![]() These men’s pursuits were continued in the next generation by Coluccio Salutati, godfather to the circle of early Quattrocento humanists. To Petrarch went the credit of making the Epistolae ad Atticum of Cicero available by transcribing a manuscript owned by the Cathedral of Verona. It is most likely Boccaccio who found in the monastic library at Monte Cassino a mid-eleventh century copy of some of the writings of the Roman historian, Tacitus. In Florence, the circle around Bruni had an ambivalent attitude to their city’s ‘three crowns’, Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, but they respected the last two for their role as pioneers in the hunt for ancient works. The scholars of humanism’s fifteenth-century heyday were not only more indebted to existing medieval learning than they would often like to admit they also had before them recent precedents for the rediscovery of classical texts. Those translations were derided and replaced by humanists led by Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), but this cannot deny the essential point: the humanists built on an existing classical heritage they did not work with a tabula rasa. Similarly, of ancient Greek authors, Aristotle had been to the West ‘the Philosopher’ since the thirteenth century, read in word-for-word translations. So, the Roman author most celebrated by humanists, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was known for some of his philosophical works and some of his speeches. ![]() Most of the authors celebrated in the Renaissance were known names in the preceding centuries. Similarly, ancient texts, pagan and Christian, suffused the learned culture of medieval Christendom. In writing of their achievements in doing this, they exaggerated both their own heroic endeavours and the dire state that preceded them. They were conscious of themselves as cut off from the classical past and set themselves the challenge of discovering works which had not been seen-they said-by scholars for centuries. Behind the humanists’ practices lay an agenda of manuscript recovery all across Europe. But before they could even be conceived, there needed to be classical texts to be imitated. The production of new books in a new, or revived, style of Latin and with a new, or revived, presentation on the page was central to their activities. Manuscripts were humanism’s lifeblood, its inspiration and its purpose. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |