Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c.1350 - c.1650 9782503525242, 9782503560588

Table of contents :
Front Matter ("Contents", "Illustration", "Preface"), p. i

Free Access

Introduction, p. 1
David A. Lines
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00037


Part I. Contexts


Sources for Ethics in the Renaissance: The Expanding Canon, p. 29
David A. Lines, Jill Kraye
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00038


From Schools to Courts: Renaissance Ethics in Context, p. 57
David A. Lines
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00039


Renaissance Ethics and the European Reformations, p. 81
Risto Saarinen
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00040


Part II. Approaches and Genres


The Method of Moral Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism, p. 107
Eckhard Kessler
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00041


Renaissance Readings of the Nicomachean Ethics, p. 131
Luca Bianchi
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00042


Morals Stored and Ready for Use, p. 169
Ann Moss
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00043


Informal Ethics in the Renaissance, p. 189
Peter Mack
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00044


Biography as a Genre of Moral Philosophy, p. 215
Alison K. Frazier
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00045


Part III. Themes


Happiness, p. 243
Antonino Poppi
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00046


Passions for this Life, p. 277
Sabrina Ebbersmeyer
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00047


Virtue of the Prince, Virtue of the Subject, p. 305
Ullrich Langer
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00048


Epilogue: After Renaissance Ethics, p. 327
Sabrina Ebbersmeyer
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CURSOR-EB.4.00049


Back Matter ("Index"), p. 337

Citation preview

Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society

CURSOR MUNDI Cursor Mundi is produced under the auspices of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles Executive Editor Blair Sullivan, University of California, Los Angeles Editorial Board Michael D. Bailey, Iowa State University Christopher Baswell, Columbia University and Barnard College Florin Curta, University of Florida Elizabeth Freeman, University of Tasmania Yitzhak Hen, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Lauren Kassell, Pembroke College, Cambridge David Lines, University of Warwick Cary Nederman, Texas A&M University Teofilo Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 3

Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c.1350 – c.1650 Edited by

David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rethinking virtue, reforming society : new directions in Renaissance ethics, c.1350-c.1650. -(Cursor mundi ; 3) 1. Ethics, Renaissance. I. Series II. Lines, David A. editor of compilation. III. Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina editor of compilation. 170.9'4'09024-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503525242

© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2013/0095/69 ISBN: 978-2-503-52524-2 Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Illustration vii Preface ix Introduction

1

David A. Lines

Part I. Contexts Sources for Ethics in the Renaissance: The Expanding Canon David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

From Schools to Courts: Renaissance Ethics in Context David A. Lines

Renaissance Ethics and the European Reformations Risto Saarinen

29 57 81

Part II. Approaches and Genres The Method of Moral Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism Eckhard Kessler

Renaissance Readings of the Nicomachean Ethics Luca Bianchi

107 131

Contents

vi

Morals Stored and Ready for Use Ann Moss

Informal Ethics in the Renaissance Peter Mack

Biography as a Genre of Moral Philosophy Alison K. Frazier

169 189 215

Part III. Themes Happiness Antonino Poppi

Passions for this Life Sabrina Ebbersmeyer

Virtue of the Prince, Virtue of the Subject Ullrich Langer

Epilogue: After Renaissance Ethics Sabrina Ebbersmeyer

Index

243 277 305 327 337

Illustration

Figure 1, p. 49. Title-page woodcut illustrating the Tablet of Cebes, designed by Hans Holbein the Younger and printed in Strabo, De situ orbis (Basel: in aedibus V. Curionis, 1523).

Preface

The groundwork for this volume was laid in a series of panels on ‘Renaissance Ethics’ organised by the co-editors for the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America which took place in Cambridge, England, in April 2005. Although the contours of this collection of essays now bear little resemblance to the sequence of papers which were delivered then, we are grateful to the many participants who provided valuable perspectives on the subject and challenged our assumptions in a number of different ways. We are especially thankful to this volume’s contributors for their patience during its long gestation. The editors at Brepols (especially Simon Forde), the Cursor Mundi series editors (particularly Blair Sullivan), and an anonymous reviewer provided expert guidance and advice, without which this volume would have had several additional shortcomings. We are also grateful for the invaluable advice of Jill Kraye as we were developing ideas for this volume. Most of all, we wish to express our appreciation for the patience and understanding of our families, who put up with us beyond the call of duty as we brought this collection of essays to a close. David Lines Sabrina Ebbersmeyer 14 April 2011

Introduction David A. Lines

W

hat is happiness, and how can it be attained? Which virtues are especially important, and how should they be exercised? What are the best ideals for both individuals and the society in which they live? Questions of this kind, central to current explorations of ethics, have been passionately discussed since ancient times. The modern lack of consensus on how to resolve such fundamental issues has led to reconsidering a range of past models of ethical and social behaviour, with considerable attention given to the ethical solutions of ancient Greece (in particular to Aristotle’s proposals)1 and to the approaches of medieval and early modern thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Baruch Spinoza. Far less studied have been the models of ethics proposed in the Renaissance, a period which philosophers usually treat as an extension of the Middle Ages or skip over altogether, according to the fashion in more general histories of philosophy.2 This volume thus aims to provide a wide-ranging introduction to Renaissance ethics, a field of research that has grown remarkably in the past twenty years.3 Although not all scholars agree, and several points are still open to serious debate, now is a good moment to consoli1 

See, for example, Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. In general, see Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 329–57. 3  See this essay’s final section. 2 

David A. Lines ([email protected]) is Reader of Italian at the Univer­ sity of Warwick. He is the author of Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Currently he is leading an AHRC-funded project on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400–1650’ and preparing several studies on the University of Bologna in the Renaissance.

2 David A. Lines

date what has been achieved and suggest possible new directions in exploring the chief developments in ethics between the age of Petrarch and the advent of early modern thought in the seventeenth century. As the volume’s title indicates, this was a period in which most thinkers agreed on seeing a strong connection between, on the one hand, developing and reflecting on personal virtue and, on the other hand, restoring the well-being of society. Humanists like Petrarch looked to the ancient — and especially the Roman — world not just as a repository of pure Latin and great literature, but as a model society whose strength and influence lay in the virtues of its individual citizens. The return of Italian (indeed, European) society to its former glory could only be achieved by a personal and individual internalization of those values, at least on the part of the cultural and political aristocracy. Humanists were keen to emphasize the familial and civic dimension of their cultural programme — as testified for example by the writings of Matteo Palmieri and Baldassarre Castiglione4 — in a trend often referred to in the scholarly literature as ‘civic humanism’.5 Humanists were hardly alone, however, in studying ethics or in associating it with social and political considerations. Francesco Piccolomini’s dense scholastic treatise Universa philosophia de moribus (1583) is one of the most important works on moral philosophy in sixteenth-century Italy; although much of it focuses on ethics, it also deals with politics in its final book.6 By concluding with this discussion, Piccolomini was not just paying homage to the Venetian political class, but also following an influential tradition that saw politics as the end or culmination of ethics. Such scholastic discussions often highlighted the practical and social dimension of the virtues discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (including magnificence, justice, and friendship), since moral philosophy was commonly seen as encompassing not only personal ethics but also family ethics, based on the (pseudo-Aristotelian) Economics, and ethics for the broader social and political community, contained in Aristotle’s Politics.7 Even Girolamo Savonarola’s reflections on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in his Compendium moralis philosophiae underlined these practical aspects by stressing the value of friendship, which could be easily reconciled with the Christian virtue of love.8 Furthermore, the humanists’ view that socio-political renewal must start with the 4 

Palmieri, Della vita civile; Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, Book iv. See Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism; Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism. 6  For further detail, see Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume. 7  See Lines, ‘Humanistic and Scholastic Ethics’. 8  See Lines, ‘Pagan and Christian Ethics’. 5 

Introduction

3

individual and be modelled on ancient examples was also shared by exponents of the devotio moderna and by the Protestant and Catholic reform movements, with their emphasis on personal repentance, devotion, and spirituality. One significant difference was that, in these contexts, the social and cultural radius was broadened to include everyone, from the most humble and illiterate to the most powerful or learned. The link between personal virtue and social well-being, however strongly and widely felt in the Renaissance, was not of course especially new. Its roots went back to, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible, and Augustine. And already the stratification of medieval society was built on the premise that some groups or classes were ‘better’ (also in terms of moral nobility) than others. Nonetheless, in several important ways Renaissance writers departed from earlier views of the relationship between virtue and society. Especially important was the sense, fostered by the development of Italy’s communes, that everyone — men, women, and children; courtiers as well as princes; merchants along with nobles — was at least potentially able to exercise the virtue necessary for achieving a renewed and stable society. Certainly, individual visions of this social utopia varied: Savonarola, Thomas More, and John Calvin did not hold or voice the same ideals. People who did share the same ideals often disagreed as to how they should be achieved. But what they had in common was a conviction that all sectors of society could be brought to buy into and exercise the same virtues — many of them now based on the new ‘merchant morality’. This is precisely why Machiavelli’s Prince, when it appeared, was so vehemently opposed: not only did it emphasize the importance of seeming to be good rather than being good, but it condoned a different morality for the prince from that of his subjects.

The Changing Contexts of Ethics in the Renaissance What was different, then, about Renaissance discussions of ethics? To begin with, they took place in a changed cultural, intellectual, and religious context. Since the twelfth-century rediscovery of Aristotelian works,9 and particularly of the Nicomachean Ethics, which became the standard textbook for instruction in moral philosophy across Europe, ethics had regained its ancient character as a philosophical discipline. Logic, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics were the core elements of the philosophical curriculum and were all based on Aristotle’s writings, occasionally supplemented by those of other authors. Lectures 9 

See especially Dod, ‘Aristoteles Latinus’.

4 David A. Lines

and questions centred on Aristotelian treatises constituted the main method of teaching and learning philosophy in formal settings, although there were in fact numerous compendia, florilegia, and other kinds of works which also communicated (or helped one to remember) his teachings. This strong Aristotelian orientation intensified during the Renaissance, which is no longer regarded by serious scholars as ‘the age of Plato’. Charles Lohr reckons that substantially more Aristotelian commentaries were written in the Renaissance than in the entire preceding millennium.10 This was the case for the Nicomachean Ethics as well, which in the period 1400–1650 was the subject of at least 142 Latin translations, commentaries, and other interpretations in Italy alone and continued to be the main university textbook, not only in Europe but wherever Europeans (and especially Jesuits) founded institutions of philosophical instruction.11 Nonetheless, the dominant and pervasive presence of Aristotelian ethics was complemented by a mounting awareness of different philosophical traditions. Interpreters felt increasingly compelled to compare the Aristotelian corpus with the viewpoints of other ancient philosophers as their writings became more widely available. This was particularly the case for Platonism and Stoicism, which enjoyed remarkable revivals in the late fifteenth and the late sixteenth centuries respectively.12 But few Renaissance thinkers saw a need to choose between ethical systems; rather, they wished to reconcile them, as had already happened in antiquity and would again take place, especially with regard to Aristotelianism and Platonism, in the sixteenth century.13 In many ways it was too early and too disruptive to envisage that the ancients might have disagreed substantially on something as important as the nature of the Good. It was best to put their differences down to words and expressions — to assume that, even when they attacked each other’s doctrines, it was all due either to posturing or to a lamentable misunderstanding. But Renaissance ethics was not just about reconciling the sources of pagan philosophy; Christianity too had to be considered and was immensely influential.14 Indeed, paradoxically, Renaissance ethics became more overtly Christianized than its medieval counterpart. Medieval philosophy had carved out for itself an independent realm of enquiry: masters who taught the subject were often reluctant to address theological issues and (especially after the condemnation of 1277) 10 

Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, p. xiii. See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, Appendix C, and Lines, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities’. 12  See the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 13  See Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume and Poppi, ‘Il problema della filosofia morale’. 14  See Risto Saarinen’s essay in this volume. 11 

Introduction

5

doggedly stuck to what seemed right from a strictly philosophical point of view. Even Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Ethics (c. 1270–72)15 is remarkably sober and philosophical, launching only rarely into related theological topics. Such a clean and separatist approach between philosophy and theology became increasingly untenable during the Renaissance. In this period of putatively strong secularism, the Greek patristic and philosophical traditions (in which philosophy and theology could happily merge, for example in the twelfth-century Ethics commentary of Eustratius of Nicaea) gave scholars a standard for reconciling different ethical viewpoints from antiquity. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the reconciliation of Platonic and Aristotelian ethics effected by scholars such as Francesco Piccolomini occurred on the basis of religious (i.e. Christian) considerations. If one adds to this the preoccupation, within both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations, with right doctrine and living, it becomes clear how strongly Christian assumptions tended to colour philosophical interpretations.16 Finally, in terms of context, another important consideration is that of the settings in which moral teaching flourished in the Renaissance.17 Schools, universities, and studia of the religious orders constitute obvious elements of continuity with the medieval educational programme, and in the latter two Aristotle’s Ethics was typically a required text. We know that, at least in Italy, the place of moral philosophy in the university curriculum and the way in which it was taught varied over time and from place to place; on certain occasions it was allied with natural philosophy, on others with rhetoric or medicine, whereas the Jesuit colleges often considered it as a propaedeutic subject to theology. The teaching of ethics in the schools and in the mendicant orders is far less clear. What is certain, however, is that the Renaissance saw an expansion in the number of informal settings in which philosophical matters (and therefore also ethics) might be discussed. In princely courts, powerful patrons and courtiers increasingly regarded themselves as members of a cultured elite which engaged in and fostered conversations about art, literature, and philosophy. These discussions usually took place in the vernacular and can therefore be likened to the activities of the academies which flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We know that, at least in some of these, ethics was a subject of interest, giving rise to lectures or publications. At the same time, informal humanist circles developed; although their activities are poorly documented, groups such as the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples 15 

See Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, ed. by Gauthier. An interesting work in this sense is Vermigli, Aristotelis Ethicorum ad Nicomachum […] commentarius, on which now see Baschera, Tugend und Rechtfertigung. 17  See my essay in this volume. 16 

6 David A. Lines

(founded by Giovanni Pontano, a prolific writer on Aristotelian moral texts) are likely to have given ethics close attention. What most matters is that the participants and the audience in ethical debates broadened during the Renaissance, changing the field from one intended for professional (or, at least, professionally trained) philosophers, writing mainly for each other’s benefit and in technical Latin, to one in which everyone (including women) might take part.

Changes of Method, Approach, Genre Signs of this momentous change are already visible in early humanism. Members of this movement were not content to stay within their own field of the humanities but made frequent incursions into the terrain claimed by professional philosophers. Petrarch ridiculed the devotion of some contemporary philosophers to Aristotle, maintaining that knowledge of the natural world was irrelevant to man’s true goal of becoming good, and regarding literary and rhetorical writings to be more useful than philosophical ones.18 By 1417 the chancellor of Florence, Leonardo Bruni, had again trespassed onto the territory of the philosophers by offering a fresh translation, in humanistic Latin, of Aristotle’s Ethics; this move threatened to displace the version used in university philosophy courses. Bruni’s audacity gave rise to a heated controversy with the crusty Alfonso da Cartagena, who objected that technical subjects should be treated by specialists and not by a parvenu from another discipline.19 Less than fifty years later, however, the lectures of Niccolò Tignosi, a teacher in the University of Florence, were clearly geared to students with little or no exposure to formal philosophy. In a treatise defending his approach, Tignosi argued that they too should be entitled to study philosophy if they were so inclined, even though they lacked the formal training provided by the standard scholastic system of learning.20 In 1490 the humanist Angelo Poliziano interpreted his remit to teach rhetoric and poetry in Florence rather broadly and lectured on the Ethics. By so doing, and by offering a primarily philological analysis of the text, Poliziano was doubtless asserting his declared right, as a grammaticus, to subject other fields of knowledge to his humanist method.21 Finally, to remain in Florence, the single most important new edition of the Greek text of the Ethics in Italy was produced in 1547 by Pier Vettori, again 18 

Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, ed. by Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall. See Hankins, ‘The Ethics Controversy’, pp. 193–239. 20  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 206–14. 21  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 101–05. 19 

Introduction

7

not by any means a professional philosopher, but a teacher of Greek and Latin in the university. Further instances of this kind could be mentioned for Italian centres outside of Florence and indeed throughout Europe: Ermolao Barbaro in Padua, Marc-Antoine Muret in Rome, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in Paris, Philipp Melanchthon in Wittenberg, and John Case in Oxford are just a few of the more famous humanists who felt free to teach or interpret Aristotle’s Ethics, showing little or no inclination to respect professional boundaries. These examples show that the clearest difference between humanists and scholastics as they approached ethics was one of method.22 This point of contrast rested on an ambiguity within Aristotle’s own writings, since he discusses the virtues and related subjects both in the Ethics and in the Rhetoric. Scholastics saw ethics as part of the philosophical corpus delivered by Aristotle, whereas humanists noted the overlap between ethics and rhetoric and therefore felt justified in claiming it as part of their own domain. Scholastics recognized that, unlike natural philosophy, ethics had to do with the realm of changeable human action and circumstance, and therefore could not be described as a science stricto sensu. Like medicine, they observed, it was a practical science, which it would be useless to study but not apply, but this did not mean that general principles could not be discovered that would tend to be universally valid. Humanists instead stressed the mutability of the human world, its setting in time and space, the role of the passions and the power of speech to direct and control them. They too sometimes became embroiled in arguments about the best kind of life (for example, whether one should devote oneself to action or contemplation). This strongly suggests that they saw their conclusions as applicable to all or at least most men. When they wished to, however, they could leave behind the format of academic discussions and present ethical issues in ways that seemed more practical, appealing, and accessible than those of their competitors. Here one needs to tread carefully. Too much has been made in modern scholarship of the humanists’ ignorance of (or opposition to) philosophy and Aristotle or of their supposedly radical departure from the contents and forms of their predecessors. We now know that the humanists included a group of dedicated Aristotelians who not only could but did interpret the works of the Stagirite according to the long-established rules of the Latin commentary tradition. Although some of these humanists initiated certain changes of approach (e.g. writing in classical Latin, adducing historical examples from antiquity, or quoting from classical literature), they largely chose to accept and stay within 22 

See Eckhard Kessler’s essay in this volume.

8 David A. Lines

the strictures of the genre in which they were writing, sometimes to the point of maintaining elements of the scholastic disputation and of responding extensively to the views of earlier commentators.23 Seeing themselves as scholars, they wrote for other scholars and published compendia, commentaries, or paraphrases which could look very much like what had been produced for centuries. Others, however, experimented with new forms or paid attention to different considerations, such as reconstructing the original Greek text, engaging in philological analysis, or using the works of the ancients as an archaeological site for recovering elements of Greek culture. In the hands of several humanists, Aristotelian ethics came to be discussed in dialogues, tables, and other genres which departed from the academic tradition and were meant for diffusion among a different (and often broader) public. The move towards more informal ethical genres or approaches was clearly easier in the case of traditions where the models of writing were neither Aristotle’s own lectures and treatises nor the university commentaries on those works. A closely related product of Renaissance educational practices (although people often continued to use it long after they had left school) was the commonplace book, in which memorable dicta from classical authors were collected under topical headings (e.g. justice, friendship) for easy retrieval in speaking and writing.24 Although compendia and florilegia serving similar purposes had long been in existence,25 it was sixteenth-century humanists who codified the form and used it extensively. The jumble of sources placed side-by-side may have aided the process of philosophical reconciliation discussed above. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the dismemberment of the original sources gave rise to a reorganization of ethical maxims on the basis of different principles from those inherent in the works from which they were drawn,26 resulting in a less dogmatic and more eclectic approach to ethics. This was probably especially true of commonplace books whose entries were ordered alphabetically. As Ann Moss’s essay points out, however, the organization of commonplace books could also reflect (and reinforce) established Christian or pagan frameworks. What is certain is that the channels for ethical discussion multiplied in the Renaissance. Emblems (whether on their own or as part of commonplace books) 23  For this and what follows, see Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume, and the section on John Case in the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 24  See Ann Moss’s essay in this volume. 25  See, for instance, Hamesse, Les ‘Auctoritates Aristotelis’. 26  See Kessler, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century’.

Introduction

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and dichomotous tables, produced according to the fashion of Peter Ramus, offered an appealing visual element.27 Furthermore, writers derived inspiration from genres such as the dialogues of Plato and Cicero, Plutarch’s Moralia, Seneca’s letters, and Lucretius’s poetry. As a result, expressions of Renaissance ethics often lurk in extremely diverse formats and genres: Erasmus’s Adagia and Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano may spring quickly to mind, but one also needs to consider works such as Montaigne’s Essais, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,28 short stories such as those by Marguerite de Navarre,29 or even plays. These more informal genres take ethical discussions in a very different direction, resulting in something far more vague and open-ended than philosophers were (or still are) used to dealing with. A particularly rich and understudied informal genre, from the standpoint of ethics, are biographies, or even pseudo-biographies. Antonio de Guevara’s forgery, the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, is replete with imagined speeches by the Roman emperor; the appeal of genres of this kind probably lay behind the work’s translation into several languages.30 Machiavelli’s patently false account of the life of a certain Castruccio shows that the genre’s usefulness as a means for dramatizing ethical problems could be prized more highly than its adherence to ‘facts’.31 Other works, including Plutarch’s Lives, enjoyed a remarkable fortuna, doubtless due in part to his ability to juxtapose the bad with the good.32 The more one delves into this form, the more one realizes that biographies of the ancients or sometimes of near-contemporaries must have exercised an irresistible pull on many readers, who sought in these works concrete models of behaviour, or at least inspiration to follow in someone’s footsteps.33 Some readers may question the wisdom of including these sources in the present volume. In addition to the considerable interpretive problems already posed by philosophical expositions, such informal works raise a number of challenging hermeneutic headaches — issues of irony, self-representation, audience, authorial intent, and so forth — which are neatly represented by the extremely varied critical response to works like Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum 27 

See Ann Moss’s essay in this volume. See Peter Mack’s essay in this volume. 29  See Ullrich Langer’s essay in this volume. 30  See Peter Mack’s essay in this volume. 31  See Alison Frazier’s essay in this volume. 32  See Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives. 33  See Alison Frazier’s essay in this volume. 28 

10 David A. Lines

Histrum.34 Secondly, one might object that these works are not really philosophical: they may deal with or represent virtue but are not necessarily about ethics. And, since they do not deploy the formal tools of philosophy, they could just as easily be left out. Without offering an extended apology, it is worth pointing out that a sketch relying on an analysis of Renaissance ethical works by professional philosophers writing in the standard philosophical format would be very incomplete. For the reasons outlined above, ethics could be claimed by both professional philosophers and rhetoricians. However understudied and important, ethical treatises and philosophical commentaries supply only part of the picture. For humanists and many other Renaissance authors, ethics was less a systematized series of answers to fundamental practical questions than a search for how one could order one’s life so as to find the greatest fulfilment and happiness. That quest, with the open-endedness it entails, is better represented by informal genres of ethical discussion than by formal ones, even though, of course, the ensuing interpretations will need to take into account further layers of subtlety. What we need to guard against is imposing our own conception of philosophy on a period in which various definitions of this field were in use. It is also crucial to address the issue of language which is raised by many of the informal Renaissance works on ethics. As is well known, most learned ethical discussions took place in Latin: since they were often connected with school and university contexts or with the studia of the religious orders, it was natural for the commentaries, compendia, and treatises related to the study of moral philosophy to be in the West’s lingua franca of scholarship. This approach continued among fourteenth- and fifteenth-century humanists, who looked to Cicero as a model of prose style and were intensely doubtful about the ability of the vernacular to carry the freight of philosophical ideas. Petrarch and Boccaccio were most influential in this respect, reserving the vernacular for poetry and short fiction, but turning to classical Latin as soon as they came to deal with learned subjects. It thus comes as no surprise that works such as Lorenzo Valla’s De vero falsoque bono and Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses were written in Latin. Already early on there had been instances in which the vernacular was used instead — the most famous being Brunetto Latini’s Trésor and Dante’s Convivio.35 These were not popularizing treatments of moral philosophy, aimed at a lowbrow audience with little or no education, but rather highly complex and subtle works written for professionals. They were followed, in the fifteenth century, by 34 

See, for example, Quint, ‘Humanism and Modernity’. See also the adaptation of Thomas Aquinas studied in Guldentops and Steel, ‘Vernacular Philosophy for the Nobility’. 35 

Introduction

11

vernacular contributions such as Matteo Palmieri’s Della vita civile (c. 1434–36) and Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia (c. 1433–41), both of which explore a number of civic and familial virtues. A poetic contest (the ‘Certame Coronario’) that took place in Florence in 1441 was dedicated to exploring, in the vernacular, the morally charged theme of friendship.36 Contributions on the topic came from several influential figures, including Alberti, Leonardo Dati, and Benedetto Accolti. These works were part of an Italian tradition, especially strong in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of writing poetic capitoli on topics such as ambition, fortune, ingratitude, and envy.37 With the settling of the questione della lingua in early sixteenth-century Italy, one notes a raft of further compositions on ethical topics in the vernacular, by authors including Castiglione, Alessandro Piccolomini, and Bernardo Segni.38 But such departures from Latin for discussing moral issues were hardly limited to Italy — we know, for example, of the fifteenth-century Cuestiones de filosofía moral by Alonso Tostado, a professor at Salamanca; of William Baldwin’s Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547); of L’Ethique ou science morale by Pierre du Moulin (1623). Several similar works from across Europe still await exploration. Considering both vernacular and Latin works opens a window onto the range of audiences and participants involved in Renaissance ethical discussions.39 Although vernacular writings did not necessarily address less educated people than their Latin counterparts, their potential audience was far broader. In addition to the learned and the religious, many works were aimed at (or written by) rulers, nobles, courtiers, merchants, and soldiers. Advice books for rulers (also called ‘mirrors for princes’) were, of course, an established genre, but it is interesting to note how Latin and vernacular works could view and promote virtues differently.40 More specific to the Renaissance were works on the behaviour of women — whether as wives, mothers, or daughters. These books attracted considerable attention, not least because women readers were seen as indispensable 36 

McLaughlin, ‘Humanism and Italian Literature’; see also Altamura, Il certame coronario. See the introduction by Inglese, ‘Introduzione’. My thanks to Robert Black for raising this point. 38  Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian; Piccolomini, De la institutione de la vita de l’homo; Segni, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare. See also Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume. 39  For extended comments on the Latin and vernacular audiences of the Ethics, see Lines, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Renaissance’ and ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism’. For the various contexts in which ethics was discussed, see also my essay in the present volume. 40  See Strack, ‘Piety, Wisdom and Temperance in Fifteenth-Century Germany’. 37 

12 David A. Lines

conduits of the vernacular.41 Especially noteworthy, however, is the growing role of women as participants in discussions of ethics. Although we know of no female commentators on Aristotle’s Ethics, women increasingly wrote on moral themes both in the vernacular and in Latin. The Tuscan letters of Alessandra Macigni Strozzi (1406–61) to her Florentine sons living in exile are full not only of practical detail, but also of warnings and advice of a moral nature.42 From the end of the fifteenth century, the vernacular production of Italian women consisted mainly in verse written in the newly popular vogue of Petrarchism; here, discussions of love, loss, and other themes could also constitute (as they had for Petrarch) a springboard for moral reflection. Women’s writings in Latin were even more directly connected to ethics. In 1451 Isotta Nogarola (1418–61) penned a serious philosophical disquisition of an ethical-religious nature (Quaestio utrum Adam vel Eva magis peccaverit), in the form of an imagined dialogue between herself and a Venetian patrician, the humanist Lodovico Foscarini.43 At the end of the fifteenth century, Laura Cereta wrote a collection of Latin letters based on moral topics.44 In verse, her contemporary Angela Nogarola produced a Liber de virtutibus; in 342 lines this poem sequentially discusses paired virtues and vices, such as superbia and humilitas, ira and mansuetudo, tristitia and laetitia.45 All of this shows that the multiplication of genres and channels of ethical discussion was linked to a broadening of authorship and audience.

Themes and Solutions So far I have argued that Renaissance ethics developed in a very different context and adopted new approaches and genres with respect to the medieval period. It is now the moment to ask whether anything changed in terms of the issues that were discussed and the solutions that were proposed. Since Aristotelianism continued to be the dominant philosophical tradition, many of the problems discussed in medieval treatments of philosophy remained alive in Renaissance ones. Issues particularly relevant to ethics were, for example, 41 

Sanson, Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del Cinquecento. Cocco, ‘Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi’; additional bibliography in Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, p. 265, n. 53. 43  Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, p. 11; text in Nogarola, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. by Ábel, ii, 185–216. Now see Nogarola, Complete Writings, ed. and trans. by King and Robin. 44  Most recently, see Gill, ‘Fraught Relations in the Letters of Laura Cereta’. 45  In Nogarola, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. by Ábel, ii, 312–26; see also Parker, ‘Latin and Greek Poetry’. 42 

Introduction

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the role of the intellect or the will in the generation of virtue, the essence of happiness, the relationship of the virtues, the process of moral education, the validity of Aristotle’s definition of justice, the place of the passions in the life of the virtuous man, and the subject matter and method of ethics. Were topics such as these posed or solved any differently in the Renaissance, or did Renaissance interpreters mainly repeat the conclusions of medieval philosophers, whose works were well known to them? One answer is that new dimensions were added to earlier debates and that new points were emphasized or new interpretations given. For example, Protestant interpreters raised much more sharply than medieval commentators the question of the role of grace in developing the habitus of virtue, and Aristotle’s views of friendship were applied more specifically to man’s relationship to God. As mentioned above, some humanists insisted on the importance of the active versus the contemplative life (a point, however, on which there was no complete agreement)46 or stressed the positive relationship between pleasure and virtue. Some interpreters even offered, quite against Aristotle’s own teaching, ingenious but lame justifications for letting young people hear ethics in the classroom.47 On the originality of Renaissance solutions within ethics, however, scholars disagree. As the essays by Poppi and Ebbersmeyer underline, the very concept of happiness and the understanding of the role played by the passions within ethics underwent fundamental transformations in the Renaissance. According to their research, these are not minor shifts of emphasis, although they can be tied to the much broader cultural and intellectual changes introduced by the humanist movement. Langer’s essay comes to a different conclusion: his examination of virtue ethics and advice books for princes finds little difference between Renaissance and earlier formulations of the topic of princely virtues. For him, the real change is not in the general framework or in the solutions provided, but in the genres and means of presentation of the issues. One element responsible for these disagreements is doubtless that of sources: literary works may give a very different impression from philosophical ones. But there can be little doubt that, although some viewpoints and positions remained unchanged, on others there were bound to be some (perhaps even considerable) shifts over the course of three centuries. Let us consider as an example the Renaissance debate concerning the status of ethics and its relationship to other branches of moral philosophy. Given the 46 

See Kristeller, ‘The Active and the Contemplative Life’. Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 199–201, 260, 272–79, 302, 318– 20, 337–38, and passim. 47 

14 David A. Lines

centrality of Aristotle’s works, in practice this discussion was about the relationship of the Ethics, Economics, and Politics. As we have seen, earlier views, championed especially by Eustratius of Nicaea and Thomas Aquinas, had emphasized the tripartite nature of moral philosophy, geared as it was to the concerns of the individual, the family, and the broader political community. In this scheme, each of the three corresponding works in the Aristotelian moral canon provided both the doctrinal teachings and the practical know-how necessary to exercise virtue, even though politics might (according to some interpreters, including Thomas) be superior to ethics. Especially in the sixteenth century, however, an increasingly popular view (borrowed from Averroes, Albertus Magnus, John Buridan, and Gerard of Odo) saw the Ethics as providing the doctrinal underpinning for the Politics, which was regarded instead as a practical book.48 (Ironically, politics would come to be viewed as a science, especially from the end of the sixteenth century on.)49 According to this view, moral philosophy was therefore bipartite rather than tripartite, and the Ethics was thus theoretical, not a mix of theory and practice. This may have been in part a strategy to pry ethics away from rhetoric and reclaim it for philosophy, but it meant that it was possible for ethical discussions to become ever more conceptual, without for a moment implying that moral philosophy as a whole was not practical. This approach provided ethics with a high status akin to that of the theoretical sciences. It would eventually lead to the abstraction of Spinoza’s Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, published shortly after his death in 1677. New views of ethics were not, however, limited to a different perspective on the status of moral philosophy and the interrelationship of its subparts, or even (as Kessler argues in his chapter) to a different emphasis on the practical aspects of ethics. Issues of substance included powerful debates about the nature of the soul and, by implication, about the role played by the soul’s various parts in the generation of virtue. Pietro Pomponazzi’s famous views about the immortality of the soul developed at around the same time as a furious debate was taking place between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus on the freedom of the will. Disagreements on the goodness of human nature, man’s place in the universe, weakness of will, and other problems reflected increasingly polarized ideas as to how people (and therefore society as a whole) should be reformed and governed.50 48 

For a fuller explanation of the two views, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renais­ sance, pp. 123–27, 143–49. 49  See Scattola, Scientia architectonica. 50  For these issues, see Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought;

Introduction

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Lines of Enquiry In this final section, I would like to offer some observations about how the field of Renaissance ethics has developed, what we have tried to achieve in this volume, and what avenues of research remain to be explored.51 Especially when compared to studies of ancient or medieval ethics, until recently Renaissance developments have received relatively little attention, despite the fact that good overviews of philosophy in the period have been available for some time.52 Although there had been some earlier explorations (most notably related to humanism, Renaissance concepts of man, and the like),53 Renaissance moral philosophy started to be studied much more intensively in the wake of Jill Kraye’s seminal 1988 article, which offered the first real map of the subject.54 We are now starting to see an increasing number of modern translations or editions of Renaissance ethical works, which is an encouraging development.55 Several collective explorations of Renaissance ethics have also begun to appear.56 The present volume consolidates much of what has been achieved, while also pointing in several new directions. for an example of Italian vernacular debates on the freedom of the will, see Lines, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism’. 51  For a general historiographical overview, see also Frank, ‘Die zweite Welle der Wieder­ aneignung des “Corpus Aristotelicum”’ and Quondam, Forma del vivere, pp. 35–70. The latter particularly notes developments in Italy, France, and the English-speaking world. 52  The best overviews in English are Schmitt and others, The Cambridge History of Renais­ sance Philosophy, Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, and Hankins, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy. Also useful are Vasoli, Le filosofie del Rinascimento and Kessler, Die Philosophie der Renaissance. 53  See especially Trinkaus, ‘In Our Image and Likeness’; Garin, ‘La fortuna dell’etica aristo­ telica’. 54  Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’. 55  See, for example, Kraye, Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts; Ebbersmeyer, Kessler, and Schmeisser, Ethik des Nützlichen; Vermigli, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, ed. by Campi and McLelland; and the series Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca Versiones Latinae Termporis Resuscitarum Litterarum (CAGL), ed. by Charles H. Lohr (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), which offers facsimiles of Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle. 56  See Kraye and Saarinen, Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity and special issue of Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale; and Bejczy, Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages. Ebbersmeyer and Kessler, Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? ranges from antiquity to the early modern period.

16 David A. Lines

Scholarship on Renaissance ethics has largely developed out of a broader surge of interest in Renaissance Aristotelianism. René-Antoine Gauthier placed his historical survey of ethics (including substantial descriptions of the subject in the Middle Ages and Renaissance) in the introduction to a French translation of Aristotle’s Ethics.57 The impulse to study Renaissance ethics was facilitated, in no small way, by a number of repertories of Aristotle editions and commentaries and by the analysis of Aristotelianism as a Renaissance cultural movement by eminent authorities such as Charles B. Schmitt.58 Several scholars, including Jill Kraye, Antonino Poppi, Luca Bianchi, Eckhard Kessler, Ullrich Langer, and myself have come to Renaissance ethics through strong interests in the Aristotelian tradition. In a way this is as it should be: as we have seen, Aristotle’s moral philosophy was part of the shared cultural heritage of educated people across Europe, and even humanists were strongly influenced by his writings.59 As this volume points out, however, other influential moral perspectives and channels should not be neglected. Stoic ethics and its renewed appreciation by Justus Lipsius and his circle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are now a central concern for many historians of Renaissance and early modern philosophy. By comparison, we have far fewer studies about fifteenth-century Stoicism or about Platonic and Epicurean ethics.60 Also, little work has been done on the moral influence of authors typically taught within the grammar and rhetoric curriculum. Cicero’s shorter moral works (e.g. De officiis, De senectute, De amicitia) were studied in schools all over Europe, and his De finibus and Tusculan Disputations were also well known. To what extent did these works help mould Renaissance ethical discussions? And how did the widespread interpretation of Homer and Virgil’s works as moral allegories (for example by Cristoforo Landino in Florence and Filippo Beroaldo the Elder in Bologna)61 reflect ethical debates or contribute new ideas? We also need a much better sense of how the Bible and the patristic tradition influenced Renaissance ethics. This observation may seem tame enough, but it is surprising how seldom scholars have shown in practice an awareness that, for Renaissance thinkers, antiquity embraced both pagan and Christian writings and doctrines. 57 

Gauthier, ‘Introduction’, pp. 147–202. Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries; Cranz, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions; Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance. 59  Ebbersmeyer, ‘Feind oder Verbündeter?’. 60  This gap has been partially closed by a new study on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ethics in Italy; see Ebbersmeyer, Homo agens. 61  See Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, pp. 170–71; Poppi, ‘Beroaldo e Codro’. 58 

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Secondly, since many pioneers in the field of Renaissance ethics have been experts in intellectual history and the classical tradition, they have tended to focus on the Latin production of humanist and scholastic writers, who privileged this medium as the European language of scholarship. Many of these works remain understudied and unfamiliar to the larger public; yet to a large degree modern scholars have been successful in emphasizing the importance of Latin works to the Renaissance through a series of important initiatives such as the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum and the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Regrettably, this enthusiasm may have gone too far in countering nineteenth-century prejudices against Latin, resulting in an unconscious adoption of Renaissance prejudices against the vernacular. For it is clear — as Ullrich Langer and Luca Bianchi have demonstrated62 — that Italian, French, Spanish, English, and other vernaculars could function as powerful vehicles for the discussion of ethics; and we now realize that vernacular works were not only important channels for the diffusion of new perspectives in ethics, but could constitute important interpretations in their own right. Views which equated Latin with learned and the vernacular with popular culture are looking increasingly dated, as we begin to appreciate that vernacular discussions could be just as philosophically challenging and subtle as (and sometimes even more so than) their Latin counterparts. It is therefore crucial for future studies of Renaissance ethics to give serious attention to vernacular commentaries, treatises, and other such works, which so far have been very much at the margins of the field and for which until recently we lacked even the most basic repertory.63 Furthermore, at present we know too little about ethical discussions outside of the commentary tradition. Commentaries tend to be explicit and very rewarding for illustrating developments in method and doctrine, and the recognition of their importance has been a fairly recent accomplishment in the field of Renaissance thought. Despite the seminal contributions by Schmitt, Lohr, and others, many such works still remain to be studied. It is striking, however, that genres such as translations, compendia, florilegia, dialogues, and treatises have been barely explored and continue to be very hard even to identify. A recent repertory of philosophical works compiled by Wilhelm Risse is of considerable help 62 

See their essays in this volume, but also Langer, Perfect Friendship and Bianchi, ‘Per una storia dell’aristotelismo “volgare”’. 63  The situation is now being addressed through a research project which I am leading, with funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400–c. 1650’. A census of vernacular works has now been published; see Refini and others, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy.

18 David A. Lines

in exploring the range of genres associated with ethics: an entire volume is dedicated to writings of moral philosophy published between the beginning of print and 1800.64 Risse’s volume has the merit of including contributions (even anonymous ones) from all philosophical perspectives and written in very diverse genres; it lists works in both Latin and the vernacular. Even so the repertory is selective, since Risse does not include other related works (such as orations, letters, histories, biographies, commonplace books, plays, and poems) and since manuscript works are excluded. The last point is important, because the discussion of ethical matters in manuscript continued (sometimes very intensively) into the age of print and well beyond 1600. In this volume we have tried to underline the relevance of informal works as well as commentaries and to point to the importance of both the vernacular and the Latin traditions. But the extent to which this was possible was limited by the range of existing scholarship. We hope that much more work will be done in this area in coming years. A further challenge concerns the geographical range of ethical discussions. At present we know a fair amount about how ethics developed in Italy (at least according to surviving works in Latin), and how this differed from the approach of the early Protestant reformers, particularly interpreters of Aristotle such as Melanchthon. Nevertheless, we are only slowly coming to appreciate the role of less-known French, German, and Swiss writers (e.g. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Theodor Zwinger) in the development of ethics in the sixteenth century.65 Despite the importance of England for Renaissance political ideas, we know very little about its contributions to ethics. Relevant studies for Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and other European areas are likewise extremely few, particularly in English. Nor do we have a good understanding of Byzantine ethics and its relationship with the Western tradition, although we may hope for improvements here, particularly as Byzantine philosophy develops into a recognized field of scholarship.66 We have encouraged our contributors to roam as widely as possible across Europe and even to its little-studied overseas colonies. But much more work will need to be done before we have even a rough outline of developments beyond Italy, France, and central Europe. 64 

Risse, Bibliographia philosophica vetus. See, for example, Kaluza, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque’. On the three individuals named, see my articles ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism’, ‘Il metodo dell’etica nella scuola padovana’, and ‘Theodor Zwinger’s Vision of Ethics’. 66  See Kupriev, ‘The Modern Study of Byzantine Philosophy’; Podskalsky, Von Photios zu Bessarion. 65 

Introduction

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A similar imbalance characterizes our knowledge of the Renaissance cultural and institutional contexts of ethical discussion. Many intellectual historians of the Renaissance are deeply interested in humanism and tend to slight or ignore the contributions of scholasticism. They have focused on schools, informal circles, and academies (more rarely, on courts) as settings in which humanist ideals were increasingly discussed or embodied. Often the documentation about these contexts is scanty and subject to sharply different interpretations, so that little agreement exists among scholars as to whether, for example, humanist schools were indeed places of moral instruction and, if so, what ideals educators wanted their students to practice. Slowly, however, scholars are starting to acknowledge that a concern with ethics was not an innovation or a monopoly of the humanist movement. Universities and schools of the religious orders had been teaching ethics for centuries and continued to do so in the Renaissance. Although in this volume we have tried to take into account recent studies in all of these contexts, it will be of special value in the future to have a better understanding of how Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinian Hermits (among others) thought about ethics and taught it in the schools of their orders. The field of Renaissance ethics will also need to continue to move away from the conventional ‘history of philosophy’ model of focusing on major (and only male) figures. General trends are best studied through the works of secondrank writers, who tend to be more representative than the ‘greats’ of literature and thought, however marked their influence. Many recent studies have already shown the way, by combining intellectual and cultural history. Perhaps the field will, in the future, be kinder to the ethical concerns expressed by women, merchants, soldiers, peasants, and others whose voices may still be heard or reconstructed. We have not attempted, in this volume, to corral these figures into a separate chapter, but have preferred to leave them free to rub shoulders, as the contributors thought fit, with their ‘betters’. We are conscious, however, that their treatment still leaves much to be desired. Further studies are urgently needed into various themes discussed within Renaissance ethics but not fully explored in this volume. The roles of the will, intellect, and fate in the exercise of virtue may seem like an obvious topic, but we still know too little about Renaissance debates on this issue,67 which was of particular interest to Spanish interpreters such as Luis de Molina. Although the 67 

Good starting points include Poppi, ‘Libertà e fato nel pensiero’ and Knebel, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit. An excellent and recent treatment is also Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought.

20 David A. Lines

topic of friendship has received some attention,68 much more remains to be said, especially since religious discussions flourished in the sixteenth century on the possibility of friendship with God. Several questions remain unanswered concerning the moral virtues as well; for example, how was Aristotle’s view of justice in the Ethics applied by Protestant writers to problems of soteriology? How was the pagan catalogue of virtues reconciled with Christian ideals such as love, hope, and patience? To what extent did a resurgent Platonism lead to the identification of the morally Good with the Beautiful or instead with the True? How and why did interpreters of different confessional backgrounds discuss the topic of heroic virtue?69 And did the interminable sixteenth-century discussions about nobility lead to new views and solutions? Finally, although we believe that one of the strengths of the present volume lies in bringing together the insights of literary scholars, intellectual historians, and philosophers, there is room for further groundbreaking scholarship by considering the interconnections between ethics and a range of other disciplines which touched on it — rhetoric, music, politics, law, medicine, theology, and biblical studies. As noted above, numerous topics of an ethical nature were discussed in Renaissance theological treatises, in commentaries on the Scriptures, in legal deliberations, in musical theory, and in medical manuals (which sometimes asked whether it was licit, for example, for a physician to treat an enemy). There is much that awaits discovery through collaboration among specialists in different fields. Likewise, we need to remember that texts are not the only relevant sources for Renaissance ethics: one must also consider the products of Renaissance visual and material culture. The significance of emblem books ought to be obvious; yet they have been studied almost exclusively from a formal and stylistic standpoint, with very little attention given to what they might tell us about developments in thinking about and representing virtue.70 Paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and cassoni are likewise rich sources; although such items, along with domestic interiors, have occasionally been explored for their expression of virtues such as magnificence,71 one also wonders whether they reflect particular views about the organization of the virtues, how they should be represented or enacted, or how 68 

Langer, Perfect Friendship; Sère, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge. For interesting comments on this problem, see Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 108–11; see also Saarinen’s essay in the present volume. 70  Ann Moss’s essay in this volume is a notable exception. 71  Cole, Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue. See also Berger, ‘The Ethics of Posing’. 69 

Introduction

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to acquire virtue. A different way of approaching similar questions is to ask how the act of viewing — or reading — specific works of art and literature or attending performances (of music and drama) in the Renaissance affected the ethical views of the audience involved.72 While we cannot investigate all of these subjects ourselves, we hope that the present collection will not only offer a much-needed overview of current scholarship in Renaissance ethics, but also encourage new explorations by others.

72 

See the discussion in Grossman, ‘Introduction’.

22 David A. Lines

Works Cited Primary Sources Castiglione, Baldassarre, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Vittorio Cian (Firenze: Sansoni, 1947) Nogarola, Isotta, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, ed. and trans. by Margaret L. King and Diana Robin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) —— , Opera quae supersunt omnia: accedunt Angelae et Zenevrae Nogarolae epistolae et car­ mina, ed. by Jenő Ábel, 2 vols (Wien: Kilian, 1886) Petrarch, Francesco, ‘On his Own Ignorance and That of Many Others’, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul O. Kristeller, and John H. Randall, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 47–133 Piccolomini, Alessandro, De la institutione de la vita de l’homo nato nobile e in città libera. Libri X in lingua toscana. Dove e paripateticamenta e platonicaments intorno a le cose de l’ethica, inconomia, e parte de la politica, è raccolta la somma di quanto principalmente può concorrere a la perfette e felice wita di quello composti dal signor Alessandro Piccolo­ mini […] (Venezia: Scoto, 1542) Segni, Bernardo, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare fiorentina et comentata per Bernardo Segni (Firenze: Torrentino, 1550) Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, ed. by René-Antoine Gauthier, Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera omnia, 47, 2 vols (Roma: St. Thomas Aquinas Foundation, 1969) Vermigli, Pietro Martire, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, ed. by Emidio Campi and Joseph C. McLelland (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2006) —— , In Aristotelis Ethicorum ad Nicomachum librum primum, secundum ac initium tertii […] commentarius doctissimus (Zürich: Froschouerus iunior, 1563)

Secondary Studies Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 17 (2006) Altamura, Antonio, Il certame coronario, Studi e testi di letteratura italiana, 1 (Napoli: Società editrice Napoletana, 1974) Baron, Hans, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988–89) Baschera, Luca, Tugend und Rechtfertigung: Peter Martyr Vermiglis Kommentar zur Niko­ machischen Ethik im Spannungsfeld von Philosophie und Theologie, Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte, 26 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2008) Bejczy, István P., ed., Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s ‘Nico­ machean Ethics’, 1200–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) Berger, Harry, Jr, ‘The Ethics of Posing: Visual Epideixis in Some Seventeenth-Century Dutch Group Portraits’, in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. by Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 38–84 Bianchi, Luca, ‘Per una storia dell’aristotelismo “volgare” nel Rinascimento: Problemi e prospettive di ricerca’, Bruniana & Campanelliana, 15 (2009), 367–85

Introduction

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Cocco, Mia, ‘Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, 1406–61’, in Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Source-Book, ed. by Rinaldina Russell (Westport: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 198–206 Cole, Alison, Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts: Virtue and Magnificence, Everyman Art Library (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995) Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Cox, Virginia, Women’s Writing in Italy: 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2008) Cranz, Edward, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions 1501–1600, 2nd edn, rev. by Charles B. Schmitt (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1984) Dod, Bernard G., ‘Aristoteles Latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. by Anthony Kenny, Norman Kretzmann, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 45–79 Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, ‘Feind oder Verbündeter? Das Verhältnis der früher italienischen Humanisten zum Aristoteles ethicus’, in Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? Mo­ del­le der Normenbegründung von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Eckhard Kessler (Berlin: LIT, 2007), pp. 219–42 —— , Homo agens: Studien zur Genese und Struktur frühhumanistischer Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010) Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, and Eckhard Kessler, eds, Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? Modelle der Normenbegründung von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: LIT, 2007) Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, Eckhard Kessler, and Martin Schmeisser, eds, Ethik des Nützlichen: Texte zur Moralphilosophie im italienischen Humanismus (München: Fink, 2007) Frank, Günter, ‘Die zweite Welle der Wiederaneignung des “Corpus Aristotelicum” in der frühen Neuzeit: die ethische und politische Tradition — ein Forschungsbericht’, Bulletin de philosophie médiévale, 44 (2002), 141–54 Garin, Eugenio, ‘La fortuna dell’etica aristotelica nel Rinascimento’, in Eugenio Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Milano: Bompiani, 1994), pp. 60–71 Gauthier, René A., ‘Introduction’, in Aristotle, L’Éthique à Nicomaque: Introduction, traduc­ tion et commentaire, ed. by René A. Gauthier and Jean Y. Jolif, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Leuven: Publications universitaires, 1970), i. 1 Gill, Amyrose McCue, ‘Fraught Relations in the Letters of Laura Cereta: Marriage, Friend­ship, and Humanist Epistolarity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 1098–1129 Gilson, Simon, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Grossman, Marshall, ‘Introduction: Reading Renaissance Ethics’, in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. by Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 3–16 Guldentops, Guy, and Carlos Steel, ‘Vernacular Philosophy for the Nobility: Li ars d’amour, de vertu et de boneurté, an Old French Adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’ Ethics from ca. 1300’, Bulletin de philosophie médiévale, 45 (2003), 67–85

24 David A. Lines

Hamesse, Jacqueline, Les ‘Auctoritates Aristotelis’: Un florilège médiéval; études historiques et tradition critique (Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1974) Hankins, James, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) —— , ‘The Ethics Controversy’, in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003–04), i, 193–237 —— , ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2000) Inglese, Giorgio, ‘Introduzione’, in Niccolò Machiavelli, Capitoli, ed. by Giorgio Inglese (Roma: Bulzoni, 1981), pp. 21–109 Kaluza, Zénon, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque à l’Université de Paris’, in ‘Ad Ingenii Acuitionem’: Studies in Honour of Alfonso Maierù, ed. by Stefano Caroti and others, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge, 38 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération inter­ nationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 2006), pp. 147–81 Kessler, Eckhard, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century: The Lefèvre Enterprise’, in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. by Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–21 —— , Die Philosophie der Renaissance: Das 15. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2008) Knebel, Sven, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit: Das System der moralischen Notwen­ digkeit in der Jesuitenscholastik 1550–1700 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000) Kraye, Jill, ed., Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy —— , ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 Kraye, Jill, and Risto Saarinen, eds, Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005) Kristeller, Paul O., ‘The Active and the Contemplative Life in Renaissance Humanism’, in Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Betrachtungen zur Vita activa und Vita contemplativa, ed. by Brian Vickers (Zürich: Fachverein, 1985), pp. 133–52 Kupriev, Georgi, ‘The Modern Study of Byzantine Philosophy’, Bulletin de philosophie médiévale, 48 (2006), 3–13 Langer, Ullrich, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Genève: Droz, 1994) Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Univer­ sities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) —— , ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Renaissance’, in The Reception of Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’, ed. by Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 171–93 —— , ‘Humanistic and Scholastic Ethics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philo­sophy, ed. by James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 304–18 —— , ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism on the Eve of the Sixteenth Century’, in Der Aristotelismus in der frühen Neuzeit: Kontinuität oder Wiederaneignung?, ed. by Günter Frank and Andreas Speer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), pp. 273–89

Introduction

25

—— , ‘Il metodo dell’etica nella scuola padovana e la sua ricezione nei paesi d’oltralpe: M. Piccart e B. Keckermann’, in La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, Atti del colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt (Padova, 4–6 settembre 2000), ed. by Gregorio Piaia, Miscellanea erudita, 64 (Padova: Antenore, 2002), pp. 319–48 —— , ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities of Medieval and Renaissance Europe’, History of Universities, 20 (2005), 38–80 —— , ‘Pagan and Christian Ethics: Girolamo Savonarola and Ludovico Valenza on Moral Philosophy’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 17 (2006), 427–44 —— , ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism: Bernardo Segni’s Ethica, the Florentine Academy, and the Vernacular in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly (forth­coming) —— , ‘Theodor Zwinger’s Vision of Ethics: Three Unpublished Writings’, in Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? Modelle der Normenbegründung von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Eckhard Kessler (Berlin: LIT, 2007), pp. 243–65 Lohr, Charles H., Latin Aristotle Commentaries, 3 vols to date (Firenze: Olschki, 1988–), ii: Renaissance Authors (1988) McLaughlin, Martin L., ‘Humanism and Italian Literature’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. by Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 231–33 Pade, Marianne, The Reception of Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2 vols (København: Museum Tusculanum, 2007) Parker, Holt, ‘Latin and Greek Poetry by Five Renaissance Italian Women Humanists’, in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, ed. by Paul Allen Miller and others (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 247–86 Podskalsky, Gerhard, Von Photios zu Bessarion: Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter Theo­ logie in Byzanz und deren bleibende Bedeutung (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2003) Poppi, Antonino, ‘Beroaldo e Codro sulla natura della filosofia e sull’etica’, in Antonino Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: Città del sole, 1997), pp. 143–75 —— , ‘Libertà e fato nel pensiero dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento’, in Antonino Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: Città del sole, 1997), pp. 89–142 —— , ‘Il problema della filosofia morale nella scuola padovana del Rinascimento: Platonismo e Aristotelismo nella definizione del metodo dell’Etica’, in Platon et Aristote à la Re­ naissance: xvie Colloque international de Tours (Paris: Vrin, 1976), pp. 103–46 (repr. in Antonino Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: Città del sole, 1997), pp. 11–87) Quint, David, ‘Humanism and Modernity: A Reconsideration of Bruni’s Dialogues’, Re­ naissance Quarterly, 38 (1985), 423–45 Quondam, Amedeo, Forma del vivere: L’etica del gentiluomo e i moralisti italiani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010)

26 David A. Lines

Refini, Eugenio, with the collaboration of David A. Lines, Simon Gilson, and Jill Kraye, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy: A Database of Works [accessed 15 May 2012] Risse, Wilhelm, Bibliographia philosophica vetus: Repertorium generale systematicum op­ erum philosophicorum usque ad annum mdccc typis impressorum, 9 vols in 11 (Hildes­ heim: Olms, 1998) Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1980) Saarinen, Risto, ‘Virtus heroica: Held und Genie als Begriffe des christlichen Aristo­te­ lismus’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 33 (1990), 96–114 —— , Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2011) Sanson, Helena, Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del Cinquecento: un contributo alla storia del pensiero linguistico (Firenze: Accademia della Crusca, 2007) Scattola, Merio, Scientia architectonica: Fondazione e trasformazione della disciplina poli­ tica nell’età moderna (Milano: Angeli, 2002) Schmitt, Charles B., Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) Schmitt, Charles B., and others, eds, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Sère, Bénédicte, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge, Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Âge, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008) Strack, Georg A., ‘Piety, Wisdom and Temperance in Fifteenth-Century Germany: A Com­parison of Vernacular and Latin Mirrors for Princes’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages 1200–1500, ed. by István Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, Disputatio, 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 259–80 Syson, Luke, and Dora Thornton, eds, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (London: British Museum, 2001) Trinkaus, Charles, ‘In Our Image and Likeness’: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; repr. Notre Dame: Uni­ versity of Notre Dame Press, 1995) Vasoli, Cesare, ed., Le filosofie del Rinascimento (Milano: Mondadori, 2002)

Part I Contexts

Sources for Ethics in the Renaissance: The Expanding Canon David A. Lines and Jill Kraye*

I

n 1370 Petrarch bolstered a biting invective against his scholastic opponents by maintaining that Plato was superior to his disciple Aristotle and that Latin writers such as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace were better able than the Stagirite to incite their readers to virtue. Indeed, according to Petrarch, Aristotle could only provide dry information about the Good and was thus unable to inspire his readers to pursue virtue. As Petrarch put it, ‘[Aristotle] teaches what virtue is, I do not deny that; but his lesson lacks the words that sting and set afire and urge toward love of virtue and hatred of vice or, at any rate, does not have enough of such power.’1 Petrarch owned Plato’s dialogues but could not, in fact, read them: like most of his contemporaries he had no Greek, and no full translation

*  Although this chapter was co-written, David Lines was chiefly responsible for ‘The Availability of Ancient Works’, ‘Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, and ‘John Case’, and Jill Kraye for ‘Justus Lipsius’, ‘Francisco de Quevedo’, and ‘The Tablet of Cebes’. 1  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, p. 103; see also p. 111. David A. Lines ([email protected]) is Reader of Italian at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Currently he is leading an AHRC-funded project on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400–1650’ and preparing several studies on the University of Bologna in the Renaissance. Jill Kraye ( [email protected]) is Librarian and Professor of the History of Re­nais­sance Philosophy at the Warburg Institute. She is the author of Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and of Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and a member of the editorial board of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

30 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

of Plato’s dialogues was yet available. Nevertheless, he was aware that the issue of sources was fundamental to how one thought about ethics. Although medieval figures such as John Scotus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante eagerly read Greek, Roman, and Christian works from antiquity whenever these were available to them, and key cultural moments known today as ‘the Carolingian renaissance’ and ‘the twelfth-century renaissance’ had secured the survival and transmission of many such writings, it is also true that the broad cultural heritage of the ancient world was known very imperfectly before 1350. The Greek tradition in particular (in both its pagan and Christian forms) was accessible only to a handful of scholars. Works written in Latin and regarded today as classics were not necessarily familiar. By contrast, the period stretching roughly from Petrarch to Descartes saw a notable expansion in the availability of ancient sources, whether in the original or in translation. Petrarch’s philological efforts to reconstruct Livy’s history of Rome (sections of which were contained in three different manuscripts) and his excitement at finding Cicero’s familiar letters (including, notably, the Pro Archia, which defended the merits of poetry) testify to a passionate love affair with antiquity that would soon embrace numerous previously unknown works of literature, history, philosophy, religion, and science, while also maintaining close ties with old standbys such as Augustine. This chapter will focus on those sources especially relevant to the study of Renaissance ethics. After a brief overview of which sources became newly available (or available in different forms and languages) for the various philosophical currents between 1350 and 1650, we will offer a few case studies in order to illuminate some of the problems posed by the new sources in the period. A phenomenon of special note is their cross-over and interaction.

The Availability of Ancient Works Works Available c. 1350 The moral views of fourteenth-century writers were moulded by a variety of contrasting influences. Within the corpus of pagan Greek and Latin ethics, pride of place undoubtedly went to Aristotle. After centuries of only limited influence, almost all of Aristotle’s works (including several spurious ones) were translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.2 Particularly important for ethical discussions was the Nicomachean Ethics, a book in which Aristotle defined 2 

For the following see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 35–54.

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virtue and happiness or fulfilment (eudaimonia, usually translated in Latin as felicitas), described the process of moral education, enunciated the theory of the ‘golden mean’ in relationship to the moral virtues (including justice), explored the differences between prudence and wisdom, considered friendship and the impediments to which virtue is subject (including the passions), and discussed the relative dignity of the active and the contemplative lives. In the thirteenth century, this work quickly became established across Europe as the main textbook for teaching ethics in universities and in schools of the religious orders. By 1350 it was known both in Latin translation and through the immensely influential Latin commentaries of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Walter Burley, Gerard of Odo, and John Buridan (as well as the thirteenth-century Latin translation of the Greek commentaries which went under the name of Eustratius, a twelfth-century Byzantine scholar). Knowledge of the Ethics also spread outside of the classroom, partly through Latin works such as Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, partly through vernacular compilations such as Brunetto Latini’s Trésor and Nicole Oresme’s Livre des Ethiques d’Aristote. Less well known, at the time, were other Aristotelian (or pseudo-Aristotelian) moral works, including the Eudemian Ethics, Magna moralia, and De virtutibus et vitiis. Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which contains important sections on the relationship between virtue and the emotions, was also highly relevant to philosophical discussions of ethics and was sometimes invoked in Ethics commentaries, especially in that by John Buridan. By contrast Plato’s writings, though respected, were known only in a limited, vague, and indirect way.3 Of Plato’s dialogues, only the Meno, the Phaedo, and parts of the Timaeus and the Parmenides were available in Latin translation. Of these, only the Timaeus was the object of commentaries. Nonetheless, many of Plato’s doctrines had been baptized and disseminated by St Augustine, who praised Plato’s closeness to Christianity. Furthermore, works such as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (fifth century ad) and the treatises circulating (falsely) under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul, contained strong Platonic or Neoplatonic perspectives, as did Macrobius’s commentary on a section of Cicero’s De republica known as the Dream of Scipio. Proclus’s commentary on the Parmenides was translated into Latin by William of Moerbeke in the thirteenth century. Most of these writings enjoyed considerable success and came to influence important philosophers such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. It was fairly straightforward to see how Plato’s emphasis on the soul’s 3 

For the following, see Grafton, ‘The Availability of Ancient Works’, pp. 778–79; Kraye, ‘The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy’, pp. 325–26; Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 58–59.

32 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

immortality, on the distinction between the visible and the ‘real’ heavenly world, and on the need to follow virtue (acquired, as Socrates maintained, through a sustained process of self-questioning and self-knowledge) could be reconciled with Christian ideas. Epictetus’s Enchiridion or Handbook, an important source for ancient Stoicism, was not yet available in 1350, but the school’s doctrines were known through authors such as Seneca (himself a professed Stoic) and Cicero (an Academic Sceptic who reported several of the Stoics’ moral ideas in his De officiis and De finibus). Various aspects of Stoic teachings were not easily compatible with Christian thought: the notion of the self-sufficient man or the disapproval of pity, for example, were hard to swallow; as Coluccio Salutati discovered, when his son died, the ideal of impassivity offered no consolation and seemed utterly heartless.4 Yet pearls of Stoic wisdom made their way into well-received anthologies of ancient moral sayings such as the Compendium moralium notabilium by Geremia da Montagnone.5 Epicurean doctrines, on the other hand, were clearly beyond the pale. Some of Epicurus’s teachings were repeated by Seneca (who offered a fairly sympathetic portrait of the philosopher) and described by Cicero; nevertheless, patristic and medieval writers misinterpreted his notion of pleasure, wrongly assuming that it referred primarily to matters of the body. Given the strong emphasis of medieval Christianity on asceticism and spirituality, this current stood little chance of being adopted, and in fact was kept well at bay up to the seventeenth century. Lucretius’s poetic masterpiece, De rerum natura, remained almost completely unknown in the Middle Ages. In addition to these pagan sources one should not, however, forget the powerful influence exercised by sacred writings. Commentaries on the Bible, and in particular on the sapiential Old Testament books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus) indicate, already in Dante’s time, an intense interest in solving complex ethical issues and in reconciling pagan and Christian positions.6 This is a promising area of research requiring further investigation. A related source of influence were the works of the Latin Church Fathers. The importance of Augustine’s Confessions for Petrarch is well known; other Fathers whose writings were widely read and influential at this time 4 

Salutati, Epistolario, ed. by Novati, iii, 408–22, 456–79; Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, pp. 358–65. For an English translation of the second letter, see Salutati, ‘A Letter to Francesco Zabarella’. 5  Weiss, Il primo secolo dell’Umanesimo, pp. 15–50. 6  Nasti, Favole d’amore e ‘saver profondo’.

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included Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. Most of the writings of the Greek Church Fathers — including important figures such as Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom — were unknown at the time.7 The sketch just provided may give the impression that fourteenth-century Christian thinkers identified themselves as followers of Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, or Seneca. This would be far from the truth, both because more recent philosophical disagreements (e.g. between the Scotists and the Occamists, or between Albertists and Thomists) generated passionate debates and divided scholars into opposing schools, and because many late medieval thinkers adopted strikingly fluid and eclectic positions. Indeed, most philosophers and compilers saw no harm in helping themselves to whichever wise sayings or perspectives might suit their purpose, resulting in a variety of different accommodations between Christianity and pagan ethics. Even Thomas Aquinas welded a largely Platonic metaphysics to his fundamentally Aristotelian philosophical and theological vision. Two factors were, we think, chiefly responsible for this kind of approach. One was the period’s flattened perspective of ancient history and thought, which made the differences among the various philosophical schools and currents of antiquity less prominent. A conviction that all but the most perverted ancient writers (e.g. the Epicureans) must have somehow shared in a common vision of the Good made this view tenable. Secondly, one should not dismiss the singular importance of Cicero. Both in his more general philosophical writings and in those specifically on ethics (De senectute, De officiis, De amicitia), Cicero transmitted the various philosophical perspectives he had encountered during his studies in Greece and in his own reading. Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Academic Scepticism thus jostled with each other, even though works such as De officiis are strongly informed by Stoicism. Confronted with this model, medieval writers may have been encouraged to be similarly wideranging in their use of sources. It helped that the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (containing portraits of eighty-two ancient philosophers and information on many others) had been translated into Latin, probably in the twelfth century, and became the basis of a popular compendium (falsely attributed to Walter Burley).8 7  Rice, ‘The Renaissance Idea of Christian Antiquity’, pp. 17–18. See also Gentile, Uman­ esimo e padri della chiesa. 8  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, p. 62; Grafton, ‘The Availability of Ancient Works’, p. 781.

34 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

Works Available by c. 1650 By the end of the Renaissance, scholars had become familiar with a number of additional works from antiquity, but one should also keep in mind that writings previously known often received fresh translations, commentaries, and/or editions which were sometimes based on the text in the original language. The new availability of the Greek Church Fathers was significant, not only from a theological perspective, but also because their writings address a number of issues relevant to ethics. An important topic in this context was that of the freedom of the will, a point on which the Greeks tended to be more positive than their Latin counterparts. Erasmus opposed Martin Luther’s Augustinian arguments in De servo arbitrio by availing himself of material derived from Origen. Zanobi Acciaiuoli translated the Against Hierocles by Eusebius of Caesarea, a text containing a sustained defence of man’s freedom and moral responsibility.9 It would be interesting to know how many works of moral philosophy relied, implicitly, on arguments provided by the Church Fathers. Unfortunately, this area has hardly been studied and stands in need of exploration. Aristotle’s Ethics continued to be his most-read moral work and was constantly reinterpreted or re-presented in a variety of genres, including Latin commentaries and translations and, by 1495–98, editions of the Greek text (in the famous Aldine editio princeps of Aristotle’s works).10 Across Europe and into the New World, the Ethics remained at the foundation of the course of moral philosophy. Medieval interpreters such as Thomas Aquinas continued to be influential (although his commentary came to be accompanied in printed editions by a new humanist translation of the Ethics). So, too, did the Greek commentary by ‘Eustratius’: this work (in reality, a collection of commentaries composed between the second and the twelfth centuries) was newly translated into Latin by Giovanni Bernardo Feliciano in 1541 and subject to more rigorous textual criticism.11 Several scholars, especially in France and Italy, worked to improve the Greek text of the Ethics. Among the most prominent was the Florentine Pier Vettori, who published his important Greek edition with Giunta in 1547, adding his own Latin translation and philological commentary in 1584. But equally 9 

Rice, ‘The Renaissance Idea of Christian Antiquity’, pp. 21–23. See Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume. 11  For a sketch of Aristotelian ethics and its reception, see Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 325–48. For the work’s Latin reception in Italy, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance. For Feliciano, see Lines, ‘Giovanni Bernardo Feliciano and the Edition of “Eustratius”’. 10 

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(if not more) active was a group of French scholars such as Denys Lambin and Joachim Périon, who also produced translations and editions including numerous textual emendations.12 Vernacular translations and commentaries connected with the Ethics have not yet been studied in any detail, but seem to have gained momentum from the 1540s onwards: of special note are the Italian translation and commentary offered by Bernardo Segni (first printed in 1550),13 even though there were versions long before this. A French translation, authored by Oresme in 1370, was first printed in 1488; a Spanish version was available from 1489; curiously, we know of no translations into English in this period.14 Other Aristotelian (and pseudo-Aristotelian) works on ethics now became better known: a sign of this are the Latin translations by Giannozzo Manetti of the Eudemian Ethics and Magna moralia (although they had very limited circulation) and the inclusion of such works in the Greek Aristotle edition of 1495–98.15 The De virtutibus et vitiis (a short work describing eight of the virtues discussed by Aristotle) began to circulate in manuscript in the fifteenth century and received its first Latin printing from the Greek original in 1504. 16 Lazzaro Gallineta, a Dominican who established himself in Padua, produced a vernacular version of this work which survives in at least three manuscripts.17 If knowledge of Aristotle expanded, that of Plato exploded. Various works by Plato were translated into Latin for the first time in the course of the fifteenth century. But it was only with Marsilio Ficino that a systematic attempt was made to translate into Latin all of Plato’s writings and those of his Neoplatonic commentators, such as Plotinus and Proclus. For several works Ficino also provided his own commentaries. His monumental edition, printed in 1484 and later revised by others, remained the standard avenue of approaching Plato into the nineteenth century and provided a strongly Neoplatonist interpretation of the dialogues. The first Greek edition of Plato’s text was produced by Aldus Manutius 12 

See Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume, and Kraye, ‘Italy, France and the Classical Tradition’. Segni, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare. 14  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, p. 22. Note that the English translation referred to there (Aristotle, The Ethiques of Aristotle, trans. by Wilkinson) is, in fact, a translation of Brunetto Latini’s Trésor. 15  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 21–22. 16  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, p. 24; Schmitt, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Sixteenth Century’, pp. 103–11; Kraye, ‘Francesco Filelfo on Emotions, Virtues and Vices’, pp. 132–33. 17  See the database of the project Refini and others, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renais­ sance Italy, work reference 96. 13 

36 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

in 1513.18 It is true that Plato’s works rarely received regular lectures in the university context, but in the academies there was more freedom; Francesco de’ Vieri the Younger, for example, offered Platonic readings of Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry in the Florentine Academy.19 Plato was also important for political philosophy, but his influence in ethics made itself felt especially in the concept of love as expressed in the Symposium.20 A key factor in the diffusion of this and other aspects of Platonic philosophy was the initiative to translate his works into the vernacular; Ficino had already paved the way and, although it was not until 1601 that a complete edition of the dialogues (into Italian, by Dardi Bembo) appeared, the fifteenth and especially the sixteenth centuries saw a flood of vernacular versions, translations, and commentaries. 21 Conversely, for some Renaissance scholars, Neoplatonism lost one of its traditional authorities when Theodore Gaza, Lorenzo Valla, and Erasmus called into question the authenticity of the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite.22 Stoic ideas continued to circulate through both genuine and spurious works of Seneca, many of which were also translated into Spanish, Italian, French, and English.23 A new source was made available through the Latin translations of the Enchiridion of Epictetus made in the fifteenth century by Niccolò Perotti and Angelo Poliziano. Whereas the first translation, which remained in manuscript, had little influence, that of Poliziano was very frequently printed. The Enchiridion was printed in Greek in 1528. Simplicius’s commentary on the text was well received and reprinted several times in the sixteenth century.24 Epictetus’s version of Stoicism seemed less austere than that of Seneca; nevertheless several interpreters (including Erasmus and Montaigne) continued to express doubts as to the compatibility of Stoic philosophy with Christianity. As we shall see, it was only towards the end of the sixteenth century that Justus Lipsius, a Flemish humanist who was responding to the horrific political and religious conflicts of his time, 18 

See Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance. Ebbersmeyer, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft, pp. 218–20. 20  For Italy, of fundamental importance is Ebbersmeyer, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft. See also Kraye, ‘The Transformation of Platonic Love’. 21  Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance; Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, p. 11. 22  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 58–59. On Platonic ethics and its reception, see Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 349–59. 23  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 37–39. 24  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp.  40–41; Kraye, ‘L’Interprétation platonicienne de l’Enchiridion’. 19 

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was able to rescue Stoicism for Christianity. He did this by eliminating some of its more controversial aspects in his 1584 treatise On Constancy in Times of Public Calamity.25 Stoicism also made inroads through the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: the Greek text was first printed (along with a Latin translation) in 1559 and received a French translation in 1570; but the work had little impact until the seventeenth century. By contrast, its forged counterpart, The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (the work of Guevara, and first printed in Spanish in 1528), had a broad diffusion.26 Two channels were especially important in providing a deeper understanding of Epicurus’s ideas. Diogenes Laertius (who had much to say about Epicurus in Book x of his Lives and transmitted most of his surviving writings) became known through a Latin translation c. 1433 by Ambrogio Traversari; the first complete edition of the Greek text was printed in 1533.27 Even more novel, however, was the availability of Lucretius. The recovery of his long poem De rerum natura in 1417 sparked considerable interest (fifty-two surviving manuscripts for the fifteenth century; three incunable editions), and several editions for school use were prepared during the sixteenth century.28 Yet it received only three printed commentaries and one translation into the vernacular (Italian, 1530) previous to the English version of 1683,29 underlining the unease and suspicion with which Epicurean ideas continued to be viewed. The few sympathetic treatments of Epicurus’s concept of pleasure usually involved gross misrepresentation or misuse of Epicurean ideas in order to underline the superiority of Christian ideals of blessedness, divine providence, or the afterlife. Lorenzo Valla, in his De vero falsoque bono (On the True and False Good), for example, firstly used Epicurean arguments to counter Stoic ones and then to affirm a thoroughly Christian account of the infinite pleasures of heavenly beatitude.30 As will be shown below, Francisco de Quevedo was one of the few Renaissance writers to defend a version of Epicurean ethics which, though still adapted to Christian sensibilities, was somewhat closer to the original spirit of this philosophical school. 25  Kraye, ‘The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy’, pp. 335–37; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 360–74. 26  Kraye, ‘“Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus”’; Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 41–42. On this work, see also Peter Mack’s essay in this volume. 27  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 62–63. 28  See Brown, The Return of Lucretius. 29  Hankins and Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 34–36. 30  Kraye, ‘The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy’, p. 338; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 374–86.

38 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

With reference to ethics, the borders between the four main philosophical currents were very porous. The nature of medieval and Renaissance thought was such that multiple traditions could be accommodated with and incorporated into a Christian perspective. The notable rise of Platonic philosophy, for example, did not displace Aristotelian understandings of ethics; despite numerous debates throughout the fifteenth century (and even more in the sixteenth) on the superiority of Plato or Aristotle, the Paduan professor Francesco Piccolomini was hardly alone in thinking that the differences between the two were more a matter of wording than of substance and that doing without one of them would be akin to losing the use of an eye. These crossovers and intersections will be clearer, however, in the examples that follow, which will consider the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici, John Case’s brand of Aristotelianism in England, and the defence of Stoicism and Epicureanism, respectively by Lipsius and Quevedo. We will conclude with a discussion of the Tablet of Cebes, which reflects a visually rich intersection of various philosophical currents.

Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici A window onto the nature of Renaissance Platonism is offered by a well-known exchange on the supreme good between Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). In 1473/74 Lorenzo authored a poem known as Altercazione or De summo bono.31 Significantly written in terza rima, this work — which recalls in various ways the compositions of Dante and Petrarch — is divided into six chapters. The central portion (chap. 2, line 52–chap. 5, line 181) has Ficino appearing to a shepherd and to Lorenzo in an idyllic setting in the Tuscan countryside, where he explains to them what true happiness is and how to attain it. The final chapter is a paean to God, the ‘sommo eterno Bene’ (‘supreme, eternal Good’; chap. 6, line 203). The two sections must be read alongside Ficino’s prose Epistula de felicitate and his Oratio ad Deum theologica respectively;32 indeed, the compositions by Ficino and Lorenzo share so much in common that scholars have argued about which is a re-elaboration of the other.33 We will leave aside here questions about precedence or arguments about the possible political statement 31 

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Scritti scelti, ed. by Bigi, pp. 51–88. These can be found respectively as Ep. I, 115 and I, 116 in Ficino, Lettere, i: Epistolae familiarum liber, ed. by Gentile, pp. 201–10 and 211–14. 33  See the helpful studies in Hankins, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici as a Student of Ficino’; Hankins, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s De summo bono’. 32 

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which Lorenzo wanted to make. It is more germane to consider to what extent the Altercazione and Epistula de felicitate convey a genuinely Platonic viewpoint. The answer turns out to be: less than one might expect. In their attempt to identify the nature of happiness and the supreme good, Ficino and Lorenzo wind their way from the lower goods (such as honour, physical beauty, and pleasure) to the very highest ones, culminating in a prolonged argument as to whether it is more praiseworthy to know or to love God, who has in the meantime been named as the highest good. Both authors reach the conclusion that loving God is better than knowing him, just as the will is superior to the intellect.34 Students of Plato will immediately recognize that this is not at all a central concern of his, for he not only stresses the role of Ideas rather than of God, but pays scant attention to the conflicting functions of will and intellect. It was Ficino who interpreted the winged charioteer in the Phaedrus to be the soul, jointly elevated by will (voluntas) and intellect (intellectus). And it was again Ficino whose programme included not only joining political power to philosophical wisdom (as Plato had suggested in the Republic), but philosophical wisdom to Christianity.35 In any case, the emphasis on the will which one finds in the Altercazione and Epistula de felicitate echoes, more closely than Plato, Petrarch’s position that ‘it is better to will the good than to know the truth’. 36 In turn, this viewpoint was strongly influenced by the humanist’s reading of Augustine, which had coloured numerous medieval considerations of the problem. It was also indebted to the late medieval conflict on this point between Thomists and Scotists (among others). Lorenzo’s Altercazione in particular may, in its setting, recall the devices of Platonic dialogues,37 but actually tends to read (much more than Ficino’s corresponding work) as a scholastic treatment of a quaestio, full of distinctiones and eager to present both sides of an argument before offering the master’s resolution. Tellingly, both compositions rely on passages from Thomas’s Summa contra gentiles. Another important source for these works by Ficino and Lorenzo is the Neo­ platonic tradition. As Hankins has suggested,38 the process of purgation and conversion involved in climbing the ladder of being was a persistent element 34 

I leave aside here considerations about which of these may have been Ficino’s mature position or his position in other works such as in his commentary on the Philebus. 35  Hankins, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici as a Student of Ficino’, pp. 326–27. 36  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, p. 105. 37  Hankins, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici as a Student of Ficino’, p. 339. 38  Hankins, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici as a Student of Ficino’, pp. 337–38.

40 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

of Neoplatonic thought. Ficino adapts this, by stressing love in contrast to the Neoplatonic emphasis on knowledge, but he nonetheless retains important aspects of an upward movement, combining it with the Christian vision of God as the final end of all things. Finally, it is instructive to consider the role of other pagan philosophical currents. Stoicism and Epicureanism are dismissed fairly rapidly, but Aristotelianism has a strong presence. Lorenzo even paraphrases the opening lines of the Nicomachean Ethics (chap. 2, lines 64–66). Both authors follow Aristotle’s explanation of why the goods of fortune, nature, and the soul cannot be the true and ultimate good. Both observe that Aristotle’s comments on contemplation do not take into account the possibility that the soul can engage in this activity in separation from the body (chap. 3, lines 142–50), yet they also recognize that Aristotle’s understanding of earthly matters is excellent, as far as it goes. It could, of course, be argued that this combination of Aristotelian and Platonic elements was already a strong feature of Neoplatonism; but here it is worthwhile recalling the presence of scholastic and Aristotelian components, since it reminds us that the vision of happiness and the supreme good offered by both Lorenzo and Ficino cannot be described as a purely Platonic attitude towards ethics. Rather, it introduces and mingles a scholastic approach and debate with Aristotelian, Platonic, Neoplatonic, humanistic, and Christian elements. The resulting mixture, which reflected Florence’s cultural fluidity in the 1470s, also had a remarkable appeal throughout sixteenth-century Europe.

John Case The interaction between the various philosophical traditions is also evident in Renaissance Aristotelianism. A telling example is John Case (1540/41?–1600), possibly the most influential writer on Aristotle in Elizabethan England.39 Case enjoyed a lifelong association with Oxford, where he not only studied but also taught, first in St John’s College and then privately in his own home (while retaining, however, strong ties with the university). He wrote works mostly of a didactic nature, aimed at various levels of students, and covering between them logic, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. Here we are most concerned with the works in the last category, and particularly with Case’s Speculum moralium quaestionum in universam ethicen Aristotelis, which appeared in 1585 as the first book to come off the press of Joseph Barnes 39 

The standard study is Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism. For editions and biblio­ graphy, see Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, pp. 85–86.

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in Oxford.40 This is, in many ways, an unusual work. It progressively covers all ten books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but its genre is hard to pin down. Each chapter begins with a brief explanation of the issues addressed by Aristotle in the corresponding section of the Ethics. This is followed by a table explaining the topics discussed by Aristotle and their main divisions. One then finds a series of objections and responses before the discussion moves on to the next section of the Ethics. The text of the Ethics itself, however, is not given, although it is occasionally quoted (in Latin translation) in the course of Case’s explanation. These three main formal elements already reflect a joining of rather disparate approaches, from the questions on Aristotle favoured by John Buridan to the Aristotelian paraphrases of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the dichotomous tables popularized by Peter Ramus. The very frequent use which Case makes of quotations from Latin poetry or of allusions to Greek and Roman history add a feature linking him to the humanistic commentary tradition. The positions assumed by Case in the course of his commentary also suggest that he drew on a number of different influences. In the introduction, he divides moral philosophy into the three sections of ‘monastica, oeconomica et politica’, which one encounters in Eustratius and Thomas Aquinas. Case is far less explicit than in his later writings as to which material is drawn from which author; but the ‘Peroratio ad lectorem’ placed at the end of the work confirms his heavy reliance not only on Eustratius and Thomas, but also on various other medieval and more recent commentators.41 Given the revival of interest at Oxford in medieval scholastic authors from around 1580 onwards, this should not be too surprising, and Schmitt is surely right to note the breadth of Case’s tastes.42 But what is also remarkable is the almost complete absence of Italian sources, with the exception of Donato Acciaiuoli, whose commentary (1478) parallels that of Case in its intensive use of medieval commentaries and its openness to the Platonic tradition.43 40 

Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism, p. 87. The book received a further ten editions before 1625, mainly in Frankfurt (Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, p. 85). After the first edition, it came to be known as Speculum questionum moralium. 41  Case, Speculum quaestionum moralium in universam, pp. 681–82: ‘Unum nunc superest, ut id etiam intelligas, quosnam authores in hisce meis lucubrationibus sequutus fuerim. Horum nomina non recensere gravabor. In prima ergo classe Thomam, Eustratium et Boetium nomino. In secunda Fabrum, Buridanum et Borreum. In tertia Odonem, Burleum et suum Donatum [Acciaolum]. In postrema Iohannem de Celaia, Iohannem Scotum, et unum satis amarum fortasse nomine subtilem tamen ingenio, Gilbertum Crab. His ex recentioribus ac neotericum Petrum Martyrem, Danaeum, et Theodorum Zwingerum addidi.’ 42  Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism, pp. 63–68, 152–59. 43  See in particular Bianchi, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele’.

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The latter is a crucial point, for whereas Stoicism tends to get a rather severe thrashing in Case’s Speculum,44 Plato’s positions are generally treated with more sympathy. When Aristotle gets a bit rough with his former teacher, claiming that truth is more important than friendship, Case points out that Aristotle seems to be misrepresenting Plato’s position.45 When he wishes to shore up his arguments through the authority of other ancient thinkers, Case is quick to invoke Plato (and also, when the occasion suits, Thales of Miletus, Solon, Cato, etc.).46 On other occasions his attitude towards Plato can be ambivalent, 47 but in the Speculum he tends to be handled respectfully. In the Speculum Case also reminds his readers of the compatibility between Aristotle and Christianity. Although he does not take an extreme position on this matter,48 he does insist that, on at least six hundred different occasions, Aristotle argues for the immortality of the soul. And he maintains (with the explicit support of Thomas Aquinas) that ancient philosophers enjoyed the light of reason (lumen naturae) sufficiently to recognize the existence of God.49 Finally, it seems important that Case not only produced the Speculum, but in 1596 also published the Reflexus speculi moralis, based on the Magna moralia,50 and in its appendix included a sixty-page work entitled ABCedarium moralis philosophiae. The latter is formatted almost as a catechism, with short questions and longer answers about moral philosophy, its structure, ends, and so forth. It would have been appropriate for an adolescent. The Reflexus is interesting because it shows the increasing breadth within treatments of Aristotelian moral philosophy. It is also significant that Case wrote works on the Economics and the Politics. What is clear is that, like other major Aristotelian writers of his time,51 Case was inclined to be eclectic and broad in his approach.

44 

See, for example, the discussion about the freedom of the will at the end of Book i. Case, Speculum quaestionum moralium in universam, pp. 29–32. 46  Case, Speculum quaestionum moralium in universam, p. 676. 47  Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism, pp. 166–67. 48  For Case’s general approach, see Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism, pp. 159–63. 49  Case, Speculum quaestionum moralium in universam, pp. 63, 679. 50  Case, Reflexus speculi moralis. 51  See Kraye, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism’; Rohls, ‘Zwischen Stoizismus und Aristotelismus’. 45 

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Justus Lipsius As we have seen, among the Greek sources which became available in the West during the fifteenth century were the Enchiridion of Epictetus, the ex-slave turned Stoic philosopher, and the Lives of Diogenes Laertius, Book vii of which contains biographical and doxographical information about the founding members of the Stoic school. It was not, however, these newly recovered works which led Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) to reassess Stoicism, laying the foundations for the Neo-Stoic movement of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.52 He took his inspiration instead from the sect’s most famous Roman spokesman, Seneca, whose writings had formed part of the staple intellectual diet of European scholars since the early Middle Ages.53 One of the most learned humanists of his day,54 Lipsius let his readers know that he had laboriously extracted every relevant fragment from all the Greek and Latin works known at the time in order to reconstruct the history and doctrines of the sect, in his Manuductio or Guide to Stoic Philosophy of 1604,55 and to explain the scientific theories on which Stoic ethical beliefs were based, in his Physiologia Stoicorum, also published in 1604.56 He made it clear, however, that the point of this exercise was to provide the philosophical background necessary to read, with maximum enjoyment and benefit, his edition of Seneca, which came out the following year.57 This case provides a salutary warning that new material could serve to illuminate, rather than replace, traditional sources. Although Lipsius’s main purpose in the Manuductio was to present a new reading of the philosophy to which ‘our Seneca’ owed his allegiance,58 he frequently compared the doctrines of the Stoics to those of other ancient philosoph52 

For an account of his life and work, with recent bibliography, see Papy, ‘Justus Lipsius’. On Lipsius’s ethics, also see the essay by Antonino Poppi in this volume. 53  See the exhibition catalogue, De Robertis and Resta, Seneca: una vicenda testuale. 54  Oestreich, ‘Justus Lipsius als Universalgelehrter’. 55  Lipsius, Manuductio, sig. *3r (‘Ad Lectorem’). 56  Lipsius, Physiologiae stoicorum, p. 2 (i. 1); see also Hirai and Papy, Justus Lipsius and Natural Philosophy. 57  Seneca, Opera quae extant omnia, ed. by Lipsius, p. iiii (‘Introductio Lectoris’): ‘eos libros sic institui ut quamquam a capite sectam sensusque Stoicos ordine exsequar, nihil tamen inseram quod proprie non sit Senecae illustrando’. Both the Manuductio and the Physiologia are subtitled ‘L. Annaeo Senecae et aliisque scriptoribus illustrandis’. See also Kraye, ‘From Medieval to Early Modern Stoicism’, pp. 12–17; Papy, ‘Erasmus’s and Lipsius’s Editions of Seneca’. 58  Papy, ‘Neostoizismus und Humanismus’.

44 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

ical schools. In a chapter, for instance, on the Stoic belief that virtue on its own was sufficient for supreme happiness, he was dismissive, like most Renaissance scholars, of the Epicureans — ‘even hearing about this doctrine is fatal to them’; but he was at pains to demonstrate that the Brahmins in India, the Cynics, and Plato held the same view as the Stoics. More importantly, in terms of his agenda to overcome lingering doubts about the compatibility of Stoicism with Christianity and thus enable his contemporaries to adopt its tenets with a clear conscience, he adduced passages from the Old Testament and from the Church Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria,59 showing that Jews and Christians likewise shared this belief in the sufficiency of virtue for happiness.60 Lipsius’s desire to correct the Stoics on the relatively few points in which he thought their doctrines were at variance with Christian theology forced him to admit that even Seneca, ‘though well intentioned’, had occasionally gone astray and that the positions of other philosophers were sometimes preferable. In De constantia sapientis (vii. 1), Seneca, arguing that the Stoic wise man was not merely a ‘lofty image of a false thing’, had written ‘Seldom perhaps, and at great intervals of time, is he discovered’, and he suggested that Cato of Utica ‘surpasses our model’. To which Lipsius replied: ‘We Christians deny this and agree with Plato that anyone who would truly be a philosopher must never and under no circumstances suppose that he will achieve pure wisdom other than among the gods of the underworld,61 that is, in those pure and blessed places, in the presence of the author of all wisdom and his flock.’62 Far more contentious, from a Christian perspective, was the Stoic belief that ‘the wise man will for reasonable cause make his own exit from life’.63 Although Lipsius was able to cite a passage in which Epictetus counsels against suicide and another in which Seneca expresses uncharacteristic restraint,64 he acknowledged that the Stoics had been wrong to take a stance that was justly condemned, not only by the Church, but also by the wisest men of antiquity, including Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle.65 59 

Papy, ‘Sanctifying Stoic Virtues?’. Lipsius, Manuductio, pp. 113–17 (ii. 20); English translation: Lipsius, ‘Guide to Stoic Philo­sophy’, trans. by Young, pp. 203–05. 61  See Plato, Phaedo, 66B–67B. 62  Lipsius, Manuductio, pp. 82–84 (ii. 8) (p. 84); Lipsius, ‘Guide to Stoic Philosophy’, trans. by Young, pp. 200–02 (p. 202). 63  This view is attributed to Zeno in Diogenes Laertius, Lives vii. 130. 64  Lipsius, Manuductio, pp. 204–09 (iii. 23) (p. 207), quoting Epictetus, Discourses, i. 9, 12–14, and 16–17, and Seneca, Epistulae morales, XXX. 12. 65  Lipsius, Manuductio, pp. 205–06 (iii. 23), quoting Cicero, De senectute xx. 72, for 60 

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Francisco de Quevedo In 1604, Lipsius received a fan letter in Latin from Francisco de Quevedo (1580– 1645),66 in which the up-and-coming Spanish author praised the distinguished Fleming’s antiquarian treatise on the Vestal virgins, published the previous year.67 In the brief correspondence which ensued,68 Quevedo attempted to establish his own humanist credentials by offering a new explanation of a disputed passage in Lucan’s Pharsalia;69 and the two scholars discovered a common interest in Seneca.70 Lipsius also told his young friend about the imminent publication of his Manuductio and Physiologia. This epistolary exchange with one of the great figures of European humanism had a powerful impact on Quevedo, who became an enthusiast for Lipsius’s brand of Christian Stoicism. Years later, having abandoned his early career as a successful, but controversial, picaresque novelist and satirist, he marketed this philosophy to his (and Seneca’s) fellow countrymen by publishing a vernacular treatise, Stoic Doctrine, heavily reliant on the Manuductio, and a Spanish verse translation of Epictetus’s Enchiridion.71 Quevedo made more strenuous (and less subtle) efforts than Lipsius to accommodate Stoic ethics to Judaeo-Christian morality, claiming, for example, that the sect’s teachings derived ultimately from the Book of Job.72 So keen was he to stress this agreement that he was willing to sacrifice the reputation of his beloved Seneca to salvage that of the school: ‘just because Seneca was of the opinion that it is permissible

Pythagoras; Apuleius, De dogmate Platonis ii. 23, for Plato; and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics iii. 7 (1116a13–15). 66  Mérimée, Essai sur la vie et les oeuvres de Francisco de Quevedo; Iffland, Quevedo in Perspective. 67  Lipsius, Vesta et vestalibus syntagma. 68  The letters are published in Lipsius, Epistolario, ed. by Ramírez, pp. 387–94, 400–05, 411–15. 69  Quevedo’s suggestion, on the basis of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives viii. 31, that ‘Ianitor’, in Pharsalia vi. 702, referred not to Cerberus but to Mercury (Lipsius, Epistolario, ed. by Ramírez, p. 401) was accepted in Frans van Oudendorp’s 1728 edition and by some later editors: see, e.g., Lucanus, Pharsalia, ed. by Haskins, p. 221. 70  Rothe, Quevedo und Seneca. 71  The edition Epicteto y Phocilides en español con consonantes also included Quevedo’s Defensa de Epicuro contra la común opinión and his Spanish version of the Carmen admonitorium, a Greek didactic poem written by a Hellenistic Jew but falsely attributed to the sixth-century bc poet Phocylides. 72  Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo, pp. 26–30.

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to commit suicide, this does not mean that it is a Stoic opinion; rather, it is the opinion of one particular Stoic’.73 Not only were other Stoic philosophers morally superior to Seneca on this matter, so, too, was the founder of a rival sect, Epicurus. In his Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions, originally intended as the introduction to Stoic Doctrine and published together with it, Quevedo lavished praise on Epicurus for rejecting ‘the opinion of certain Stoics’, most notably Seneca, ‘who maintained that the wise man can and should inflict death upon himself ’. The evidence came from Seneca himself, who had quoted Epicurus’s ‘words against his own interest’.74 The majority of material in the treatise, in fact, is taken from Seneca, whose sympathetic account of Epicurus Quevedo sought to justify: ‘Seneca admired him, indeed truly admired him’, and the stated aim of the Defence was, ‘in the name of the venerable Seneca, to restore Epicurus to the place which he deserves’.75 Quevedo also drew on Book x of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives, Lucretius, and other sources which had re-emerged in the Renaissance, such as Sextus Empiricus, as well as contemporary works that presented Epicurus in a more positive light, including the Essais of Montaigne.76 Nevertheless, the work bears an unmistakably Senecan stamp, and Quevedo throughout portrays the hedonist philosopher as a Stoic manqué, who believed that virtue was the foundation of pleasure.77 Convinced of the similarity of Epicureanism to Stoicism, Quevedo maintained that both philosophies were largely in accordance with Christianity. Ignoring explicit statements by Epicurus and Lucretius to the contrary, Quevedo held that the philosopher’s fortitude in the face of death, as recounted by Seneca, 73 

He then gives the passage from Epictetus’s Discourses quoted by Lipsius (see note 64 above). See Quevedo, Nombre, origen, intento, i, 872–91 (p. 876) (English translation, i, 210– 25). See also Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo, pp. 30–33. 74  Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, p. 25; English translation: Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, p. 250. Quevedo quotes Seneca, Epistulae morales xxiv. 23. 75  Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, pp. 34, 50; Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, pp. 253, 258. 76  He quotes Montaigne’s statement in ‘Of Cruelty’ (bk ii, chap. 11) that ‘the Epicurean school in no wise yields to the Stoics in firmness of opinion and rigour of doctrine’: Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, pp. 31–32; Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, pp. 252–53. 77  Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, p. 8; Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, p. 247. See also Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo, pp. 43–53.

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showed that he had believed in the afterlife; and, although he had denied divine providence, this was because, ‘like all other pagans’, he was deprived of the light of faith.78 In contrast to the Stoics, however, who had received a good press from the Church Fathers, Epicurus had been vilified by Christian authors. This was because the envious slanderers, from whom Quevedo had suffered in his own day,79 had turned Epicurus’s name into ‘a synonym for depravity and debauchery’, even though his works were ‘useful, modest and — insofar as it is permitted to say such a thing of a pagan — saintly’.80

The Tablet of Cebes Towards the end of the Defence, Quevedo quotes a fellow Spaniard, Gonzalo Correas, who had asserted that the Epicureans placed happiness in the ‘pleasure of the soul’, not of the body. The statement occurs in a note to Correas’s Castilian translation of the Tablet of Cebes, which had recently been published together with his version of Epictetus’s Enchiridion as the writings of two ‘Stoic philosophers’.81 Yet the supposed author of the Tablet — a Greek dialogue of the first century bc or ad, in which the main character presents a moralizing allegorical interpretation of a votive painting in a temple of Saturn to a group of youthful pilgrims — was Cebes of Thebes, a disciple of Pythagoras and Socrates, who appeared in Plato’s Phaedo (59D–63B) and Crito (45B).82 The variegated mixture of ethical doctrines on display in the dialogue has provoked heated debates among modern scholars, who have classified it as Neo-Pythagorean, Platonic, Stoic, Cynic, or some blend of the Hellenistic sects.83 For Renaissance commen78 

Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, pp. 34–35; Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, p. 254. See also Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo, pp. 53–56. Twelve years later, Pierre Gassendi defended Epicurus’s theological mistakes on similar grounds: Gassendi, De vita et moribus Epicuri, p. 5. 79  Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo, pp. 17–18. 80  Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, pp. 14–15; Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, p. 248. Epicurus’s earliest Renaissance defender, Cosma Raimondi, blamed his bad reputation on the envy of rival sects, which resented the popularity of his school: see Davies, ‘Cosma Raimondi’s Defence of Epicurus’, p. 131. 81  Quevedo, Defensa de Epicuro, ed. by Acosta Méndez, p. 59; Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, p. 261. See Correas, Ortografia kastellana nueva i perfeta, p. 115, n. 5. 82  See Fitzgerald and White, ‘Introduction’. 83  Trapp, ‘On the Tablet of Cebes’, pp. 168–71.

48 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

tators, this eclecticism was part of the work’s appeal, enabling them to show off their knowledge of the different philosophical schools of antiquity and to present an attractive vision of pagan wisdom, in which a common commitment to living virtuously papered over any sectarian disagreements. First appearing in Greek and Latin editions in the mid-1490s, then gaining huge popularity in the sixteenth century through a large number of vernacular translations, the Tablet remained popular in the following century and well beyond, inspiring not only literary and philosophical interpretations but also artistic recreations.84 The dialogue’s combination of easy Greek and sound moral content recommended it as a school textbook, sometimes printed in conjunction with grammar books, as in the edition of c. 1501 published by Aldus Manutius, who described the Tablet as eminently worthy of reading and extremely useful for learning the language.85 More often, however, it was paired with Epictetus’s Enchiridion, as in Correas’s version and in the 1561 Greek–Latin edition of the German humanist and schoolmaster Hieronymus Wolf, who saw both works as teaching youths how to attain tranquillity of the soul through contempt for worldly goods.86 For the Bolognese humanist Gian Battista Pio, who in 1496 produced a Latin verse paraphrase of the Tablet for his patron Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, the crucial lesson conveyed by Cebes was rather the superiority of the contemplative life, a theme he associated with Epicureanism in his 1511 commentary on Lucretius, while also identifying Pythagorean, Platonic, and Stoic elements in the dialogue.87 By the seventeenth century, this eclectic tendency had developed into the kind of encyclopaedic approach we find in Antonio Mascardi’s Moral Discourses of 1627, a Baroque extravaganza in which the text of the Tablet was little more than a springboard for academic dissertations on diverse aspects of ancient philosophy, literature, and religion.88 Renaissance authors seized every opportunity, as they did with other pagan ethical texts, to reconcile the Tablet with Christian moral precepts. Its depiction of the path to virtue and happiness as steep, narrow, and not much frequented (xv) was often compared to Matthew 7. 14: ‘strait is the gate, and narrow is the 84 

Lutz, ‘Ps. Cebes’; Sider, Cebes’ Tablet; Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, pp. 206–09; Schleier, Tabula Cebetis; Gombrich, ‘A Classical “Rake’s Progress”’. 85  Manuzio, Aldo Manuzio editore, trans. and ed. by Giovanni, i, 38. 86  Epictetus, Enchiridion, ed. and trans. by Wolf, pp. 3–17 (‘Praefatio’). See also Lutz, ‘Ps. Cebes’, pp. 13–14. 87  Tucker, Homo Viator, pp. 120–49; Benedetti, Itinerari di Cebete, pp. 113–22. 88  Mascardi, Discorsi morali; see also Benedetti, Itinerari di Cebete, pp. 323–84.

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Figure 1. Title-page woodcut illustrating the Tablet of Cebes, designed by Hans Holbein the Younger and printed in Strabo, De situ orbis (Basel: in aedibus V. Curionis, 1523). Photograph supplied by the Warburg Institute.

50 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

way which leads to life, and only a few ever find it’.89 Typical of this exegetical method was the 1524 commentary of Johannes Camers, an Italian Franciscan who taught at the University of Vienna. He associates the discussion of wealth in the Tablet, which concludes that it is not a good thing, since it does not make those who possess it better (xxxix), with Christ’s dictum that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19. 24), but goes on to list a number of wealthy biblical figures, from Abraham and Joseph to David and Solomon, who had lived outstandingly holy lives because they used their riches well.90 The message that classical and Christian moral values were in harmony was communicated on a visual level by Hans Holbein the Younger’s woodcut of the 1520s, in which the Tablet’s allegorical figures of Happiness and True Learning are shown wearing haloes, making it a suitable image for the title pages of Basel editions of Augustine’s City of God and Erasmus’s New Testament, as well as the works of the ancient geographer Strabo.91 In this chapter we have tried to give some idea of the impact on Renaissance scholars of the availability of new sources for moral philosophy. We have also attempted to show that thinkers of this period rarely saw themselves as exclusively committed to one or another philosophical school from antiquity: interpreters of Plato could hardly ignore the works of Aristotle, just as supporters of Epicureanism had to contend (at least implicitly) with the claims of Stoicism. All were confronted, at the same time, by the need to reconcile their philosophical viewpoints with their own religious convictions and those of their readership. In a climate in which the various confessions increasingly viewed philosophy as a weapon of religious warfare, the different ethical positions presented in ancient sources were often deployed singly or in combination to fight particular battles. Practical considerations, too, no doubt encouraged the eclecticism of the age: the urge to sell more books by attracting a wider range of readers, to show off one’s learning, to initiate trends, or to appear au courant all played a part. Yet the expanding canon also offered opportunities to pursue loftier, less self-interested aims. Petrarch saw the literature and ideals of ancient Rome as a model for the renewal of Italian culture and society. Ficino believed that Platonism would help make his contemporaries (both individually and collectively) more selfaware, more pious, and more loving of the Good. Lipsius regarded his variety of Christian Stoicism as a balm for the wounds of a society torn by religious and 89 

Schleier, Tabula Cebetis, pp. 124–38 (‘Cebes Christianus’) (p. 124). Cebes of Thebes, Socratisque discipuli tabula, with a commentary by Camers, fol. Hv v. See also Lutz, ‘Ps. Cebes’, pp. 12–13. 91  Schleier, Tabula Cebetis, pp. 34–37, 131 and plates 5, 7, 8. 90 

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political strife. Despite differences of emphasis, Renaissance authors shared the belief that the perspectives on ethics worked out in antiquity could offer solutions relevant to the broad cultural, social, and even political problems of their time. This assumption would be rejected by early modern philosophers during the course of the seventeenth century, but not before virtually the entire corpus of ancient ethics known today had been brought to light and numerous experiments in applying old and new sources to the challenges facing Renaissance Europe and its overseas colonies had been carried out.

52 David A. Lines and Jill Kraye

Works Cited Primary Sources Aristotle, The Ethiques of Aristotle, That Is To Saye, Preceptes of Good Behauote and Perfighte Honestie, trans. by John Wilkinson (London: Grafon, 1547; STC 754) Case, John, Reflexus speculi moralis, qui commentarii vice esse poterit in magna moralia Aristotelis (Oxford: Barnes, 1596) —— , Speculum quaestionum moralium in universam Aristotelis philosophi summi Ethicen (Frankfurt: ex officina typographica Ioannis Saueri, impensis Nicolai Bassaei, 1594) Cebes of Thebes, Cebetis Thebani Socratisque discipuli tabula […], with a commentary by Johannes Camers (Kraków: Vietor, 1524) Correas, Gonzalo, Ortografia kastellana nueva i perfeta […]: el Manuel de Epikteto i la Tabla de Kebes, filosofos estoikos […] (Salamanca: Tabernier, 1630) Davies, Martin, ‘Cosma Raimondi’s Defence of Epicurus’, Rinascimento, n.s., 27 (1987), 123–39 Epicteto y Phocilides en español con consonantes, con el Origen de los estoicos y su defensa con­tra Plutarco y la Defensa de Epicuro contra la común opinion (Madrid: Maria de Quiñones, 1635) Epictetus, Enchiridion, hoc est, pugio: sive Ars humanae vitae correctrix: Item, Cebetis Thebani tabula, qua vitae humanae prudenter instituendae ratio continetur, ed. and trans. by Hieronymus Wolf (Basel: Oporinus, 1561) Ficino, Marsilio, Lettere, i: Epistolae familiarum liber 1, ed. by Sebastiano Gentile (Firenze: Olschki, 1990) Gassendi, Pierre, De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo (Lyon: Barbier, 1647) Lipsius, Justus, De vesta et vestalibus syntagma (Antwerpen: Moretus, 1603) —— , Epistolario de Justo Lipsio y los Españoles (1577–1606), ed. by Alejandro Ramírez (Madrid: Castalia, 1966) —— , ‘A Guide to Stoic Philosophy in Three Books’, trans. by Robert V. Young, in Cam­bridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 200–09 —— , Manuductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam libri tres (Antwerpen: Moretus, 1604) —— , Physiologiae stoicorum libri tres (Antwerpen: Moretus, 1604) Lucanus, Marcus Annaeus, Pharsalia, ed. by C. E. Haskins (London: Bell, 1887) Manuzio, Aldo, Aldo Manuzio editore: Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, ed. and trans. by Orlandi Giovanni, with an intro. by Carlo Dionisotti, 2 vols (Milano: Polifilo, 1975) Mascardi, Antonio, Discorsi morali su la Tavola di Cebete (Venezia: Pellagallo, 1627) Medici, Lorenzo de’, Scritti scelti di Lorenzo de’ Medici, ed. by Emilio Bigi, 2nd edn (Torino: UTET, 1965) Petrarch, Francesco, ‘On his Own Ignorance and That of Many Others’, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul O. Kristeller, and John H. Randall, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 47–133

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Quevedo, Francisco de, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, trans. by Luc Deitz and Adelheid Wiehe-Deitz, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 245–66 —— , Epicteto, y Phocilides en español con consonantes: Con el orígen de los estoicos, y su def­ensa contra Plutarco, y la defensa de Epicuro, contra la común opinión (Madrid: Quiñones, 1635) —— , Nombre, origen, intento, recomendación y decencia de la doctrina estoica, in Obras com­ pletas de don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, ed. by Luis Astrana Marin, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1945) (English translation: Francisco de Quevedo, ‘Stoic Doctrine’, trans. by Luc Deitz and Adelheid Wiehe-Deitz, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 211–24) Salutati, Coluccio, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. by Francesco Novati, 4 vols (Roma, 1891–1911) —— , ‘A Letter to Francesco Zabarella: Selections’, trans. by Ronald G. Witt, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 179–91 Segni, Bernardo, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare fiorentina et comentata per Bernardo Segni (Firenze: Torrentino, 1550) Seneca, Opera quae extant omnia, ed. by Justus Lipsius (Antwerpen: Moretus, 1605)

Secondary Studies Benedetti, Stefano, Itinerari di Cebete: Tradizione e ricezione della Tabula in Italia dal xv al xviii secolo (Roma: Bulzoni, 2001) Bianchi, Luca, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele: L’Expositio super libros Ethicorum di Donato Acciaiuoli’, in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento, rev. edn (Padova: Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 11–39 (first publ. in Rinascimento, n.s., 30 (1990), 25–55) Brown, Alison, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) Chew, Samuel C., The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962) De Robertis, Teresa, and Gianvito Resta, eds, Seneca: una vicenda testuale (Firenze: Man­ dragora, 2004) Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft: Studien zur Rezeption und Trans­for­ma­ tion der Liebestheorie Platons in der Renaissance (München: Fink, 2002) Ettinghausen, Henry, Francisco de Quevedo and the Neostoic Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) Fitzgerald, John T., and L. Michael White, ‘Introduction’, in The Tabula of Cebes, ed. and trans. by John T. Fitzgerald and L. Michael White (Chico: Scholars, 1983), pp. 1–47 Gentile, Sebastiano, ed., Umanesimo e padri della chiesa: Manoscritti e incunaboli di testi patristici da Francesco Petrarca al primo Cinquecento [mostra, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 5 febbraio–9 agosto 1997] (Roma: Rose, 1997)

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Gombrich, E. H., ‘A Classical “Rake’s Progress”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15 (1952), 254–56 Grafton, Anthony, ‘The Availability of Ancient Works’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 767–91 Hankins, James, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici as a Student of Ficino: The De summo bono’, in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Roma: Storia e letteratura, 2003–04), ii, 317–50 —— , ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s De summo bono and the Popularization of Ficinian Platonism’, in Humanistica: Per Cesare Vasoli, ed. by Fabrizio Meroi and Elisabetta Scapparone (Firenze: Olschki, 2003), pp. 61–69 —— , Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990–91) Hankins, James, and Ada Palmer, The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy in the Renaissance: A Brief Guide (Firenze: Olschki, 2008) Hirai, Hiro, and Jan Papy, Justus Lipsius and Natural Philosophy (Brussel: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2011) Iffland, James, ed., Quevedo in Perspective: Eleven Essays for the Quadricentennial, Proceedings from the Boston Quevedo Symposium, October, 1980, Hispanic Monographs (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982) Kraye, Jill, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism in the Moral Philosophy of Francesco Piccolomini’, in La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, Atti del colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt (Padova, 4–6 settembre 2000), ed. by Gregorio Piaia, Miscellanea erudita, 64 (Padova: Antenore, 2002), pp. 57–82 —— , ‘“Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus”: Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot’, in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 107–34 (repr. in Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), no. VIII) —— , ‘Francesco Filelfo on Emotions, Virtues and Vices: A Re-Examination of his Sources’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance, 43 (1981), 129–40 (repr. in Jill Kraye, Clas­ sical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Alder­ shot: Ashgate, 2002), no. V) —— , ‘From Medieval to Early Modern Stoicism’, in Continuities and Disruptions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by Charles Burnett and others, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge, 48 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 2008), pp. 1–23 —— , ‘L’Interprétation platonicienne de l’Enchiridion d’Épictète proposée par Politien: philologie et philosophie dans la Florence du xvème siècle, à la fin des années 70’, in Penser entre les lignes: Philologie et philosophie au Quattrocento, ed. by F. Mariani Zini (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2001), pp. 161–77 —— , ‘Italy, France and the Classical Tradition: The Origins of the Philological Com­ mentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’, in Italy and the Classical Tradition, ed. by Carlo Caruso and Andrew Laird (London: Duckworth, 2008), pp. 118–40

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—— , ‘The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. by David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 323–52 —— , ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 —— , ‘The Transformation of Platonic Love in the Italian Renaissance’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 76–85 (repr. in The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader, ed. by Keith Whitlock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 81–87) Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) —— , ‘Giovanni Bernardo Feliciano and the Edition of “Eustratius”’, in Eustratius and others, Aristotelis Stagiritae Moralia Nicomachia. Übersetzt von Johannes Bernardus Felicianus. Neudruck der Ausgabe Paris 1543 mit einer Einleitung von David A. Lines, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca: Versiones latinae temporis resuscitarum litterarum, 11, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2006) Lohr, Charles H., Latin Aristotle Commentaries, 3 vols to date (Firenze: Olschki, 1988–), ii: Renaissance Authors (1988) Lutz, Cora A., ‘Ps. Cebes’, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, ed. by F. Edward Cranz and others, 8 vols to date (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960– ), vi (1986), 1–14 Mérimée, E., Essai sur la vie et les oeuvres de Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) (Paris: Picard, 1886) Nasti, Paola, Favole d’amore e ‘saver profondo’: la tradizione salomonica in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2007) Oestreich, Gerhard, ‘Justus Lipsius als Universalgelehrter zwischen Renaissance und Barock’, in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning, ed. by T. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyes (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 180–201 Papy, Jan, ‘Erasmus’s and Lipsius’s Editions of Seneca: A “Complementary” Project?’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 22 (2002), 10–36 —— , ‘Justus Lipsius’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2008 edition [accessed 10 March 2011] —— , ‘Neostoizismus und Humanismus: Lipsius’ neue Lektüre von Seneca in der Manu­ ductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604)’, in Der Einfluss des Hellenismus auf die Philo­ sophie der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Gábor Boros (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), pp. 53–80 —— , ‘Sanctifying Stoic Virtues? Justus Lipsius’s Use of Clement of Alexandria in the Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604)’, in Virtutis imago: Studies on the Con­ ceptualisation and Transformation of an Ancient Ideal, ed. by G. Partoens and others (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 507–27

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Refini, Eugenio, with the collaboration of David A. Lines, Simon Gilson, and Jill Kraye, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy: A Database of Works [accessed 15 May 2012] Rice, Eugene F., ‘The Renaissance Idea of Christian Antiquity: Humanist Patristic Scholarship’, in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, ed. by Albert Rabil, Jr, 3 vols (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), i, 17–28 Rohls, Jan, ‘Zwischen Stoizismus und Aristotelismus: Lutherische und reformierte Ethik im Zeitalter der Orthodoxie’, in Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? Modelle der Normenbegründung von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Eckhard Kessler (Berlin: LIT, 2007), pp. 267–91 Rothe, Arnold, Quevedo und Seneca: Untersuchungen zu den Frühschriften Quevedos (Genève: Droz and Librarie Minard, 1965) Schleier, Reinhart, Tabula Cebetis: Studien zur Rezeption einer antiken Bildbeschreibung im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann, 1973) Schmitt, Charles B., ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Sixteenth Century: Some Preliminary Con­siderations’, in Ethik im Humanismus, ed. by Walter Rüegg and Dieter Wuttke (Boppard: Boldt, 1979), pp. 87–112 (repr. in Charles B. Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum, 1984), no. VII) —— , John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, ON: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1983) Sider, Sandra, Cebes’ Tablet (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1979) Trapp, M.  B., ‘On the Tablet of Cebes’, in Aristotle and After, ed. by Richard Sorabji (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1997), pp. 159–78 Tucker, Hugo, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Genève: Droz, 2003) Weiss, Roberto, Il primo secolo dell’Umanesimo: Studi e testi (Roma: Storia e letteratura, 1949) Witt, Ronald G., Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salu­ tati (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983)

From Schools to Courts: Renaissance Ethics in Context David A. Lines

C

hildren, youths, and adults in Renaissance Europe were everywhere surrounded by reminders of their obligations towards God and society and of their responsibility to live a good life, not only for themselves, but also for others. In a society where political and moral debates centred on duties rather than rights, depictions of virtue and exhortations to follow it could be found everywhere. Domestic objects (including tiles, paintings, tapestries, and relief sculptures) commonly reminded a household of the cardinal — and often the theological — virtues. Printed ephemera (such as art prints and popular posters) and woodcuts in books made these lessons clear even to the less educated, while emblems provided the more learned with matter which appealed simultaneously to their moral, aesthetic, and literary sensibilities. Plays, processions, sermons, and frescoes in churches were additional avenues for driving home the importance of virtue. The sacrament of confession made it clear that people should turn away from evil and do good. Altars on street corners reminded the unruly that they were being watched from above. Perhaps no occasion was more powerful than that of public executions, a solemn reminder of the consequences of heresy and wickedness, and a final opportunity for those declared guilty to repent.1 1 

On this point, see especially Terpstra, The Art of Executing Well.

David A. Lines ([email protected]) is Reader of Italian at the Univer­sity of Warwick. He is the author of Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Uni­ versities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Currently he is leading an AHRC-funded project on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400–1650’ and preparing several studies on the University of Bologna in the Renaissance.

58 David A. Lines

Despite the obvious importance of this intensely moral context of everyday life in the Renaissance, historians still know far too little about it. This essay will therefore focus on better-studied and often better-documented institutional contexts in which discussions of virtue and ethics flourished, sometimes in quite innovative ways. One should not, however, forget the broader context alluded to above: political and religious authorities demanded at least outward conformity to certain standards of moral behaviour, and fostering education about virtue or encouraging discussions about it were some of the means for communicating their expectations. First I will examine the three formal and more established contexts of schools, universities, and studia of the religious orders, and then the newer and rather more informal ones of humanistic circles, academies, and courts. I hope to show that understanding the contexts in which virtue was debated in the period is crucial to grasping the different ethical approaches and genres that developed. It also helps to clarify how certain doctrinal views changed.

Formal Institutions Schools Although primary and secondary education were not compulsory in the Renaissance, nonetheless various kinds of institutions flourished, geared especially to the needs of an increasingly urbanized society. After boys had learnt to read and write they had the option of learning merchant skills (what in Italy was called the abbaco) and/or of studying Latin grammar and literature. The latter route was usually taken only by those whose parents had a professional career planned for their sons — as notaries, lawyers, doctors, men of the church, or professional rhetoricians. All of these professions would typically require further study at university level. Youngsters who belonged to one of the religious orders (especially those of the mendicant friars) would, if judged intellectually promising by their superiors, pursue their higher education in one of their order’s studia, where the curriculum culminated in the study of theology. Needless to say, most of these options were not open to girls, although the most elementary phase of education was available to them and several well-off families also chose to have their daughters tutored privately in higher subjects. Several letters and treatises point to the way in which girls were educated in the Renaissance, but this remains a historiographically contested field.2 2 

The Florentine Giovanni Villani claimed in 1338: ‘Troviamo ch’e fanciulli e fanciulle che stanno a leggere, da otto a dieci mila’ (‘We find that the boys and girls [my emphasis] who are

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A decline in the number of church schools meant that, especially after 1300, other types of schools were needed.3 The evidence we have for Tuscany, which is among the European areas we know most about, shows that most cities hired masters for the primary and secondary education of their citizens’ offspring, while in other centres (especially Florence) primary education was in the hands of private teachers. (Both private and publicly sponsored education were available at the secondary level.) Increasingly, the well-to-do relied on private schools or tutors to educate their children. Even convents often depended on the services of private teachers coming in from the outside. As Robert Black has pointed out, at least two notable developments differentiated these schools from earlier educational patterns: first, teachers were now overwhelmingly laymen; second, education had now become a business, in which considerations of profit and competition played an increasing role.4 It is also important to stress that, since schoolmasters travelled a great deal in pursuit of better conditions and remuneration, education increasingly became less parochial (although also less continuous). And the expectations and desires of parents, together with changing societal needs, were responsible both for a surge in elementary literacy and for varying local emphases in education.5 Of the elements mentioned above, especially important were the expansion of education and the involvement of the laity, features which received further emphasis in the schools of the Protestant Reformation (Lutherans and Calvinists both pushed for universal education, including that of girls) and in the Catholic Schools of Christian Doctrine (which first started in Milan in 1536). 6 The pedagogical efforts of Robert Mulcaster, who both founded the famous Merchant Taylors’ School in London (1561) and later headed London’s School of St Paul’s, established by John Colet, consolidated a trend not quite countenanced by the earlier, more elitist humanist schools.7 learning to read, number between eight and ten thousand’); see Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. by Porta, iii, 198; some comments on girls’ education in Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 87–102. 3  Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 6–11; Black, Education and Society, chap. 3. Now see also Denley, Teachers and Schools in Siena and Gehl, Humanism for Sale. 4  Black, Education and Society, pp. 241–43. 5  Both Black and Gehl, for example, show that Latin grammar schools were less important in Florence than elsewhere in Tuscany in comparison with the abacus schools, quite possibly because of the city’s focus on commerce. See Gehl, Moral Art. 6  Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 333–62. 7  Cousin-Desjobert, La Théorie et la pratique d’un éducateur élisabéthain; DeMolen, Richard Mulcaster; Mulcaster, The Educational Writings, ed. by Oliphant.

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What place did moral education occupy in these schools? Did the involvement of the laity and the broader audience make for a change from the medieval aims of virtue and godliness (pietas) repeated in countless documents? And, even if the stated objectives remained similar (making allowance for some secularization of the language in which they were expressed), what actually went on in the classroom? On these points historians have, especially in recent years, disagreed. Paul Gehl saw Latin grammar consistently treated as ‘a moral art’ in the schools of Trecento Florence, and Paul Grendler (not unlike Eugenio Garin) insisted on the moral direction of humanistic education, even though this was rarely testified by actual classroom practice.8 Conversely, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine proposed that the school of Guarino da Verona gave very little space indeed to character formation,9 and recently Robert Black’s examination of glosses in schoolbooks concluded that the teaching of classical authors in both the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance was ‘overwhelmingly philological; the few moral or philosophical glosses are invariably lost in a vast sea of philological detail’.10 This is not the place to unravel an extremely complex historiographical problem, which would require at the very least an evaluation of glosses and commentaries versus oral classroom teaching and the production of commonplace books, and an analysis of aims versus practices of education. It does seem significant, however, that across Europe the texts that were used for teaching reading and writing tended to be of a moral or moralistic nature; (Ps‑)Cato’s Disticha, Aesop’s Fables, the Epigrammata of Prosper of Aquitaine, and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy must have been chosen for a good reason other than just their Latin.11 And certainly there was a sense in which, for both Renaissance and medieval pedagogues, reading was considered a moral activity, since texts were stored in the memory for recollection, meditation, and imitation.12 Furthermore, if the grammar curriculum promoted by the humanists relied so heavily on Cicero’s prose works, including his shorter moral treatises (De officiis, De amicitia, De senectute, and also De finibus and Tusculan Disputations),13 it stands to reason that they were not regarded solely as models of style. Indeed, the diffusion of moral topoi through collections of Ciceronian sententiae points in the opposite 8 

Gehl, Moral Art; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 263–64, 408. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 12–19. 10  Black, Humanism and Education, p. 9; see also pp. 286–325. 11  Gehl, Moral Art, chaps 4 and 5. 12  Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 156–88. 13  Black, Humanism and Education, pp. 262–67. 9 

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direction.14 For humanists, language and morals were so inextricably linked that to learn good Latin was to absorb the virtues of the Romans. In any case, it is hard to believe that the many pedagogical manifestos of the time, linking (according to long-standing precedent) learning and virtue, were just hot air. A particularly eloquent example is Johann Sturm’s The Correct Opening of Elementary Schools of Letters (1538) for the nascent humanistic school in Strasbourg, in which he states that ‘A man will not live virtuously who will be ignorant of what is common to all or many, or what is private, and what is praiseworthy in nature or honourable in habit’, even though the curriculum he outlines does not specifically include moral philosophy.15 Likewise, Sturm identifies the aim of education as ‘learned and eloquent godliness’ (‘sapiens atque eloquens pietas’),16 something that would also have found approval in the schools of the Bretheren of the Common Life and of the Jesuits. If one looks elsewhere, particularly to the system of grammar schools in England, one finds a constant attention to the moral meaning of poems and prose works to be read (e.g. Ovid, Virgil, Cicero), just as recommended by Erasmus and Philipp Melanchthon, and to the value of writing on ethical topics. Peter Mack has concluded that grammar education in England was very strongly moral in orientation.17 Universities Although schoolbooks for children provided examples of virtue and included proverbs, dialogues, or orations relevant to the right choices to make in life, any serious discussion of ethics had to wait until university study. It was then that moral philosophy could be followed in earnest, almost always on the basis of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and often (but usually not in Italy) of his Politics and the (pseudo-Aristotelian) Economics. There were considerable local differences in the importance given to the moral-philosophy course and in its place within the wider curriculum, and in any case there were significant developments over time.18 In Paris the Ethics was being taught well before the Oxford scholar Robert Grosseteste provided a fresh and full translation of the work in 1246. 14 

Moss, Printed Common-Place Books. Spitz and Tinsley, Johann Sturm on Education, p. 72. 16  Spitz and Tinsley, Johann Sturm on Education, p. 69. 17  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp. 14–15, 20–24, 32–38, 46–47, and passim. 18  For the following, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, especially chap. 2; Lines, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities’; and the essay in this volume by Luca Bianchi. 15 

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It soon became a requirement: according to the statutes of 1366 and 1452, candidates for the MA were to have studied most of its books. Ethics was taught ‘ordinarily’,19 at an advanced point in the curriculum, around the same time as metaphysics, usually by a specially appointed lector Ethicorum who was studying for his degree in theology and taught the course for two years. Evidence from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries suggests that the subject was increasingly brought forward to an earlier point in the Arts curriculum, typically to the first and/or second year.20 Ethics was taught very much philosophically, with a strong emphasis on the solution of philosophical (more rarely, theological) problems through quaestiones. Elsewhere in northern and central Europe, theological considerations seem to have interfered even less with the teaching of ethics than in Paris, since the lecturers were typically regents in Arts with interests centring on philosophy (or, as in Vienna, other subjects including mathematics or rhetoric). The opposite, however, was true in the Spanish universities, where a theological emphasis seems to have been very strong. In Italy the context of the ethics course was different yet again. Bologna and Padua, the pre-eminent Italian centres of university learning, were especially known for their teaching of law, medicine, and natural philosophy. Moral philosophy, which was taught within the faculty of Arts and Medicine, had a hard time establishing itself as a subject in its own right. For a long time it failed to attract specialists. Furthermore, it was not required for the degree, was taught only on holidays or during vacation periods, and had no clear place in the curriculum. Due to the weakness or absence of theology in the Italian universities, ethics had a more secular orientation than in some other European universities. Indeed, it was not unusual for it to be taught by professors of natural philosophy or medicine, who had little or no formal grounding in theology. Only during the sixteenth century did some of these aspects change. In Bologna, from the 1560s, the course was made an ‘ordinary’ one, and it tended to be taught for long stretches of time by a single preceptor, a change that soon took root in Padua as well. Although the subject continued to be fairly poorly paid, it did achieve more prominence and 19  ‘Ordinary’ teaching was typically required for the degree and imparted on regular teach­ ing days. In Renaissance Italy this designation also indicated a course delivered by a senior professor. 20  This new placement was probably related to various factors, including the pressures faced by several universities of the time, in both France and central Europe, to shoehorn the Arts curriculum into two years rather than the traditional three or more. Also important were the views of humanists and Reformers concerning the place of ethics in the university curriculum; see below.

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on occasion received lectures based on the Greek text.21 Moral philosophy was also affected by a revived alliance with rhetoric and Greek literature, something which had its beginnings in the second half of the fifteenth century in Florence (Angelo Poliziano, for example, lectured on the Ethics in 1490) and really took off in Pisa during the sixteenth century. Although in Italy the Ethics had always been the only textbook read in moral philosophy, university professors started to give attention to the Politics as well (but only seldom to the Economics).22 Some, such as Francesco Piccolomini in Padua, wrote on moral philosophy as a whole, reconciling Aristotle’s moral writings with those of Plato and adapting both to the requirements of the Christian faith.23 Four Renaissance developments were especially significant for the fate of ethics in the European universities. One was the increasing application of humanistic techniques and knowledge of Greek to the study and teaching of the Ethics. Already in the fifteenth century, new translations by the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni (1416/17) and the Greek émigré Johannes Argyropoulos (1450s) had made their way into university teaching; they were just a foretaste of the many new efforts which would be made (often by university professors) in the sixteenth century, including further translations by French scholars such as Denys Lambin, and editions of the Greek text by Pier Vettori and others. In numerous (but not all) circles, literary, linguistic, and scholarly considerations became the preponderant element in explaining a text that up to then had been considered solidly philosophical, and therefore in need of being expounded according to the rules and methods of philosophical discourse. On occasion this kind of analysis shifted attention away from the work’s practical implications. Often, however, this tendency was countered by a second important development, namely an effort to build a new Christian philosophy.24 Especially with Lutherans like Melanchthon, who used moral philosophy as a foundation for explaining the truths of the Gospel, the Ethics had a very obvious practical purpose and could be used as an introduction to the elements of faith.25 The religious use of the work transcended confessional boundaries, affecting personalities as 21 

The best examples are Marc-Antoine Muret in Rome and Pier Vettori in Florence. See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 238–46, 331–40. 22  Again, a telling case is Muret, who lectured at the university in Rome on both the Ethics and the Politics, respectively in 1563–67 and 1577–78. 23  Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus. On Piccolomini, see Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume. 24  See the Introduction to this volume, pp. 4–5. 25  See Risto Saarinen’s essay in this volume.

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different as John Case in England and Francisco Suárez in Spain; 26 the Jesuits’ Cursus Conimbricense (1592), which included moral philosophy, 27 is just one witness among many to their interest in the Ethics. Third, the increasing availability of sources related to competing ethical traditions28 made its way into the classroom. Although chairs in Platonic philosophy were few and far between in the Renaissance, and no chairs were officially dedicated to Stoic or Epicurean ethics, university lecturers were well aware of the importance of the non-Aristotelian traditions of thought. They were by no means tempted to abandon the explanation of Aristotle’s text, which became more than ever an intense object of interpretation,29 but they sought to solve the differences between the ancient systems of thought as they considered the Stagirite’s text. In the process, works that were not officially part of the curriculum in moral philosophy received a hearing. Several sixteenth-century lecture commentaries on the Ethics, for example, testify to lecturers’ engagement with the moral writings of Cicero; and in 1581 one lecturer of moral philosophy in Padua, Giason Denores, went so far as to suggest that works by the Roman orator such as the De finibus, De officiis, Tusculan Disputations, and De amicitia basically correspond in content to Aristotle’s Ethics and could comfortably take its place (with the added benefit of providing inspiration as well as instruction).30 Finally, of crucial importance was the shift in the audience of ethics. We have seen that, in northern and central Europe, ethics was taught to students as a philosophical subject and was therefore approached with the technical sophistication of professional philosophy. Ironically, the uncertain place of moral philosophy in Italy meant that it was often taught outside of the official programme of study and could therefore garner a broader audience. Teachers of the subject thus had to adapt their instruction to an audience that might very well include students from other subjects (e.g. rhetoric) or to the wider citizenry. A telling instance of this development is the commentary on the Ethics by Niccolò Tignosi, datable to around 1460 in Florence; while clearly not the work of a stylist, this commentary employs various strategies (e.g. philosophical analysis combined with the use of examples from history and classical poetry) 26 

Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 342–48, on the reconciliation of Aristotle’s moral philo­ sophy with Christianity. On Case, see the section on Case in the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in the present volume. 27  Aristotle, In libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum. 28  See the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 29  On the continuing and fundamental importance of Aristotle in the Renaissance, see especially Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance; Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries. 30  Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance, p. 406.

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in order to appeal simultaneously to students of philosophy and of rhetoric. Some of the latter probably came from outside the university altogether.31 A key interepreter who, on the cusp of the sixteenth century, brought together all of these tendencies and transmitted them to others, was Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in Paris. A teacher of philosophy at the Collège du Cardinal-Lemoine, it was he who, for the first time (1492), placed in direct comparison the older medieval translation of the Ethics with those of Bruni and Argyropoulos. Lefèvre not only used a polished Latin style in explaining the work, but enriched his commentaries (according to the model already pioneered by Tignosi) with historical examples and quotations from the classics. 32 Furthermore, it was he who cast the Ethics into a mould more congenial to his deep commitment to Christianity. (Lefèvre, who is actually best known for his later work on the Bible, allowed his student Josse Clichtove to expand his own notes on the Ethics through a running commentary which underlined the points in common between Aristotle and the teachings of Scripture.) Again, Lefèvre was instrumental in highlighting the importance of Platonic and mystical writers, whose insights must have affected his understanding of ethics in ways that remain to be studied.33 Finally, the French humanist rethought the pedagogical approach that should be taken to Aristotle’s works, including those on moral philosophy, something which had important consequences for how the Ethics was taught in the universities throughout the sixteenth century.34 Religious Studia Far less is known about the teaching of ethics in the schools of the religious orders than in the contexts of secular schools and universities. Especially the Dominicans were, from early on, enthusiastic interpreters of Aristotle’s Ethics, as is clear from the commentaries on this work by both Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas. And the relevance of Aristotle’s moral philosophy for theology is inescapable in works such as Thomas’s Summa theologiae, particularly the Ia IIae and IIa IIae. But the documentation concerning any regular teaching 31  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 192–220. See also this volume’s Intro­duction, pp. 6–8. 32  Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 104–05. 33  For an outline of Lefèvre’s career and Aristotelian works, see Lohr, ‘Faber Stapulensis’, in Latin Aristotle Commentaries, pp. 138–42. 34  On several of these points, see Lines, ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism’.

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of ethics in the studia of the Dominicans is very thin.35 It is only after 1314 that moral philosophy clearly enters into the curriculum of these studia generalia, but to some this has seemed an afterthought. The fact that this teaching could alternate with that of Thomas’s Summa strongly suggests that the study of ethics was seen as preparing the way for theology. Documents for the Dominican province of Toulouse in 1327, however, outline a three-year Arts programme, presumably on the heels of the study of logic, in which moral philosophy is not linked to theology at all. According to this prospectus, ethics was to be studied as a secondary subject in the first two years, while primary attention was given to natural philosophy and mathematics. Instructions from three years later list the books that teachers for the course were to cover; these included, in addition to the Ethics, the Magna moralia, Economics, and the De causis, and in the following year the Politics and, secondarily, the Rhetoric.36 The extent to which these instructions were actually followed is unclear. For Italy, we know only isolated cases of ethics teaching in the Dominican convents, yet the Dominicans were by far the most active among all interpreters of the Ethics in the fourteenth century, unsurprisingly offering a point of view which mostly remained close to that of Thomas Aquinas.37 In the fifteenth century their contribution began to fade somewhat, but significant personalities such as Girolamo Savonarola still wrote on moral philosophy, a subject which he possibly taught while he was regens studiorum of the convent in Bologna.38 Dominicans could also be found, in both the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, teaching moral philosophy and other subjects in the Italian universities. Their approach to philosophy and interventions in the debates of their day could be strongly conservative, as is suggested by the students’ opposition to Dominicus de Flandria at the University of Pisa.39 Certainly they did not, in the sixteenth century, take Pietro Pomponazzi’s ambiguous comments on the immortality of the soul lying down, and in fact it was one of the Dominicans, a certain Crisostomo Javelli, who tried to avoid such problems in the future by giving a strongly Christian flavour to Aristotle’s philosophy, including to his Ethics.40

35 

Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow Is Bent in Study’, pp. 333–36. Maierù, ‘Tecniche di insegnamento’, pp. 322–23. 37  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 84–85, 167–74. 38  Lines, ‘Pagan and Christian Ethics’. 39  Verde, ‘Domenico di Fiandra’. 40  Javelli, Totius rationalis; see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 499. 36 

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Among the Jesuits too moral philosophy was a subject of great interest.41 Jesuit colleges were of two types: those that taught only grammar and rhetoric, and those that also included the higher subjects — philosophy (for three and a half years) and then theology. In the schools of the second type, such as the Collegio Romano, there was initially a great deal of uncertainty about (and therefore irregularity in) the teaching of ethics during the second half of the sixteenth century. But the definitive Ratio studiorum (1599) emphasized the subject’s importance, especially for theology, and placed it at the end of the Arts curriculum, as a preparation for the topics to be covered in Thomas’s Summa. Its teaching gave rise to numerous questions and disputations, and to what was probably the most extensive commentary on the Ethics ever written.42 The application of the Ratio, however, varied significantly in different localities, since the Jesuits were often competing with local schools and universities and had to adapt their teaching programme accordingly.43 Numerous cursus philosophici written by the Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries skip over moral philosophy altogether.

Informal Contexts Compared to schools, universities, and religious studia, other Renaissance contexts of ethical discussion are more amorphous and harder to capture. Both humanists and scholastics, for example, commonly debated issues such as the superiority of the active or the contemplative life, the nature and limits of friendship, the essence of nobility or love, and (especially in the wake of the Reformation) the relationship of virtue and faith. But these and other topics were not necessarily discussed within well-defined institutions or within a clearly defined programme or set of rules. The figures involved might be solitary scholars or (more often) in the pay of a republic or court or (especially in the sixteenth century and later) members of academies or professors at universities. Boundaries could blur significantly, as for example when Florentine humanists discussed the power of love while gathered in a Ficinian or Platonic Academy, which for all practical purposes was an extension of the Medici’s (undeclared) court, or when humanists 41 

For this paragraph, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 348–62; and Lines, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities’, pp. 62–63. 42  Galluzzi, In Aristotelis libros quinque priores moralium ad Nicomachum and Galluzzi, In Aristotelis libros quinque posteriores moralium ad Nicomachum. 43  This is best illustrated by the correspondence collected in Monumenta pedagogica Societa­ tis Iesu, ed. by Lukács.

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in France held debates on moral topics at the court academy of King Henry III. Not all could be like Erasmus, who corresponded with princes and men of letters throughout Europe without really being subject to any of them. No systematic study has been undertaken of how ethics was discussed in these overlapping informal contexts, and of the possible implications for the directions the discussions themselves took. In the following I will therefore use individual examples to illustrate some relevant points. Humanist Circles Among the most slippery contexts to reconstruct is that of humanist circles, sometimes referred to as sodalitates or ‘academies’. Some informal circles flourished in fifteenth-century Italy around figures such as Marsilio Ficino in Florence, Johannes Bessarion in Rome, Giovanni Pontano in Naples, and Aldus Manutius in Venice. The early sixteenth century saw important literary and cultural gatherings such as those in Florence’s Rucellai Gardens (Orti Oricellari). Identifying these groups’ activities and practices in detail is complicated by a severe dirth of documentation.44 What does seem clear is that usually these were loose associations of scholars who tended to gather for discussion and/or instruction around a particular respected individual, often meeting in that person’s home or business (e.g. Aldus’s printing shop). The topics of discussion were, in all likelihood, miscellaneous — from Latin and Greek literature to scholarship, philosophy, and issues in ethics. If the writings of Giovanni Pontano are anything to go by, themes may have varied from the four cardinal virtues to nobility and obedience.45 Certainly, many of these groups spawned the writing of dialogues and other works, but one should resist the temptation to treat these as a faithful portrait of what went on in the meetings themselves.46

44 

For a helpful overview, see Chambers, ‘The Earlier “Academies” in Italy’; Quondam, ‘L’Accademia’. On the circle around Ficino in Florence, a revived (and, by now, tiresome) debate has followed the publication of Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy in Florence, with several interventions by James Hankins, Robert Black, and Field; see for instance Hankins, ‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy’. The controversy chiefly illustrates how scant the documentation is and how hard it is to interpret. 45  See, for example, De fortitudine and De oboedientia, collected in Pontano, I libri delle virtù sociali, ed. by Tateo. 46  This assumption mars the otherwise interesting discussion in De Caprio, ‘I cenacoli umanistici’.

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The absence of formal pedagogical responsibilities left discussants free to adopt a broad range of rhetorical strategies including the use of dialogues without resolution (e.g. Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum) or replete with masterful irony which still today make certain works perplexing to interpreters. In particular, Leon Battista Alberti’s ability to assume various masks in dialogues such as Theogenius has made it hard for critics to discern who (if anyone) really speaks for the author. It is not always so difficult: Poggio Bracciolini, for example, is more straightforward (some would say, less skilled) in dialogues such as De avaritia and De infelicitate principum.47 And it is quite clear where Erasmus’s sympathies lie in works such as The Praise of Folly. Nonetheless, qualities such as ambiguity, indirectness, elegance of style, classical allusion, dramatic tension, realism, and psychological insight were highly valued all the way from Petrarch’s Secretum to Rabelais’s Pantagruel. It goes without saying that many of these features stand in direct contrast to the main aims of philosophical discourse, which include clarity and the solution of ambiguities. Humanists dealing with ethics therefore tended to loosen the subject from its philosophical moorings and examine it instead through a different approach, derived from grammar and rhetoric. By so doing, the humanists were not so much rejecting philosophy as such; rather they elaborated another, less metaphysical brand of philosophy.48 Although they too were able, when called upon, to write fairly systematic treatises (such as Machiavelli’s De principatibus), what really caught the humanists’ imagination was a different kind of writing, when possible tied to the specific detail of everyday life. It is for this reason, among others, that dialogues, short fiction, and works of biography or local history could be privileged as avenues for discussing virtue.49 And, since their project was not philosophical in the traditional sense, it became more thinkable to express their debates in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Yet ironically there was a strong current among the humanists which appreciated and even wrote according to the models of university philosophy, and one should not emphasize too much the distance between humanistic circles and universities.50 47 

On Alberti and Poggio, see especially Kircher, Living Well in Renaissance Italy. See Grassi, Renaissance Humanism. See also this volume’s Introduction and the essay by Eckhard Kessler. 49  On the power of short stories, see the essay by Ullrich Langer in this volume. For bio­ graphies, see the essay by Alison Knowles Frazier. 50  See Lines, ‘Humanism and the Italian Universities’; Kraye, ‘Philologists and Philo­ sophers’. 48 

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The Ethics commentary of Donato Acciaiuoli is a case in point,51 as are the writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The trend continued in the sixteenth century; humanists were masters at recycling old material while producing something that looked new. Even Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano and Machiavelli’s political works owe a significant debt (not always acknowledged in modern scholarship) to Aristotelian philosophy. Academies The sixteenth-century academies, instead, had a much clearer institutional base (although here too documentation is often scarce). They typically had an official membership, a head and/or governing body, some kind of constitution, and a programme of lectures, scholarly discussions, and publication. An especially interesting case is the Accademia degli Infiammati of Padua, founded around June 1540. It was in this setting that the Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi (who was involved in various aspects of organizing the academy) offered a course on Aristotle’s Ethics, replacing Vincenzo Maggi who had been scheduled to cover Aristotle’s Poetics. Varchi’s lectures took place on Sundays and Thursdays, the occasions on which the academy typically met (and, doubtless by design, the days on which no university lectures took place). Since he was already engaged in a programme of translating the Ethics from Greek into Tuscan, and since many academies anyway championed the merits of the vernacular, it made sense for his lectures to be in Italian. Yet his course met with such success that his lectures were soon swamped by foreign university students. To meet especially the needs of the German-speaking ones who had little Italian, Varchi soon had to switch to Latin.52 The surviving lecture notes show that Varchi tried to address both the university adolescents and the academy’s grown men, that he made frequent recourse to the Greek text, and that he offered his audience something seriously approximating a classroom lecture in philosophy. Varchi left Padua in 1541, but his example must have left people hungering for more since Alessandro Piccolomini was appointed in the following autumn to cover, once again, Aristotle’s moral philosophy.53 His well-received exposition of the subject was published the following year.54 51 

Bianchi, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele’. Varchi offers a first-hand account and an initial section of commentary in Firenze, Bibl. Naz. Centrale, Rinuccini, filza 10, no. 38, fols 511r–518v; see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 506. 53  Cerreta, ‘Alessandro Piccolomini’. 54  Piccolomini, De la institutione de la vita de l’homo. 52 

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One should note, however, that lectures did not need to be explicitly related to Aristotelian texts in order to be ethically charged. Varchi observed, ‘non merita il nome di scrittore non che di poeta chi non insegna i costumi buoni’ (‘whoever neglects to teach good habits does not deserve the name of a writer or poet’), before telling his protegé Carlo Strozzi that the whole aim of the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was moral improvement.55 The lectures on Dante which took place in the Accademia Fiorentina (founded in the autumn of 1540 as the Accademia degli Umidi) show how the Divine Comedy could be used to impart knowledge of ethics, natural philosophy, and theology (as in the case of Giambattista Gelli) or to provide a strong moral and spiritual inspiration (as happened with Bernardino Daniello).56 Francesco Verino the Elder was one of the guiding lights in this philosophical approach to literature from the academy’s inception, and his death in 1541 did not prevent his model from being followed by others, even though not all the Academicians in Florence appreciated it.57 Indeed, some members of the Florentine Academy were intensely interested in Aristotle’s moral philosophy. An important example is Bernardo Segni, who translated and commented on several Aristotelian works including the Ethics and the Politics, published respectively in 1550 and 1549.58 Courts The best-known work on moral philosophy associated with a Renaissance court is Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano. Begun around 1513, when Castiglione was in the service of Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino (but only published in 1528, a year before Castiglione’s death), this work presents the reader with a series of conversations set in the Urbino court of 1506. The participants include both men and women, both regulars at court and members of the papal curia, whose recent visit had increased the number of participants. As is well known the topics examined vary widely, and do not only include ethics; nonetheless, considerable attention goes to issues such as love, sprezzatura, the virtues, the conduct of women, and how to direct a prince onto the path to virtue. 55 

Letter of 8 October 1539 quoted in Plaisance, ‘Une première affirmation’, p. 43. See Gelli, Commento […] sopra la Divina Commedia, ed. by Negroni and De Gaetano, ‘Dante and the Florentine Academy’; Bernardino Daniello, L’espositione […] sopra la Commedia di Dante, ed. by Hollander and Schnapp. On the links between Aristotle and Dante in the Florentine Academy now see Gilson, ‘“Aristotele fatto volgare”’. 57  Plaisance, ‘Une première affirmation’, pp. 96–97, and passim. 58  See Lines, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism’ and Refini and others, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, work references 2 and 30. 56 

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Like many other Renaissance dialogues, that of Castiglione is fictional and can hardly be relied upon to provide an accurate portrayal of the cultural interests of the duchy of Urbino’s rulers or nobles, the frequency and manner of their ethical debates, their contents, or the more general involvement of monarchs, princes, and popes in similar discussions occuring at their courts. Despite the large amount of scholarship dedicated to Urbino, we still remain less than informed on the real workings of its court and what kinds of cultural programmes took place there.59 Our understanding of these matters is also unsatisfying for several other localities, such as Florence, Mantua, and Augsburg. It is clear, however, that the courts gave rise to a number of works concerned with the morals of all who were associated with them. The success of mirrors for princes continued unabated and was swollen by works written against Machiavelli’s The Prince. But more notable are the writings concerned with the deportment of courtiers and other personalities present at court. Castiglione’s masterpiece often receives the lion’s share of attention on this point. But one should not forget other works including Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo (published in 1558).60 One context that sits awkwardly between that of the courts and the academies is the Palace Academy of King Henry III of France. This gathering, which met for around an hour twice a week immediately after supper, took place from 1576 to 1579 despite the monarch’s frequent movements. Henry III himself presided, proposing topics to be examined; these were then discussed by the participants (who were not numerous and included two noblewomen) through lectures, several of which have survived. Apparently one lecture was delivered per session, followed by discussion. Moral philosophy was, especially in the early period, a paramount concern.61 Discussions included topics such as the superiority of the moral or the intellectual virtues, and specific emotions (such as joy, sorrow, anger, envy, and fear) and virtues (including patience and justice). The scaffolding of the lectures is clearly Aristotelian, while the manner of exposition combines elements of scholasticism and humanism.62 Yates has noted that they also include elements 59 

See especially Clough, ‘Sources for the History’. On morals in the context of the Italian courts, see especially the works of Quondam, most recently his Forma del vivere. 61  On the topic, see Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, pp. 105–30. Similar ground is covered, with corrections and further details, by Sealy, Palace Academy of King Henry III, pp. 37–58. Sealy shows that after 1576 the lectures covered many other fields as well, including natural philosophy and logic. 62  Sealy argues that these were lectures because they were meant to complete the King’s philosophical education (Sealy, Palace Academy of King Henry III, pp. 32–33), but his evidence 60 

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taken from St Thomas and from Plato, thus reflecting tendencies towards reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle in the sixteenth century. The speeches were delivered, however, in French, and they therefore offer an interesting parallel to the discussions depicted by Castiglione. An important work closely connected with the Palace Academy (Bartolomeo Delbene’s poem Civitas veri sive morum of 1609) is in Latin,63 but was first written in Italian.64 No similar events seem to have taken place at the court of the Tudors, where cultural patronage was typically directed towards institutions and scholars outside of the court itself. We know of no study or discussion groups other than a short-lived school to educate Prince Edward and the sons of some nobles.65 But the elements of theatre and performance, which applied to the real-life political stage of the court,66 were also part of the entertainments staged for it, and there were elements of moral instruction (especially for the monarch) in the masques and pageants that were an integral part of courtly life.67 Also, despite the objections voiced by Puritan writers, drama was considered, along with literature and the arts in general, to have an educative, moral function. Whether performed at court or including members of the court as an audience, comedies and tragedies were not simply forms of entertainment, but could be more or less veiled vehicles of moral and political advice, whilst reminding the audiences of the vagaries of fortune, the power of the emotions, and the duty of virtue.68

Contexts and Their Influence In what ways, if any, did the contexts just discussed affect the direction of ethics in the Renaissance? A first and fundamental aspect is that of audience. From ancient times, it had been assumed that moral formation was one of the principal objectives of education. Discussions of, and especially incitements to, virtue for this is not compelling, and he does not explain why the same aim might not have been achieved through private tutoring. 63  Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, pp. 111–16, 120–21 examines the work at length. 64  Gorris Camos, ‘I volti della duchessa’, pp. 82–86. 65  Loades, The Tudor Court, esp. pp. 114–26. 66  Levi, ‘The Theatre and the Court in the 1590s’. 67  Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I, pp. 9–11. 68  Astinton, English Court Theatre; Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, pp. 133–34 and passim; Butles, ‘Private and Occasional Drama’.

74 David A. Lines

could therefore take place even at the earliest point in the educational curriculum, and apart from the fact that the virtues extolled may have been more secular than those promoted in church schools in earlier centuries, here one does not note a substantial difference. With discussions of ethics, however, we enter a very different arena. Since the twelfth- and thirteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle, ethics had been strongly linked to philosophy and theology, although it was also recognized that there were points of contact between ethics and rhetoric. It was assumed that, as a part of moral philosophy, ethics should be approached philosophically, by students who were fairly mature (as Aristotle auspicated) and already well-grounded in logic, which provided the discipline’s methodology. Humanists and reformers like Melanchthon, however, broadened the audience of ethics: they placed it earlier on in the curriculum, favoured a non-technical approach to the subject, allied ethics more closely with literature, assumed that merchants and nobles were capable — if sufficiently trained — of discussing and understanding it, and in certain instances allowed or even modelled the use of the vernacular for ethical discussions. By so doing, they enabled ethical teaching to make its way out of the schools and institutions of higher education into informal circles, academies, and courts. This change brought others in its wake. It would hardly be fair to describe school and university writing culture as restrictive and static, since several forms of expression were available and many developments took place within them during the period we are considering.69 Nonetheless, newer contexts did introduce a greater range and flexibility of expression. Its members could choose whether to write in Latin or the vernacular. Although they were quite free to use the forms commonly in use in schools and universities (and many of them did write lectures or commentaries), they often preferred to express their musings in other genres, such as fictional dialogues, invectives, letters addressed to friends, treatises dedicated to princes, poems, or essays in the style of Montaigne. A further development were humanist commonplace books: a literary, historical, or philosophical text could be quite literally dismembered, and its precious sentences placed under appropriate headings for meditation, memorization, and future use; its pithy sayings could thus be employed for personal and collective betterment.70 A broadening of the audience also meant that other aspects or applications of ethics could be treated in addition to the familiar ones. Household economics, 69  I am thinking particularly of genres such as compendia, florilegia, commonplace books, questions, treatises, systematic textbooks, and school exercises (e.g. themes, the antecedents to the essay). 70  See Ann Moss’s essay in this volume.

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not usually taught in the universities, got a good airing in Alberti’s I libri della famiglia. Merchant values were much better represented in discussions on the active and contemplative lives, and the tendencies of the nobility might be reinforced through discussions of magnificence. Friendship became (for both social and religious reasons) a topic of crucial importance, linked in interesting ways with the responsibilities of a courtier towards his prince.71 It is also worth remembering that the resurgence of Petrarchism in the sixteenth century, combined with the renewed influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism, led to countless discussions of love, a topic with very strong connections with ethics, since true love could only originate within a noble soul. Finally, the rise of new contexts led to an increasing encounter with new, or different, sources.72 We have already referred to the hidden influence of new sources on university contexts. In humanist circles, academies, and courts it was easier and more natural to discuss the theories of Plato in particular, as the Lezzioni d’Amore by Francesco Verino the Younger make clear,73 or to bring together the moral ideas of Cicero and Aristotle, as Leonardo Bruni did in his much earlier Isagogicon moralis philosophiae (1425).74 Towards the end of the sixteenth century, works such as Justus Lipsius’s De constantia (1584) were initiating a full-scale revival of Stoic philosophy. Eventually, these alternative positions contributed to erode Aristotle’s authority and promote the need for a different philosophical model. The relative freedom of the informal contexts of ethical discussion was crucial to the developments that took place within Renaissance ethics. But so too were more established institutions, which carried forward debates on ethical issues that were deeply informed by discussions taking place outside their walls. It should not be surprising that university professors were often members of academies and could have connections with papal or princely courts, or that humanists could serve at court, be members of academies, and/or teach in schools or universities. The contexts of ethics in the Renaissance were various and overlapping; their workings and influence deserve to be more fully explored, but had a clear effect on how ethics was discussed.

71 

See especially Langer, Perfect Friendship. On this topic, see especially the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 73  De’ Vieri, Lezzioni d‘amore, ed. by Colaneri. 74  See Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 77–79. 72 

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Works Cited Manuscripts Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rinuccini, filza 10, no. 38

Primary Sources Aristotle, In libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum, aliquot conimbricensis cursus disputationes (Lyon: Officina Iuntarum, 1593) Daniello, Bernardino, L’espositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca sopra la Commedia di Dante, ed. by Robert Hollander and Jeffrey Schnapp (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989) Galluzzi, Tarquinio, In Aristotelis libros quinque priores moralium ad Nicomachum nova interpretatio, commentarii, quaestiones (Paris: Cramoisy, 1632) —— , In Aristotelis libros quinque posteriores moralium ad Nicomachum nova interpretatio, com­mentarii, quaestiones (Paris: Cramoisy, 1645) Gelli, Giovanni Battista, Commento edito e inedito sopra la Divina Commedia, ed. by Carlo Negroni, 2 vols (Firenze: Bocca, 1887) Javelli, Giovanni Crisostomo, Totius rationalis, naturalis, divinae ad moralis philosophiae compendium, 2 vols (Lyon: Juncta, 1568) Lukács, Ladislaus, ed., Monumenta paedagogica societatis Iesu, Monumenta historica socie­ tatis Iesu, 7 vols (Roma: Institutum historicum Societatis Jesu, 1965–92) Mulcaster, Richard, The Educational Writings of Richard Mulcaster (1532–1611), Abridged and Arranged and with a Critical Estimate, ed. by James Oliphant (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1903) Piccolomini, Alessandro, De la institutione de la vita de l’homo nato nobile e in città libera. Libri X in lingua toscana. Dove e paripateticamenta e platonicaments intorno a le cose de l’ethica, inconomia, e parte de la politica, è raccolta la somma di quanto principalmente può concorrere a la perfette e felice wita di quello composti dal signor Alessandro Piccolo­ mini […] (Venezia: Scoto, 1542) Piccolomini, Francesco, Universa philosophia de moribus a Francisco Piccolomineo Senense, philosophiam in Academia Patavina e prima sede interpretante. Nunc primùm in decem gradus redacta et explicata (Venezia: De Franceschi, 1583) Pontano, Giovanni Gioviano, I libri delle virtù sociali, ed. by Francesco Tateo (Roma: Bulzoni, 1999) Vieri, Francesco de’, Lezzioni d’amore, ed. by John Colaneri (München: Fink, 1973) Villani, Florentine Giovanni, Nuova cronica, ed. by Giuseppe Porta, 3 vols (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1991)

Secondary Studies Astinton, John H., English Court Theatre 1558–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

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Bianchi, Luca, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele: L’Expositio super libros Ethicorum di Donato Acciaiuoli’, in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento, rev. edn (Padova: Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 11–39 (first publ. in Rinascimento, n.s., 30 (1990), 25–55) Black, Robert, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2007) —— , Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Butles, Martin, ‘Private and Occasional Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. by A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, 2nd edn (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 131–63 Cerreta, Florindo V., ‘Alessandro Piccolomini, Teacher of Moral Philosophy’, Italica, 33 (1956), 22–25 Chambers, David S., ‘The Earlier “Academies” in Italy’, in Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, ed. by David S. Chambers and François Quiviger (London: Warburg Insti­ tute, 1995), pp. 1–14 Clough, Cecil H., ‘Sources for the History of the Court and City of Urbino in the Six­ teenth Century’, in Cecil H. Clough, The Duchy of Urbino in the Renaissance (London: Variorum, 1981), no. IV Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Cousin-Desjobert, Jacqueline, La Théorie et la pratique d’un éducateur élisabéthain: Richard Mulcaster, c. 1531–1611 (Paris: SPM, 2003) De Caprio, Vincenzo, ‘I cenacoli umanistici’, in Letteratura italiana, ed. by Asor Rosa, 5 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1982), i, 799–822 De Gaetano, Armand L., ‘Dante and the Florentine Academy: The Commentary of Giambattista Gelli as a Work of Popularization and Textual Criticism’, Italica, 45 (1968), 146–70 DeMolen, Richard L., Richard Mulcaster (c. 1531–1611) and Educational Reform in the Renaissance (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1991) Denley, Peter, Teachers and Schools in Siena, 1357–1500 (Siena: CISIT, 2007) Field, Arthur, The Origins of the Platonic Academy in Florence (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1988) Gehl, Paul, Humanism for Sale [accessed 22 November 2009] —— , A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­versity Press, 1993) Gilson, Simon A., ‘“Aristotele fatto volgare” and Dante as “Peripatetico” in SixteenthCentury Dante Commentary’, L’Alighieri: Rassegna Dantesca, n.s., 39 (2012), 31–63 Gorris Camos, Rosanna, ‘I volti della duchessa: Icone e rappresentazioni del potere alla corte di Margherita di Francia, Duchessa di Savoia’, in Iconologia del potere: Rap­ presentazioni della sovranità nel Rinascimento, ed. by Daniela Carpi and Sidia Fiorato (Verona: Ombre corte, 2011), pp. 45–86

78 David A. Lines

Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) Grassi, Ernesto, Renaissance Humanism: Studies in Philosophy and Poetics, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 51 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Re­ naissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1988) Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) —— , The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2004) Hankins, James, ‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991), 429–75 Kircher, Timothy, Living Well in Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Battista Alberti (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012) Kraye, Jill, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 —— , ‘Philologists and Philosophers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Hum­ anism, ed. by Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142–60 —— , ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, in Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Olga Weijers, CIVICIMA, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 96–117 (repr. in Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), item vi) Langer, Ullrich, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Genève: Droz, 1994) Levi, Fritz, ‘The Theatre and the Court in the 1590s’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. by John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 274–300 Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) —— , ‘Humanism and the Italian Universities’, in Humanism and Creativity in the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. by Chrisopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 323–42 —— , ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism on the Eve of the Sixteenth Century’, in Der Aristotelismus in der frühen Neuzeit: Kontinuität oder Wiederaneignung?, ed. by Günter Frank and Andreas Speer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), pp. 273–89 —— , ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities of Medieval and Renaissance Europe’, History of Universities, 20 (2005), 38–80 —— , ‘Pagan and Christian Ethics: Girolamo Savonarola and Ludovico Valenza on Moral Philosophy’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 17 (2006), 427–44

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—— , ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism: Bernardo Segni’s Ethica, the Florentine Academy, and the Vernacular in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly (forth­coming) Loades, David, The Tudor Court (London: Batsford, 1986) Lohr, Charles H., Latin Aristotle Commentaries, 3 vols to date (Firenze: Olschki, 1988–), ii: Renaissance Authors (1988) Mack, Peter, Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Maierù, Alfonso, ‘Tecniche di insegnamento’, in Le scuole degli ordini mendicanti (secoli xiii–xiv) (Todi: Accademia Tudertina, 1978), pp. 305–52 Moss, Ann, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Mulchahey, M. Michèle, ‘First the Bow Is Bent in Study’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998) Plaisance, Michel, ‘Une première affirmation de la politique culturelle de Côme Ier: la transformation de l’Académie des Humidi en Académie Florentine (1540–1542)’, in Michel Plaisance, L’Accademia e il suo principe: cultura e politica a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo I e di Francesco de’ Medici, Cinquecento, 6 (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2004), pp. 29–122 Quondam, Amedeo, ‘L’Accademia’, in Letteratura italiana, ed. by Asor Rosa, 5 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1982), i: Il letterato e le istituzioni, pp. 823–98 —— , Forma del vivere: L’etica del gentiluomo e i moralisti italiani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010) Refini, Eugenio, with the collaboration of David A. Lines, Simon Gilson, and Jill Kraye, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy: A Database of Works [accessed 15 May 2012] Schmitt, Charles B., Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) Sealy, Robert J., The Palace Academy of King Henry III (Genève: Droz, 1981) Spitz, Lewis W., and Barbara Sher Tinsley, eds, Johann Sturm on Education: The Refor­ mation and Humanist Learning (St Louis: Concordia, 1995) Terpstra, Nicholas, ed., The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008) Verde, Armando, ‘Domenico di Fiandra: Intransigente tomista non gradito nello studio fiorentino’, Memorie domenicane, n.s., 7 (1976), 304–21 Wilson, Jean, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980) Yates, Frances A., The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Ins­ titute, 1947)

Renaissance Ethics and the European Reformations Risto Saarinen*

T

he European Reformations of the sixteenth century were to an extent popular movements, but they were also steered by the universities. This was in particular the case with the Lutheran Reformation. Its main proponents, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, remained university professors at Wittenberg through their entire career, Luther from 1511 and Melanchthon from 1518. Their enormous literary output and the steady flow of students from all Europe to Wittenberg gave their teaching already in their lifetime an impact that would have been impossible before the invention of printing. The Lutheran Reformation, together with its various impacts, is often called ‘the Reformation’. New historical studies aim at distinguishing among several different reformations, beginning from the Hussite reformation attempts in the fifteenth century, continuing with German, Swiss, Dutch, French, Scandinavian, and British reformation movements and ending with the Catholic Reform that followed the Council of Trent (1545–63) and was in some respects a ‘reformation’ of Roman Catholicism.1 Since the various Protestant Reformations were

*  In the following notes, the abbreviation WA refers to Luther, Werke (the so-called

Weimarer Ausgabe), which is customarily referred to as follows: WA, vol., page(s), (lines). 1 

For recent overviews, see Hillerbrand, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, and Gritsch, A History of Lutheranism. Risto Saarinen ([email protected]) is Professor of Ecumenics at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Since 2008 he has led the Renaissance and Reformation team of the Finnish Academy’s Centre of Excellence on ‘Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Politics’.

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thoroughly interrelated, it remains a matter of debate whether they can be distinguished from one another. With regard to the teaching of ethics, it is helpful to make a distinction between the Lutheran and the Calvinist Reformation and to treat them in succession. The period of the Catholic Reform produced important new ethical paradigms which need to be discussed separately. The final part of this article is concerned with the varying interpretations of an exemplary theme, heroic virtue, in the different branches of the European Reformations. The scholarly profile of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic ethics was not only or even primarily determined by the confessional controversies. Many classical issues, for instance the mutual relationship of Aristotelian and Stoic traditions or the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy, were discussed in all three confessions.2 The differences between the scholastic and the humanist approach to ethics likewise preoccupied all parties. As the Reformation movements emphasized the use of original texts and their translation into the vernacular, the impact of the Renaissance was particularly visible in those humanistic writings of the Reformation that discuss philological matters in detail. At the same time, the Latin Aristotle and Cicero also prevailed in the Protestant universities. In spite of the theological criticism of Aristotle, the Protestant universities continued the tradition of commenting on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

The Lutheran Reformation Martin Luther began his academic career by lecturing on the Ethics in Wittenberg in 1508–09. His lecture notes have not survived, but we know that the young Augustinian monk knew Aristotelian philosophy well. Luther’s teachers in Erfurt, Bartholomäus Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutvetter, followed the via moderna, the Scotist and Occamist branch of scholasticism. Traces from John Buridan’s Quaestiones super decem libros Ethicorum can be found in their printed works.3 Another important book widely used in Germany was the extensive commentary of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. The 1497 edition of this work contains the medieval translation of the Ethics by Robert Grosseteste as well as the Renaissance translations of Johannes Argyropoulos and Leonardo Bruni. Giorgio Valla’s translation of Aristotle’s Magna moralia, introductory texts to ethics by Bruni and Baptista Mantuanus, as well as Lefèvre d’Étaples’s own commentary on the 2 

On this issue more broadly, see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. See Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles, and Kärkkäinen, ‘Theology, Philosophy and Immortality’. Buridan, Quaestiones super decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis. 3 

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Ethics are also included. This edition was the first really humanistic exposition which gave a new direction to the interpretation of Aristotle.4 With this book in hand, the Reformers had excellent access to Renaissance ethics. The University of Wittenberg began its activities in 1502; the humaniora were included in its curriculum from the beginning. Among the new professors, Johann Lang, Georg Spalatin, and Martin Luther developed the programme of humanism in Wittenberg. All three had studied in Erfurt and were interested in reading the Bible and the Church Fathers in Greek. From their mutual correspondence we know that they were familiar with the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Lefèvre d’Étaples, and Johannes Reuchlin.5 Luther and Lang were Augustinian Hermits who lectured on the Bible in Wittenberg and gradually grew critical of Aristotle and scholasticism. Spalatin was the librarian of the university; one preserved list of his book-orders contains works of Angelo Poliziano, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Reuchlin, and Erasmus. During his early career Luther also became increasingly aware of the earlier renewal attempts of John Wyclif and Johann Hus. The increasing criticism of scholastic theology and the beginnings of the Reformation led to the gradual reform of the university from 1518. In this reform, the teaching of Greek and Hebrew was strengthened. One small instance in which humanism played a role was the orthography of Martin Luther’s name. Originally Luder, he started to use the Greek-sounding name-forms Luther and even Eleutherius (‘free’) between 1517 and 1519.6 The most important step in the university reform was, however, the appointment of Philipp Melanchthon to the professorial chair of Greek in 1518. For the next forty years, Melanchthon promoted humanist studies not only in Wittenberg, but throughout Europe. His textbooks on all fields of learning combined the religious teachings of the Reformation with the ideals of humanism. Although he shared Luther’s criticism of Aristotle and Erasmus, he skilfully moderated the position of the Reformers so that many traditions of humanism and even Aristotelianism were continued in the Protestant universities.7 4 

Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 17–18. Lefèvre d’Étaples, Com­ mentarii. 5  For this and the following, see Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, pp. 36–49, 76–81, 108–12; Junghans, Der junge Luther und die Humanisten, pp. 57–61. I have benefited from a Finnish study: Kopperi, Renessanssin Luther. 6  Junghans, Der junge Luther und die Humanisten, pp. 307–11. 7  See Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy; Wengert, Human Freedom, Chris­tian Righteousness; Kuropka, Philipp Melanchthon.

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Melanchthon was an extremely important role model for Protestant academic learning. Although he studied theology and participated in the doctrinal discussions of the Reformation, he remained a layperson. As rector of the University of Wittenberg in1523, he introduced the custom that every new student should come to greet the rector personally. Melanchthon advised each student which teacher he should approach to obtain a personally tailored study plan. 8 Such pedagogically oriented ideas earned him the title of praeceptor Germaniae (‘Germany’s teacher’). Already the early works of Luther are very critical of Aristotle’s ethics. The criticism is thoroughly theological: Aristotle’s concept of virtue underlines the meritorious nature of human works, whereas Pauline and Augustinian theology teaches that God’s grace is a free gift. The use of Aristotle’s ethics in theology approaches the Pelagian heresy, which assumes a free will that can obtain merit. The medieval Catholic doctrine of an Aristotelian habitus or ‘created grace’ which is active as human virtue in the process leading to salvation is problematic. In Luther’s view, this doctrine presupposes that Christians can ‘earn’ their salvation. But it is faith alone that justifies the sinner, not human works.9 As this criticism proceeded from theological premises, it had little to do with the philosophical use of Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle’s Ethics was rejected in the university reform of Wittenberg, but it soon found its way back into the curriculum. Melanchthon wrote the first ethical textbooks in which Aristotle’s ethics was readopted with certain qualifications. In his Philosophiae moralis epitomes (1546) Melanchthon presents the paradigmatic solution which enables the preservation of much of philosophical ethics while supporting Luther’s criticism. Christians should undertake a basic distinction between law and gospel. The gospel which informs us about God’s promise and the forgiveness of sins has nothing to do with philosophy, since the gospel remains outside of the reach of reason.10 The law, however, comprises the secular realm in which reason and moral philosophy retain their validity insofar as human life in family and society is concerned. When a Christian properly learns the distinction between law and gospel, he also learns that God’s law expresses a certain affinity to philosophy. Philosophy follows the natural law, which is fundamentally God’s law impressed upon human beings in creation. Through the use of their reason, human beings 8 

Scheible, ‘Melanchthon, Philipp’. For Luther’s early cricitism of Aristotelianism, see his ‘Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam’, WA, i, 224–28, and ‘Disputatio Heidelbergae habita’, WA, i, 353–74. See further Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology. For mature Luther, see Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith. 10  Melanchthon, Philosophiae moralis epitomes, p. 157. 9 

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can detect this law and obey its voice. Although sin has weakened human capacities, human beings have retained the use of their reason and judgement. Human intellect thus mirrors the wisdom of God. But this is a ‘wisdom of the law’ that does not pertain to the gospel.11 In keeping with this basic view, Melanchthon calls moral philosophy an ‘unfolding of the natural law’ (‘explicatio legis naturae’). Moral philosophy cannot elucidate the theological doctrine of justification, but it remains valid in the sphere of civil life. This interpretation can embrace the contribution of ancient philosophers: their ethical precepts govern those who are not enlightened by the Holy Spirit. The precepts of the natural law help to preserve the peace and order of civil life.12 An important corollary of this view is that civil society is not ruled by the gospel. Our natural reason suffices for the necessary legislation and obedience to the laws of the state. Luther makes this point particularly clearly when he states that it is better to have a morally bad ruler with practical knowledge than a pious ruler without it. A morally bad but skilful ruler can at least prevent chaos and anarchy, whereas a godly character without practical skill remains helpless.13 The basic distinction between law and gospel is often expressed as the doctrine of the ‘two kingdoms’. Whereas the heavenly kingdom is ruled by the gospel, civil society or the worldly kingdom needs law and practical reason. Recent studies on early Lutheran ethics and politics have stressed, however, that even more important than the two kingdoms doctrine was the idea of ‘three orders’.14 This idea is developed by Luther especially from 1528 on, but its roots are found in the ethics of the medieval and Renaissance period. In late medieval moral philosophy, a tripartite division distinguishing individual ethics (ethica monastica, Aristotle’s Ethics), household ethics (pseudo-Aristotelian Economics), and politics (Aristotle’s Politics) was current.15 Renaissance ethics reflected this tripartite division. Some Renaissance authors held that moral philosophy should be divided into parts: whereas ethics concerns 11 

Melanchthon, Philosophiae moralis epitomes, pp. 157–58. Melanchthon, Philosophiae moralis epitomes, p. 159. See also Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, p. 324. 13  ‘Predigten des Jahres 1526’, WA, xx, 553, 21–28. For other similar sayings of Luther, cf. ‘Sachregister’, WA, lxvii, 545. 14  Bayer, Martin Luthers Theologie, p. 114. Further Witte, Law and Protestantism. 15  See Saarinen, ‘Ethics in Luther’s Theology’; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 303–06; Buridan, Quaestiones super decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis, lib. 6, quaest. 14 (‘Utrum prudentia monastica et prudentia civilis et prudentia economica sint idem habitus’). See also the Introduction to this volume, pp. 13–14. 12 

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theory, economics and politics deal with practice.16 Given that Luther replaces individual ethics with a specific Christian life in faith, the bipartite division resembles his view of the two kingdoms. In his view of the three orders, Luthers continues the tradition of tripartite division. God has in creation instituted three social structures or orders, namely the Church (ecclesia), the household (oeconomia), and the state (politia). The household and the Church existed already in paradise, whereas the state, which corresponds to the worldly kingdom, became operative only after the Fall. Individual human beings are as a rule members of all three orders. Although God’s law regulates all three realms, its practical application may vary in different orders.17 In the state, citizens and authorities deal with the civil use of the law. This use is similar to the political science taught by the philosophers. The world does not operate according to the gospel, but the rulers should apply their natural reason and practical skills. In the Church, however, Christians should discover the transforming power of the gospel. The individual conduct of a Christian is a fruit of faith which cannot be judged with human powers. The distinction between the political and ecclesiastical realms to a great extent stems from Luther’s bad experiences during the Peasants’ Revolt in the 1520s. Many radical Reformers wanted to rule the world through the gospel, but Luther prefers to legitimize the power exercised by the worldly authorities. The ethics of household and family remains suspended between worldly and ecclesiastical orders. Luther secularizes the sacrament of marriage and teaches that a marriage is not a private but a public matter. On the other hand he affirms many spiritual dimensions of marriage and family and considers, in keeping with the Aristotelian tradition,18 the household to be the primary or nuclear form of social ethics. The household thus remains on two different borderlines: it is between the public and the private sphere as well as between the worldly and spiritual kingdoms. Melanchthon argues that the ecclesiastical administration resembles more a household than a state. Both in Church and in family we speak of the ‘power of the keys’, whereas the state is ruled by the sword. The government of the church is like ‘fatherly and motherly’ [sic] government. Melanchthon adds that schools also 16 

See Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, p. 305. ‘Galaterkommentar’, WA, xl. 1, 460–61; ‘In XV Psalmos graduum’, WA, xl. 3, 210–14; ‘Genesisvorlesung’, WA, xlii, 79–80; ‘Responsus ad Prierias’, WA, l, 652, 12–34. For this and the following, see Saarinen, ‘Ethics in Luther’s Theology’, and Bayer, Martin Luthers Theologie, pp. 110–39. 18  Aristotle, Economics, 1343a 14–16. 17 

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belong to the oeconomia. Therefore it is proper to call the Church a school.19 He also takes a stance on the issue that since the sixteenth century has occupied many Protestants: should the Church resemble democracy, aristocracy, or monarchy? Melanchthon refutes the papal monarchy and says that Christ is the monarch of the Church. Having said that, he adds that the human administration of the visible Church resembles aristocracy.20 Early Lutheranism was probably less democratic, but also less theocratic, than Calvinism. The three orders provided a useful framework of discussion when different reforms were being carried out. As the Lutheran Reformation was very interested in founding schools and renewing the university curricula, it was necessary to discuss to which order they belonged. Like Melanchthon, Luther considers that schools are an extension of the household and thus belong to the oeconomia. At the same time, both wordly and ecclesiastical authorities took responsibility for the founding of schools and universities in Lutheran territories.21 One influential topic of early Lutheran ethics was the treatment of conscience, in particular with regard to the freedom of a Christian. Luther refutes the medieval idea of synderesis, the root of conscience that remains intact even after the Fall. He nevertheless approves the view that a Christian can make right judgements in his or her conscience: although conscience cannot bring forth good works, it can judge human actions. It is ‘not a virtue of action, but a virtue of judgement’.22 In a certain sense, this means a permanently bad or guilty conscience, since conscience points out which actions are wrong but cannot bring forth good ones. In 1520 Luther published his De libertate christiana (On the Freedom of a Christian), a popular treatise in which he holds that inner, spiritual freedom is the true freedom. Since 1525 he connects this view with his theology of conscience and holds that true Christians are characterized by their ‘free’ conscience. This libertas primarily means that the conscience is ‘free from the law, sin, and death’.23 In other words, when a Christian fully trusts in God, he or she need not worry about guilt but can be joyous. 19  Melanchthon, Scripta exegetica, p. 48: ‘Sic tota gubernatio in Ecclesia est similis oeconomiae: id est, gubernationi paternae et maternae. […] Oeconomiae similis est etiam schola. Nec male dicitur, Ecclesiam esse similem scholae.’ 20  Melanchthon, Scripta exegetica, pp. 48–49. 21  Bayer, Martin Luthers Theologie, pp. 129–30. For the reform of education, see Witte, Law and Protestantism, pp. 257–92. 22  For ‘non est virtus operandi sed virtus iudicandi’, see ‘De votis monasticis’, WA, viii, 606, 30–39. See further Baylor, Action and Person and Chadwick, ‘Gewissen’. 23  See ‘Galaterkommentar’, WA, xl. 2, 3, 5–9.

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As the rhetoric of freedom was highly loaded in the Reformation period, Luther’s claim of Christian freedom in 1520 was soon interpreted in terms of political freedom. The same happened with the phrase libertas conscientiae (‘freedom of conscience’) which has become one of the essential human rights praised by modernity. Although Luther interpreted libertas primarily as ‘freedom from’ and not as human right, he could see how the idea of the freedom of conscience might contribute to understanding individual freedom as freedom of speech and opinion. Reformation scholars sometimes hold that Luther was the first person to use the phrase ‘freedom of conscience’, but the phrase has its roots in late antiquity.24 It was nevertheless the Lutheran Reformation that made this phrase famous. With regard to the doctrine of conscience, it may also be important that Luther and Melanchthon were somewhat more friendly towards the Stoic tradition than towards Aristotle. Melanchthon edited and commented Cicero’s De officiis.25 Luther often replaces the language of virtues with the rhetoric of God’s gifts or favours (beneficia). This language of gifts bears resemblance to Seneca’s De beneficiis. Melanchthon emphasizes that theologians should not study divine matters per se, but rather focus on the work of Christ that benefits humans (beneficia Christi). Erasmus published an edition of Seneca in 1515, and in the preface to his Greek New Testament (1516) he mentions Seneca’s treatment of divine and human beneficia.26 Although Luther embraced Christian freedom and the freedom of conscience, he was sceptical about the will’s autonomous ability to choose good and steer external action. His grounds for denying this kind of freedom of the will were theological: because the Christian is saved by faith, without his or her own good works, it would be theologically problematic to say that the Christian can, by his or her own free power, bring forth good works. For Erasmus of Rotterdam, Luther’s view of such ‘bondage of the will’ was too pessimistic. The debate 24  Reiner, ‘Gewissen’, p. 583, wrongly attributes the invention of the phrase to Luther. See also Ebeling, Lutherstudien III, pp. 385–86. As the phrase ‘conscientiae libertas’ appears in Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, 1, pr. 4, it was known in the medieval period. ‘Libera conscientia’ appears in Cassiodorus, Variarum libri XII, Lib. 1,4,5 and Lib. 9,12,1. Wheatley, Expositio in Boethii, lib. 1 cap. 8, says like Luther: ‘Nota quod libertas conscientiae habet nullum metuere’ (quotation from Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, xxvii, 17a). 25  See Melanchthon, Ethicae doctrinae elementa. Melanchthon refutes the Stoic position that only virtue can be called good and observes that it is not useful to study ancient authors in order to defend absurd positions, but that their views need critical examination (Melanchthon, Ethicae doctrinae elementa, pp. 179–80). 26  Erasmus, ‘In Novum Testamentum praefationes’, pp.  80–83; Melanchthon, Loci communes, pp. 22–23; Luther, ‘Sachregister’, WA, lxiv, 267–71. Saarinen, ‘Gunst und Gabe’.

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between Eramus and Luther on this topic in 1524–25 alienated many Reformers from Erasmian humanism.27 The second and third generations of Lutheran reformers wrote extensive textbooks on ethics. Joachim Camerarius, a close friend of Melanchthon and university reformer in Tübingen and Leipzig, wrote an extensive commentary on the Ethics.28 This commentary is humanistic and philological. Aristotelian doctrines are extensively compared with Greek literature, not only philosophy but also drama and poetry. Major Lutheran compendia on ethics were written by Johannes Avenarius and Wolfgang Heider.29 Although these two works to an extent follow the outline of the Ethics, they are more textbooks than commentaries. Avenarius and Heider are less interested in philology and adopt the neoscholastic method of questions which Melanchthon and Camerarius avoided. The tradition of Lutheran commentaries and textbooks on ethics remains poorly studied.30 As Lutheranism exercised a great influence on the European continent during the seventeenth century, this literature may contain teachings which were influential in the later development of ethics and politics.

The Calvinist Reformation Calvinists often consider that the Lutheran Reformation only provided a reformation of doctrine which needed to be supplemented with the reformation of life, reformatio vitae.31 In this sense the Calvinists were more concerned with ethics than the Lutherans. On the other hand, the holistic attitude of the Calvinist Reformation sometimes also meant that existing philosophical traditions were treated with suspicion. John Calvin received a thorough education in Paris and Orléans from 1523 to 1530. The humanist renewal programme of Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples enjoyed a great popularity in France in those years, and young Calvin was sym27  Erasmus, ‘De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio’; Luther, ‘De servo arbitrio’, WA, xviii, 600–787. See further Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method. 28  Camerarius, Ethicorum Aristotelis Nicomachiorum explicatio. 29  Avenarius, Quaestiones ad seriem X librorum Ethicae and Heider, Philosophiae moralis systema. 30  Good overviews are Garber and Ayers, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Wollgast, Philosophie in Deutschland. 31  See Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, p. 1; Strohm, ‘Ethics in Early Calvinism’, offers a concise overview.

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pathetic to renewal movements. Reactions to Luther’s reform were complex and turbulent: while some supporters were sentenced to death, moderate sympathizers often enjoyed relative freedom. In 1531 Calvin already adhered to the notion of freedom of conscience. His edition of Seneca’s De clementia (1532) defends tolerance as a virtue of rulers.32 The first edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) reveals his positive relationship to Martin Luther’s theology. Calvin’s long involvement with the reformation in Geneva was an attempt to reform both Christian doctrine and life. Calvin had studied law in Orléans, and his reform attracted many lawyers. While Luther remained sceptical of lawyers, the intimate connection between theology and jurisprudence was typical of the French Reformation.33 Lutheranism often considered the external order of the Church to be of secondary importance. The Calvinist programme of a reformation of life needed a clear concept of the ecclesiastical order which could be provided by church lawyers. Another difference between Lutherans and Calvinists concerned the doctrine of the ‘marks of the church’ (notae ecclesiae). While the Lutheran confessional writings stress ‘word and sacrament’, that is, the pure preaching of the gospel, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, as the constitutive marks of the Church, Calvinist confessions often add moral obedience and church discipline to the list of such marks. The Scottish Confession of Faith (1560), for instance, considers that God’s word and sacrament are followed by another ‘note of the true kirk’, namely ‘ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered, as God’s word prescribes, whereby vice is repressed, and virtue nourished’.34 Given this outlook, ethics is not primarily a matter of natural law and reason, but it receives its meaning wihin the Christian form of life. This conviction promoted the emergence of ethica Christiana, a specific Christian ethics. If virtue is considered to be a mark of the true church, it can be thought that true Christians are distinguished by their virtuous life. If this thought is connected with the Calvinist idea of predestination, a good life and external success can even be regarded in terms of God’s election. This reasoning is known in Calvinist theology as syllogismus practicus; it is discussed in Max Weber’s famous study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber claims that the early 32 

Ganoczy, ‘Calvin’s Life’, pp. 3–6. Calvin, Commentary on Seneca’s De clementia, ed. and trans. by Battles and Hugo. 33  Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, p. 228. 34  Confessio Scotica, art. 18: ‘ecclesiasticae disciplinae severa, et ex verbi divini prascripto, observatio, per quam vitia reprimantur, et virtutes alantur’. For Lutherans, see the Augsburg Confession of 1530, art. 7.

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Protestants contributed to the emergence of capitalism through keeping their financial profits and investing them as capital. These profits were interpreted as concrete evidence of God’s favour. Although the empirical verification of Weber’s claim remains difficult, the doctrine of syllogismus practicus can be employed in support of this claim.35 Recent historical studies are critical of Max Weber’s work. Christoph Strohm concludes that, insofar as the sixteenth-century Calvinist ethics is concerned, altogether different convictions and thematic occupations determined its content. Strohm emphasizes the continuity between the philosophical ethics of humanism and early Calvinism. He further considers that the impact of jurisprudence and the need to adapt the traditional teachings to the new norms of early modern territorial state were of formative importance in early Calvinist ethics.36 Strohm concentrates on Lambert Daneau’s Ethices Christianae libri tres (1577). This work can be regarded as the most important early Calvinist academic textbook on ethics. Its title gives the impression that the author wants to outline a particularly Christian theological ethics. The extensive subtitle37 reveals, however, Calvinism’s erudite reception of different ethical traditions. Daneau attempts to find the genuine Aristotle behind the scholastic distortions in a humanist fashion. Daneau also participates in the emerging Neo-Stoicism. In addition to Cicero he employs the chapters on Stoicism in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the texts of Musonius in the collection of Ioannes Stobaeus, as well as many Church Fathers’ views of Stoicism.38 Calvin approves some Stoic aspects of destiny (fatum); he also recommends a moderation of emotions and selfcontrol in a Stoic fashion.39 In keeping with Calvin’s views, Daneau regards the control and moderation of emotions as an essential aspect of the Christian virtue. Daneau focuses on the virtue of enkrateia (‘temperance’ or ‘self-control’) which provides a meeting point between Aristotelian, Stoic, and Christian ethics.40 35 

Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The work first appeared in German in 1904. 36  Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, p. 655. 37  In quibus de veris humanarum actionum principiis agitur: atque etiam legis divinae, sive decalogi explicatio, illiusque cum scriptis scholasticorum, iure naturali sive philosophico, civili Romanorum, et canonico collatio continetur. Praeterea virtutum, et vitiorum, quae passim vel in sacra scriptura, vel alibi occurruntur, quaeque ad singula legis Divinae praecepta revocantur, definitiones. 38  Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, pp. 131–33. 39  Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, pp. 128–29; Hass, ‘Calvin’s Ethics’, p. 96. 40  Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, pp. 112, 148.

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Since Protestants think that sin continues its attacks even on reborn Chris­ tians, the Stoic idea of harmful passions that need to be controlled had an obvious appeal. Because Christians regard some emotions as positive, however, the eradication of all emotions (apatheia) is not a possible alternative. Calvin therefore criticizes the Stoic ideal of apatheia.41 But a successful moderation and cultivation of emotions remains an option. While Calvin and Daneau approve some Stoic ideas, other thinkers, most notably Justus Lipsius, adopt Stoicism more strongly. Originally a Catholic, Justus Lipsius commuted several times between Cath­ olic and Protestant faith.42 Lipsius describes both ethics and politics in Stoic terms as a struggle against harmful passions. In his textbook on ‘Christian politics’, Lambert Daneau adopts many ideas of Lipsius, making the Stoic virtue of constancy the outstanding civil virtue of Calvinism. Many other Calvinists follow this Neo-Stoic trend, although not uncritically. Thus early modern Calvinist ethics and politics receive important aspects of the Stoic tradition.43 Another significant tradition which carried over from Renaissance humanism to Calvinism was that of Ramism, named after Peter Ramus. Originally a French Catholic, Ramus died as a Protestant martyr during the massacre of the night of St Bartholomew in 1572. Ramus developed a logical method of dividing concepts with the help of visual aids like tables and charts. Ramistic books are filled with ramifying charts which often resemble Aristotelian categories.44 In the field of Calvinist ethics, Theodor Zwinger was a prominent representative of Ramism. His commentary on the Ethics consists exclusively of charts and tables. They divide the subject matter of the Ethics into thousands of subunits that build a complex network of references.45 Greek concepts receive a dictionary-style treatment, but the philosophical problems disappear behind endless subdivisions. To use an anachronistic comparison, Zwinger’s extensive textbook resembles the twenty-first-century website designs that operate with links while splitting the content into countless tiny units. 41 

Calvin, Commentary on Seneca’s De clementia, ed. and trans. by Battles and Hugo, pp. 359–61; Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, p. 157. 42  See Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 263–66. See also the dis­cussion in the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume, pp. 43–44. 43  Lipsius, Politicorum; Daneau, Politices Christianae; Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus, pp. 191–92. 44  See Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 230–40. 45  Zwinger, Aristotelis de moribus.

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The Catholic Reformation The Reformation also had an impact on the Roman Catholic teaching of ethics. This impact did not, however, primarily consist of different answers to the disputed questions. Some controversial issues, in particular that of free will, did create lasting differences, but a more profound confessionalization concerned the emerging new paradigms that accompanied and followed the Council of Trent. Protestant universities were little concerned with these paradigms. We will briefly outline two new Catholic ethical discourses: (1) the emergence of moral theology as a new discipline, and (2) the debate on nature and grace. In addition to these, attention must be paid to (3) the continuing tradition of Renaissance Aristotelianism. Moral Theology as a New Discipline When the Council of Trent renewed the practice of penance and confession, prescribing that the penitent should report his or her sins in detail, the moral evaluation of particular sins gained in importance. This phenomenon of casuistry had its roots in patristic and medieval penitential books as well as in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Jean Gerson. During the Renaissance period, the devotio moderna, a spiritual movement in Germany and France, concentrated on the moral evaluation of concrete actions and the consolation of individual conscience. John Nider belonged to the influential authors of this literary genre.46 After the Council of Trent, the emerging Jesuit order instituted professorial chairs in ‘moral theology’ (theologia moralis) which concentrated on casuistry and ‘the cases of conscience’. A major problem in this development concerned the nature of moral certainty. In the medieval Latin translation of the Ethics, endoksos was translated with probabilis and akribeia with certitudo. In the medieval framework these notions did not involve quantitative probabilities. In late medieval and Renaissance discussions it was further presupposed that the conscience normally can find certainty with regard to the best moral alternative.47 In early modern moral theology, ‘tutiorism’ refers to the position that one should always choose the safest alternative. If one is not certain a particular 46 

For the history of casuistry and moral theology, see e.g. Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology; Leiter, Conscience and Casuistry. Nider, Expositiones decalogi; Nider, Consolatorium timoratae conscientiae. 47  For this and the following, see Kantola, Probability and Moral Uncertainty; Knebel, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit; Schüssler, ‘On the Anatomy of Probabilism’.

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course of action is sinful, it is better not to follow it. ‘Probabilism’ is the position according to which a person can choose a course of action which is probably right. Given this, one can discuss whether this also holds in cases in which something else is even more probably right. Bartholomew of Medina and Francisco Suárez presented different variations of moral probabilism. Thyrsus Gonzalez outlined a variety of ‘probabiliorism’, a view in which the more probable alternative is preferred. Gonzalez presupposes that the conscience cannot always reach certainty but must take risks in uncertain situations. He discusses cases in which tutioristic solutions cannot be approved, since the risk of erring is so low that it would not be prudent to refrain from action. Gonzalez is already aware of the objective nature of risk and probability. Finally, the preferred Catholic solution came to be that of ‘equiprobabilism’, in which an opinion is preferred if it is considerably more probable than its alternative. This view was forged in the eighteenth century by Christoph Rassler and Alfonso de Liguori.48 The emergence of moral theology in post-tridentine Catholicism led to the coexistence of two ethics: whereas the Greek moral traditions continued to be taught in the university faculty of Arts (or the Jesuit colleges’ programme in philosophy), the penitential cases of conscience and casuistry belonged to the theologians. Although many Protestant theologians pleaded for a specific Christian ethics, Protestants did not develop moral theology. However, on both sides of the confessional divide a certain theological ethics emerged. Lutherans were the last ones to follow in this development, since ethics in early Lutheranism consists of God’s law which is accessible to reason and can thus be taught in a philosophical faculty. The Debate on Nature and Grace Another Catholic theological discourse which was not followed by the Protestants was that of nature and grace. In the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, the realm of philosophy, or nature, found its fulfilment and elevation in the theological realm of grace. The two realms do not conflict, but they are related to each other as imperfect and perfect. During the sixteenth century, however, Catholic philosophers and theologians began to ask what this Thomistic synthesis really means for the practice of moral philosophy. The concept of pure nature (natura pura) was the focus of this quest.49 48  See Schüssler, ‘On the Anatomy of Probabilism’, pp. 108–09. Kantola, Probability and Moral Uncertainty, pp. 143–78 discusses Gonzales, Fundamentum theologiae moralis. 49  For this and the following, see de Lubac, Augustinisme et théologie moderne, pp. 183–

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The concept of pure nature was shaped by Cardinal Cajetan in his interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. It was further elaborated in Dominic de Soto’s De natura et gratia. A somewhat simplified version of their account can be presented in terms of a thought experiment. Given that humans have a natural end which becomes elevated to the supernatural end in grace, a philosopher may ask whether it is possible to imagine the natural end without the factual intervention of sin and grace. Sin corrupted nature, and grace has elevated it, but God could in principle create an Adam who would only consist of pure nature without sin or grace. This never happened, but it is theoretically possible. If we could imagine such a pure or ‘bare’ nature (natura nuda), we may better understand the Greek philosophers who did not know of sin or grace. Such an Adam would be a rational animal who would not desire anything supernatural. He would have natural ends which are not theological. The postulate of pure nature is historically interesting since it in many ways precedes and accompanies the increasingly secular views of human beings in the early modern period. Dominic de Soto was careful to add that some theological aspects belong to the ‘natural end’. Happiness is for de Soto a natural end, but it is nevertheless related to the ultimate end of the vision of God, whether the person knows it or not.50 The discussion of pure nature has its background in the late medieval distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power. Protestants did not adopt the Thomistic framework of nature and grace. Martin Luther denies the possibility of loving God ‘out of purely natural capacities’ (ex puris naturalibus). He further considers that it is false to assume a natura integra that would have remained in us after the Fall. All we have is a corrupted nature.51 Luther likes to speculate on the natura integra of Adam in Paradise;52 as creation, Paradise already represents the ordained power of God. The Protestant theologians stick to the revealed truth of God’s ordained power. They reject the speculative possibilities related to human nature without sin and grace. Catholic philosophers and theologians are more flexible in this respect, since the interplay of nature and grace opens up theoretical possibilities for a philosophical anthropology which is independent of God’s ruling power. 213, and Stegmüller, ‘Zur Gnadenlehre des spanischen Konziltheologen Domingo de Soto’. For Aquinas, see Pope, The Ethics of Aquinas and Stump, Aquinas. 50  Soto, De natura et gratia, lib. 1, cap. 3–4. 51  ‘Leipzig Disputation’, WA, ii, 401, 26; ‘Disputationes’, WA, xxxix. 1, 85 and xxxix. 2, 189, 8; ‘Galaterkommentar’, xl. 1, 40b, 13. In ‘Genesisvorlesung’, WA, xlii, 349, 19–26, this natural love of God is portrayed as Scotistic doctrine. For the complicated medieval semantics of ‘natural’ and ‘integral’, see Osborne, Love of Self and Love of God. 52  ‘Genesisvorlesung’, WA, xlii, 83a, 37; 87b, 3; 114b, 5; 116a, 41; 116b, 6; 137a, 33; 177, 9.

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In the Catholic church, the debate on pure nature has continued until the present day. The official teaching of the Church emphasizes the gratuity of grace in an anti-Pelagian manner. Because of this, nature does not have a strong intrinsic desire for grace, but it receives the supernatural benefits as gift.53 This emphasis furnishes nature with an extensive autonomy in philosophical reflection. If a human being is compared to a house with two floors, the philosophical person living on the ground floor of nature is only very vaguely aware of what is happening on the upper floor of grace. This official view may have promoted philosophical ethics, because it permits the analysis of natural ends in a relatively atheological manner. The accounts of Cajetan and de Soto in many ways initiated this development. Renaissance Aristotelianism The Greek tradition, especially Aristotle’s ethics, retained its place in the Catholic universities. While Renaissance Italy was innovative in many fields, its teaching of ethics continued the medieval, in particular Thomistic, tradition. After 1500, the number of translations and commentaries on the Ethics increased. David Lines has counted five Latin translations and sixty commentaries in Italy until 1500, but eight new translations and over one hundred commentaries emerged from there between 1500 and 1650.54 Other genres of ethics textbooks also became common. The style of Aristotelian ethics changed during the Renaissance and the early modern period. Expositions and questions continued to be written, often in scholastic style. An increased knowledge of Greek led to a philological treatment of Aristotle’s text as well as to comparisons with classical Greek literature. The humanists were sometimes more interested in pedagogical clarity than philosophical sophistication. The growing popularity of Platonic and, in particular, Stoic philosophy challenged Aristotle’s authority. The emphases of the Catholic Reformation are to an extent visible in the commentaries, but the humanist style

53 

Cf. the papal encyclical, Pius XII, Humani generis: ‘Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.’ It may surprise many secular readers that the papal position holds that God can do this. The encyclical opposes de Lubac, Surnaturel which emphasizes the religious desire in human nature. 54  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 224.

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of ethics and the continuity of Greek tradition in both Protestant and Catholic universities often make them insignificant.55 A typical and influential example of this kind of Aristotelian ethics is the Universa philosophia de moribus of Francesco Piccolomini (1523–1607). The work was first printed in Venice in 1583, followed by a revised edition in 1594. It was reprinted in Geneva and several times in Frankfurt. The work was popular in Germany, and Protestant commentaries of the early seventeenth century often employ it without significant confessional prejudices.56 It is also used as the main source of the massive Roman commentary of the Jesuit Tarquinio Galluzzi.57 Piccolomini’s De moribus is related to his controversy with Jacopo Zabarella concerning the pedagogical order of the teaching of ethics.58 Piccolomini’s position in this controversy was that the end of moral education can be stated after other necessary preliminaries have been discussed. Following this idea, the chapter on the end of virtue only appears in the final part of De moribus. The work is divided into ten books or pedagogical steps (gradus) that more or less deal with topics present in the Ethics. But the work is rather a systematization or a textbook than a commentary. Many topics that Aristotle mentions in passing are discussed at great length. The sixth step, for instance, is devoted to heroic virtue, a topic which is only briefly mentioned in Ethics vii. 1. The first step discusses the perturbations of the soul, a topic which gives Piccolomini an opportunity to criticize the Stoics, Augustine, and John Duns Scotus. The freedom of the will is likewise treated at great length in the second gradus.59 The popularity of Piccolomini’s commentary may be due to his ability to combine humanist, scholastic, and Catholic views and discuss the various traditions of ethics in a systematic fashion. The Renaissance commentary of Donato Acciaiuoli was likewise printed many times in the sixteenth century. Often it only offers a pedagogically lucid exposition of Thomas Aquinas’s views.60 Pier 55 

Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 17–22, 49–54; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’; Kraye, ‘Conceptions of Moral Philosophy’. 56  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 264–88. Some remarks on the Protestant use of Piccolomini are in Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 108–11; Lines, ‘Il metodo dell’etica nella scuola padovana’. On Piccolomini, see also Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume. 57  Galluzzi, In Aristotelis libros quinque priores moralium ad Nicomachum. See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 374–75. 58  Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 257–58. 59  Cf. Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 266–67. 60  Acciaiuoli, Expositio super libros Ethicorum Aristotelis. See Lines, ‘Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy’, p. 19.

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Vettori’s commentary on Ethics is a remarkable achievement of classical philology but does not contain much philosophical discussion.61 It can be compared with Joachim Camerarius’s work. The philological genre of ethics commentaries was represented by both erudite Catholic and Protestant scholars.

Heroic Virtue Rather than attempting a summary or conclusion, this last section describes one exemplary topic which was extensively commented on by Protestants and Catholics alike. This is heroic virtue (virtus heroica, aretē hēroikē) which Aristotle only mentions in passing, saying that very few people can reach the highest virtue which is something heroic or divine.62 Aristotle does not formulate any comprehensive definition of this virtue, but his mention of the divine gives later commentators a possibility to reflect on the relationship between theology and ethics. In addition, the elaboration of this topic in the Renaissance and early modern period shows how the focus of ethics increasingly shifted towards individual talents. Medieval commentators of Aristotle paid some attention to this passage, but because they attempted to expound Aristotle’s text in which many other issues were more important, heroic virtue did not receive much comment. At the same time, however, heroic virtue received theological features as the virtue or gift of the most exemplary Christians. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this virtue becomes famous since it begins to be used as a technical term in the process of canonization of new saints. Heroic virtue is a sign of the presence of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the saint. From the early modern period until today, the Catholic church requires that a candidate to sainthood should have displayed heroic virtue in his or her conduct.63 The regularization of the canonization process has interesting resemblances with the new ideals of the human being in the Renaissance. The godlike dignity of man, as exemplified by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, has traditionally been regarded as the centre of Renaissance thought.64 The emerging Catholic interest in the individual virtues and capacities of the 61  Vettori, Commentarii in X libros Aristotelis; Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Re­ naissance, pp. 240–41. 62  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1145a15–20. 63  Hofmann, Die heroische Tugend; Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 96–100. 64  Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 163–67.

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saint accompanied the optimist views of human potential in the Renaissance. For this reason it is no wonder that Catholic writers began to develop the doctrine of heroic virtue as an essential part of ethics. Francesco Piccolomini’s extensive treatise on heroic virtue contains twentythree subheadings in which he collects the earlier tradition of commentaries and many other writings. Some late scholastics, most notably John Buridan, had already devoted philosophical attention to the topic. Buridan was among the first thinkers to present the important idea that the phenomenon of heroism may also pertain to the intellectual virtues so that we may obtain heroic wisdom or become ‘geniuses’ in the modern sense of the word.65 Piccolomini remains critical of the concept of heroic wisdom. If we say that Plato’s wisdom was ‘heroic’, we are using the concept figuratively and not properly. Piccolomini prefers to call the wise persons who reach excellence in the theoretical sciences ‘divine’. When he discusses the meaning of the attribute ‘divine’ in heroic virtue, his opinion displays typical Renaissance features. First, as God is in a certain sense ‘everything’, so a heroic person can in his manifold understanding become ‘everything’. Second, in their creative work heroic persons imitate their Creator. Third, as God governs the world, a heroic person can rule it with his virtue.66 Protestant textbooks on ethics also display a great interest in heroic virtue. This is surprising because Protestants abolished the veneration of saints. But they obviously needed to create pantheons of exemplary persons and to reflect on the nature of their virtue. For Luther, the Old Testament patriarchs exemplified heroic virtue. Melanchthon develops Cicero’s idea that divine inspiration (afflatus divinus) is needed in order to become a hero. Melanchthon approves the Buridanian view that philosophers and artists can display heroic virtue.67 Joachim Camerarius is not interested in the theological and philosophical dimensions of heroic virtue. He merely says that this virtue is divine because it is beyond human powers. A reformed and Ramistic view is provided by Theodor Zwinger. In the preface to his commentary on the Ethics Zwinger remarks that, whereas philosophers can discuss clearly the nature of ordinary virtue, a special illumination is needed to recognize heroic virtue. This does not prevent him 65  Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, pp. 529–72. Buridan is mentioned on p. 536. Cf. Buridan, Quaestiones super decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis, Book VII, q. 2. 66  Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, pp. 536, 555–57. Cf. Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 106–07. 67  Cicero, De natura deorum ii. 66; Luther, ‘Der 82. Psalm ausgelegt’, WA, xxxi. 1, 183– 217; Melanchthon, Philosophiae moralis epitomes, pp. 176, 194–95. Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 101–03.

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from giving in the expository part a Ramistic table in which Aristotelian heroic virtue becomes confirmed by both reason and authority.68 An extensive compendium of Protestant teaching on heroic virtue is provided by Johannes Avenarius. Using Catholic and Renaissance thinkers like Acciaiuoli, Piccolomini, and even Machiavelli, but also Protestants like Lambert Daneau, Theodor Zwinger, and Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Avenarius deals with heroic virtue in nine questions. His gallery of heroes includes rulers (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar) and biblical characters (Samson, David, Elijah) but also contemporary persons from different churches, for instance Martin Luther and the Italian princes mentioned in Piccolomini’s discussion. As a good Protestant Avenarius remarks, however, that their virtue is not achieved by their own powers, but it is given by God.69 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussion of heroic virtue shows in an exemplary manner how Aristotle’s text was moulded to meet new needs. It further shows that the ethical themes of the Renaissance continued to be intensively discussed in both Catholicism and Protestantism. At the same time the ethical textbooks are interesting in their own right. The discussion of individual heroism often serves the purpose of praising the rulers and legitimizing their power. Sometimes this feature had interesting consequences. The ethical textbooks written in Sweden during the reign of Queen Christina, for instance, are quick to affirm the possibility that women have various talents which can be called heroic.70 The discussions pertaining to the possibility of intellectual and artistic heroic virtue prefigure the Enlightenment view of the genius.

68 

Camerarius, Ethicorum Aristotelis Nicomachiorum explicatio, pp. 311–12; Zwinger, Aris­ totelis de moribus, pp. 3a–3b; 201a. 69  Avenarius, Quaestiones ad seriem X librorum Ethicae, pp.  221–37. Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 108–09. 70  The first ethics professor of the Finnish university, Wexionius-Gyldenstolpe, published an extensive Collegium ethicum which often follows Heider, Philosophiae moralis systema. Gyldenstolpe’s work contains an extensive chapter on the heroic virtue (pp. 353–84) in which Christina is praised (pp. 368–69).

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Works Cited Primary Sources Acciaiuoli, Donato, Expositio super libros Ethicorum Aristotelis in nouam traductionem Argriopyli Bizantij (Firenze: De Ripoli, 1478) Avenarius, Johannes, Quaestiones ad seriem X librorum Ethicae (Wittenberg: [n. pub.],1623) Buridan, John, Quaestiones super decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum (Paris: Ponset le Preux, 1513; repr. Frankfurt a.M.: Minerva, 1968) Calvin, John, Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De clementia, ed. and trans. by Ford Lewis Battles and André Malan Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969) Camerarius, Joachim, Ethicorum Aristotelis Nicomachiorum explicatio accuratissima (Frankfurt a.M.: Wechelus, 1578) Daneau, Lambert, Ethices Christianae libri tres. In quibus de veris humanarum actionum principiis agitur: atque etiam legis divinae, sive decalogi explicatio, illiusque cum scriptis scholasticorum, iure naturali sive philosophico, civili Romanorum, et canonico collatio continetur. Praeterea virtutum, et vitiorum, quae passim vel in sacra scriptura, vel alibi occurruntur, quaeque ad singula legis Divinae praecepta revocantur, definitiones (Genève: Vignon, 1577) —— , Politices Christianae: libri septem (Genève: Vignon, 1596) Erasmus, Desiderius, ‘De libero arbitrio diatribē sive collatio’, in Desiderius Erasmus, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. by Werner Welzig, 9 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), iv, 1–195 —— , ‘In Novum Testamentum praefationes’, in Desiderius Erasmus, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. by Werner Welzig, 9 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), iii, 1–115 Galluzzi, Tarquinio, In Aristotelis libros quinque priores moralium ad Nicomachum nova inter­pretatio, commentarii, quaestiones (Paris: Cramoisy, 1632) Gonzales, Thyrso, Fundamentum theologiae moralis: id est Tractatus theologicus de recto usu opinionum probabilium […] (Köln: Ghissardo, 1694) Heider, Wolfgang, Philosophiae moralis systema: seu Commentationes in universam Aristotelis ethicen ( Jena: Reiffenberger, 1628) Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, Commentarii in x libros Ethicorum (Paris: Hopilius, 1497) Lipsius, Justus, Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (Leiden: Raphelengius, 1589) Luther, Martin, Werke, 69 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2007) Melanchthon, Philipp, Ethicae doctrinae elementa, in Corpus Reformatorum, ed. by Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Henricus Ernestus Bindseil, 28 vols (Halle and else­where: Schwetschke, 1834–60; facsmile repr. New York: Johnson, 1963) xvi, 529–680 —— , Loci communes [1521], ed. by Horst Georg Pöhlman (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1993) —— , Philosophiae moralis epitomes, in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, ed. by Robert Stupperich, 6 vols (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1951–75), iii: Humanistiche Schriften, ed. by Richard Nurnberger (1961), pp. 149–301

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—— , Scripta exegetica, in Corpus Reformatorum, ed. by Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Henricus Ernestus Bindseil, 28 vols (Halle and elsewhere: Schwetschke, 1834– 60; facsmile repr. New York: Johnson, 1963), xxv Nider, Johannes, Consolatorium timoratae conscientiae (Köln: Augustinus, 1473) —— , Expositiones decalogi (Köln, c. 1473) Piccolomini, Francesco, Universa philosophia de moribus (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1595) Pius XII, Encyclica, Humani generis, Acta apostolicae sedis, 42 (Città del Vaticano: Officina Libraria et Editoria Vaticana, 1950) Soto, Domingo de, De natura et gratia libri iii cum Apologia contra […] Catharinum (de certitudine gratiæ) […] Accesserunt ad hæc ejusdem authoris liber de tegendo et detegendo secreto. Et in causa pauperum deliberatio (Salamanca: [n. pub.], 1570) Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia (Parma: Fiaccadori, 1852–73) Vettori, Pietro, Commentarii in x libros Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum (Firenze: Iuncta, 1584) Wexionius-Gyldenstolpe, Michael, Collegium ethicum (Turku: Wald, 1649) Zwinger, Theodor, Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem, tabulis perpetuis, quae Commentariorum loco esse queant, explicati et illustrati (Basel: Oporinus et Episcopus, 1566)

Secondary Studies Bayer, Oswald, Martin Luthers Theologie (Tübingen: Siebeck, 2003) Baylor, Michael G., Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther (Leiden: Brill, 1977) Chadwick, Henry, ‘Gewissen’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, ed. by Theodor Klauser and others, 20 vols to date (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1950–), x: Genesis– Gigant (1978), pp. 1025–1107 Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Dieter, Theodor, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001) Ebeling, Gerhard, Lutherstudien, 3 vols in 5 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971–89), iii: Begriffs­ unter­suchungen, Textinterpretationen, Wirkungsgeschichtliches (1985) Ganoczy, Alexandre, ‘Calvin’s Life’, in The Cambridge Companion to Calvin, ed. by Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 3–14 Garber, Daniel, and Michael Ayers, eds, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Gritsch, Eric W., A History of Lutheranism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) Grossmann, Maria, Humanism in Wittenberg 1485–1517 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1975) Hass, Guenther H., ‘Calvin’s Ethics’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 93–105 Hillerbrand, H. J., ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Hofmann, Rudolf, Die heroische Tugend (München: Kösel, 1933)

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Junghans, Helmar, Der junge Luther und die Humanisten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985) Kantola, Ilkka, Probability and Moral Uncertainty in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola Society, 1994) Kärkkäinen, Pekka, ‘Theology, Philosophy and Immortality of the Soul in the Late Via Moderna of Erfurt’, Vivarium, 43 (2005), 337–60 Knebel, Sven, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit: Das System der moralischen Not­ wendigkeit in der Jesuitenscholastik 1550–1700 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000) Kolb, Robert, Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005) Kopperi, Kari, Renessanssin Luther (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 1994) Kraye, Jill, ‘Conceptions of Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ii, 1279–1316 —— , ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 Kuropka, Nicole, Philipp Melanchthon: Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Siebeck, 2002) Kusukawa, Sachiko, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanch­ thon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Leiter, Edmund, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) —— , ‘Il metodo dell’etica nella scuola padovana e la sua ricezione nei paesi d’oltralpe: M. Piccart e B. Keckermann’, in La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, Atti del colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt (Padova, 4–6 settembre 2000), ed. by Gregorio Piaia, Miscellanea erudita, 64 (Padova: Antenore, 2002), pp. 319–48 —— , ‘Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas and Jean Buridan on Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 7–29 Lohse, Bernhard, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Develoment (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999) de Lubac, Henri, Augustinisme et théologie moderne (Paris: Aubier-Montagne, 1965) —— , Surnaturel (Paris: De Brouwer, 1991) Mahoney, John, The Making of Moral Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) Mannermaa, Tuomo, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) Osborne, Thomas M., Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) Pope, Stephen, ed., The Ethics of Aquinas (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002)

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Reiner, Hans, ‘Gewissen’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, 13 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971–2007), iii: G–H (1974), pp. 574–92 Saarinen, Risto, ‘Ethics in Luther’s Theology: The Three Orders’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 195–215 —— , ‘Gunst und Gabe: Melanchthon, Luther und die existentielle Anwendung von Senecas “Über die Wohltaten”’, in Kein Anlass zur Verwerfung: Festschrift für O.H. Pesch, ed. by Johannes Brosseder (Frankfurt a.M.: Lembeck, 2007), pp. 184–97 —— , ‘Virtus heroica: Held und Genie als Begriffe des christlichen Aristotelismus’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 33 (1990), 96–114 Scheible, Heinz, ‘Melanchthon, Philipp’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. by Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller, 38 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977–2007), xx: Malaysia – Minne (1992), p. 373 Schüssler, Rudolf, ‘On the Anatomy of Probabilism’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 91–113 Stegmüller, Friedrich, ‘Zur Gnadenlehre des spanischen Konziltheologen Domingo de Soto’, in Das Weltkonzil von Trient, ed. by Georg Schreiber, 2 vols (Freiburg: Herder 1951), i, 169–230 Strohm, Christoph, ‘Ethics in Early Calvinism’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 255–81 —— , Ethik im frühen Calvinismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996) Stump, Eleonore, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003) Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001) Wengert, Timothy, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s Exe­ getical Dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Witte, John, Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Wollgast, Siegfried, Philosophie in Deutschland zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung (Berlin: Akademie, 1988)

Part II Approaches and Genres

The Method of Moral Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism Eckhard Kessler

The Methodological and Ontological Context Since the times of ancient Neoplatonic commentators in the Aristotelian tradition, which in the Middle Ages served and throughout the Renaissance continued to serve as the general philosophical framework,1 philosophy used to be divided into theoretical philosophy, destined to separate truth from error, practical philosophy, meant to distinguish good from evil, and instrumental philosophy (philosophia organikē), charged with providing the necessary means for both of the other two and thus making them able to meet their obligations and reach their various goals.2 The latter, ‘organic’ part of philosophy was based on logos — man’s capacity of mental as well as oral language, of reasoning and speaking, or, in the Latin 1 

Kessler, ‘The Transformation of Aristotelianism’. Ammonius, In Aristotelis Categorias commmentarius, ed. by Busse, p. 4, line 28 through p. 5, line 18; Hadot, ‘La Division néoplatonicienne des écrits d’Aristote’; Zabarella, ‘De natura logicae’, cols 2–5; Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism. 2 

Eckhard Kessler ([email protected]) is Professor Emeritus of Renaissance Philo­sophy and Intellectual History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and author of Die Philosophie der Renaissance: Das 15. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2008). His most recent publication is Alexander of Aphrodisias and his Doctrine of the Soul: 1400 Years of Lasting Significance (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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tradition, of ratio and oratio. It consisted of an introduction to the general elements of language, that is, single ‘words’, as taught in Aristotle’s Categories, their combination into single ‘sentences’, as explained in Aristotle’s De interpretatione, and finally the combination of single sentences into arguments, as disclosed in the syllogistic theory of the Prior Analytics. Only then followed the principal part of the Organon, that is, instruction on how to use these elements, so that the very truth and the true good might with certainty be distinguished from error and evil, as displayed in the doctrine of demonstrative syllogism — the syllogismos epideiktikos — of the Posterior Analytics. Since, however, the use men make of logos is not limited to what is suitable to serve as an object of demonstration and to be treated with the intention to prove either its very essence or its true quality, but is generally concerned with all kinds of objects, the teaching of the Organon is not restricted to the art of formal demonstration, but includes as well all kinds of arguments and ways of reasoning that deal with what cannot or cannot yet be proved.3 Thus instrumental philosophy embraces still another, third part, which teaches those modes of reflection and expression that approach truth and goodness by ways different from demonstrative syllogism — such as those developed in Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations as well as in his Poetics and Rhetoric.4 We may say, therefore, that from the Greek commentators in Late Antiquity through Averroes5 and his followers in the Middle Ages and up to Jacopo Zabarella6 at the end of the Renaissance, demonstrative syllogism was regarded as the appropriate method for reaching the very ends of theoretical and practical philosophy insofar as their subject matters can be determined as being indubitably true or false, good or evil, and their purposes are limited accordingly. Yet, at the same time, it was quite clear that, whenever the subject matter or the purpose of philosophy was redefined and spread beyond the narrow limits of their definitions, the concept of method needed to change as well and become adapted to the new end intended and the new subject matter considered. 3 

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1357a1–7 (p. 2157), where he defines the duty (ergon) of rhetoric. 4  Ammonius, In Aristotelis Categorias commmentarius, ed. by Busse, p. 5, lines 6–8: ‘The instrumental lectures are divided into those, which deal with the principles (archai) of the method (methodos), those, which deal with the method itself, and those, which try to arrive in other ways at the same end as the method, I mean the demonstrative one (apodeiktikē)’. 5  Averroes, ‘In libros Rhetoricorum Aristotelis paraphrases’. 6  Zabarella, ‘De natura logicae’, cols 78B–93C; Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 59–66 (with further bibliography).

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In the first half of the fourteenth century we meet with just such a change in practical philosophy when Petrarch, who in his autobiographical writings7 styled himself (and by his contemporaries8 and followers9 was celebrated as) the inventor of what the nineteenth century would call ‘humanism’, proposed a new understanding of moral philosophy. Even though the scholastics had learned from Aristotle that ethics did not allow for the same kind of certainty as sciences like mathematics,10 and that the aim of ethics was not knowledge but action,11 in general they remained concentrated on the development of the method of science and uninterested in the kind of certainty that might suit moral philosophy and oblige men to act accordingly. The humanists, however, were determined to reach the final end of moral philosophy and did not content themselves with the establishment of a non-contradictory, consistent theory of virtues and moral principles. Rather, they did their best to go beyond the general results of abstract moral speculations, preferring to focus on the strivings and desires of particular human beings. Thus they addressed the individual man or particular groups of men — the subjects of concrete actions.12 Furthermore, the humanists strove not only to know and teach how a human being should act and behave, but also tried themselves to behave and act accordingly and to motivate others to the same practice.13 Thus the purpose of moral philosophy which emerged from the writ7 

Petrarca, ‘Epistle to Posterity’, pp. 5–12; Petrarca, ‘Letter to Luca da Penna’, pp. 599– 600; Petrarch, ‘Letter to Subirani’, pp. 22–24; Petrarch, ‘Letter to Philippe, Bishop of Cavaillon’, pp. 308–13; Petrarch, ‘Coronation Oration’. 8  See, e.g., Salutati, ‘Letter on the Death of Petrarch’, p. 5: ‘Good God, how he excelled in philosophy! […] I do not mean that philosophy which the modern sophists wonder at in the schools with vain, windy boastings and impudent garrulity; but rather that which refines spirits, builds virtue, washes away the filth of vice and throws light on the truth of all things.’ Kohl, ‘Mourners of Petrarch’, pp. 350–52. 9  See, e.g., Rudolph Agricola, one of the earliest northern humanists, who in his ‘Life of Petrarch’ presents Petrarch as the example to be followed by his contemporaries of the second half of the fifteenth century: Agricola, ‘Oratio de vita Petrarcae’, ed. by Bertalot, p. 398. 10  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Ross, i. 3, 1094b19–24 (p. 1730). 11  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Ross, i. 3, 1095a5–6 (p. 1730). 12  See e.g. Petrarch, Rerum memorandarum libri, ed. by Billanovich which teaches the virtues through a large number of concrete examples instead of abstract definitions, or Lorenzo Valla, who in De voluptate sive de vero bono (trans. and ed. by Schenkel) defends his position by recounting a multitude of possible actions instead of relying upon abstract moral principles. 13  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, trans. by Nachod, p. 105: ‘The true moral philosophers and useful teachers of virtues are those whose first and last intention is to make hearer and reader good, those who do not merely teach what virtue and vice are and hammer into our ears

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ings of Petrarch and those who followed him was no longer just to determine and teach the universal final end of mankind, as the scholastics had done by means of scientific analysis and formal demonstration, but to outline and teach how human beings might act and behave well under the conditions of their particular situations and how they could come to terms with their particular inclinations and preferences.14 As a consequence of this change in purpose, at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, moral philosophy also experienced a change in its subject matter. Since the scholastics had asked for unchanging, generally obligating principles, their subject matter belonged to the eternal and necessary world of the universal. It therefore corresponded to the structure of logical reasoning and could be submitted to the scientific method of demonstrative syllogism. The humanists, however, searched for what might be the most fitting behaviour of an individual human being under specific circumstances; they were thus dealing with the changeable, contingent world of the particular. Their subject matter therefore became the changeability of the world of action. In turn, this corresponded to the prerequisites of rhetoric, which do not depend on premises and syllogisms that force the assent of the human mind, but on arguments that meet with the spontaneous approval of the individual human will. Even though for a long time scholars did not take notice of the fact, this change was, if not caused, at least inspired by the crisis of late medieval philosophy. In particular, Scotist voluntarism (which taught the universal contingency of the divine creation) and Occamist nominalism (which defended the general particularity of all being) had called for a new approach in philosophical thinking.15 Thus Petrarch and his followers could point to precedent in their decision to side — at least in moral philosophy — with the contingent world of action against the necessary world of concepts, and with the particularity of the real against the universality of the conceptual. But they had to face the methodological problem of how such a type of moral philosophy could argue on a sound basis, since it was not prepared or able to define a universally valid and generally obligating criterion of goodness or happiness that might serve as the common standard of moral judgement. the brilliant name of the one and the grim name of the other but sow into our hearts love of the best and eager desire for it and at the same time hatred of the worst and how to flee it.’ 14  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’. 15  Garin, ‘La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del Trecento’, pp. 139–66; Leff, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook; Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Wallace; Kessler, Petrarca und die Geschichte, pp. 159–82; Kessler, ‘Humanist Thought’.

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Confronted with this methodological dilemma, the humanists do not fall back into the apparent warmth of formal security. They refrain from defining an a priori ‘summum bonum’ and instead of disputing and demonstrating on the basis of ontological or religious principles which of the traditional candidates might deserve to receive this distinction — Platonic ‘beauty’ or the Aristotelian ‘contemplative life’; Stoic ‘honesty’ or Epicurean ‘pleasure’; Stoic ‘self-preservation’, the Neoplatonic ‘unification with the divine oneness’, or the Augustinian ‘sacrifice of one’s own will’ — they resort to intuitive evidence and case-by-case judgements. They use the topical criteria of Dialectics, which attribute a relatively strong validity to the number and competence of those who defend a particular position;16 alternatively, they appeal to the persuasive force of rhetorical argumentation, which is meant to shed as much light as possible on those matters and problems which reason has not (yet) been able to explain in a satisfactory way.17 Thus in the humanist tradition moral philosophy did not claim universal validity for its identification of man’s final end. Since the ‘summum bonum’ had become particularized, its validity was no longer based on the one and only method of formal demonstration. Rather, it rested on some of the various types of method that fall under the third part of instrumental philosophy and content themselves with the conditional character of their claims. This explains why, in the moral teaching of the humanists, we find a plurality of different final ends18 and of different means of persuasive argumentation; the former depend on the prejudices and persuasions of the specific teacher, whereas the latter depend on the particular audience and its changing circumstances.19

16 

Aristotle, Topics, trans. by Pickard-Cambridge, i.  1, 100b21–23 (p. 166): ‘Those opinions are reputable which are accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise — i.e., by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them.’ 17  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1357a1–7 (p. 2157). 18  Kristeller, ‘The Moral Thought of Renaissance Humanism’; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’. 19  See what Petrarch says about the difficulties of letter writing in Petrarch, ‘Letter to His Socrates’: ‘The first thought of a letter writer must be the person, he is writing to. […] We should write one way to a strong man, another to a sluggard; one way to a green youth, another to an elder who has fulfilled life […] The varieties of men are infinite; there is no more similitude of minds than of faces. As the palate of one man — let alone those of many men — does not always relish the same food, so one mind is not always to be fed on the same literary style. So the writer has a double task: to envisage the person he is writing to, and then the state of mind in which the recipient will read what he proposes to write.’

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Petrarch’s Basic Model Telling evidence for this type of moral argumentation is found in a letter of Petrarch’s in which he counsels a young man — Marco da Genova — who is insecure whether or not to continue studying law.20 Petrarch’s competence is based on personal experience, for he too was once vexed by the same doubt. He proclaims as a general point of reference that the perfection of a person’s life should not be based on the common nature of man as a rational animal. In that case, every human being would have to choose the same perfect way of life, for instance that of the philosopher or the poet, resulting in mankind’s extinction by starvation. Rather, one must consider the particular nature and living conditions of the individual in question21 before offering any counsel or reaching any decision. Petrarch starts his letter by offering a lengthy history of jurisprudence. He describes the golden age (embracing the period from Solon to Cicero, Crassus, and Anthony), when the perfect lawyer was at the same time the perfect orator, and its subsequent decline up to the time of the codification and systematization of law. It was during this period that law was divorced from oratory and turned into a doctrine and scholarly discipline. In modern times, jurisprudence became loquacious ignorance, and the former defenders of justice degenerated into sheer merchants of law.22 Thus history serves as a means to show the wide range of possible uses that can be made of a certain kind of life. At the same time, it refers the questioner to himself and proves that the moral quality of one’s living does not depend on the kind of life one might choose, but on the capabilities and intentions of whoever is making the choice.23 20 

Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’. Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, pp. 132–33: ‘In the election of the way of life not always is preferred what is most beautiful but what is most fitting to the electing person. Otherwise all men would pursue the same profession since, as in everything else, there is always one superior to the others. Yet if all men were to focus on this one pursuit, what would become of the others? If everyone aspired to philosophy or poetry, what would happen to the others? […] imagine the world consisting only of Platos and Homers […] who will be the plowman, the merchant, the architect […] without whom great minds would go hungry and be distracted from the heights of their noble studies for lack of food and shelter?’ 22  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, pp. 133–36. 23  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, pp. 136–37; see esp. p. 136: ‘Laws are certainly good, not only useful but necessary to the world; but those who administer the law can be either good or evil […] In human action the intention of the doer is of prime importance, as is the purpose for which one undertakes something; it is not the matter in itself but your mind that deserves praise or censure.’ 21 

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One of the purposes of the historical narrative is that of shaping this intention. The examples of real agents, whether virtuous or vicious, allow the reader or listener to identify with them and to learn, through this emotional experience, whom he would want to emulate.24 Finally, once the choice has been made with regard to one’s specific way of life and intended objective, one’s interior and exterior circumstances have to be analysed, in order to judge whether the project is likely to succeed. Here Petrarch mentions the inborn faculties as well as the aspirations to learn, which differ conspicuously between men. Other factors include one’s age, marital status (it takes ‘great strength to support both scholarship and a wife’), and the social recognition one might win in the end.25 Only at this point can man afford to determine his final end. But this decision cannot represent the true moral principle of the individual in question. It is just a reasoned hypothesis about what this person, according to the best of his knowledge, might be capable of carrying out successfully. As long as he goes ahead with this experiment of life in a steadfast and persistent manner, he will be in charge of his life whatever fortune may bring.26 The results — success as well as failure — will show whether the decision was in line with ‘what the heavens may grant’; in other words, they will show to what extent the hypothesis has proved to be a right and appropriate ‘moral’ principle for the agent, given his circumstances and capabilities.27 The concept of moral philosophy that lies behind Petrarch’s model of moral counselling has two centres of gravity: first and foremost, to define the final end appropriate to the particular person or persons in question. This task is not (or in 24  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Giovanni Colonna’, p. 314: ‘There is nothing that moves me as much as the examples of outstanding men. They help one to rise on high and to test the mind to see whether it possesses anything solid, anything noble anything unbending and firm against fortune, or whether it lies to itself about itself. Next to experience itself, […] there is no better way to learn than having the mind desire to emulate these greats as closely as possible.’ 25  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, p. 137: ‘I would suggest that you carefully consider many things, weighing on accurate scales your qualifications and your inclinations.’ 26  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, p. 137: ‘I urge and suggest that you persevere in this field to which either your will or your fate has driven you and not start a new way of living every day. Nothing is worse for a wayfarer than not knowing where he is going, nothing more shameful for a man than not knowing what he wants. […] From the beginning we must have fixed in our minds, where we wish to go.’ 27  Petrarch, ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, pp. 137–38: ‘When your prow is directed to a particular shore and your sails to a single wind with your helm under control, then at last will […] you really make progress, perhaps not as much as you wish, but as much as heaven will grant.’

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any case is not only) a matter of rational enquiry, but also of emotional aspiration, since emotions are the only means that can oblige a person to pursue the desired end wholeheartedly. Therefore in the reflections and discussions of the humanists the emotional and intentional aspects gain conspicuously in importance. It is not just that some of the most important philosophers decide the scholastic debate on the priority of the intellect or the will in favour of the latter;28 they also affirm the superiority of what is good over what is true29 and, therefore, also the superiority of the practical over the speculative disciplines.30 The second centre of gravity is closely connected with the question of how to define a final end that is both appropriate to the individual and, at the same time, obligating. In other words, how does one attain the final end in the best and easiest way? It is not just a matter of reflecting upon the structure of the contingent world of action in general: more personally and practically, one must consider how people should deal with the contingencies they must face in the course of their lives. Therefore, beyond the experience of life of the individual, history (defined as narratio rerum gestarum or ‘narration of what has been done’ and regarded as magistra rerum or ‘teacher of reality’)31 is promoted to one of the five core disciplines of the studia humanitatis;32 medicine is called an ‘applied science’ (scientia operativa) and as such is evaluated according to its usefulness;33 humanist schools are founded as a useful preparation for life in the case of both princes and merchants.34 In 1501 the Italian Giorgio Valla published a huge encyclopaedia (the Rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum libri or ‘Books of what should be pursued and what should be avoided’), which presents the whole of available knowledge and evaluates it according to how much it may favour or obstruct moral and effective activities.35 In the preface to his lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics the Florentine arch-humanist Angelo Poliziano mentions as useful even the ‘dirty’ 28 

Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. by Garin; Valla, ‘On Free Will’; Ficino, ‘De felicitate’. 29  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, trans. by Nachod, pp. 103–04; Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. by Garin, p. 32, p. 258. 30  Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. by Garin, pp. 182–94; Garin, La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento. 31  See above, note 24; see Cicero, De oratore, ii. 9. 36. 32  Kristeller, ‘The Humanist Movement’, p. 10. 33  Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. by Garin, pp. 244–48. 34  See, e.g., Melanchthon, ‘In laudem novae scholae, 1526’. 35  Valla, De expetendis et fugiendis rebus.

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arts like those of the usurers, the ‘crouching’ ones like those of the cobblers, and finally even those of the tightrope walkers.36 In short, comparing the two centres of gravity in humanist moral teaching with the Ciceronian-Stoic outlook,37 one would be entitled to speak of the honestum (‘virtuous’) and the utile (‘useful’) as twin criteria to be applied to individual situations.

Aristotle’s Heritage: The Art of Rhetoric As mentioned above, the only discipline in the tradition of Western thought that could serve as inspiration for a method to handle both the honestum and the utile was the tradition of rhetoric. Its first systematic treatment is offered by Aristotle’s Ars rhetorica.38 Previous instances include the discussions of the Greek sophists (which survive only fragmentarily) and Plato’s polemics. Aristotle organizes rhetoric in analogy with logic and dialectics, in the sense that it serves as an instrumental art and belongs ‘to no definite science’ so that ‘all men make use, more or less’, of it.39 Nevertheless, like the instrumental disciplines of logic and dialectics, rhetoric is provided with a well-defined subject matter. This comprises whatever is contingent, either because it is in itself not necessary and is therefore subject to our deliberation (as is the case with the realm of action) or because it appears to be contingent to those who are not able to follow too complicated a demonstration.40 In addition, all three instrumental disciplines strive to prove what they propose; thus they are all equally based on the only two possible ways of concluding an argumentation. These are the syllogism (in rhetoric called the enthymeme), which proceeds from the general to the particular, and induction (in rhetoric called example), which proceeds from the particular to the general.41 Yet, although the three instrumental disciplines correspond to one another in that they use the tool of formal conclusion, they differ in the subject matter 36 

Poliziano, Praelectio cui titulus panepistemon, ed. by Maier, i, fol. 462. Cicero, De officiis, iii. 3. 11–4. 19. 38  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, pp.  2152–2269; a huge recent commentary is Aristotle, Rhetorik, trans. by Rapp. 39  See Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 1, 1354a1 (p. 2152). 40  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1357a1–7 and 24–27 (p. 2157). 41  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i.  2, 1356a35 (p. 2156). See also Aristotle, Analytica priora, trans. by Jenkinson, ii. 23–24, , 68b8–69a19 (pp. 109–10); Aristotle, Analytica posteriora, trans. by Barnes, i. 1, 71a9–11 (p. 114). 37 

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to which they apply this tool. Furthermore, the premises they start from and the conclusions they draw are more or less reliable according to the different reliability of their subject matters. While the logical disciplines can boast necessity and the dialectical ones probability, rhetoric has only contingent premises and therefore only contingent conclusions. From the point of view of scientific rigour and universal validity, the rhetorical use of these tools therefore seems to be the least perfect one, and in relation to philosophy it is regarded with mockery and disdain. Yet, when Aristotle added to the methods of logic and dialectics that of rhetoric, he was not inanely designing and propagating a less perfect method of handling language and reason. Rather, he was trying to come to grips with the huge realm of matters which either do not possess or are not regarded as possessing the precious quality of necessity. For although these things cannot be treated with the tool of demonstration, they nevertheless require adequate treatment, since they constitute the world of human action — the world of human life and survival. Of course, Aristotle was well aware, even before he started his project, that there were men who — without having attended a course of rhetoric — knew how to act within contingent reality and how to teach others to act accordingly. But at the same time he was persuaded that what these men had done by chance or by nature could be analysed, turned into the system of an art, and used as a means of improvement.42 So logic and dialectic taught the modes of demonstration, which served to achieve and teach cognition of the world of necessity. Similarly rhetoric was meant to teach the modes of persuasion;43 these enabled men to deal with the world of contingency and find out how they could and should wish to act. They might even induce others to trace out the same for themselves.44 Now, the first thing to do was to cope with the fact that, although the orator had been commissioned to use the common method of inductive and deductive reasoning,45 inferential scrupulousness does not — as it does in the fields of logic 42 

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 1, 1354a4–12 (p. 2152). Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 1, 1354a13–14 (p. 2152); see also ibid., i. 2, 1355b35–1356a1 (p. 2155). 44  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1355b25 (p. 2155). 45  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356b6–11 (p. 2156): ‘Everyone who effects persuasion through proof does in fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way. And since every one who proves anything at all is bound to use either syllogisms or inductions (and this is clear to us from the Analytics [Aristotle, Analytica priora, trans. by Jenkinson, ii. 22, 68b13]), it must follow that enthymemes are syllogisms and examples are inductions.’ 43 

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and dialectic — generate and guarantee the reliability of a syllogism in rhetoric as well, since a contingent premise cannot give rise to a conclusion of any reliability or binding force. Therefore it would be pointless for the orator to primarily care for an improvement and formal perfection of the inferential modes he is using. In order to develop the art of rhetoric, therefore, the modes of deduction and induction had to be adapted to the requirements of the contingent subject matter. This process involved reducing what was only useful in the world of necessity and adding what could instead serve to cope with the specific requirements and possibilities of the world of human action. With the enthymeme therefore Aristotle abandons the absolute exactness of the syllogism, which is based on an unbroken chain of propositions from the first premise to the last conclusion. He maintains instead that the orator should refrain from already known propositions and be content with those that are still unknown to the audience. As one can experience in everyday communication, through such a strategy a rhetorical argument does not lose much of its conclusiveness, but rather gains conspicuously in comprehensibility.46 Furthermore, it is true that rhetorical premises in and of themselves lack necessity and therefore also true universality, regardless of whether they are probable propositions or signs of some kind. Nonetheless, they may be used as universal premises in an enthymeme, which infers from the universal to the particular in the world of contingency.47 The example, which serves as a kind of rhetorical induction in the world of contingency, benefits in a similar way from the abandonment of the demand for necessity. Logical induction makes inferences from the particular to the universal and, in order to provide necessity to these inferences, must be based without any exception on all particular instances of the respective case. For its part, the example is by definition free from the demand for necessity and therefore also free from that for completeness. It is therefore authorized to infer from one particular to the other, from the more familiar to the less familiar case.48 46 

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1357a16–21 (p. 2157). Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1357a30–1357b3 (pp. 2157–58): ‘Now the materials of enthymemes are “probabilities” and “signs” […] A “probability” is a thing, that usually happens […]. It bears the same relation to that, in respect of which it is probable, as the universal bears to the particular. Of “signs”, one kind bears the same relation to the statement it supports as the particular bears to the universal [cf. Aristotle’s example (1357b12–13): ‘The fact that Socrates was wise and just is a sign that the wise are just’], the other [kind] the same as the universal bears to the particular [cf. Aristotle’s example (1357b19): ‘The fact that he breathes fast is a sign that he has a fever’].’ 48  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1357b26–30 (p. 2158). See also Aristotle, Analytica priora, trans. by Jenkinson, ii. 24, 69a13–19 (p. 110). 47 

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Thus rhetoric is much less restricted by formal rigidity than the logical way of argumentation, yet at the same time the way of rhetoric — which reflects the unsteadiness of its subject matter — is much harder to predict and control. The orator’s art is therefore more difficult to acquire and requires constant adaptation to the changing conditions of the contingent world. The subject matter of both logic and dialectic may be well defined or at least definable, but the ground is constantly shifting in the contingent world of rhetoric. Lorenzo Valla emphasized this point in his comparison of rhetoric and dialectic: Rhetoric is supremely difficult and steep, and not everybody is able to acquire it. For it — I am referring here to perfect eloquence — likes to roam through the open sea, right in the middle of the waves, and to fly under full and flapping sail. It does not yield to the waters but rules them. Dialectic however is the friend of security, the consort of the shore; it prefers to look out onto the earth than the sea, it rows near to the coast and to the rocks.49

The ‘Artificial’ Means of Persuasion: Adapting the Structure of the Communicative Situation The specific function of the art of rhetoric is ‘to observe in any given case the available means of persuasion’. In other words, it is not to invent the particular arguments that an orator might use in order to persuade (with reference, for example, to particular questions in a particular discipline), but to design the types of arguments to be used in order to persuade within the context of all disciplines.50 In the area of inventive rhetoric (where the speaker does not merely use means of persuasion — such as testimonies or contracts — but actually produces them), Aristotle distinguishes three main kinds of ‘artificial’ means.51 These are the character of the speaker himself, the emotional state of the listener, and the ‘the proof provided by the words of the speech’.52 In the history of rhetoric this listing main49 

Valla, Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. by Zippel, i, 176–77: ‘Longe difficillima rhetorica est et ardua, nec omnibus capessenda. Nanque lato mari mediisque in undis vagari et tumidis ac sonantibus velis volitare gaudet, nec fluctibus cedit, sed imperat: de summa et perfecta loquor eloquentia. Dialectica vero amica securitatis, socia litorum, terras potius quam maria intuens, prope oras et scopulos remigat.’ 50  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1355b25–34 (p. 2155). 51  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1355b35–39 (p. 2155). 52  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i.  2. 1356a1–4 (p. 2155). See also ibid., ii.  1, 1377b29–1378a19 (pp. 2194–95).

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tained its pivotal position and was the object of lengthy discussions; in the Latin tradition these ‘means of persuasion’ were called the three ‘duties’ (officia) of the orator, since he was expected to be able to reconcile himself with his listeners (conciliare), to move them (permovere), and to teach them (docere).53 The last duty (to speak in such a way that the listeners become convinced of what the orator intends to transmit to them) contains all that is related to the formal art of rhetorical speaking: the enthymemes and their different kinds of premises, and the examples with their various literary forms.54 These formal rules testify to the deep-rootedness of rhetoric in the other argumentative disciplines of the ‘Organon’. Yet, in addition to their application to the specific subject matter in question, these formal rules are also employed to verbalize both of the other two means of persuasion. The formal art of rhetoric is thus enlarged with two general fields of content.55 The claim that the character of the speaker is a means of persuasion is based on the following observation: often, particularly in controversial situations, special significance and credibility gets attached to the character of the speaker, or better to the character the speaker exhibits in his speech — regardless of what kind of a person he really is or what the listener thought about him earlier. In order to exploit this phenomenon for the process of persuasion, the speaker must learn as much as possible about character and moral values, so as to present himself according to what will best meet with social acceptance.56 Thus the Ciceronian translation conciliatio (to reconcile oneself with the audience) seems to be most appropriate; the attempts by authors and politicians to present themselves in a certain way in introductions, prefaces, dedications, and addresses have proved its truth over the centuries. The third and last of the orator’s general duties concerns the audience. The goal is to bring the addressee(s) to assent to what the speaker proposes, but the 53 

See e.g., Cicero, De oratore, ii. 27. 115: ‘Ita omnis ratio dicendi tribus ad persuadendum rebus est nixa: ut probemus vera esse, quae defendimus; ut conciliemus illos nobis, qui audiunt; ut animos eorum ad quemcumque causa postulabit motum, vocemus.’ See also ibid., ii. 29. 128; ii.  77.  310. Quintilian (Institutio oratoria iii.  5.  2) replaces ‘to conciliate’ with ‘to please’. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. by Combès and others, p. 430, transfers these duties from secular to sacred oratory. 54  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, ii. 19–26, 1392a8–1403b3 (pp. 2217–37), where Aristotle discusses carefully and at length the various types of rhetorical arguments. 55  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356a19–20 (p. 2155). 56  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356a4–14 (p. 2155). See also ibid, ii. 12–15, 1372a4–1377b12 (pp. 2184–94), where Aristotle displays typical features of the different ages and gifts of fortune, which affect the various states of mind.

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process is hardly straightforward. First of all, the subject matter is not necessary, and the argument is not intrinsically compelling. Second, the listener is endowed not only with reason but also with an emotional capacity; it is quite possible for his emotions to strongly affect his judgements. As a result, a persuasive speech must address both the intellectual and the emotional forces of the audience in order to cope with the weakness of an argument or the poor performance of one’s reason.57 Thanks to the powerful effects that the emotions are able to exert on the decisions of men, some interpreters — like Cicero or Valla58 — regard it as the height of oratory to reign over the emotions of the audience. Thus, unlike logic and dialectic, which restrict themselves to the mere formality of rational argumentation, rhetoric embraces as well the undeniable reality and vitality of the irrational. The orator, therefore, must acquire a comprehensive understanding of the economy of man’s emotional system and the functioning of the volitional generation of virtues and vices, of values and habits. He thus learns how to master the irrational forces that lie dormant in the hearts of men, but are also eager to participate in the business of decision making. Indeed, they are ready to awake as soon as the chains of necessity get broken through the incalculable contingency of the concrete world of action.59

The Three Kinds of Rhetorical Speech: Adapting the Structure of Contingency Determined to cope with the vagueness of the contingent world by means of the art of rhetoric, the orator must first of all — as we have seen — comply with the specific nature of the relation between the three elements involved. The listener has turned out to be the most important factor, since his mental, moral, and emotional state decide the success or failure of the act of persuasion. As a result, the listener’s way of experiencing the world in which he lives must guide the orator’s approach to his speech’s subject matter. Aristotle divides listeners and orators into three classes according to their different relationships with reality: in the case of the rhetoricians, the judge renders judgement on past things, the politician decides about future things, and 57 

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356a14–16 (p. 2155); see also ibid, ii. 1, 1378a19–21 (p. 2195). 58  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356a16–17 (p. 2155); Cicero, De oratore, i. 12. 53; for Lorenzo Valla see above, note 49. 59  See Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356a20–26 (pp. 2155–56).

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the observer watches and evaluates what exists or happens in the present. Thus, the three ‘genera’ of rhetorical speech are the legal or forensic, the deliberative or political, and the epideictic or ceremonial, all of which match the perspective of their listeners.60 While all three classes of listeners reflect on certain general issues (for example, whether something is possible or impossible, great or small), the orators of all three of the ‘genera’ must be provided with propositions of this kind.61 In addition, however, there are also other issues which are specific to each of the listeners and therefore specific as well to the corresponding orators. Thus when the political orator urges or disapproves a course of action, his primary consideration is to counsel the useful and to warn against the harmful. Everything else — just or unjust, honourable or dishonourable — is of secondary significance to him.62 The forensic orator, on the other hand, attacks or defends somebody with the sole concern of establishing the justice or injustice of some action.63 Finally, when the epideictic orator praises or censures somebody, his undivided attention is turned towards the honourable and the shameful.64 At first it may seem surprising how categorically and without hesitation Aristotle endows each of his three kinds of listeners and orators with only one exclusive aim. He also offers no reason for why there should be exactly three kinds of listeners and why they should be interested only just in these questions. The answer lies in Aristotle’s link between the three kinds of rhetorical speeches and the three divisions of time (the past, the present, and the future); by linking them in this manner, Aristotle derives their subject matters from their chronological aspects: ‘what has been’, ‘what is’, and ‘what will be’.65 Rhetoric thus serves as the one and only means to describe motion and deal with change of any kind — of generation and corruption, of growth and decrease, of progress and decline. In short, it is the basic tool for perceiving and handling the contingent world. When Aristotle therefore structures rhetoric according to the logic of time, he accommodates the art of speaking to the three phases which determine the progress of contingent beings. He thus provides an ontological foundation to rhetoric’s claim to be the legitimate and only effective method of how to dominate the 60 

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 3, 1358a36–b 8 (p. 2159). Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 3, 1359a11–26 (pp. 2160–61). 62  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 3, 1358b8–10 (p. 2159) and 1358b21–25 (p. 2160). 63  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 3, 1358b10–12 (p. 2159) and 1358b25–27 (p. 2160). 64  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 3, 1358b12–13 (p. 2159) and 1358b27–29 (p. 2160). 65  See Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 3, 1358b13–20 (pp. 2159–60). 61 

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unreliability of fortune and build the historical world of men. As we know, the latter was a pivotal concern of the humanists.66 Aristotle announces, at the outset of his reflections, that he wishes to ground his art of rhetoric in the experience of spontaneous speech.67 This may serve to notify his intention to extract and systematize, in an art, what men experience when they meet with the world of action and both of its basic elements — the contingent structure of reality and the no-less-contingent structure of the communicative situation. As far as the contingent reality of action is concerned, Aristotle analyses the three divisions of time from the human point of view: the future as the period of human actualization, aimed at the perfection of political order and based on the attainment of individual happiness;68 the past as the period of assessing and judging what has been done or experienced by men in the light of their reasons and motives;69 the present as the moment of approval and reproach of a person in the light of virtue and vice, the honourable and the shameful.70 In addition he assigns to every time a specific means of argumentation: the example is related to speech about future actions, whereas enthymeme is associated with speech about past deeds, and amplification is applied to the praise or blame of present goodness or evil.71 In terms of the communicative situation of rhetoric, we must take into account that rhetoric is not meant to soliloquize like logic. Since the logician deals with what is necessary, he does not depend on the consent of a listener. Instead the orator, confronted with the contingent, is unable to secure what he firmly believes through demonstration and therefore is in need of a consenting mind or, even more, of a collaborating hand. Rhetoric therefore, which in Aristotle as well as in Cicero is praised as the founder of social communities and political order,72 cannot content itself with teaching the future orator how to attain true cognition or firm beliefs as an individual. It must also teach the orator how to communicate 66 

See Trinkaus, Adversity’s Noblemen. See above, note 42. 68  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 4–8, 1359a30–1366a22 (pp. 2161–74); for the polis as embodying the perfection of individual men see Aristotle, Politics, trans. by Jowett, i. 2, 1252b27–1253a39 (pp. 1987–88). 69  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 10–14, 1368b1–1375a21 (pp. 2178–90). 70  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 9, 1366a23–1368a37 (pp. 2174–78). 71  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 9, 1368a26–33 (p. 2178). 72  See Aristotle, Politics, trans. by Jowett, i. 2, 1253a9–19 (p. 1988); Cicero, De inventione, i. 2. 2; De oratore, i. 8. 32–34; De officiis, i. 4. 11–12; De legibus, i. 9. 27; De republica, iii. 2. 3. 67 

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his insights or convictions to his fellow men and how to cope with the requirements of the contingent communicative situation.

Rhetoric: Outdated but Indispensable Thus according to the first book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric the essential purpose of the rhetorical art has been to teach the orator ‘to reason logically, to understand human character and goodness in their various forms and to understand the emotions’.73 These points are dealt with at length in the second book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric under the headings of ‘emotions’ (pathē),74 ‘human character’ (ēthē),75 and ‘persuasive speech’ (pithanoi logoi).76 Only the third book — much shorter than the other two — is dedicated to ‘style’ (lexis), which is considered to be the very heart of modern rhetoric,77 although it has been divorced from the service which Aristotle intended rhetoric to render to moral philosophy and the practical life. Up to the end of the sixteenth century — for nearly two millennia — Aristotle’s concept of rhetoric was handed down from century to century as the method of the practical disciplines concerned with contingent reality. Cicero, who was to become the torchbearer of the ars oratoria in the Latin world, knew Aristotle’s Rhetoric very well78 and did not hesitate to adopt the three-part division outlined above, both for the structure of the contingent subject matter (past, present, and future)79 and for the contingent communicative situation (reconciling the orator to the audience, teaching the subject matter, and exciting the listener’s emotions).80 He was followed by Quintilian,81 the other shining light of Roman oratory, who was present in the medieval ‘liberal arts’ curriculum thanks to Martianus Capella and Isidore of Seville,82 but was more fully recovered in 73 

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 2, 1356a20–25 (pp. 2155–56). Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, ii. 2–11, 1378a30–1388b30 (pp. 2195–2213). 75  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, ii. 12–17, 1388b31–1391b6 (pp. 2213–17). 76  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, ii. 18–26,1391b7–1403b3 (pp. 2217–37). 77  Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, i. 9–12 (pp. 9–10). 78  Solmsen, ‘Aristotle and Cicero on the Orator’s Playing upon the Feelings’; Riposati, Studi sui ‘Topica’ di Cicerone. 79  Cicero, De inventione, i. 5. 7; De oratore, i. 31. 140–41; Topica, 24. 91. 80  Cicero, De oratore, ii. 27. 115; 28. 121; 29. 128; 72. 292; 77. 310; 81. 333; iii. 24. 91. 81  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, iii. 3. 14–4. 16. 82  Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. by Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, v. 444–49 (ii, 163–66); Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, ed. by Lindsay, ii. 4. 1–8. 74 

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1416 by Poggio Bracciolini at St Gallen. In the second half of the thirteenth century, translated from the Arabic and from the original Greek into Latin, Aristotle’s Rhetoric became integrated into the teaching of scholastic philosophy.83 As early as the fourteenth century John Buridan, the exponent of Occamism in Paris, in the introduction to his commentary to the Nicomachean Ethics went back to Averroes84 and claimed that rhetoric was the method of moral philosophy.85 With this claim, the scholastic Aristotelian meets the demand of Petrarch, the humanist Ciceronian, who not only successfully initiates the new humanist approach to moral philosophy and the self-image of its representatives as oratores,86 but also augurs a new and more faithful Latin translation of Aristotle’s writings from the Greek, including his Rhetoric.87 In general, one has the impression that in the fifteenth century it was Cicero and, to a lesser degree, Quintilian who dominated the debate on the ars rhetorica, while Aristotle’s Rhetoric enjoyed a veritable revival in the sixteenth century together with the recovery of the Poetics, containing the last instrumental discipline in the system of Aristotle’s ‘Organon’. Yet, although the intense and fervent discussions of the Poetics were accompanied by the constant affirmation that the Rhetoric and Poetics both belonged to the Organon, making use of a specific mode of conclusions,88 the close association of the two works may have supported the tendency to consider them both as being mainly literary or, as we might say, aesthetic rather than a logical instrument. In other words, they served the pleasure (delectare) rather than the usefulness (prodesse) of the rhetorical use of language. In any case, in the seventeenth century — the century of Descartes — rhetoric was to arouse suspicion and become excluded from the circle of disciplines of the philosopher’s Organon. This was the period dominated by the persuasion that 83  See Dod, ‘Aristoteles Latinus’, pp. 59–60 (Hermannus Alemannus from the Arabic c. 1256), p. 63 (William of Moerbeke from the Greek, c. 1270). 84  See above, note 5. 85  See Ebbersmeyer, Kessler, and Schmeisser, Ethik des Nützlichen, pp.  38–40: ‘Prima ergo et principalis pars, scilicet quae docet bene vivere ad salutem, traditur in libris Ethicorum, Oeconomicorum et Politicorum. Secunda vero pars, quae hunc modum docendi docet, traditur in libris Rhetoricorum et Poetriae. Unde scientia dictorum librorum vere et proprie dicenda est non logica simpliciter neque moralis scientia simpliciter, sed logica moralis.’ Cf. Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 147–48. 86  See Gray, ‘Renaissance Humanism’. 87  See Petrarch, Rerum memorandarum libri, ed. by Billanovich, ii. 31 (pp. 64–65). 88  See Zabarella, ‘De natura logicae’; Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 59–79.

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‘whoever is endowed with the most powerful reasoning and is able to arrange his thoughts in the best way in order to render them clear and intelligible, will always be able to convince the listeners best of what he is proposing — even if he would speak only Netherbreton and had never studied rhetoric’.89 Furthermore, philosophers became convinced that, since there is ‘never more than one truth’, ‘everything that is only probable’ should be regarded as ‘wrong’.90 This Cartesian rejection of rhetoric from the realm of philosophy is not only an act of purification and intensification that directs the focus of philosophy exclusively towards the cognition of what is necessarily and unchangeably true. It implies, at the same time, an essential reduction of the subject matter of philosophy and an exclusion of the contingent world of human action from philosophical consideration.91 In this regard Descartes is not a step of progress beyond the Aristotelian tradition, but rather a step of regress into the times before Aristotle,92 who established rhetoric as an additional part of the Organon with the design of dealing with what is at most probable yet, at the same time, of essential importance for the survival of human beings.

89 

Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, i. 9, p. 9 (my translation). Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, i. 12, p. 10 (my translation). 91  See Toulmin, ‘Science and the Many Faces of Rhetoric’, who points to Aristotle’s Organon as an exemplary method of reasoning, which bridges the gap between reason and rhetoric, invented by Descartes as late as the seventeenth century. 92  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i. 1, 1354a3–11 (p. 2152). 90 

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Works Cited Primary Sources Agricola, Rudolph, ‘Life of Petrach’ (= ‘Oratio de vita Petrarcae’), ed. by Ludwig Bertalot, La Bibliofilia, 30 (1928–29), 382–404 Ammonius, In Aristotelis Categorias commmentarius, ed. by Adolf Busse, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1895) Aristotle, Analytica posteriora, trans. by J. Barnes, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 114–66 —— , Analytica priora, trans. by A. J. Jenkinson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 39–113 —— , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by W. D. Ross, rev. by J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 1729–1867 —— , Politics, trans. by B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 1986–2129 —— , Rhetoric, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 2152–2269 —— , Rhetorik, trans. with intro. and commentary by Christof Rapp, 2 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001–02) —— , Topics, trans. by W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 167–277 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. by Gustave Combès and others (Paris: De Brouwer, 1949) Averroes, ‘In libros Rhetoricorum Aristotelis paraphrases’, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis (Venezia: Giunta, 1562; repr. Frankfurt a.M.: Minerva, 1962), ii: De Rhetorica, et poetica libri, 69A–72E Capella, Martianus, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, in Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans. by William H. Stahl, Richard Johnson, and E. L. Burge, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), ii Descartes, René, Discours de la méthode, in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1973; repr. 1996), i, 1–78 Ficino, Marsilio, ‘De felicitate’, in Opera omnia, 2 vols (Basel: Petri, 1576; repr. Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959–60), fols 662–65 Isidore of Seville (Isidorus Hispalensis), Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. by Wallace Martin Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911; repr. 1985)

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Melanchthon, Philipp, ‘In laudem novae scholae, 1526’, in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, ed. by Robert Stupperich, 6 vols (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1951–75), iii: Humanistiche Schriften, ed. by Richard Nurnberger (1961), pp. 63–69 Petrarch, Francesco, ‘Coronation Oration’, in Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch, ed. by Earnest Hatch Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1955), pp. 300–13 —— , ‘Epistle to Posterity’, in Letters from Petrarch, selected and trans. by Morris Bishop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 5–12 —— , ‘Letter to Giovanni Colonna, what examples are worth is shown by examples’, in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri xxiv, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), i: i–viii, pp. 314–17 [= Ep. fam., vi. 4] —— , ‘Letter to his Socrates’, in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri xxiv, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), i: i–viii, pp. 19–20 [= Ep. fam., i. 1] —— , ‘Letter to Luca da Penna, Papal Secretary, on Cicero’s Books’, in Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri i–xviii, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ii: x–xviii, pp. 599–607 [= Ep. sen., xvi. 1] —— , ‘Letter to Marco da Genova’, in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri xxiv, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), iii: xvii–xxiv, pp. 132–38 [= Ep. fam., xx. 4] —— , ‘Letter to Philippe, Bishop of Cavaillon, Concerning the Incredible Flight of Time’, in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri xxiv, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), iii: xvii–xxiv, pp. 308–13 [= Ep. fam., xxiv. 1] —— , ‘Letter to the Venerable Elder Raimondo Subirani, Attorney at Law, on the Fleetingness of Time’, in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri xxiv, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), i: i–viii, pp. 22–24 [= Ep. fam., i. 3] —— , ‘On his Own Ignorance and That of Many Others’, trans. by Hans Nachod, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul O. Kristeller, and John H. Randall, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 47–133 —— , Rerum memorandarum libri, ed. by Giuseppe Billanovich, vol. xiv of Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca (Firenze: Sansoni, 1945) Poliziano, Angelo, Praelectio cui titulus panepistemon, in Opera omnia, ed. by Ida Maier, 3 vols (Torino: D’Erasmo, 1971), i: Scripta in editione Basilensi anno mdliii collecta, fols 462–73 Salutati, Coluccio, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. by Eugenio Garin, Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano, 8 (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1947), repr. in Latin/

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German in Vom Vorrung der Jurisprudenz oder der Medizin, trans. and ed. by Peter M. Schenkel, Humanistische Bibliothek, 25 (München: Fink, 1990) —— , ‘Letter on the Death of Petrarch’, in The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio, trans. and ed. by David Thompson and Alan F. Nagel (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 3–13 Valla, Giorgio, De expetendis et fugiendis rebus (Venezia: Manutio, 1501) Valla, Lorenzo, De voluptate sive de vero bono, trans. and ed. by Peter M. Schenkel, Hu­ manistische Bibliothek, 2nd ser., 34 (München: Fink, 2004) —— , ‘On Free Will’, trans. by Charles Trinkaus, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul O. Kristeller, and John H. Randall, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 147–82 —— , Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. by Gianni Zippel, Thesaurus mundi, 21–22, 2 vols (Padova: Antenore, 1982) Zabarella, Jacopo, ‘De natura logicae’, in Jacobi Zabarellae Patavini opera logica (Köln: Zetzner, 1597, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), cols 2–102

Secondary Studies Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) Dod, Bernard G., ‘Aristoteles Latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philo­ sophy, ed. by Anthony Kenny, Norman Kretzmann, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 45–79 Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, Eckhard Kessler, and Martin Schmeisser, eds, Ethik des Nützlichen: Texte zur Moralphilosophie im italienischen Humanismus, Humanistische Bibliothek, 2nd ser., 36 (München: Fink, 2007) Garin, Eugenio, ‘La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del Trecento e i “barbari Britanni”’, in Eugenio Garin, L’età nuova (Napoli: Morano, 1969), pp. 139–66 —— , ed., La disputa della arti nel Quattrocento: testi editi ed inediti (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947) Gray, Hannah H., ‘Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 497–514 Hadot, Ilsetraut, ‘La Division néoplatonicienne des écrits d’Aristote’, in Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung. Paul Moraux gewidmet, ed. by Jürgen Wiesner, 2 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), ii: Kommentierung, Überlieferung, Nachleben, pp. 249–85 Kessler, Eckhard, ‘Humanist Thought: A Response to Scholastic Philosophy’, Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition, 2 (1979), 149–66 —— , Petrarca und die Geschichte: Geschichtsschreibung, Rhetorik, Philosophie im Über­ gang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, 2nd edn, Humanistische Bibliothek, 1st ser., 25 (München: Fink, 2004) —— , ‘The Transformation of Aristotelianism during the Renaissance’, in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt, ed. by John Henry and others (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp. 137–47

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Kraye, Jill, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘The Humanist Movement’, in Paul O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 3–23 —— , ‘The Moral Thought of Renaissance Humanism’, in Paul O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, ii: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 20–68 Kohl, Benjamin G., ‘Mourners of Petrarch’, in Francis Petrarch Six Centuries Later: A Sym­ posium, ed. by Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Depart­ ment of Romance Languages, 1975), pp. 340–52 Leff, Gordon, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on Intellectual and Spritual Change in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) Mikkeli, Heikki, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism: Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature of Arts and Sciences (Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae, 1992) Riposati, Benedetto, Studi sui ‘Topica’ di Cicerone (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1947) Solmsen, Friedrich, ‘Aristotle and Cicero on the Orator’s Playing upon the Feelings’, Classical Philology, 33 (1938), 563–71 Toulmin, Stephen, ‘Science and the Many Faces of Rhetoric’, in Science, Reason, and Rhetoric, ed. by Henry Krips, J. E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia, Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science, 4 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1995), pp. 3–11 Trinkaus, Charles, Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (New York: Octagon, 1965)

Renaissance Readings of the Nicomachean Ethics Luca Bianchi

The Medieval Background It is well known that the history of Latin Aristotelianism is largely one of gradual absorption of Aristotle’s works in the universities, as they became available thanks to translations from Greek and Arabic. In this respect Aristotle’s moral philosophy has a unique and almost ambiguous position, especially when examined from the standpoint of Paris, one of the leading centres of philosophical studies in the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s Ethica (or more precisely the first three books of the Nicomachean Ethics, his only work on ethics known during the Middle Ages, apart from a collection of passages from the Magna moralia and the Eudemian Ethics called Liber de bona fortuna) is the sole non-logical treatise whose teaching was permitted in the first surviving statute of the University of Paris, where the ‘reading’ of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics was forbidden. But according to this document, promulgated in 1215 by the papal legate Robert of Courçon, lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics were only optional and confined to feast days. After Robert Grosseteste retranslated it in full around 1246–47, this Aristotelian work was studied more intensively, and was probably included among the regular subjects by the new statutes of 1255, where almost all Luca Bianchi ([email protected]) is Professor of History of Medieval Philosophy at the Università del Piemonte Orientale—Vercelli, Italy. He is the author of several works on medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism. His most recent books include: Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’Université de Paris (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2003), and Pour une histoire de la “double vérité” (Paris: Vrin, 2008).

