"In the Footsteps of the Ancients." The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Ronald G. Witt
Ronald G. Witt , "In the Footsteps of the Ancients." The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 74.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000. xiii + 514 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-11397-5. This is an outstanding work of scholarship, and an intellectual feast for students of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literary history. It was preceded by the author's "Medieval Italian Culture and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal" (in Renaissance Humanism, vol. 1, ed. Albert Rabil, 1988), and accompanied by his subentry on "The Origins of Humanism" in the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (1999; vol. 3, s.v. "Humanism"). One criterion we can use to assess large books like this is whether the chapters stand alone as independent units or function as integral parts of the whole, and often enough we are glad if we find that they stand alone, so that we can select the ones we want to read, even though their sum total is an aimless or shapeless book. In this one the chapters are definitely subordinate to the whole, which does have an aim and a shape, and which I think most scholars will want to read right through. Witt's aim is to shift the conventional low dating of the origins of humanism (roughly speaking, circa 1350) to a higher date two generations earlier, circa 1290; and to locate it rather precisely in the city of Padua, the home of Lovato dei Lovati and Albertino Mussato. His narrative, however, begins a century or more above even that date, for he sees humanism emerging out of the literary history of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is a broad territory, but Witt, whose linguistic range and command of the technicalities of genre, stylistics, metric, and rhetoric are remarkable, has immersed himself in the primary sources, and he succeeds in mapping it in high relief. Italy was overshadowed by France, and the literatures and dialects of northern and southern France each flowed into the peninsula and exerted influence there. This movement brought not only chivalric epic and troubador lyric, but also the seeds of the classicizing revival that we call humanism. The revival itself needed the urban, laic, secularly-minded, and rhetorically and legally sophisticated society of the north Italian communes to flourish. Witt takes the time and the space to show just what the halting revival of classicism meant for the writer at his desk, as he analyzes the prose and poetry of Lovato, and those who followed, at the level of the individual prose sentence or passage of verse. With the shift in chapter five to Tuscany in the age before and after Dante, we move onto territory that most of us may feel we know a little better. Still, the richness of detail with which Witt explores the interplay and interweave between