Late Middle Ages

Renaissance Thought and Discovery

Renaissance thought is best read as a set of overlapping projects: the recovery, emendation, and translation of Greek and Latin texts that Petrarch had made the central intellectual ambition of the age; the remaking of the European university around the studia humanitatis; and the slow construction, between roughly 1450 and 1600, of an empirical and mathematical natural philosophy that would eventually be called modern science. The three articles in this section treat those projects in turn, and they do so without losing sight of the long medieval inheritance — the scholastic tradition, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century translations from Arabic and Greek, and the institutions of the medieval university — that made the Renaissance programme possible in the first place.

The hunt for manuscripts: recovering the classical past

The first article, The rediscovery of classical texts, follows the humanist hunt for forgotten manuscripts from Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in Verona in 1345 to the arrival of Greek refugees from a collapsing Byzantium after 1453. It traces the great finds — Poggio Bracciolini’s recovery of Lucretius’ De rerum natura in a Fulda monastery in 1417, Lorenzo Valla’s exposure of the Donation of Constantine in 1440 with its new philological method, and Aldus Manutius’s Aldine Press in Venice after 1494, which put cheap octavo editions of Aristotle, Aristophanes, and the Greek church fathers into the hands of students across Europe. It also takes the story in two harder directions: Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), which drew on newly translated Hermetic and Platonic texts to construct a manifesto of human freedom, and Machiavelli’s Il Principe (written 1513, printed 1532), which turned the rhetorical tools of humanism against the moral conventions of the genre. Anthony Grafton’s The Swerve (2011) and the work of Lisa Jardine and William Bouwsma on Erasmus are useful correctives to the older heroic view of the humanists; the recovery was real, but it was also selective, partisan, and deeply entangled with the politics of the Italian city-states.

Universities, the studia humanitatis, and the new curriculum

The second article, The late medieval university, follows the institutions in which this scholarship was taught and tested. By 1400 Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Padua had already been operating for two centuries, and the new universities of the fifteenth century — Turin, Louvain, Alcalá, St Andrews, the Universität Wien refounded in 1384 — spread the model across Europe. Paul Oskar Kristeller’s landmark essay of 1944–45 on the studia humanitatis argued that the humanist curriculum of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy was a genuine disciplinary innovation, neither a soft ornament nor a simple revival of Cicero. James McConica’s work on Erasmus and the Collegium Trilingue at Louvain (1517) shows how the humanist programme took institutional root in the North. The article also takes up the limitations of the medieval university: its hierarchical faculties, the slow incorporation of natural philosophy, the marginal position of women and the poor, and the dependence of even the most famous schools on local bishops, princely patrons, and a thin endowment base.

Renaissance science and the boundaries of knowledge

The third article, Renaissance science and the boundaries of knowledge, takes the story into the natural world. It treats the long fifteenth-century prelude in the universities of Padua, Pisa, and Bologna, the slow replacement of the Ptolemaic universe by Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), and the anatomy of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543), as well as the practical mathematics of cartography, fortification, and navigation that funded the early modern state. The historiographical frame draws on the work of A. Rupert Hall, whose The Revolution in Science 1500–1750 (1954) and the subsequent debate over the “Scientific Revolution” — its dating, its causes, and the very idea of a single “revolution” — have shaped the field for half a century. The article also traces the reverse current, of Renaissance natural magic, hermeticism, and Paracelsian medicine, that the older “Scientific Revolution” model tended to ignore and that recent scholarship has put back at the centre of the picture.

Articles in this section

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