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Aristotelian writings were adopted as textbooks for the Arts faculty. Nevertheless these statutes allotted to the study of the first four books of this work only six weeks, the same amount of time devoted to some minor treatises on grammar. Although its marginal role in the curriculum did not prevent several masters from writing commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, in thirteenth-century Paris Aristotle’s moral philosophy clearly received less attention than his logic, physics, and metaphysics.1 It would be misleading, however, to underestimate the importance of the inclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics among the texts which might be lectured on within the Arts faculty in Paris. During the twelfth century there were lively debates on the nature and limits of moral teaching, on its relationship with Christian precepts, on its place within the liberal arts, on its links with grammar and rhetoric, and on the use of pagan authors as models of natural virtue. It is therefore striking that it was a cardinal, Robert of Courçon, who granted ethics the status of a philosophical topic, which could be discussed in university classrooms within a philosophical curriculum. As a matter of fact, it was his decision to allow feast-day lectures on the first books of the Nicomachean Ethics that sanctioned the supremacy of Aristotle in a field — moral education — where his authority, far from being uncontested as in logic or natural philosophy, was seriously challenged by classical and Christian authors such as Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and Boethius.2 By so doing, he willy-nilly recognized that topics such as virtue and human happiness could be examined rationally, as Aristotle did, without recourse to theological principles. If one keeps in mind that the emergence of ethics as scientia practica — an autonomous discipline to be studied within a university context and based on Aristotle’s doctrines rather than on religious sources — was a revolutionary step, one can better understand the reactions provoked, in the long run, by this new approach: suffice it to remember the great number of articles concerning virtues, human happiness, and sexual morality included in the great condemnation of heterodox and suspect opinions taught by Arts masters such as Siger of Brabant 1  For the statute of 1215, see Denifle and Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, i, 78–79. The bibliography on the reception of Aristotle at the University of Paris is immense: see at least Grabmann, I divieti ecclesiastici di Aristotele; Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West; Bianchi, Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’Université de Paris, pp. 87–162. On the reception of the Ethics and its place in the Parisian curriculum, see notably Wieland, Ethica—Scientia practica; Wieland, ‘Happiness: The Perfection of Man’; Sère, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge, pp. 35–65. 2  See Bianchi, Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’Université de Paris, p. 97.

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and Boethius of Dacia, issued on 7 March 1277 by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier.3 Yet, despite these reactions, Aristotelian moral philosophy consolidated its role in university instruction, in Paris and all over Europe, between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, even if the price to be paid was often an increasing involvement of theologians in its teaching. David Lines has carefully pointed out that the importance and place of courses on Aristotle’s Ethics within the curriculum, as well as their method, length, and coverage differed considerably from place to place and from time to time. In Paris, moral philosophy aroused the growing interest of masters and students, as witnessed by both the creation of a lector ethicorum, who received a good salary to lecture on the subject for two years, and the statutes of 1366 and of 1452, where particular emphasis was placed on the requirement that candidates for the license should have a good knowledge of most of the Nicomachean Ethics, and not only of the first four books as before. At Oxford as at several universities of central Europe, all founded on the Parisian model, the Ethics was studied intensively, as a required subject for Arts degrees, to be complemented by the reading of two other masterpieces of Aristotelian practical philosophy, that is, Aristotle’s Politics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics.4 As a result, many commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics were prod­ uced by masters working in universities such as Paris, Oxford, Vienna, Heidelberg, Prague, and Krakow. Needless to say, not all of these commentaries were a byproduct of university teaching. First, some of the most relevant and influential commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics derive from lectures given not at the university, but in the studia of religious orders: this was the case, for instance, of Albertus Magnus’s Lectura, or Super Ethica, which is the redaction of the lectures he gave in the Dominican convent of Cologne, and of Gerard of Odo’s commentary, which derives from his teaching to Franciscan friars. Second, several commentaries were simply the fruit of their author’s desire to examine thoroughly Aristotle’s thought: in his Sententia libri Ethicorum Thomas Aquinas recorded his personal reading of Aristotle’s doctrines (possibly in order to prepare himself for the writing of the moral section of his Summa theologiae), and Walter Burley wrote his commentary long after his sojourn at the University of Paris. Nonetheless, 3 

The central position of ethics in the Paris condemnation of 1277 has been emphasized by Bianchi, Il vescovo e i filosofi, pp. 149–95; de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge, pp. 181–245; and Piché, La Condamnation parisienne, pp. 227–83. 4  See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 65–80; Lines, ‘Moral Philo­ sophy in the Universities’, pp. 41–45 on Paris and Oxford. On Oxford, see Luscombe, ‘The Ethics and the Politics’. New documents and insights on fifteenth-century Paris are provided by Kaluza, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque’.

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commentaries authored by prominent Arts masters, such as John Buridan and Albert of Saxony, and also by theologians charged to teach moral philosophy, such as Henry of Friemar, reflect the exposition of the Aristotelian text provided in university classrooms, based on the standard scholastic method of combining the expositio litterae with the discussion of quaestiones rising from it.5 Variously linked to teaching practices are also different sorts of abridgements, which aimed at providing an easy introduction to moral philosophy, without any claims for originality and often heavily drawing on the most authoritative commentaries. It is worth noting that a considerable number of works on the Nicomachean Ethics produced in central European universities up to the fifteenth century consist of questions closely related to, and often copied from, Buridan’s question-commentary, which was immensely popular.6 The situation was significantly different in southern Europe: whereas the universities of the Iberian peninsula would make a large use, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Aristotle’s works on moral philosophy, most medieval Italian universities gave them a minor place. Only occasionally and often rather late do university documents mention lectures on the Ethics: for instance, despite the well-known interest in this Aristotelian work on the part of several Italian professors of medicine and law, the earliest statutory evidence of its teaching comes in 1387 for Florence, 1405 for Bologna, and 1465 for Padua. Documentation from staffing practices and payment records confirms that this was a marginal subject in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian universities and had instead a better status in the studia of religious orders, especially the Dominicans.7 This does not mean, however, that philosophical ethics was a topic that only friars appreciated, as a preparation for the study of theological ethics: one need only think of Dante’s Convivio to remember that a layman might be not only fond of ‘moral philosophy’, but also willing to challenge the traditional hierarchy of disciplines in order to place it above physics and metaphysics.8 5  On the scholastic method of commenting Aristotle’s texts and the structure of the medieval commentaries, see at least Del Punta, ‘The Genre of Commentaries in the Middle Ages’; Weijers, ‘La Structure des commentaires philosophiques à la Faculté des artes’. 6  On the teaching of the Ethics in central Europe, see Lines, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities’, pp.  45–48; Flüeler, ‘Ethica in Wien anno 1438’; Flüeler, ‘Teaching Ethics at the University of Vienna’. Among the numerous studies on the influence of the commentary attributed to Buridan, see at least Lines, ‘Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy’; and Müller, ‘Wiener Ethikkommentare des 15. Jahrhunderts’. 7  See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 81–108, and Lines, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities’, pp. 48–63. 8  Dante, Convivio, ed. by Vasoli and De Robertis, Book ii. 14. 14–21 (i, 255–63). The orig­

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Humanism and the ‘New’ Readings of the Ethics Starting from the beginning of the Quattrocento, the study of Aristotle’s moral philosophy received an extraordinary impulse by Italian humanists and Greek scholars who emigrated to Italy. Providing in 1416/17 a new Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, Leonardo Bruni set an example which was followed by Roberto de’ Rossi, Andrea Biglia, and Johannes Argyropoulos, who authored other translations of the same work; by Giannozzo Manetti, who around the middle of the century translated not only the Nicomachean Ethics, but also the Eudemian Ethics and the (probably spurious) Magna moralia; and by Ciriaco d’Ancona, Niccolò Perotti, and Georgius Hermonymus of Sparta, who prepared new Latin versions of the pseudo-Aristotelian De virtutibus et vitiis, already available in the Middle Ages.9 Moreover, the larger knowledge of the Greek language and the wider circulation of Greek manuscripts made it possible to study, edit, and print the original text of the four works on moral philosophy which have come down to us under Aristotle’s name. This broadening of the moral corpus would in time raise philological, exegetical, and philosophical problems, but it did not threaten the central position of the Nicomachean Ethics, which remained the university textbook for moral education, was passionately studied in humanist circles and schools, and was repeatedly translated, printed, and commented. Although the Eudemian Ethics, the Magna moralia, and the De virtutibus et vitiis gained a certain popularity from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, they were hardly ever commented and scarcely used:10 only after the mid-sixteenth century did interpreters such as Francesco Vimercati, Agostino Galesio, Simone Simoni, Pier Vettori, MarcAntoine Muret, Cesare Rovida, and Francesco Piccolomini make frequent references, in their commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, to parallel passages of the other Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian works on moral philosophy.11 inality of Dante’s position on this point has been highlighted by Gilson, Dante et la philo­sophie, pp. 100–13. 9  On fifteenth-century translations of Aristotle, see Garin, ‘Le traduzioni umanistiche di Aristotele’. See also Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 64–72. Bruni’s translation of the Ethics provoked a long controversy: for a refreshing interpretation of it, see Hankins, ‘The Ethics Controversy’. 10  See Schmitt, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Sixteenth Century’ (paying special attention to the De virtutibus); Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, p. 327; Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 52–54, 106. 11  See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 240 (Vettori), 280–81, 390

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Editions, translations, and commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics therefore represent an excellent case study, which modern scholarship has eagerly examined in order to evaluate the transformation of the Aristotelian tradition during the Renaissance. The tendency to overestimate the novelties introduced by the humanists has been tempered by the researches of the last two decades, which have shed more light not only on the discontinuities, but also on the continuities between medieval and Renaissance interpretations of Aristotle’s moral philosophy.12 First of all, we are now in a position to recognize that most fifteenthcentury translations of the Nicomachean Ethics were often a mere revision of the antiqua (i.e. medieval) translatio, dressed in elegant Latin, which was supposed both to reproduce the elevated style it had in the original Greek and to render the text more palatable to non-specialist readers.13 Moreover, it has been shown that if the humanists criticize the interpretive tradition built up by their medieval predecessors, they nevertheless heavily rely on it. Of course, it is true that the humanists intended to adapt the old literary genre of the Aristotelian commentary to the needs, the interests, and the tastes (and sometimes to the scarce competence) of their new audience. Conceived as simple aids to the reader and proffering Aristotle’s thought ‘directly from the spring’,14 explanations of his text were therefore expected to adopt a simple, clear, but elegant style. Technical philosophical jargon and scholastic quaestiones were to be avoided: these were considered as emblematic of the supposedly ‘sophistic’ and historically insensitive approach to Aristotle typical of scholastic exegesis. Nevertheless, we know that scholasticism and humanism developed side by (Piccolomini), 304 (Galesio), 335, 340 (Muret). For Vimercati, Simoni, and Rovida see below, pp. 150–53. 12  The best survey of Renaissance commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics is offered by Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’. On this literature, besides the fundamental studies by Schmitt and Lines mentioned above, see also Poppi, ‘Il problema della filosofia morale’; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 325–48; Lines, ‘The Commentary Literature on Nicomachean Ethics’; Lines, ‘Ethics as Philology’. 13  On Bruni’s intention to provide ‘the new audience of liberally-educated gentlemen’ with new translations of Aristotle’s works, see Hankins, ‘The Ethics Controversy’, pp. 196–98. On his use of Grosseteste’s translation, see Gerl, Philosophie und Philologie, pp. 154–218; for a comparison of Grosseteste’s, Bruni’s, and Argyropoulos’s translations, see Kaluza, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque’, pp. 178–81. 14  The image of the spring, taken from Horace, is to be found in Bruni, ‘Isagogicon moralis disciplinae’, p. 22; it is used by Poliziano, Praelectio de dialectica, i, 530; and it graces the frontispiece of Lefèvre d’Étaples’s 1503 edition of the Organon, now available in Lefèvre d’Étaples, The Prefatory Epistles, ed. by Rice, p. 87.

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side in fifteenth-century Italy, both competing with one another and fruitfully interacting;15 so it is not surprising that the humanists introduced their new hermeneutical principles and methods with a certain caution and, in spite of their polemical claims, continued to exploit the works of the ‘barbarian’ Aristotelians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Bruni did not add a commentary (as he did for the Economics) to his new version of the Nicomachean Ethics. His Isagogicon moralis disciplinae (1425) is rather a summary, written in dialogic form, of Aristotle’s practical philosophy and was often considered by his contemporaries as a translation and/or explanation of the Eudemian Ethics.16 Donato Acciaiuoli’s Expositio super libros Ethicorum — written at the behest of Cosimo de’ Medici, based on lectures given by Argyropoulos in Florence in 1457–58, completed in 1464, and printed in 147817 — was therefore inevitably destined to be seen as the first example of a humanistic reading of the Nicomachean Ethics. Great historians such as Eugenio Garin and Charles B. Schmitt had their reasons to treat it thus: after all, this lengthy commentary resulted from the collaboration of a famous Byzantine scholar and a learned chancellor, who was a passionate supporter of the studia humanitatis; moreover, it was probably the most influential commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics of the entire Renaissance, as proved by about twenty sixteenth-century editions. Yet a more attentive reading has allowed me to show that this Expositio, despite the clarity of its Latin, still uses scholastic terminology; that it follows the pattern of literal commentaries but sometimes introduces quaestiones and dubia; that it makes only modest use of Greek and skips philological discussions, including Argyropoulos’s critical remarks on Bruni’s translation; that it quotes Cicero but still heavily depends on medieval sources such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Burley. The only humanist imperative that Acciaiuoli seems to observe scrupulously is the one suggesting that the Greek interpreters should be privileged, as they were considered the most trustworthy guides to Aristotle due to their chronological and cultural proximity to him. Unfortunately, in the case of the Nicomachean Ethics this suggestion was rather ineffective, because the only Greek commentary available was a compilation generally attributed to ‘Eustratius’, but actually 15 

See Kristeller, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’. To give just two examples, according to the 1477 Treviso edition (H. Liechtenstein), the Isagogicon is a useful book that Bruni ‘traduxit ex dialogo principis philosophorum Aristotelis ad Eudemium amicum suum’. The explicit of the 1497 Paris edition (G. Marchant) reads instead as follows: ‘finit Leonardi Aretini Introductorius de moribus dialogus cum Marcellino instar dialogi Aristotelis cum Eudemio amico’. 17  Acciaiuoli, Expositio super libros ethicorum Aristotelis. 16 

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authored by several philosophers, among whom only Aspasius (the interpreter of Book viii) and the anonymous interpreter of Books ii–v lived in the second century, while the others (Eustratius himself, who commented on Books i and vi, and Michael of Ephesus, who commented on Books v, ix, and x) worked in twelfth-century Byzantium. So, when in his explanation of Book i Acciaiuoli systematically draws on (and often plagiarizes) Eustratius, he is simply recycling a ‘medieval’ Neoplatonic and Christianized interpretation of Aristotle, which, thanks to Grosseteste’s translation, had been the basis of all Latin exegesis from 1250 onwards!18 Ironically enough, a flavour of what a humanistic reading of the Nicomachean Ethics might be has come to us through two scholastically trained masters, Guglielmo Becchi and Niccolò Tignosi. The first, an Augustinian friar active in Bologna and Florence, wrote in 1456 a commentary which, covering all ten books, still relies on medieval sources, but deliberately avoids quaestiones and dubia in order to provide those who dedicate themselves to ‘humane studies’ with ‘a pure and clear understanding of the philosopher’.19 The second, a doctor of medicine who taught logic, philosophy, and medicine, composed around 1460 another long commentary, probably based on the lectures he had given at the Florentine studium using Bruni’s Latin version. In this work, Tignosi integrates the standard repertory of sources with quotations from Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Cicero, and he illustrates Aristotle’s doctrines with exempla taken from literature, the visual arts, ancient history, and contemporary events.20 This approach sparked the reaction of conservative milieus, as witnessed by an apologetic tract (In illos qui mea in Aristotelis commentaria criminantur) that Tignosi finished before August 1464, in order to answer criticism from both the scholastics and the humanists. This remarkable work can be considered as the archetype of a new literary genre, destined to flourish in the Renaissance, dedicated to defining ‘the task (offitium) of a commentator’. Tignosi insists that a commentator should aim at making the text under consideration as clear as possible, explaining single passages ‘acte, aperte, distincte ac recte’: he should therefore focus more on res than on verba, without overestimating the importance of elegance of style, contrary to the claims of ‘those who rely on antiquity’. On the other hand, Tignosi defends himself from the attack of ‘those who oppose poets’, asserting that when he 18 

See Bianchi, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele’. On the collection of Greek commentaries on the Ethics, see Mercken, ‘The Greek Commentators on Aristotle’s Ethics’. 19  I quote Becchi’s passage from Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 190–91. 20  On this text, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 192–206 (for its dating, p. 193, n. 35), and Lines, ‘Ethics as Philology’, pp. 35–39.

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referred to historical examples and poems he was simply following in Aristotle’s own steps, as he had frequently quoted Homer and Hesiod.21 This application of the oft-repeated humanist slogan inviting imitation of the style of the ancients does not imply that Tignosi was ‘a genuine son of humanism’, but rather shows that he was sensitive to ‘the needs and interests of a humanistically oriented audience’.22 Tignosi’s complex and sometimes ambiguous attitude towards his predecessors and contemporaries, as well as his need to reply to various detractors confirm, moreover, that in fifteenth-century Florence the distinction between the ‘scholastic’ and the ‘humanistic’ camps was not as clear-cut as scholars once imagined. It is noteworthy, in this perspective, that Tignosi did not need to defend himself for adopting Bruni’s translation, which, despite the continuing controversies about its reliability, seems to have quickly become the standard one in Florence and elsewhere in Italy.23 This was not the case in Padua, where in 1474–75 Ermolao Barbaro — who would go on to conceive the ambitious project of retranslating into elegant Latin the whole corpus Aristotelicum and the Greek interpreters — still lectured on the medieval version of the Ethics. It has been remarked that at this time Barbaro was a young master who could not dare to break with the established teaching practices of his university; and we know that he did record in his manuscript copy his own corrections to the version he was using, whether or not he presented them to his students.24 However it may be, his Compendium ethicorum librorum — probably a by-product of his teaching — offers a tidy but condensed and conventional exposition of the first six books of the Nicomachean Ethics. The work avoids scholastic jargon but contains five brief questions, dealing with virtue, prudence, and wisdom.25 Of course, an introduc21 

Tignosi’s tract is published in Sensi, ‘Niccolò Tignosi da Foligno’, pp.  465–82; for references to Aristotle’s use of poets, see pp.  479, 481. For the controversy on Tignosi’s commentary and modern interpretations of it, see Lines, ‘Faciliter Edoceri’, and Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp.  206–20. On Renaissance discussions of the officium commentatoris, see Bianchi, ‘Interpretare Aristotele con Aristotele’, especially pp. 200–08. 22  Cf. Sensi, ‘Niccolò Tignosi da Foligno’, p. 390, and Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 218. 23  See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 100 and n. 121, pp. 218–19; Hankins, ‘The Ethics Controversy’, pp. 196–97, 215–17. 24  Cf. Kristeller, ‘Un codice padovano di Aristotele postillato’; Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 248–49. 25  Barbaro’s Compendium was posthumously published by his nephew Daniele Barbaro only in 1544. I have used a later edition, Barbaro, Aristotelis Ethicorum compendium, pp. 325– 84. On Barbaro’s Compendium, see Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 102–04.

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tion for beginners, though inspired by Themistius’s Paraphrases to Aristotle’s De anima which Barbaro had retranslated in 1481, is not the best place to see the new humanist hermeneutical techniques at work. It remains nevertheless striking that ten years later — just before his famous debate with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on eloquence — Barbaro once again wrote an outline of Aristotle’s philosophy that is notable for its conservatism: as a matter of fact, his Compendium scientiae naturalis ex Aristotele, finished in 1484, is a trivial presentation of the Peripatetic world view, where the few problems comprehensively investigated are those typical of the fourteenth-century English ‘calculatory’ tradition.26

Perspicua brevitas? According to several of his contemporaries, a turning point in the method of commenting Aristotle was marked by the Parisian philosopher and theologian Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. During a trip to Italy in 1491–92, Lefèvre met Barbaro and also Angelo Poliziano; in 1490 the latter had started, beginning with the Nicomachean Ethics, his Florentine lectures on Aristotle. In two celebrated orations (the Praelectio de dialectica of 1491, and the Lamia of 1492), Poliziano developed the dominant motifs of the humanist polemic against scholastic commentators — rejection of the quaestio disputata, criticism of specialized jargon, the goal of elegance, and expository clarity (perspicua brevitas) — and announced his intention to apply to the Philosopher’s works the same philological methods successfully applied to other ancient texts.27 Influenced by this approach, Lefèvre conceived the project of reforming Parisian Aristotelianism and, between 1492 and 1508, published Aristotelian translations by Italian humanists such as Leonardo Bruni and Giorgio Valla, by Byzantine scholars such as Argyropoulos and Bessarion, and by his own collaborators, such as François Vatable and Gérard Roussel. Moreover, he authored several well-received commentaries, paraphrases, and introductions to Aristotle’s main works.28 Although we lack evidence that Lefèvre ever was a lector Ethicorum, his work on the Nicomachean Ethics is part of this project of reform. It is generally assumed that at this time the University of Paris was dominated by old-fashioned 26 

See Bianchi, ‘Fra Ermolao Barbaro e Ludovico Boccadiferro’, pp. 353–58. See at least Branca, Poliziano e l’umanesimo, pp. 13–18, 56, 76–77, and Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, i, 9–44. On ‘perspicua brevitas’, see Poliziano, Praelectio de dialectica, p. 530. 28  On Lefèvre’s Aristotelianism, see at least Rice, ‘Humanist Aristotelianism in France’; Kessler, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century’; Lines, ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism’. 27 

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forms of scholasticism, which Lefèvre was trying to stamp out. This black-andwhite picture is too simplistic and, as far as ethics is concerned, misses two central points. First, between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, Parisian masters displayed a growing interest in practical philosophy and theology, as is witnessed by their editions of medieval and contemporary works on these topics: the list includes Nicole Oresme’s annotated French version of the Nicomachean Ethics (1488), Buridan’s Quaestiones super decem libros Ethicorum (1489), Martin Lemaître’s treatises De fortitudine and De virtutibus et vitiis (1489–90, reprinted in 1510), Alexander of Hales’s De virtutibus (1509), Aquinas’s Secunda secundae (1512), Jerôme de Hangest’s Introductorium morale (1515), and, needless to say, several commentaries — one authored by Pierre Tartaret (1496), another ‘ad mentem […] Martini Magistri et Johannis Buridani’ (1500), anonymously published but soon reprinted (1509) with questions by Nicolas Dupuy and Gilbert Crab — as well as Latin translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Moreover, Parisian scholastic masters proved more receptive to new approaches than is generally acknowledged. To name just a few examples, in 1488 Giles of Delft, the fellow of the Sorbonne who sent to the press scholastic works such as Lemaître’s moral treatises and Buridan’s questions on the Ethics, edited Argyropoulos’s translation,29 which was reprinted several times and soon became the standard text even for scholastic masters such as John Mair;30 furthermore, the unknown author of the commentary ‘ad mentem […] Martini Magistri et Johannis Buridani’, while using the antiqua translatio, sometimes compared it with humanistic translations and criticized Bruni’s controversial rendering of the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics (‘quapropter bene ostenderunt summum bonum, quod omnia appetunt’) because ‘the Greek text (as witnessed by Francesco Filelfo) does not here have summum’.31 In such a context, Lefèvre’s goal was to encourage and consolidate change rather than to affirm an absolutely new approach. As a matter of fact, he did not 29 

Aristotle, Opus Aristotelis de moribus, trans. by Argyropoulos and ed. by Delphus. Aristotle, Ethica […] peripateticorum principis. Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 98–99, considers Mair as a representative of ‘the fundamental conservatism of scholastic commentators’, but this judgement might be softened if one considers his massive use of historical examples and classical authors. 31  Aristotle, Textus Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum, fols 2v (on ‘summum bonum’), 110v, and 125r (where both Bruni and Argyropoulos are mentioned). The third edition (1509) of this text contains questions of Gilbert Crab and Nicholas Dupuy on books vii–x. On misunderstandings concerning these editions, see Kaluza, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque’, pp. 168–71. 30 

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intend to break abruptly with the past. His first preoccupation was to ‘reconcile’ the three Latin translations of the Nicomachean Ethics available to him (i.e. the revised version of Grosseteste’s translation plus Bruni’s and Argyropoulos’s translations) by applying to all of them the same division in chapters and paragraphs, something which would facilitate their comparison. Accordingly, in his commentary he followed this division of the text, so that ‘Parisians might recognize their method of philosophizing’.32 These concessions to scholastic exegesis were balanced, however, by an open attack against quaestiones: claiming that moral education does not require verbal quarrels, Lefèvre offered a brief and highly readable literary exposition of Aristotle’s work, making a large (and often affected) use of syllogisms; then he added a series of notae, where individual passages were explained by means of historical examples and quotations from Greek and Latin classics. This aspect of Lefèvre’s commentary has been highlighted by modern scholars,33 but equally important are, in my opinion, two other elements. First, Lefèvre’s Introductio was first published in 1497, but enjoyed a great success only in the sixteenth century, when it was reprinted many times, accompanied by the glosses of Lefèvre’s disciple Josse Clichtove. The fact that a commentary conceived as an answer to the humanistic call for re-establishing direct contact with the text of Aristotle was supplemented by a much longer ‘super-commentary’ is in itself rather disconcerting, especially if one remembers that Clichtove reintroduced questions, which are not structured according to the scholastic format of the quaestio disputata, but whose function is carefully explained and justified. Besides, Lefèvre and Clichtove, who were both theologians as well as philosophers, frequently referred to the Old and New Testament, quoted patristic sources, presented Mary as a model of all virtues, and contrasted Peripatetic and Christian conceptions of happiness with the Muslims’ supposed pursuit of ‘dirtiness’ (spurcitia), that is, bodily pleasures.34 32 

In the prefatory epistle to his edition and commentary of the Ethics (now available in Lefèvre d’Étaples, The Prefatory Epistles, ed. by Rice, pp. 42–43) Lefèvre states: ‘Tres literas — Argyropili, Leonardi et Antiquam conciliaui et capitibus et numeris, ut semper ad consimiles numeros consimilis littera respondeat […] et commentarium conclusionibus, divisionibus, diffinitionibus, correlariis et consimilibus distinxi, quo Parisienses suum philosophandi modum recognoscant.’ 33  Cf. Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 104–05, and Kessler, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century’, pp. 11–12. 34  Lefèvre d’Étaples, Moralis in ethicen introductio. On questions, see notably fol. 3 v; on Mary, fols 14v, 16r, 18r, 41v, 42v; on Muslim religion, fols 12v, 52r. Lefèvre’s recourse to religious sources has been highlighted by Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 347–48 and Kraye, ‘Pagan

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Of course, one need only think of Eustratius, Thomas Aquinas, or Gerard of Odo to remember that most medieval commentators read the Ethics in a Christian light; and whereas during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries several Parisian Arts masters — from Boethius of Dacia to Buridan — tried to affirm the full autonomy of moral philosophy, throughout the fifteenth century the teaching of this discipline was often associated, in Paris, with metaphysics and theology, so that Aristotle’s text could serve as an occasion for dealing with topics such as sin, God’s love of his creatures, or the destiny of the damned.35 It remains nevertheless striking that Lefèvre and Clichtove do not content themselves with insisting on the ‘harmony’ between Aristotle’s teachings and the precepts of the Gospels.36 They exploit the ‘unleashing of the auctores’ promoted by the humanists in order to introduce biblical materials, Christian ideas, and theological principles in a way unknown to their scholastic predecessors. Further on we will see that it was precisely this feature of their reading of the Ethics that would be followed by many other interpreters, but it is worth anticipating here that Giulio Landi developed this attitude in Le azioni morali — a vernacular and dialogic paraphrase of both Lefèvre’s commentary and Clichtove’s ‘super-commentary’ written between 1564 and 1565 — introducing issues, problems, and authors dear to the culture of the Counter-Reformation and emphasizing that Aristotelian ethics is complementary to ‘Evangelic philosophy’.37

The Flourishing of Textual Criticism Lefèvre’s and Clichtove’s commentaries also bear witness, among other things, to another important change. If, from Bruni to Poliziano, Florence had been the leading centre for the study of the Ethics, the last decade of the fifteenth century Virtue in Pursuit of Christian Happiness’, pp. 57–58. For a later, impressive example of the use of Aristotle’s treatment of pleasure in order to attack Mahomet’s view of the afterlife, see Pellegrini, De moribus libri decem, p. 49. 35  Cf. Lines, ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities’, pp.  41–42. Kaluza, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque’, pp. 164–65, shows that most fifteenth-century lectores Ethicorum were theologians. 36  ‘Septimum praeceptum docet proximos esse amandos […]. Et idem sacratissima lex Evangelica (cui haec moralis philosophia mirum in modum et pulchra quadam harmonia consonat) praecepit: dilige proximum tuum sicut teipsum’: Lefèvre d’Étaples, Moralis in ethicen introductio, fol. 29r. 37  Landi, Le attioni morali. On agreements and disagreements between Aristotle and ‘Evangelic philosophy’, see notably i, 77–86. On Landi’s work, see below, p. 155.

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saw a multiplication of centres in Italy as well as a movement towards northern Europe. There is no need to recall that this is notoriously a general trend of Renaissance Aristotelianism,38 but the case of the Nicomachean Ethics is indeed particularly striking. The Greek text of the Nicomachean Ethics was printed for the first time in the fifth volume of Aldus Manutius’s editio princeps, published in Venice in 1498, but later editions were, for the most part, produced across the Alps: in their Bibliography of Aristotle Editions 1501–1600, Cranz and Schmitt list twenty-four editions, only three of which were published by Italian presses (two in Florence and one in Venice). Likewise, even if in the sixteenth century Argyropoulos’s Latin version remained a bestseller, there appeared over twenty new Latin translations of the Ethics, only eight of which were authored by Italian scholars, with Pier Vettori as the only Florentine among them. Moreover, these translations generally proved unable to beat the competition of those produced by French Hellenists such as Joachim Périon, Nicolas de Grouchy, Denys Lambin, and Adrien Turnèbe, which by and large were the best received — the only exception being Giovanni Bernardo Feliciano’s translation, which however owed most of its success to its inclusion in a new version of the Greek and Byzantine commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics.39 A similar (though not identical) trend can be detected in two of the most characteristic innovations that the humanists introduced in the exegesis of the corpus Aristotelicum: the use of the Greek text and the application of philological techniques. To avoid any misunderstandings, one should remark that ‘humanist philology’ is a rather vague label, often used to convey the highly disputable idea that, from Bruni to Poliziano, Erasmus, or Vettori, Renaissance scholars shared the same method of reading, studying, and editing ancient texts. Recent scholarship has challenged this myth, and we are now in a position to appreciate the plurality of methodological approaches displayed by humanists in their editions and commentaries of Aristotle’s works, and notably of his Ethics. Despite his acquaintance with Argyropoulos, Acciaiuoli made only occasional references to the original Greek, discussed a number of discrepancies between alternative translations but generally avoided examining variants from different manuscripts, and borrowed from Eustratius most of his remarks on Aristotle’s terminology,

38 

See Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 36–37, 70. For these data, see Cranz, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions, pp. 172–73; for Italian translations, Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 224–26; Schmitt, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Sixteenth Century’, p. 95. On Feliciano’s translation and his fortuna, see Lines, ‘Giovanni Bernardo Feliciano’. 39 

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style, and method.40 From some notes written by his students between 1491 and 1501 we can conjecture that Poliziano’s reading of the Ethics ‘was primarily philological and literary’,41 and very likely based on the Greek text. In any event, the practice of lecturing on the Greek text of Aristotle spread all over Europe and was followed — as far as the Ethics is concerned — by Pier Vettori and Ciriaco Strozzi in Florence, by Francesco Vimercati and Denys Lambin in Paris, by Antonio Bernardi Mirandolano, Marc-Antoine Muret, and Francesco Benci in Rome, and by Ottaviano Ferrari in Pavia.42 This growing interest in interpreting the Ethics in the original was the consequence not only of the humanists’ ideal of returning ad fontes, but also of other cultural and institutional changes. Lines has rightly emphasized that, using historical examples and quoting from Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, the humanists blurred the boundaries between ethics and rhetoric. So, from the fifteenth century onwards, especially in Italian universities, ethics was often taught by professors of rhetoric and literature, who knew Greek and sometimes employed it in their lectures. Whereas in fifteenth-century Paris lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics had generally been contracted out to theologians, starting from the 1530s they were offered also by professors of Greek, such as the above-mentioned Lambin.43 If one remembers that students too were often expected to know this language, which was increasingly mastered by the well-educated, it is easy to understand why most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentaries make systematic use of Greek words and sentences, instead of the Latinized Greek forms that one can find in the previous tradition, from Albertus Magnus to Acciaiuoli. It should be emphasized, however, that this wider use of the Greek text of the Ethics — alone, or published in bilingual (i.e. Greek and Latin) editions — did not necessarily imply a special attention to strictly philological problems: Jill Kraye has pointed out that ‘textual criticism did not, in fact, become a prominent feature of humanist commentaries on the Ethics until well into the sixteenth century’, and Lines 40 

Bianchi, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele’, pp. 25–27, 31–35. See Hankins, ‘The Ethics Controversy’, pp. 218–19. 42  See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 102–04. For a general discussion of the practice of lecturing on the Greek text of Aristotle, see Schmitt, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Sixteenth Century’, pp. 288–89, and Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, p. 37, along with my clarifications in Bianchi, ‘Una caduta senza declino?’, pp. 180–83. 43  For Italy, see Lines, ‘Ethics as Philology’, pp. 32–34. As to Lambin, although he published his philological annotations on the Ethics in 1558 during his second sojourn in Italy, he lectured on this text when he was a royal reader, charged to teach both rhetoric (1560–61) and Greek (1561–72). 41 

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has recently added that, surprisingly enough, ‘one has to wait until 1584 to find a philological commentary on the Ethics’, the one published in Florence by Pier Vettori and rightly considered as one of the best achievements of Renaissance scholarship.44 These are certainly sound judgements if one takes into account only works that answer to a ‘proper’ definition of commentary; nevertheless, they might be qualified by a broader consideration of philological work on the Ethics. As a matter of fact, the need to find good manuscripts, to compare and collate them, and to choose the best readings had already started in the fifteenth century with the new translations, and increased in the next century with the editions of the original Greek text. Some philological glosses are indeed a ‘by-product’ of translations and editions, whose authors felt obliged to provide justifications for the readings or renderings adopted, often bitterly criticizing the choices of other scholars. This is the case, for instance, of the annotations that Périon appended to his De optimo genere interpretandi (the work in which he vindicated his method of translation) and of Lambin’s and de Grouchy’s annotations, published respectively in 1558 and 1566 as an appendix to their revisions of Périon’s versions of the Ethics. Lambin and de Grouchy did not only denounce the devastating effects of Périon’s effort to dress up Aristotle in pure Ciceronian garb. They intended also to demonstrate that Périon’s work was inferior to theirs because it was based on an incorrect Greek text. This they tried to ‘restore’ in a variety of ways: by carefully comparing manuscripts of the Ethics; by scrutinizing its textual and interpretive tradition (Thomas Aquinas included, because according to Lambin he was often able to capture the true meaning of Aristotle’s words, despite the ‘vicious translation’ he was relying upon); by suggesting conjectural emendations; and by drawing from other editions or exploiting pieces of information gathered from distinguished scholars such as Vettori, Turnèbe, and Muret.45 44 

Cf. Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, p. 105, and Lines, ‘Ethics as Philology’, pp. 28–29, 31–32 (I quote from p. 31); see also Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 242. 45  Cf. the Annotationes published by Périon at the end of Périon, De optimo genere interpretandi commentarii; those in Aristotle, De moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem, trans. by Lambin, notably pp. 289, 306, 308, 325, 401–02 (for his exchanges with contemporary scholars); pp. 362, 395, 441 (on Aquinas); and those in Aristotle, Ad Nichomachum filium de moribus, quæ Ethica nominantur, trans. by Grouchy: see for instance fols 30v, 48v (on Vettori’s scholarship) and 83r. In a remarkable article published after I wrote the present paper Jill Kraye calls attention to and thoroughly discusses the role played by Lambin and Muret in the development of a philological approach to the Nicomachean Ethics: see Kraye, ‘Italy, France and the Classical Tradition’. On Lambin’s annotations, see also O’Brien, ‘Translation, Philology

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Seen against the background of this already flourishing tradition of textual criticism — and of the growing attention devoted to questions relating to the structure, transmission, and authenticity of the corpus Aristotelicum46 — Vettori’s commentary seems less the late and almost isolated performance of an exceptionally skilled Hellenist than the final result of his forty-years-long work on the Greek text of the Ethics, which he had published twice (in 1547 and 1560) and continued to study in a constant, but often critical dialogue with his contemporaries. Significantly enough, one of Vettori’s main targets was Lambin, whom he found ‘too free in modifying and contaminating the text’, and therefore unable, in most cases, to suggest good emendations.47 This is not to deny, of course, that Vettori’s huge commentary was incomparably richer than the previous glosses. The Florentine scholar devotes more than six hundred pages to examining the Greek text of the Ethics. First he reproduces it, sentence by sentence, appending his own Latin version; then he provides for each passage an explanation, which focuses almost exclusively on philological problems. Vettori examines the manuscript and printed tradition, evaluates variant readings of the codices, clarifies the exact meaning of difficult terms, and gives cross-references to the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna moralia. Sometimes he also adds his personal remarks on Aristotle’s arguments and doctrines, using Greek interpreters, classical poetry, historical examples, and, in a few cases, even medieval authors: Thomas Aquinas, whose literal commentary he appreciates as an exception to the scholastic method of writing ‘obscure questions’, which he considers more disturbing than helpful in teaching moral philosophy; or Dante, whom he praises for having ‘carefully’ studied the Ethics.48 It has been remarked that Vettori is extremely reluctant to deal with philosophical issues and that his Commentarii fully carry out — one century later — and Polemic’; Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 111–13. On Grouchy’s and Lambin’s criticism of Périon’s method of translation, see Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 76–78 and Bianchi, ‘Una caduta senza declino?’, pp. 153–54. 46  On this point Kraye’s contributions are fundamental: see in particular articles IX, X, XI, XIII, and XIV now collected in Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy. 47  For Vettori’s discussion of Lambin’s Annotationes, see Vettori, Commentarii in X libros Aristotelis, pp. 120–21, 125, 195, 198, 227, 241, 293, 403, 600 (and p. 293 for my quotation). 48  For Vettori’s use of Aquinas, see Vettori, Commentarii in X libros Aristotelis, pp. 7 (where Aquinas is praised for dismissing questions), 18, 288, 238, 346, 378; on Dante, pp. 25, 53. On Vettori’s commentary, see Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 114–15; Lines, ‘Ethics as Philology’, pp. 28–31; and Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 238–46.

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the project defined in the 1490s by Poliziano: to read Aristotle less as a thinker than as a ‘classic’, an author to be situated in his historical context and understood through an accurate examination of his writings, his style, and his language, after the manner of the Hellenistic grammarians.49 Vettori’s Commentarii, however, are the result not only of the application of these humanistic hermeneutical principles, but also of two major changes: first, the growing sophistication of philological techniques, which in the sixteenth century interested classical scholarship in general, requiring high specialization; second, the new policy of recruitment of the professors of ethics, who, as we have seen, were no longer chosen only among professional philosophers. In particular, during the second half of the sixteenth century, several rhetoricians and distinguished Hellenists were hired to comment on the Ethics.50 It is therefore not surprising that they paid much more attention to reconstructing the text, comparing competing Latin translations, presenting Greek grammar and lexicon, and displaying their knowledge of ancient history, culture, and literature than to expounding and discussing Aristotle’s conception of virtue, happiness, and the supreme good.

Philology and/or Philosophy (and Theology)? A similar approach risked causing a divorce between philology and philosophy, and even questioning the old accepted choice — which, as we have seen, had been sanctioned as early as 1215 by a papal legate — to consider ethics as a philosophical discipline, founded on the homonymous treatise of the Stagirite. It is therefore noteworthy that, though Vettori did have some followers (as proved for instance by Theodorus Marcilius, whose scholia are devoted solely to textual criticism),51 several interpreters tried to balance philological awareness and theoretical interests. Jill Kraye has remarked that in the commentary authored by Vettori’s archrival, Marc-Antoine Muret, ‘philological acumen is combined with solid, if uninspired, philosophical erudition’.52 Known as one of the best Hellenists and orators of his age, Muret was invited to teach at the University of Rome, where he lectured on 49 

See Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, p. 115, where Vettori is presented as a ‘disciple’ of Poliziano. 50  See on this point Lines, ‘The Importance of Being Good’, pp. 163–65, and Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 94–96, 107–08, 298–300, 332–35, 364–66. 51  Preserved in Paris, BnF, MS lat. 6463 (on Books i–iv), where most scholars are system­ atically rebuked using expressions such as ‘male’, ‘absurde’, ‘pessime’, or ‘delirationes ridiculae’. 52  Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, p. 116.

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the Ethics in 1563–67 and 1583–84. Posthumously printed in 1602, the commentary drawn from these lectures shows that Muret used the Greek text established by Vettori, but often discussed his readings; that he criticized all the most celebrated translations of the Ethics, addressing harsh polemical remarks towards Périon and Lambin; and that he often compared passages of the different works on moral philosophy attributed to the Stagirite. Muret, however, did not forget the doctrinal content of the treatise he was explaining. One of the most characteristic apects of his commentary is the presence, under a new form, of the scholastic quaestiones et solutiones, renamed in good humanist fashion aporiai kai luseis, and devoted to a detailed examination of the problems arising from the text. Now only a few of these deal with philological and historical matters, such as the distinction between the esoteric and acroamatic works of Aristotle, while most of them are related to strictly philosophical issues: for instance, Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s Ideas or the division of the soul and its immortality. 53 This attitude is particularly striking if one keeps in mind that Muret approached Aristotle’s Ethics less as a ‘handbook’ for a theoretical discussion of moral problems than as a repository of precepts and exempla of praiseworthy conduct. Significantly his course’s general prolusion, held in 1563 and printed over fifteen times between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, is a piece of high rhetoric, where classical quotations, historical examples, and humanistic topoi are piled up in order to spur the Romans to imitate the unsurpassed models of their ancestors. Proposing once again a late and mannered version of the ideals of ‘civic humanism’, Muret emphasizes that Camillus, Curius, Fabritius, and Scipio did not discuss or write about moral philosophy, but practiced ‘the most beautiful and truest way of philosophizing’, which consists in virtuous actions.54 If a similar blend of edifying rhetoric and philosophy can be found in other commentators working in Italian universities (for instance, in Antonio Riccoboni),55 a greater interest in Aristotle’s ideas and arguments is evident in most sixteenth53 

See Muret, Commentarii in Aristotelis, pp. 79–88, 148–54, 448–58. On this text, see Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 116–17, and Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 331–40. 54  Muret, Scripta selecta, ed. by Frey, i, 45–46: ‘Vita illi, non oratione, factis, non dictis, moribus, non sermonibus, philosophabantur, quod pulcherrimum ac verissimum est philosophandi genus.’ 55  See Aristotle, Ethikon nikomachein biblia deka, trans. by Riccoboni. Riccoboni declares in his preface (pp. 9–12) that his approach to Aristotle’s Ethics is that of a humanist (‘humanitatem profiteor’), not of a professional philosopher. Nevertheless he includes in his commentary a lot of philosophical material, in most cases overtly borrowed from Francesco Piccolomini: on this point, see Kraye, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism in the Moral Philosophy’, pp. 78–79.

