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New Approaches to European History #6
Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
In this updated edition of his classic account, Charles Nauert charts the rise of humanism as the distinctive culture of the social, political and intellectual elites in Renaissance Europe. He traces humanism's emergence in the unique social and cultural conditions of fourteenth-century Italy and its gradual diffusion throughout the rest of Europe. He shows how, despite its elitist origins, humanism became a major force in the popular culture and fine arts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the powerful impact it had on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. He uses art and biographical sketches of key figures to illuminate the narrative and concludes with an account of the limitations of humanism at the end of the Renaissance. The revised edition includes a section dealing with the place of women in humanistic culture and an updated bibliography. It will be essential reading for all students of Renaissance Europe.
266 pages, Paperback
First published September 29, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 29, 2013
I've read a decent bit about humanism and the Renaissance, but it's been almost entirely via very specific monographs, and this was a nice way of zooming out to look at the big picture. I think it would also work very well as a general introduction to intellectual currents of the period for any one that's interested.
Nauert follows the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller in his insistence that humanism was not a philosophy that emerged to do battle with scholasticism: it wasn't a philosophy at all, and didn't bother much with the discipline. Instead, it was the emergence of a new world view - very nebulous and never possessing any clear or cohesive goals - that aimed to revitalize the world through the rediscovery of a murky, idealized Antiquity. In practice, this meant the rejection of the traditional medieval disciplines of natural science and theology - disciplines based on certainty - and an embrace of disciplines like rhetoric, grammar, and moral philosophy. These subjects, unlike their medieval predecessors, were ideal for civic involvement and for making decisions based on probability rather than certainty. Where a scholastic education aimed to allow one to explain the workings of the world and divinity, a humanist education allowed one to make successful and practical decisions when faced with political, social, and economic problems. Because of this, Nauert argues, it was unsurprising that humanism first took off in republican Florence before morphing into an ideology that fit more comfortably in princely courts.
The work gives an account of 15th century Italian humanism and Neoplatonism before exploring the effects of the printing press, the gradual trickle of humanist ideas over the Alps (particular attention is given to German humanists like Celtis & Reuchlin, as well as Erasmus), and how it changed over the course of the Reformation. It ends with a thematic section about the impact of the Reformation that stresses the conservative nature of most humanists and underlines the fact that while humanists ideas may have unintentionally paved the way, the Scientific Revolution was not a creature of the Renaissance or of humanism.
It's a great intro book, and the first and last chapters are especially good. Humanism is usually a very fuzzily-defined word, and this work is valuable for providing a good idea of what it was and what it was not. It's middle sections, which focus on individual humanists in various areas, can occasionally feel a little muddled or like a list of names, and that's sometimes made worse by the fact that it's lacking any sort of primary source material. But it does have a pretty good bibliography/guide to further reading and covers an impressively wide geographic range for such a small book.
Nauert follows the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller in his insistence that humanism was not a philosophy that emerged to do battle with scholasticism: it wasn't a philosophy at all, and didn't bother much with the discipline. Instead, it was the emergence of a new world view - very nebulous and never possessing any clear or cohesive goals - that aimed to revitalize the world through the rediscovery of a murky, idealized Antiquity. In practice, this meant the rejection of the traditional medieval disciplines of natural science and theology - disciplines based on certainty - and an embrace of disciplines like rhetoric, grammar, and moral philosophy. These subjects, unlike their medieval predecessors, were ideal for civic involvement and for making decisions based on probability rather than certainty. Where a scholastic education aimed to allow one to explain the workings of the world and divinity, a humanist education allowed one to make successful and practical decisions when faced with political, social, and economic problems. Because of this, Nauert argues, it was unsurprising that humanism first took off in republican Florence before morphing into an ideology that fit more comfortably in princely courts.
The work gives an account of 15th century Italian humanism and Neoplatonism before exploring the effects of the printing press, the gradual trickle of humanist ideas over the Alps (particular attention is given to German humanists like Celtis & Reuchlin, as well as Erasmus), and how it changed over the course of the Reformation. It ends with a thematic section about the impact of the Reformation that stresses the conservative nature of most humanists and underlines the fact that while humanists ideas may have unintentionally paved the way, the Scientific Revolution was not a creature of the Renaissance or of humanism.
It's a great intro book, and the first and last chapters are especially good. Humanism is usually a very fuzzily-defined word, and this work is valuable for providing a good idea of what it was and what it was not. It's middle sections, which focus on individual humanists in various areas, can occasionally feel a little muddled or like a list of names, and that's sometimes made worse by the fact that it's lacking any sort of primary source material. But it does have a pretty good bibliography/guide to further reading and covers an impressively wide geographic range for such a small book.
January 16, 2021
I thought this was an excellent book that didn’t read like a textbook. It didn’t oversimplify the divisions between medieval, Renaissance and reformation.
December 14, 2022
Avrupa'da Hümanizma ve Rönesans Kültürü üzerine detaylı bir eserdir. Dili gayet anlaşılır ve sadedir. Düşünce tarihinin önemli bu noktası üzerine mutlaka bir şeyler okumak gerekir. Ve bu eseri öneririm bu konuda.
June 13, 2016
Very solid overview of the field complemented by a helpful bibliographical essay (through 2006).
Nauert conceives of humanism as a reorientation of European intellectual culture in which certain disciplines (the studia humanitatis) were revitalized by a new vision of history in which the newly coined Middle Ages had to be bypassed in order to bring ancient wisdom into the present. Denying that humanism entailed a specific philosophical program (per Kristeller), Nauert nevertheless asserts that its mindset was characterized by a turn from metaphysics to morals, from speculative thought to preparation for ethical action in society. He retains Petrarch as the founder of humanism while acknowledging proto-humanists. He knows that Baron's "civic republicanism" thesis has been debunked, but he still takes pains wherever possible to draw connections between Italian humanism and flourishing republics. (Perhaps it would be better to focus on the non-feudal and non-clerical culture of Italy's cities than republicanism per se.)
Northern humanism is explained primarily a diffusion of Italian culture, despite isolated classicists with in other nations. He acknowledges that humanism enabled the Protestant Reformation without claiming that it inevitably led there. Perhaps even more importantly, he shows that the Reformation did not kill humanism, which suffused the educational institutions of the sixteenth century without ever fully displacing Aristotle or the basic structure of the medieval university. In the "late Renaissance" (no exact time given) two trends are highlighted: the growth of professional philological scholarship and the diffusion of classical texts and themes into the vernacular. Humanism wanes as the failure to find truth and harmony in ancient texts led to a renewal of skepticism, then to philosophies such as Descartes' and Bacon's, which focused less on accruing yesterday's knowledge than on the possibility of tomorrow's discoveries.
I was pleased with the book's style, organization, and content. I do wish there had been a bit more biblical humanism, which tends to be left unfairly to the side in introductory books. We hear about Luther, Melanchthon, and Erasmus, then little else, despite the fact that those men were merely pioneers of the activity that consumed the majority of European scholarship for the next two centuries at least.
Nauert conceives of humanism as a reorientation of European intellectual culture in which certain disciplines (the studia humanitatis) were revitalized by a new vision of history in which the newly coined Middle Ages had to be bypassed in order to bring ancient wisdom into the present. Denying that humanism entailed a specific philosophical program (per Kristeller), Nauert nevertheless asserts that its mindset was characterized by a turn from metaphysics to morals, from speculative thought to preparation for ethical action in society. He retains Petrarch as the founder of humanism while acknowledging proto-humanists. He knows that Baron's "civic republicanism" thesis has been debunked, but he still takes pains wherever possible to draw connections between Italian humanism and flourishing republics. (Perhaps it would be better to focus on the non-feudal and non-clerical culture of Italy's cities than republicanism per se.)
Northern humanism is explained primarily a diffusion of Italian culture, despite isolated classicists with in other nations. He acknowledges that humanism enabled the Protestant Reformation without claiming that it inevitably led there. Perhaps even more importantly, he shows that the Reformation did not kill humanism, which suffused the educational institutions of the sixteenth century without ever fully displacing Aristotle or the basic structure of the medieval university. In the "late Renaissance" (no exact time given) two trends are highlighted: the growth of professional philological scholarship and the diffusion of classical texts and themes into the vernacular. Humanism wanes as the failure to find truth and harmony in ancient texts led to a renewal of skepticism, then to philosophies such as Descartes' and Bacon's, which focused less on accruing yesterday's knowledge than on the possibility of tomorrow's discoveries.
I was pleased with the book's style, organization, and content. I do wish there had been a bit more biblical humanism, which tends to be left unfairly to the side in introductory books. We hear about Luther, Melanchthon, and Erasmus, then little else, despite the fact that those men were merely pioneers of the activity that consumed the majority of European scholarship for the next two centuries at least.
August 9, 2008
A cultural history, obviously, by a specialist on northern Europe, written primarily for an undergraduate and general audience. A sound overview with an extremely useful and fairly comprehensive bibliographical essay at the end, although those seeking more detailed information on Italy will want to look elsewhere. Women don't appear much in the book, either, and they should.
The "New Approaches" series from Cambridge offers a lot of good titles, all of them written by respected scholars. Neither textbooks nor popular accounts written by journalists, they make for excellent introductory reading.
The "New Approaches" series from Cambridge offers a lot of good titles, all of them written by respected scholars. Neither textbooks nor popular accounts written by journalists, they make for excellent introductory reading.
June 6, 2021
Hümanizmi ve Rönesans'ı derinlemesine (evet, biraz fazla ayrıntılı) öğrenmek için iyi bir kaynak. Ayrıca bilinen birçok bilgiyi de yerinden ediyor. Mesela Bruno güneş merkezli sistemi savundu diye Engizisyon tarafından öldürülmüyormuş aslında. Kalınca bir kitap, hümanizmi merak ediyorsanız sadece giriş ve sonuç bölümlerini okumanız yeterli olacaktır.
March 27, 2021
Did not finish.
October 2, 2022
history class slay
July 31, 2013
Truly demonstrates a new approach to the topic of humanism and explores its every aspect in detail. Nauert proves his point dexterously.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews