this approach, drawing in part on Erasmus's Ciceronianus (1528).
79. According to D'Amico, Ciceronianism contributed to a more comprehensive staleness and inbreeding in Renaissance Rome. For a critique of that position, see Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden, forthcoming).
80. use the phrase "prison-house" to allude to Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J., 1972).
81. Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance, chap. 1, provides an account of the case of Longueil and further bibliography.
82. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 (Oxford, 1971).
83. See, for example, Robert M. Durling, "Petrarch's 'Giovene donna sotto un verde Lauro,'" MLN 86 (1971): 1-20;
84. Durling, "The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory," Italian Quarterly 18, no. 69 (Summer 1974): 7-28;
85. John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics 5 (1975): 34-40;
86. and Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn., 1982), esp. chap. 8.
87. See Ronald Witt, "Medieval 'Ars Dictaminis' and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem," Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982): 1-35, esp. 29-30, with extensive bibliography in the notes.
88. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 404, emphasizes the critical importance of the fact that fifteenth-century humanist educators inserted the letters of Cicero into the curriculum as the model for Latin prose.
89. For an account of Petrarch's critical innovations set against the backdrop of their humanist antecedents, see Ronald Witt, "Petrarch and Pre-Petrarchan Humanism: Stylistic Imitation and the Origins of Italian Humanism," in John W. O'Malley, et al., eds., Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus (Leiden, 1993), 73-100.
90. Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1992), 4.
91. John M. Najemy, "Machiavelli and Geta: Men of Letters," in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 53-79.
92. For a more comprehensive argument, see Najemy's superb Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513-1515 (Princeton, N.J., 1993). Whether or not we choose to identify Machiavelli as a humanist, he is relevant here because a humanistic education significantly shaped his writing and thought.
93. See the excellent treatment of this subject in Diana Robin, Filelfo in Milan: Writings, 1451-1477 (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 56-81, esp. 77.
94. Robin, Filelfo in Milan, 56-81, develops this theme as well. Albert Ascoli sees a similar form of life-writing at work in The Prince, in which vulnerability to metaphorical rape by one's patron forms a demonstrable subtext.
95. Ascoli, "Machiavelli's Gift of Counsel," in Ascoli and Kahn, Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, 219-57.
96. Laura Cereta, Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, Diana Robin, ed. and trans. (Chicago, 1997).
97. On this, see Witt, "Medieval 'Ars Dictaminis,'" esp. 30.
98. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Letters of Machiavelli, Allan Gilbert, ed. and trans. (Chicago, 1961), 142.
99. See also the excellent close-reading of this letter in Najemy, Between Friends, 215-40.
100. On some of the more radical beliefs of Renaissance Neoplatonists, see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958).
101. Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 13, argues provocatively (if not always persuasively) that Renaissance humanists anticipated Ferdinand de Saussure's "divorcing meaning from reference and regarding it as a function of the manifold relations of words with each other."
102. John E. Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience," AHR 92 (October 1987): 879-907, offers a brief synopsis of that development.
103. William J. Bouwsma, "From History of Ideas to History of Meaning," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981), offers a more sympathetic assessment.
104. On the pitfalls of interpreting words apart from their contexts in coherent expressions of belief, see Mark Bevir, "Mind and Method in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 36 (1997): 167-89;
105. and Bevir, "The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism," History and Theory 31 (1992): 276-98.
106. The underlying, ineradicable methodological problem is what Carlo Ginzburg has termed "the perpetual inadequacies of our analytical categories." Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, John and Anne C. Tedeschi, trans. (Baltimore, Md., 1989), 155.
107. On sites of memory, see Pierre Nora, "General Introduction: Between Memory and History," in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (New York, 1996).
108. See, too, however, the remarks of Patrick Geary about Nora's false dichotomy between "collective memory" and "history," in Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 11. In the pages that follow, in the interest of concision, I shall focus on the revival specifically of classical Roman culture, first by Petrarch and then by early sixteenth-century Roman humanists. For studies of changing conceptions of the remote and immediate past among Florentine and Venetian humanists, see note 51 below.
109. While classical Rome tended to hold pride of place for the humanists, they also sought to recover the cultures of ancient Greece, Etruria, and Egypt, and many of them focused on the writings of the Church Fathers (both Greek and Latin) in the first few centuries of Christian culture. See Charles L. Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Renaissance (Albany, N.Y., 1977);
110. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance;
111. and Stinger, Renaissance in Rome.
112. See Greene, Light in Troy, esp. 88-93. Greene uses linguistic metaphors copiously, as when he states that "Petrarch essentially read an order" into the wilderness of ruins that he saw in Rome (88). Similarly, in writing of Petrarch's focus on the ancient over the modern, Greene remarks (91) that Petrarch "saw the vestigial text of the Roman Palimpsest as still more precious than its rude overlay." Although Greene's metaphors illumine the interrelationship of reading, seeing, and touching, we must be careful not to fall prey to literary essentialism by giving strict priority to the verbal. In assessing a figure such as Petrarch, whose poetry and letters attest to an acute awareness of sensory experience and of its influence on emotions and thoughts, surely we ought not to present the relationship between reading and tactile/visual experience as so unidirectional.
113. On the term "cognitive mapping" as a metaphor for the functioning of memory, see Steven Rose, The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (New York, 1992), 137.
114. I follow the translation from the fifth letter in Book 1 of Petrarch's Rerum familiarium libri in Greene, Light in Troy, 89.
115. Petrarch's process of cognitive mapping bears an intriguing resemblance to the way that classical orators committed speeches to memory by taking walks (whether real or imagined) and using physical sites as memory pegs for structuring the points they planned to address. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966).
116. The analogy would be misleading, however, in that for Petrarch the ruins he sees relate meaningfully to his recollections from reading, and so their role in his cognition far exceeds that of mere pegs. On this point, we may learn much from Stephen Michael Kosslyn, Image and Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). Based on his own experimental research and that of other cognitive psychologists, Kosslyn argues that "visual" images (whether constructed from reading or from seeing objects other than writing) play a far more active role in our memory and thought than has generally been assumed. Thus he writes (456): "In addition to representing information about objects in the world in a static form, images also allow one to transform information, to mimic dynamic aspects of our environment."
117. For evidence on sixteenth and seventeenth-century theories of memory, and in particular on the active juxtaposition and deployment of remembered images in creative ways, see Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell'età della stampa (Turin, 1995).
118. Here I follow Greene's argument closely, but with one notable exception. For Greene (Light in Troy, 88), the geographical inaccuracies in Petrarch's account suggest that the "surface accidents of the city" served as "merely evocative pretexts" for his reflections. Again privileging the literary, Greene suggests that "Petrarch might be said to have divined the subterranean plan of a living city in the way a scholar might puzzle out conjecturally the precious and nearly obliterated text of a palimpsest whereon a debased modern text had been superimposed." In my view, the precedence that Greene gives to the textual over the physical is somewhat misleading for Petrarch, as well as for later humanists such as Jacopo Sadoleto (on whom see below). On the importance of the tactile and the visual to Petrarch, see Paula Findlen's essay in this Forum. A further potential problem with Greene's assessment is its privileging of words over images in the description of Petrarch's recollections from his reading. Still, Greene's juxtaposition of the literary and the tactile/visual is extremely suggestive of ways that those elements of the classical revival constituted parts of a whole.
119. Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, 1969), 2,
120. as modified by Greene, Light in Troy, 90.
121. For a more sympathetic take on medieval perspectives, see Bynum, "Wonder."
122. Greene, Light in Troy, 90. I draw the expression "cultural alternative" from Greene, 90-91.
123. Baron, Crisis, 61-64.
124. See also the observations of Ronald Witt, "The Crisis after Forty Years," AHR 101 (February 1996): 110-18.
125. For an argument that similar developments occurred somewhat later in Venice, see Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense.
126. See also the important recent contribution of Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven, Conn., 1996).
127. Stinger, Renaissance in Rome, 181-84.
128. Humanists also played important roles in official ceremonies of various sorts, whether through delivering orations or by designing iconographical programs. For example, Roman humanists were among those delivering sermons before the popes, orations to cardinals entering conclaves, and funeral orations, and they took part in pageantry such as Alexander VI's celebration of the Jubilee Year (1500), the triumphal entry of Julius II into Rome (1507), and the papal coronation rites for Leo X (1513). These occasions provided opportunities for humanists and artists further to draw attention to the revival of Rome's cultural and intellectual life, as well as to their own importance as agents of cultural change. On sacred oratory coram papa, see O'Malley, Praise and Blame.
129. On funeral oratory, see McManamon, Funeral Oratory.
130. On pageantry and public ceremony, see Stinger, Renaissance in Rome, 46-59, 236-46.
131. Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (New York, 1993), 143.
132. See, however, the cautions in review of Jacks's book by Paul Gwynne, Roma nel Rinascimento: Bibliografia e note (1994): 182-85.
133. On Paul II's suppression of Leto's academy, see A. J. Dunston, "Pope Paul II and the Humanists," Journal of Religious History 7 (1972-73): 287-306.
134. Leopold D. Ettlinger and Helen S. Ettlinger, Raphael (Oxford, 1987), 200-06.
135. On the exploration of the Domus Aurea in the Renaissance, see Rodolfo Lanciani, The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome: A Companion Book for Students and Travellers (London, 1897), 360-65;
136. and Nicole Dacos, Le découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance (London, 1969).
137. Ingrid D. Rowland, "Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders," Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 81-104, at 82: "That intertwining of art and learning for which we so admire the Renaissance stems in great measure from the fact that its art, speaking, and writing subscribe to a single aesthetic, this itself rooted in Greco-Roman antiquity. The analytical vocabulary for art and rhetoric is one entity: not that the classical strain in Western culture is logocentric, for by a reciprocal action words themselves function as visual entities."
138. Stinger, Renaissance in Rome, 274-76.
139. Gian Piero Maragoni, Sadoleto e il Laocoonte: Di un modo di descrivere l'arte (Parma, 1986),
140. reproduces the poem in a postfazione by Marzio Pieri (47-48).
141. Phyllis Pray Bober, "The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 223-39;
142. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, 107-12;
143. Domenico Gnoli, "Orti letterari nella Roma di Leon X," in La Roma di Leon X, Aldo Gnoli, ed. (Milan, 1938), 136-63;
144. Federico Ubaldini, Vita di Mons. Angelo Colocci, Vittorio Fanelli, ed. (Vatican City, 1969).
145. Ubaldini, Vita, "Appendix iv," 114-15, provides a listing of members of Küritz's sodality.
146. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, 107-08, provides a brief summary of Colocci's career and interests.
147. See also Ingrid D. Rowland, "Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis." The humanist sodality constituted what Erving Goffman has called a "focused gathering" - that is (in the words of Lawrence Levine), "a set of people who relate to one another through the medium of a common activity."
148. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 56. Levine applies the concept to the American theater at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
149. From Valeriano's lecture on Catullus 12, delivered at the University of Rome, preserved in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat. Lat. 5215, fol. 176r-v, as quoted and translated by Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers, 136, 350-51.
150. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, 107-08, provides a brief summary of Colocci's career and interests.
151. See also Rowland, "Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis."
152. On Küritz (or "Goritz"), see Théophile Simar, Christophe de Longueil, humaniste (1488-1522) (Louvain, 1911), 194-203;
153. Bober, "The Coryciana";
154. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, 108-09;
155. and Julia Haig Gaisser, "The Rise and Fall of Goritz's Feasts," Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 41-57.
156. Virginia Anne Bonito, "The Saint Anne Altar in Sant' Agostino: A New Discovery," Burlington 122 (1980): 805-12;
157. and Bonito, "The Saint Anne Altar in Sant' Agostino: Restoration and Interpretation," Burlington 124 (1982): 268-76.
158. Bober, "The Coryciana" 228.
159. One poem attached to the St. Anne altar, for example, invoked the saints above it to "look favorably and let Rome again govern the reins of things and let it be once again the accustomed theatre of the world." Bonito, "The Saint Anne Altar in Sant' Agostino: Restoration and Interpretation," 276. Bonito argues that the Hebrew inscription on the scroll that Isaiah holds in Raphael's fresco for this altar also anticipates a return of the Golden Age. She attributes its composition to Giles of Viterbo.
160. Bober, "The Coryciana" 238, writes that garden nymphs "and their sacred fountains fulfilled in Christianized context the promise of apotheosis first held out by Plato to an intellectual elite."
161. The poetry delivered to Corsi by the masked man is copied into BAV Vat. Lat. ms. 3436 and is reproduced in G. F. Lancellotti, Poesie italiane e latini di mons. A. Colocci (Jesi, 1772), 166-70.
162. Anne Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism at the Court of Clement VII: Francesco Berni's "Dialogue against Poets" in Context (New York, 1997), 91-92, reproduces the poem from BAV Vat. Lat. 2836, fols. 122-23, and provides an English translation.
163. The poem "In Jovium," to date unedited (perhaps mercifully so), is found in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat. Lat. 5225, t. IV, fol. 903v. On Berni's poem attacking Alcionio and its range of implications, see Kenneth Gouwens, "Ciceronianism and Collective Identity: Defining the Boundaries of the Roman Academy, 1525," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1992-93): 173-95, at 185.
164. Paula Findlen, "Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993), 49-108, 345-58. As Findlen observes (79), "In attempting to create a culture modeled on antiquity, humanists had to come to terms with all of its values and practices, however antithetical those might be to the goals of a Christian society."
165. Bouwsma, "Two Faces of Humanism," 3.
166. Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism, provides detailed examinations of several rivalries that transcended the bounds of civility (for example, Aretino vs. Berni).
167. By 1525, Giles of Viterbo, at least, had come to find the verbal jousting at Küritz's parties too hostile to be enjoyable (see Gaisser, "Goritz's Feasts").
168. But see the important insights of Walter Ong, S.J., "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite," in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y. [1971]), 113-41, which portrays education in Renaissance Latin as conducive to homosocial bonding.
169. See also Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca, 1981), esp. chap. 4.
170. Stinger, Renaissance in Rome, 50, writes that the statue is "now believed to depict Menelaus with the body of Patroclus, or Ajax with the body of Achilles."
171. Valerio Marucci, Antonio Marzo, and Angelo Romano, eds., Pasquinate romane del Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Rome, 1988).
172. See also Anne Reynolds, "The Classical Continuum in Roman Humanism: The Festival of Pasquino, the Robigalia, and Satire," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 49 (1987): 289-307;
173. Reynolds, "Cardinal Oliviero Carafa and the Early Cinquecento Tradition of the Feast of Pasquino," in Roma Humanistica: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 34 A (1985): 178-209;
174. and Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism.
175. See, for example, Marucci, et al., Pasquinate romane, no. 375, which lambastes Clement VII.
176. Stinger, Renaissance in Rome, 50.
177. On the feast of Pasquino in 1526, see Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism, 8 and following.
178. Recent research has highlighted the extent to which the creativity for which the Renaissance is justly famed arose out of collaborative efforts, which in turn helped to propel exceptionally talented individuals such as Lorenzo de' Medici and Raphael to greater accomplishments. See esp. Melissa Meriam Bullard, Lorenzo il Magnifico: Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance (Florence, 1994);
179. and Rowland, "Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders." On the individualism and introspection that were also hallmarks of Renaissance culture, the words of Kristeller are instructive: "The humanists . . . think and write in terms of their own individual person and experience, not in terms of an incorporeal mind or of a pure reason common to all human beings, as do most ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophers."
180. Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Cultural Heritage of Humanism: An Overview," in Rabil, Renaissance Humanism, 3: 515-28, at 522-23.
181. Charles Trinkaus, "Italian Humanism and Scholastic Theology," in Rabil, Renaissance Humanism, 3: 327-48, at 330.
182. See also Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, Conn., 1979), an exceptionally fine yet neglected study.
183. In addition to Bruner, Culture of Education, see, for example, T. Berry Brazelton and Bertrand G. Cramer, The Earliest Relationship: Parents, Infants, and the Drama of Early Attachment (Reading, Mass., 1990);
184. Stanley I. Greenspan, Developmental Based Psychotherapy (Madison, Conn., 1997);
185. Diane Gillespie, The Mind's We: Contextualism in Cognitive Psychology (Carbondale, Ill., 1992);
186. and J. Kevin Nugent, Barry M. Lester, and T. Berry Brazelton, eds., The Cultural Context of Infancy, 2 vols. (Norwood, N.J., 1989-91).
187. Even in the notoriously hidebound field of psychoanalytic theory (for which social constructionists admittedly tend to have little sympathy), the old image of the therapeutic encounter as catharsis has to some extent given way to dialogic models, as evidenced in the influential journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues and in the writings of Robert Langs, who speaks of a "bi-personal field." See Langs, The Evolution of the Emotion-Processing Mind: With an Introduction to Mental Darwinism (Madison, Conn., 1996). In light of current research, Eugenio Garin's contention that (in the words of Robert Black) "objective self-knowledge is developed only through knowledge of others," that "to know himself, an individual must be able to take someone else's perspective," may have quite a lot to tell us about Renaissance humanism after all.
188. Black, "Italian Renaissance Education," 318.
189. Bruner, Culture of Education, 62. He carefully avoids endorsing the excesses of relativism currently fashionable in the academy, while at the same time avoiding a retreat into naïve realism (59): "It is a foolish 'postmodernism' that accepts that all knowledge can be justified simply by finding or forming an 'interpretive community' that agrees. Nor need we be so old guard as to insist that knowledge is only knowledge when it is 'true' in a way that precludes all competing claims."
190. On culture as a "collaborative narrative construal," see Bruner, Culture of Education, 96.
191. Eric W. Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), 161-211, surveys the changing views of the French invasion of 1494 in the writings of contemporary historians in Milan, Naples, Venice, Florence, and elsewhere in Italy. In Florence, for example, only in 1512, after the Spanish sack of Prato and the return of the Medici to power, did the events of the early 1490s come to be interpreted as a watershed.
192. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, N.J., 1965), esp. 258-70.
193. On the cultural impact of the sack of Rome, see esp. Vincenzo De Caprio, La tradizione e il trauma (Rome, 1991);
194. André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, Beth Archer, trans. (Princeton, N.J., 1983);
195. and Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance.
196. Jacopo Sadoleto, Epistolae quotquot extant proprio nomine scriptae nunc primum duplo auctiores in lucem editae, 5 vols., Vincenzo Costanzi, ed. (Rome, 1760-67), 1: 309-18, at 314-15: "Sunt quidem & multae praeterea amoris causae; vetusta necessitudo inter nos: societas etiam eorundem studiorum, tum cum dabamus Graeco doctori Carteromacho simul operam. Quo quidem ex tempore recordor nec meam tibi insignem benevolentiam, nee tuum mihi studium unquam defuisse: tum autem multa saepe nobis communia, lusus, convictus, deambulatio: par prope atque idem in amicis delectus, ex eisdem rebus delectatio."
197. Sadoleto, Epistolae, 1: 317: "Nulli unquam sua patria, solumque illud in quo quisque natus, & alitus, gratam incunabulorum memoriam secum perpetuo fert, tam charum fuit, tamque amabile, quam mihi urbs Roma, & sancti illi penates tot clarissimorum fortissimorumque hominum, quorum pene in passus singulos, cum per vicos & plateas urbis vadebamus, aliquod in monumentum, aliquamque in historiam pedem ponebamus. Cur autem tantum amarem, & vetustatis admiratio faciebat, & praesens civitatis majestas."
198. Sadoleto, Epistolae, 1: 315.
199. Sadoleto, Epistolae, 1: 310-11: "Ac mihi recordanti spatium praeteriti temporis, & vetera animo repetenti, cum & plures convenire soliti eramus una, & erat aetas nostra ad omnem alacritatem animique hilaritatem longe aptior: quoties venire in mentem putas eorum coetuum conviviorumque, quae inter nos cr[e]bro habere solebamus: cum aut in hortis t[u]is suburbanis, aut in meis Quirinalibus, aut in Circo maximo, aut in Tyberis ripa ad Herculis, alias autem aliis in urbis locis conventus habebantur doctissimorum hominum: quorum unumquemque & propria ipsius virtus, & communis cunctorum praedicatio commendabat. Ubi post familiares epulas, non tam cupedia multa conditas, quam multis salibus, aut poemata recitabantur, aut orationes pronuntiabantur, cum maxima omnium nostrum qui audiebamus voluptate: quod & summorum ingeniorum in illis laus apparebat, & erant illa tamen quae proferebantur plena festivitatis ac venustatis."
200. Sadoleto, Epistolae, 1: 317: "Hanc igitur Urbem mihi dilectam & charam usque eo, ut nihil in amore fieri possit ardentius, deformatam ruinis, exinanitam frequentia, plurimis claris viris illustribusque orbatam, quorum in suavitate & benevolentia, mei (quos pro republica capiebam) labores requiescebant, ut videre velim, animum inducere non possum: jactatam praeterea etiam nunc procellis, objectam tempestatibus."
201. Among the more prominent examples, we may note Pierio Valeriano, De litteratorum infelicitate,
202. Paolo Giovio, Elogia virorum illustrium,
203. and Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, De poetis nostrorum temporum.
204. See the argument of Paula Findlen, "Possessing the Past," in this issue.
205. Lewis W. Spitz, The Renaissance and Reformation Movements, Vol. 1: The Renaissance (St. Louis, Mo., 1971), 25. Spitz's observation does not, of course, depend on our ability to determine with certainty just what the "actual facts" are or in any way preclude ideas having an "actual" impact.
206. For a recent fine example of scholarship that combines scholarly rigor with playfulness, see Corbis's new (1996) CD-ROM on Leonardo da Vinci. This remarkable resource includes bit-mapped copies of the Codex Leicester (complete with translation and mirror-imaging capability) and several paintings, as well as an introduction to the study of Leonardo. The closing credits juxtapose the names of contributors, including prominent Leonardo scholars such as Claire Farago and Martin Kemp, with a series of twentieth-century artistic parodies, including Andy Warhol's serigraph of the Mona Lisa (1963), Terry Pastor's "Magritte Lisa" (1974) and, just before a parting shot of the original Mona Lisa by Leonardo, an image of the unforgettable Muppet masterpiece from the "Kermitage" Collection, "Mona Pigga" (1986).