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century interpreters of the Ethics. Lines has called attention to the idiosyncratic approach of Agostino Galesio and Claudio Betti, authors of unpublished but remarkable commentaries based on lectures given in Bologna. Though the first makes frequent cross-references to literary sources and the second is familiar with Greek and ready to discuss alternative translations of Aristotle’s text, they are both primarily interested in its philosophical content and methodology: Betti’s main concern is precisely that of clarifying the logical structure of Aristotle’s moral philosophy, which he tries to reconstruct by making an impressive use of syllogisms.56 A more prudent use of syllogism can be found in another Italian commentary, which is ascribed to Cesare Rovida (who was a professor of natural philosophy and medicine at Pavia during the 1570s–1580s), but which was likely authored by Ottaviano Ferrari. In this unpublished and hitherto unstudied literal commentary on Books v–x, the author makes a great effort to find the best reading for every individual sentence of Aristotle’s text, so he frequently examines parallel passages from the Eudemian Ethics, quotes the Greek commentators, and collates manuscripts and printed editions. Nevertheless, for him textual criticism is not an end in itself, but a means to recover the authentic meaning of the Stagirite’s thought, which he intends to expound as clearly as possible. In order to do that, he feels free not only to use syllogisms, but also to reintroduce on various occasions the ‘barbarous’ terminology of the scholastics and to make long digressions, such as the treatise de providentia inserted in Book x.57 Other interpreters working outside Italy show even better that erudition and philological skills, far from replacing philosophical understanding of the Ethics, might become an instrument to render it more accurate. Among the numerous examples, I will focus on two neglected but highly representative commentaries. The author of the first is Francesco Vimercati, who after a good training in philosophy in Bologna, Pavia, and Padua held between 1542 and 1561 the position of royal reader in Paris, charged to teach Greek and Latin philosophy, the Ethics included. The draft of his lectures on Books i–iii has survived in manu­ 56 

Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 301–07, 310–24. This commentary is preserved in Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS D 13 suss. (on Books v–vii) and Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS F 42 suss. (on Books viii–x). For the philological approach, see for instance Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS D 13 suss., fols 121r, 137r-v, 153r, 155v, 169r–v, 183v, 200r, 205v, 216v. For his use of syllogisms and scholastic terms see for example fol. 85r: ‘Sed nobis liceat, ut quae cogitata sunt apertius enuntiemus, barbaro, et inusitato uerbo uti “Scibile”, igitur dicamus et argumentemur: “Omne scibile non potest aliter se habere, Omne quod non potest aliter se habere est necessarium, ergo omne scibile est necessarium.”’ For the treatise de providentia, see Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS F 42 suss., fols 342r–369r. For the attribution to Ottaviano Ferrari, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 513. 57 

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script and shows that Vimercati provided his own Latin version of Aristotle’s text, often comparing it with those of his predecessors, discussing their method of translation, and defending a prudent use of scholastic terminology. Moreover, Vimercati is clearly aware of a crucial point — too often dismissed by modern scholars — that is, that medieval and Renaissance translators disagreed not only because they had different methods, but because they relied upon different versions of the Greek text. So he evaluates variants of the codices, discusses the exact meaning of Greek terms, compares statements from different works of, or attributed to, Aristotle (the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna moralia included), and discusses their authorship.58 Vimercati, however, never forgets to explain the theoretical content of the passage under examination. Though quoting Homer, Plutarch, Livy, and Virgil, he examines in depth Eustratius’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, he rebukes him for criticizing Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s theory of Ideas, he systematically matches Plato’s and Aristotle’s views, and he makes frequent but prudent references to one of the most controversial topics of medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism — which he had treated at length in 1543 — that is, Aristotle’s position on the immortality of the soul.59 While in his printed commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, Physics, and Metaphysics Vimercati uses Averroes, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Jean of Jandun, and Buridan, in expounding the Ethics he dismisses the medieval commentators (with the exception of the Byzantine Eustratius) but calls attention to other philosophical traditions. Besides Plato, who is for him a constant point of reference, Vimercati discusses Stoic doctrines, mentions Epicurus’s distinction between different kinds of pleasures, and emphasizes that the latter’s views on this matter were generally misinterpreted. Having remarked that even Cicero wrongly saw in Epicurus an advocate of vita voluptuosa, Vimercati declares that a thorough examination of his writings, such as the one carried on by Seneca and Lorenzo Valla, confirms that he did not separate the supreme good from virtue, and used the term ‘pleasure’ simply to signify ‘peace of mind’ and the lack of bodily pain.60 58 

Vimercati’s commentary is preserved in Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS R 106 sup., fols 1 –227r. For his remarks on Aristotle’s terminology, variant readings, and translations, see for instance, fols 7v–8r, 21r–v, 105r (where Vettori is mentioned), 106v–107r, 108v–109v, 163v, 170r, 225v. On Vimercati’s attitude towards Aristotle’s translations and his defence of philosophical jargon, see Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 78–81, and Bianchi, ‘Una caduta senza declino?’, pp. 157–58. On Vimercati’s life and works, see Gilbert, ‘Francesco Vimercato of Milan’. 59  On Plato’s Ideas, see Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS R 106 sup., fols 47 r–56v; on the immortality of the soul, fols 88r–v, 101v–102v, 202v. On Vimercati’s position on the immortality of the soul, see Hasse, ‘Aufstieg und Niedergang des Averroismus in der Renaissance’, pp. 461–66. 60  On the differences between Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, see Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, r

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With the considerable exception of this friendly attitude towards Epicurean ethics,61 the most outstanding features of Vimercati’s work reappear in the commentary published in 1567 by Simone Simoni. Largely ignored by modern scholarship, this commentary, though limited to Book i, offers one of the most original sixteenth-century introductions to Aristotle’s moral philosophy. Having studied at Lucca, Bologna, and Pavia, Simoni was obliged to flee for religious reasons to Geneva, where he adhered to Calvinism. Well trained in philosophy and medicine, Simoni had a good mastery of Greek, as witnessed by his translations of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and De sensu. In his commentary on the Ethics, based on the notes taken for lectures he gave in Geneva, Simoni pays attention to variant readings and Greek lexicon; he examines the structure and transmission of the whole moral corpus attributed to Aristotle; he disregards Périon’s Latin version as ‘totally absurd’ and discusses those provided by Lambin and Turnèbe. Trying to bring together the philological and the philosophical approaches, he censures both those who play the pedant, continuously saying hoc ille, illud iste, and those who claim to be able to read Aristotle without the precious help of the exegetical tradition. Faithful to this method, Simoni makes critical use of Greek, Arabic, and Latin Aristotelian commentators, classical authors, the Fathers, scholastic theologians (especially Thomas Aquinas, Hervaeus Natalis, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus), and a remarkable variety of Renaissance thinkers (Marsilio Ficino, Alessandro Achillini, Giovanni Pontano, Marco Antonio Zimara, Girolamo Cardano, Joseph Justus Scaliger, Philipp Melanchthon, etc.).62 In his tendency to absorb elements originating in different currents of thought Simoni goes well beyond Vimercati. If the latter, despite his application of philological techniques and his cautious receptivity, gave a rather traditional reading of the Ethics, the former provides us with a magnificent illustration of the spirit of MS R 106 sup., fols 61v–62r, 215r. For Epicurus on pleasure see fols 219r–v and 39v: ‘Sed qui illius scripta diligenter expendit non fuisse eum huius sententiae assertorem comperiet, imo potius summum bonum a virtute non seiunxisse, et quae de voluptate ait, de doloris vacuitate quod ad corpus attinet, et animi tranquillitate quod ad animum esse pronunciata, quod et a Lucio Seneca et post a Valla egregie ostensum est.’ On Renaissance attitudes towards Stoic and Epicurean ethics, see Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 360–86; Kraye, ‘Pagan Virtue in Pursuit of Christian Happiness’, pp. 61–68; and the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 61  See his critical remarks in Simoni, Commentariorum in Ethica Aristotelis, pp. 137–38. 62  Simoni, Commentariorum in Ethica Aristotelis, fol. IIr–v (for his remarks on the right method of interpreting and his criticism of Périon’s translation), and pp. 11–18, 32, 50, 63, 83–88, 117, 123, 128, 186. On Simoni’s life, see Madonia, ‘Simone Simoni da Lucca’; on his Aristotelian translations, Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, p. 81.

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adaptation and of the vitality of Renaissance Aristotelianism. Far from slavishly following the discursive order of Book i, Simoni focuses on passages that give him the opportunity to deal not only with practical philosophy (politics included), but also with logic, metaphysics, and theology. His attention to theological problems is particularly striking. It is well known that numerous passages of Aristotle’s Ethics could be used to discuss problems which touch upon the Christian faith, such as the nature and origin of human happiness or the immortality of the soul; and we have already noticed that Lefèvre and Clichtove relied upon the Bible and the Fathers more frequently than their medieval predecessors.63 Throughout the sixteenth century the practice of using Aristotle’s text as a pretext to introduce edifying remarks or polemical considerations in religious matters was followed by several interpreters, both in the Catholic camp (Mair, Segni, Scaino, Florimonte, Crisostomo Javelli, Landi, Denores, Lelio Pellegrini, the Conimbricenses) and in the Protestant camp (Pietro Martire Vermigli, Zwinger, Victorinus Strigelius, Magirus). If Vimercati — heir, on this specific point, to medieval ‘radical Aristotelianism’ — maintained a clear-cut distinction between philosophy and revealed truths, Simoni declares instead from the beginning of his work that knowledge of moral virtues is preliminary to knowledge of theological virtues, and accordingly selects his favourite topics and sources. So he makes several attempts to Christianize Aristotle who, in his opinion, ‘spoke piously of the number of the souls’; he quotes even Aquinas’s theological works, despite his strong anti-Catholic feelings; he declares nonetheless his predilection for Protestant interpreters such as Melanchthon and Vermigli and takes every opportunity to attack the ‘papists’ on matters such as free will and the cult of saints.64

The Differentiation and Decline of the Commentary Tradition During the Renaissance the Nicomachean Ethics appealed to different audiences: it was primarily read in Greek by humanists and scholars, in Latin by professional philosophers and university students, in the vernacular languages by the learned laity. Too little work has been done on the vernacular tradition of this text — and of Aristotle’s writings in general65 — so that only a very incomplete and provisional survey can be offered here. It is useful to recall that several vernacular trans63 

See above, pp. 140–42. Simoni, Commentariorum in Ethica Aristotelis, pp. 9, 12–13, 21–22, 116, 128, 156–58, 166–68, 178. 65  See Bianchi, ‘Per una storia dell’aristotelismo “volgare” nel Rinascimento’. 64 

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lations of Aristotle’s practical philosophy were made as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; that most of these translations provide a text which substantially modifies the original, whether by abbreviating it or adding new materials, often drawn from the most famous commentaries; and that others were accompanied by explanatory glosses, sometimes quite expanded ones, such as those prepared by Oresme for his French versions of the Ethics and the Politics.66 Under the patronage of kings, princes, and courtiers, vernacular literature on Aristotle’s moral philosophy flourished during the Renaissance and evolved in such a multiplicity of composite forms that it is often impossible to distinguish clearly between translations, paraphrases, and commentaries. In Spain, where Bruni’s Latin version of the Ethics enjoyed a rapid success, around 1450 Charles, prince of Viana, relied on it for his own Castilian version, which also contains portions of Aquinas’s commentary, introduced to elucidate unclear passages.67 The attempt to get closer to Aristotle’s text is evident in the Florentine Bernardo Segni, who in 1550 gave a rather faithful Italian translation of the Ethics which claimed to be based on the Greek text while actually depending on Argyropoulos’s Latin version. Chapter by chapter, Segni adds to his translation a concise set of explanatory notes, openly inspired by a selection of earlier commentaries. Though most of his sources — with the exception of the ‘humanist’ Acciaiuoli — are medieval (notably Eustratius, Aquinas, and Burley), Segni tries to meet the interests and tastes of his non-academic audience and makes frequent references to Dante’s Comedy, mentions contemporary figures and events (the Medici family, Michelangelo, the discovery of the New World, etc.) and relates autobiographical anecdotes. Yet he does not hesitate to discuss difficult philosophical problems, such as Plato’s theory of Ideas (which he submits to a Christian rereading, in order to show that both Plato and Aristotle saw in God the final, efficient, and formal cause of all things), and introduces theological considerations, defending first of all the Catholic views on free will.68 66 

teur’. 67 

See Babbit, ‘Nicole Oresme traducteur d’Aristote’, and Lusignan, ‘Nicole Oresme traduc­

Pagden, ‘The Diffusion of Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy’, pp. 303–05. Segni, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare, fols 7v (on his selective reading of the exegetical tradition), 3v–4r, 88v–89r (on free will), 22r–24v (on Plato’s Ideas), 37r, 54v, 116v–117r, 221v–222r (for references to contemporary events). For a fine analysis of Segni’s use of personal experiences, see Langer, ‘Aristotle Commentary and Ethical Behaviour’. On his dependence on Argyropoulos’s translation, see Ridolfi, ‘Bernardo Segni e il suo volgarizzamento della Retorica’, p. 525, n. 28. For a sustained discussion of this work, now see Lines, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism’. 68 

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The effort to reconcile the philosophical viewpoint with the Catholic one is a common hallmark of four commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics written in Italian during the age of the Counter-Reformation: by Felice Figliucci,69 Galeazzo Florimonte,70 Giulio Landi,71 and Antonio Scaino.72 The first three are remarkable not only for their pious content, but also because they are in the form of a dialogue between two or more characters. Figliucci, Florimonte, and Landi are aware that, in order to reach a socially elevated (but not very educated) public, one had both to adopt the vernacular language and to find different communicative strategies from those in use in the universities. Therefore they all assume that the dialogue — a typically Platonic argumentative procedure, as Figliucci emphasizes — is the best way of expounding Aristotle’s moral doctrines, because it allows on the one hand giving a more lively and selective presentation of them, and on the other introducing a great number of digressions of topical interest; Landi, in particular, does not hesitate to devote the entire second book of his work to the discussion of the conditions under which duels are permissible. Needless to say, this attempt to reproduce, in idealized and ‘enjoyable’ form, the civili conversazioni among gentlemen often fails and becomes a mere dramatic expedient in the indoctrination of all-too-docile pupils on the part of rather pedantic teachers. Moreover, if for Figliucci and Florimonte the dialogic form is a method of writing true commentaries on the Ethics, Landi presents his work as a translation of Lefèvre’s Introductio. And since the two main characters of his dialogue are Fabro (i.e. Lefèvre himself ) and Clitoveo (i.e. Clichtove, the author of the already mentioned ‘super-commentary’ on Lefèvre’s introduction), Landi offers much more than a vernacular explanation of Aristotle’s Ethics: he gives a ‘vulgarization’ of both a Latin commentary on it and of the commentary on this commentary!73 Though choosing this format, Landi reproduces some tables from Lefèvre’s Introductio, and also adds some of his own. The habit of reducing Aristotle’s doctrines to a sequence of short sentences, rearranged in a simple logical order that was easy to memorize, goes back to the Middle Ages but was revived thanks to the influence of Peter Ramus. A friend of Ramus’s, Theodor Zwinger, professor of moral philosophy at Basel, published in 1566 a peculiar introduction to the 69 

Figliucci, De la filosofia morale libri dieci. Florimonte, Ragionamenti. The work had been printed twice before, but in editions apparently not authorized by the author (Venice, 1554, and Parma, 1562). On this text, see Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 108–09. 71  Landi, Le attioni morali (see note 37 above). 72  Scaino, L’Ethica di Aristotele. 73  See Bianchi, ‘Uses of the Dialogue in Renaissance Aristotelianism’. 70 

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Ethics which provides the reader with a bilingual edition of the text, a set of philological notes — largely borrowed from Lambin, the author of the translation he adopts — and an exposition of Aristotle’s doctrines completely made up of diagrams. It is acknowledged that this attempt to give ‘maps’ of Aristotle’s works enjoyed a great success in northern Europe towards the end of the sixteenth century.74 It would be an exaggeration, however, to deny its presence in Italy altogether: as Zwinger spent several years in Padua studying medicine, it is not surprising to find traces of his direct or indirect influence in Italian interpreters of the Ethics such as the aforementioned Landi, Betti, or Giason Denores, who left several manuscripts where dichotomous tables are mingled with excerpta and auctoritates from the Ethics.75 The fourth Italian sixteenth-century exposition of the Ethics also makes use of tables, but this is not its most remarkable trait. Having openly refused the method of questions, as well as that of the literal exposition, Scaino declares in his title that he will offer a ‘paraphrase’, and in the preface he carefully explains that this means condensing ‘the substance’ of the Aristotelian work. There is no need to recall that abridgements are an old literary genre, adopted for the teaching of moral philosophy in Italy since the thirteenth century, and renewed by humanists such as Barbaro and Lefèvre. Scaino nonetheless distinguishes himself for his full awareness that it is possible to preserve the ‘texture’ of Aristotle’s discourse without following its ‘order’ (progresso).76 By so doing he bears witness to a general trend: during the sixteenth century, paraphrases and compendia became more and more independent of their source text both in structure and content, and therefore evolved in a way that would result in handbooks.77 74  See Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 56–59. Zwinger’s commentary is edited in Zwinger, Aristotelis de moribus; on this work, see Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 109–11. 75  On Zwinger’s influence in Italy, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp.  235, 323, where Betti and Denores are mentioned. Note, however, that focusing on university teaching Lines does not consider vernacular commentaries, where tables and images were often used, even before any possible influence of Zwinger: see for instance Segni, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare, fols 77v, 96v, 142v, 146r, 149v, 153v, 154r, 177v, 219r. 76  In the preface (pages not numbered) of L’Ethica di Aristotele, Scaino declares that he intends to ‘raccogliere il sugo, e la sostanza’ of Aristotle’s text, without commenting on it, and adds that he called his work a paraphrase because ‘quantunque ne’ detti modi io habbia variato dal progresso di Aristotile, mi persuade non dimeno di non aver divertito dall’universale testura de’ concetti suoi’. 77  See Schmitt, ‘The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook’, and Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renais­sance, pp. 52–53. For the broader context, see Campi and others, Scholarly Knowledge.

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The contribution of some Protestant thinkers is here particularly relevant. Convinced that it was necessary to distinguish pagan and Christian ethics more clearly than the scholastics used to do, they favoured a very selective reading of Peripatetic moral philosophy. The founder of this approach was Melanchthon who, although Martin Luther in 1517 had attacked Aristotle’s ethics as ‘the worst enemy of grace’, saw in it — and in particular in the doctrine of moral virtue as a means — an expression of natural law, which he considered as part of divine law. Therefore he gave the Nicomachean Ethics a place in the Lutheran educational programme, taught it from 1527, and in 1538 and 1550 published two textbooks — entitled Philosophiae moralis epitome and Ethicae doctrinae elementa — primarily, although not exclusively, based on it. These immensely popular works became a model, soon followed by other Protestants such as John Case, who summarized the Ethics in his well-received Speculum quaestionum moralium; Theophilus Golius, who authored the Epitome doctrinae moralis (1592); and Johannes Magirus, whose Corona virtutum moralium (1602) was still printed in Oxford in 1842.78 This practice, however, was not confined to Protestants: to give a few examples, in 1554 the English Catholic bishop Cuthbert Tunstall composed a very concise Compendium et Συνόψις in decem libros Ethicorum, in order ‘to sustain the slips of the memory’; around 1565 Nicasius Hellebodius had written, probably for his personal use, an unpublished compendium.79 At this time, Hellebodius was studying at Padua, where he might have met Giason Denores and Francesco Piccolomini. A Cypriot nobleman hired to teach moral philosophy in the studium Patavinum, Denores published in 1578 an Italian summary of ‘all the human philosophy of Aristotle’, conceived as an introduction to the Ethics, the Politics, and the Economics (Breve institutione dell’ottima republica […] raccolta in gran parte da tutta la Philosophia humana di Aristotile), and in 1584 a Latin abridgement of the Nicomachean Ethics, entitled De constitutione partium universae humanae et civilis philosophiae.80 One year earlier Francesco Piccolomini 78 

See Kraye, ‘Melanchthon’s Ethics Commentaries and Textbooks’; Cuttini, Unità e plura­lità nella tradizione europea, pp. 131–84; Bellucci, ‘Natural Philosophy and Ethics in Melanchthon’. On Protestant and Catholic approaches to moral philosophy, see especially Risto Saarinen’s essay in this volume. On Case, see Schmitt, ‘John Case e l’aristotelismo nell’Inghilterra’, pp. 49–80 and Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism. See also the section on Case in the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 79  Tunstall, Compendium et Συνόψις, fols IIv–IIIr. Hellebaut’s compendium is preserved in Milano, Bibl. Ambrosiana, MS S 78 sup., fols 224r–232r; on this work, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 232. 80  Both works were published by P. Megietti, respectively in Venice and Padua. On Denores,

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— relative of Alessandro Piccolomini who in 1542 first published De la institutione di tutta la vita de l’homo nato nobile, e in città libera, dedicated to exposing ‘Peripatetically and Platonically’ the whole practical philosophy81 — had sent to the press the Universa philosophia de moribus, a huge treatise of nearly six hundred folios where moral philosophy is presented without following the sequence of the topics discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. So, instead of being modelled on the ten books of Aristotle’s work, its ten books reproduce the ten levels of nobility in Venetian political institutions.82 Piccolomini is deeply interested in comparing Aristotelian, Platonic, and Stoic doctrines and makes great efforts to reconcile them. Sometimes he exploits the old strategy of interpreting doctrinal conflicts as mere verbal disputes, dear to all Renaissance ‘concordists’ and adapted to moral philosophy as early as 1554 by the Spanish philosopher Sebastian Fox-Morcillo, who advertised his syncretistic approach in the very title of his work: Ethices philosophiae compendium ex Platone, Aristotele, aliisque optimis quibusque auctoribus collectum. Conforming to a constant tendency in the history of Aristotelianism, such ‘eclecticism’ aimed first of all at disclosing the harmony supposedly existing not only between this and other philosophical movements, but between rational thought in general and religious faith. Yet Fox-Morcillo, influenced by Ficino, had emphasized that Plato’s conception of life was closer to the teaching of the Scriptures than the Stagirite’s; and two decades earlier Crisostomo Javelli had presented his abridgments of both Peripatetic and Platonic ethics as the first two steps of a ladder leading to the supreme and ‘golden’ form of morality, that is, ‘Christian moral philosophy’.83 Piccolomini tries instead to avoid the clash between different philosophical and theological positions in order to support Aristotle’s views on see Patrizi, ‘Denores, Giason’. On his moral works, see Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 400–07. 81  Piccolomini, De la institutione di tutta la vita. For editions of this work, see Refini and others, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, work reference 22. 82  Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus. On this work, see Poppi, ‘Il problema della filosofia morale’, pp. 38–39, 59–78, 206–13; Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 254–88; Kraye, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism in the Moral Philosophy’, pp. 57–82; and Poppi’s essay in this volume. 83  See Javelli, Epitomata in decem libris Ethicorum Aristotelis (apparently the first edition, mentioned neither by Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, p. 204, nor by Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, p. 499), fol. 24v: ‘Sed deo optimo favente, loquemur nos in philosophia morali accademica, quam intendimus ordinare post moralem peripatheticam, quam pre manibus habemus. Et post academicam ordinaturi sumus moralem philosophiam Christianam; et scias pro certo quod gradualiter se excellunt ut stagnum, argentum et aurum.’

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virtue and the supreme good, which he considers superior to those of any other schools of thought.84 Despite their different perspectives, Melanchthon, Case, Magirus, Denores, Alessandro, and Francesco Piccolomini seem to share a new attitude: though most of their ideas remain essentially Peripatetic, they present them more as their own than as Aristotle’s; therefore they conceive their works as independent contributions to the field of practical philosophy and refuse, more or less explicitly, to identify the teaching of ethics with the task of commenting on the homonymous Aristotelian treatise(s). Such a major change has a multiplicity of different causes, but one among them seems particularly important: the effort to escape from the impasse resulting from the transformations that had taken place in the commentary tradition throughout the Renaissance. Although fifteenthcentury humanists censured the ‘verbosity’ of their scholastic predecessors and recommended that direct contact with the texts of the Stagirite should be reestablished, they gave birth to a new interpretive tradition of the Nicomachean Ethics, which did not succeed in displacing the earlier ones, but interacted with them. As a consequence, most sixteenth-century commentators felt obliged to take into account all hermeneutical perspectives, which had been produced over a span of fifteen centuries in different cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts, and were now easily comparable thanks to the printing press. As a result, they often ended up attaching to every sentence of the Aristotelian text a huge amount of philological, lexicographical, historical, philosophical, and theological observations. This hypertrophy of exegetical materials was both an effect of the vitality of Aristotelianism and a symptom of its profound crisis,85 and would inevitably spark the reaction of those who wanted to abandon the ‘bookish’ conception of philosophy as founded on a definite set of authoritative texts in favour of a systematic approach to it: Bartholomaeus Keckermann’s Systema ethicae, first published in London in 1607, is emblematic of the application of this new trend to the field of ethics. Of course, the practice of interpreting the Nicomachean Ethics survived for a while: in 1632–45 the Jesuit Tarquinio Galluzzi published the 84  See for instance Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, p. 308b : ‘et ita Philo­ sophi inter se non pugnant, nec Theologi inter se, neque enim Theologi cum Philosophis, sed rem eandem vario modo considerant, ac varia referunt’. On Piccolomini’s eclecticism as an instrument ‘to prevent any significant assimilation of non-Aristotelian material’, see Kraye, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism in the Moral Philosophy’, p. 78. 85  For general remarks on this hypertrophy as a major cause of the crisis of Aristotelianism on the threshold of modernity, see Bianchi, ‘Una caduta senza declino?’, pp.  133–72, and Perfetti, ‘How and When the Medieval Commentary Died Out’, pp. 440–43.

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most prolix edition of this Aristotelian work ever written — around one thousand and nine hundred pages in two in folio volumes! — presenting every passage in Greek and in a new Latin translation, then carefully explaining it, and finally discussing a number of related quaestiones.86 Nevertheless, throughout the seventeenth century the commentary genre, in its multiple forms, ceased be the main instrument for teaching moral philosophy, and even for disseminating Aristotle’s ethical doctrines. This is not to say, however, that their influence was coming to an end.

86 

Galluzzi, Explanatio et quaestiones. On this work, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 374–76.

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Works Cited Manuscripts Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS D 13 suss. —— , MS F 42 suss. —— , MS R 106 sup. —— , MS S 78 sup. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. lat. 6463

Primary Sources Acciaiuoli, Donato, Donati Acciaioli Florentini expositio super libros ethicorum Aristotelis in novam traductionem Iohannis Argyropyli Bizantii (Firenze: De Ripoli, 1478) Aristotle, Aristotelis ad Nichomachum filium de moribus, quæ Ethica nominantur, libri decem, trans. by Nicolas Grouchy (Paris: Du Puys, 1566) —— , Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem. Nunc primum e Graeco et Latinè et fide­liter, quod vtrunque querebantur omnes præstitisse adhuc neminem a Dionysio Lam­bino expressi. Eiusdem Dionysii Lambini in eosdem libros annotationes, quibus cùm obscuri loci multi illustrantur, deprauatique emendatur, tum, quid inter hanc et ceteras horum librorum conuersiones intersit, alqua ex parte ostenditur, trans. by Denys Lambin (Venezia: Valgrisio, 1558) —— , Opus Aristotelis de moribus […], trans. by Johannes Argyropoulos and ed. by Aegidius Delphus (Paris: Higman, 1488) —— , Ethica Aristotelis peripateticorum principis, cum Joannis Maioris Parisiensis theologi commentariis (Paris: Bade for Pétit, 1530) —— , Ethikon nikomachein biblia deka: Ethicorum ad Nicomachum libri decem, trans. by Antonio Riccoboni (Frankfurt a.M.: De Marne and Aubry, 1596) ——— (trans. ascribed to Heinrich Kosbein), Textus Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum iuxta antiquam translationem cum familiarissimo commentario in eundem et com­pen­ diosis questionibus ac dubiis circa litteram emergentibus ad mentem […] magistrorum Martini Magistri et Johannis Buridani […] (Paris: Bocard for Petit, 1500) Barbaro, Ermolao, Aristotelis Ethicorum compendium (Heidelberg: Licius, 1562) Bruni, Leonardo, ‘Isagogicon moralis disciplinae’, in Leonardo Bruni Aretino Humanistischphilosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe, ed. by Hans Baron, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928), pp. 20–41 Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. by Cesare Vasoli and Domenico De Robertis, in Opere minori, 2 vols (Milano: Ricciardi, 1995) Figliucci, Felice, De la filosofia morale libri dieci: sopra li dieci libri de l’Ethica d’Aristotile (Roma: Valgrisi, 1551) Florimonte, Galeazzo, Ragionamenti di Mons: Galeazzo Florimonte, vescovo di Sessa, sopra l’Ethica d’Aristotile […] (Venezia: Nicolini, 1567)

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Galluzzi, Tarquinio, Explanatio et quaestiones in Aristotelis Moralium libros (Paris: Cramoisy, 1632–45) Javelli, Giovanni Crisostomo, Epitomata in decem libris Ethicorum Aristotelis ordinata per fratrem Chrisostomum Iavellum, et nuper ab eodem in lucem emissa (Venezia: Da Stabio, 1536) Landi, Giulio, Le attioni morali dell’illust. sig. Conte Giulio Landi […], 2 vols, vol. i (Venezia: De’ Ferrari, 1564), vol. ii (Piacenza: Conti and Ferrari, 1575) Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, Moralis in ethicen introductio, Iudoci Clichtouei Neoportuensis familiaris commentario elucidata (Paris: Colinaeus, 1537) —— , The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Related Texts, ed. by Eugene F. Rice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) Muret, Marc Antoine, Commentarii in Aristotelis x. libros Ethicorum ad Nicomachum (Ingolstadt: Sartorius, 1602) —— , Scripta selecta, ed. by Joseph Frey, 2 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1871–93) Pellegrini, Lelio, De moribus libri decem iis, qui Aristotelis ad Nicomachum inscribuntur, ordine perpetuo, atque sententia respondentes (Roma: Zanetti, 1600) Périon, Joachim, De optimo genere interpretandi commentarii (Paris: Colinaeum, 1540) Piccolomini, Alessandro, De la institutione di tutta la vita de l’homo nato nobile e in città libera. Libri x in lingua toscana (Venezia: Scoto, 1542) Piccolomini, Francesco, Universa philosophia de moribus a Francisco Piccolomineo Senense, philosophiam in Academia Patavina e prima sede interpretante (Venezia: De Franceschi, 1583) Poliziano, Angelo, Praelectio de dialectica, in Opera omnia, ed. by Ida Maier, 3 vols (Torino: Bottega D’Erasmo, 1971), i: Scripta in editione Basilensi anno mdliii collecta Scaino, Antonio, L’Ethica di Aristotile a Nicomacho, ridutta in modo di parafrasi con varie annotationi (Roma: Degli Angeli, 1574) Segni, Bernardo, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare fiorentina et commentata per Bernardo Segni (Venezia: Bartholomeo detto l’Imperadore, 1551) (earlier edn Firenze: Torrentino, 1550) Simoni, Simone, Commentariorum in Ethica Aristotelis ad Nicomachum liber primus (Genève: Crispin, 1567) Tunstall, Cuthbert, Compendium et Συνόψις in decem libros Ethicorum […] (Paris: Vascosanus, 1554) Vettori, Pietro, Commentarii in x libros Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum (Firenze: Giunta, 1584) Zwinger, Theodor, Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem, tabulis perpetuis, quae com­mentariorum loco esse queant, explicati et illustrati (Basel: Oporinus et Episcopus, 1566)

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Bellucci, Dino, ‘Natural Philosophy and Ethics in Melanchthon’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 235–54 Bianchi, Luca, ‘Una caduta senza declino? Considerazioni sulla crisi dell’aristotelismo fra Rinascimento ed Età moderna’, in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rina­ scimento, rev. edn (Padova: Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 133–83 —— , Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’Université de Paris (xiiie–xive siècles) (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1999) —— , ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele: l’Expositio super libros Ethicorum di Donato Acciaiuoli’, in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento, rev. edn (Padova: Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 11–39 (first publ. in Rinascimento, n.s., 30 (1990), 25–55) —— , ‘Fra Ermolao Barbaro e Ludovico Boccadiferro: qualche considerazione sulle tras­ formazioni della “fisica medievale” nel Rinascimento italiano’, Medioevo, 29 (2004), 341–78 —— , ‘From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi: Uses of the Dialogue in Renaissance Aristotelianism’, in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Jill Kraye and Martin W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 41–58 —— , ‘Interpretare Aristotele con Aristotele: percorsi dell’ermeneutica filosofica nel Rina­ scimento’, in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento, rev. edn (Padova: Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 185–208 —— , ‘Per una storia dell’aristotelismo “volgare” nel Rinascimento: problemi e prospettive di ricerca’, Bruniana & Campanelliana, 15 (2009), 367–85 —— , Il vescovo e i filosofi: la condanna parigina del 1277 e l’evoluzione dell’aristotelismo sco­ lastico (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990) Branca, Vittore, Poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola (Torino: Einaudi, 1983) Campi, Emidio, and others, eds, Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe (Genève: Droz, 2008) Cranz, Edward, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions 1501–1600, 2nd edn, rev. by Charles B. Schmitt (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1984) Cuttini, Elisa, Unità e pluralità nella tradizione europea della filosofia pratica di Aristotele (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2005) Del Punta, Francesco, ‘The Genre of Commentaries in the Middle Ages and its Relation to the Nature and Originality of Medieval Thought’, in Was ist Philosophie im Mittelalter? Akten des X. Internationalen Kongress für mittelalterliche Philosophie 30 August 1997, ed. by Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), pp. 138–51 Denifle, Henri, and Émile Chatelain, eds, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols (Bruxelles: Culture et civilisation, 1964) Flüeler, Christoph, ‘Ethica in Wien anno 1438: Die Kommentierung der Aristotelischen Ethik an der Wiener Artistenfakultät’, in Schriften im Umkreis mitteleuropäischer Uni­ ver­si­täten um 1400. Lateinische und volssprachige Texte aus Prag, Wien und Heidelberg: Unterschiede, Gemeinsamkeiten, Wechselbeziehungen, ed. by Fritz P. Knapp, Jürgen Mietke, and Manuela Niesner (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 92–138

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—— , ‘Teaching Ethics at the University of Vienna: The Making of a Commentary at the Faculty of Arts (a Case Study)’, in Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, 1200–1500, ed. by István Bijczy (Leiden: Brill 2008), pp. 277–346 Garin, Eugenio, ‘Le traduzioni umanistiche di Aristotele nel secolo xv’, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia fiorentina di scienze morali ‘La colombaria’, 16 (1947–50), 55–104 Gerl, Hanna-Barbara, Philosophie und Philologie: Leonardo Brunis Übertragung der Niko­ machischen Ethik in ihren philosophischen Prämissen (München: Fink, 1981) Gilbert, Neal W., ‘Francesco Vimercato of Milan: A Bio-Bibliography’, Studies in the Re­ nais­sance, 12 (1965), 188–217 Gilson, Étienne, Dante et la philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1953) Grabmann, Martin, I divieti ecclesiastici di Aristotele sotto Innocenzo III e Gregorio IX (Roma: Herder, 1941) Grafton, Anthony, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–93) Grendler, Paul F., The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) Hankins, James, ‘The Ethics Controversy’, in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Roma: Storia e letteratura, 2003–04), i, 193–239 Hasse, Dag N., ‘Aufstieg und Niedergang des Averroismus in der Renaissance: Niccolò Tignosi, Agostino Nifo, Francesco Vimercato’, in ‘Herbst des Mittelalters?’ Fragen zur Bewertung des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Jan A. Aertsen and Martin Pickavé (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), pp. 447–73 Kaluza, Zénon, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque à l’Université de Paris’, in ‘Ad Ingenii Acuitionem’: Studies in Honour of Alfonso Maierù, ed. by Stefano Caroti and others, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge, 38 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération inter­ nationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 2006), pp. 147–81 Kessler, Eckhard, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century: The Lefèvre Enterprise’, in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. by Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–21 Kraye, Jill, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) —— , ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism in the Moral Philosophy of Francesco Piccolomini’, in La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, Atti del colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt (Padova, 4–6 settembre 2000), ed. by Gregorio Piaia, Miscellanea erudita, 64 (Padova: Antenore, 2002), pp. 57–82 —— , ‘Italy, France and the Classical Tradition: The Origins of the Philological Com­ mentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’, in Italy and the Classical Tradition, ed. by Carlo Caruso and Andrew Laird (London: Duckworth, 2008), pp. 118–40 —— , ‘Melanchthon’s Ethics Commentaries and Textbooks’, in Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), no. VII (first pub­ lished as ‘Melanchthons ethische Kommentare und Lehrbucher’, in Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. by J. Leonhardt (Rostock: Universität Rostock, 1997), pp. 1–13)

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—— , ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 —— , ‘Pagan Virtue in Pursuit of Christian Happiness’, in Zeichen — Rituale — Werte, ed. by Gerd Althoff (Münster: Rhema, 2003), pp. 56–68 —— , ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, in Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), no. VI (first published in Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Olga Weijers, CIVICIMA, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 96–117) Kristeller, Paul O., ‘Un codice padovano di Aristotele postillato da Francesco ed Ermolao Barbaro: il manoscritto Plimpton 17 della Columbia University Library’, in Paul O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 4 vols (Roma: Storia e lette­ra­ tura, 1956–96), i, 337–53 —— , ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’, in Paul O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 4 vols (Roma: Storia e letteratura, 1956– 96), i, 553–83 Langer, Ullrich, ‘Aristotle Commentary and Ethical Behaviour: Bernardo Segni on Friend­ship between Equals’, in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. by Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 107–25 Libera, Alain de, Penser au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 1991) Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Uni­ versities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) —— , ‘The Commentary Literature on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Early Renaissance Italy: Preliminary Considerations’, Traditio, 54 (1999), 245–82 —— , ‘Ethics as Philology: A Developing Approach to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Florentine Humanism’, in Renaissance Readings of the ‘Corpus Aristotelicum’, ed. by Marianne Pade (København: Museum Tusculanum, 2001), pp. 27–42 —— , ‘Faciliter Edoceri: Niccolò Tignosi and the Audience of Aristotle’s Ethics in FifteenthCentury Florence’, Studi medievali, 40 (1999), 139–68 —— , ‘Giovanni Bernardo Feliciano and the Edition of “Eustratius”’, in Eustratius and others, Aristotelis Stagiritae Moralia Nicomachia: übersetzt von Johannes Bernardus Felicianus; Neudruck der Ausgabe Paris 1543, ed. by David A. Lines, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2006), i, pp. vi–xviii —— , ‘The Importance of Being Good: Moral Philosophy in the Italian Universities, 1300–1600’, Rinascimento, n.s., 36 (1996), 139–92 —— , ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism on the Eve of the Sixteenth Century’, in Der Aris­to­telismus in der frühen Neuzeit: Kontinuität oder Wiederaneignung?, ed. by Günter Frank and Andreas Speer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), pp. 273–89 —— , ‘Moral Philosophy in the Universities of Medieval and Renaissance Europe’, History of Universities, 20 (2005), 38–80 —— , ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism: Bernardo Segni’s Ethica, the Florentine Academy, and the Vernacular in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly (forth­ coming)

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—— , ‘Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas and Jean Buridan on Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 7–29 Lohr, Charles H., Latin Aristotle Commentaries, 3 vols to date (Firenze: Olschki, 1988–), ii: Renaissance Authors (1988) Luscombe, David, ‘The Ethics and the Politics in Britain in the Middle Ages’, in Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, ed. by John Marenbon (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 337–49 Lusignan, Serge, ‘Nicole Oresme traducteur et la pensée de la langue française savante’, in Nicolas Oresme: Tradition et innovation chez un intellectuel du xive siècle, ed. by Pierre Souffrin and Alain P. Segonds (Padova: Belles Lettres, 1988), pp. 93–104 Madonia, Claudio, ‘Simone Simoni da Lucca’, Rinascimento, n.s., 26 (1980), 161–97 Mercken, H. Paul F., ‘The Greek Commentators on Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and their Influence, ed. by Richard Sorabji (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 407–43 Müller, Sigrid, ‘Wiener Ethikkommentare des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 17 (2006), 445–67 O’Brien, John, ‘Translation, Philology and Polemic in Denys Lambin’s Nicomachean Ethics of 1558’, Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 267–89 Pagden, R. D., ‘The Diffusion of Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy in Spain, ca. 1400–ca. 1600’, Traditio, 31 (1975), 287–313 Patrizi, G., ‘Denores, Giason’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 76 vols to date (Roma: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1960–), xxxviii: Della Volpe–Denza (1990), pp. 768–73 Perfetti, Stefano, ‘How and When the Medieval Commentary Died Out: The Case of Aristotle’s Zoological Writings’, in Il commento filosofico nell’occidente latino (secoli xiii–xv), ed. by Gianfranco Fioravanti, Claudio Leonardi, and Stefano Perfetti, Ren­ contres de philosophie médiévale, 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 429–43 Piché, David, La Condamnation parisienne de 1277 (Paris: Vrin, 1999) Poppi, Antonino, ‘Il problema della filosofia morale nella scuola padovana del Rinasci­ mento: Platonismo e Aristotelismo nella definizione del metodo dell’Etica’, in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance: xvie Colloque international de Tours (Paris: Vrin, 1976), pp. 103–46 (repr. in Antonino Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: Città del sole, 1997), pp. 11–87) Refini, Eugenio, with the collaboration of David A. Lines, Simon Gilson, and Jill Kraye, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy: A Database of Works [accessed 15 May 2012] Rice, Eugene F., ‘Humanist Aristotelianism in France: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and his Circle’, in Humanism in France at the End of the Middle Ages and in the Early Re­ naissance, ed. by Antony H. T. Levi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), pp. 132–49 Ridolfi, Roberto, ‘Bernardo Segni e il suo volgarizzamento della Retorica’, Belfagor, 17 (1962), 511–26

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Schmitt, Charles B., ‘Aristotelian Textual Studies at Padua: The Case of Francesco Cavalli’, in Scienza e filosofia all’Università di Padova nel Quattrocento, ed. by Antonino Poppi (Trieste: LINT, 1983), pp.  287–314 (repr. in Charles B. Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum, 1984), no. XIII) —— , Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) —— , ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Sixteenth Century: Some Preliminary Considerations’, in Ethik im Humanismus, ed. by Walter Rüegg and Dieter Wuttke (Boppard: Boldt, 1979), pp. 87–112 (repr. in Charles B. Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renais­ sance Universities (London: Variorum, 1984), no. VII) —— , John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, ON: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1983) —— , ‘John Case e l’aristotelismo nell’Inghilterra del Rinascimento’, in Charles B. Schmitt, La tradizione aristotelica fra Italia e Inghilterra (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1985) —— , ‘The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philo­sophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 792–804 Sensi, Mario, ‘Niccolò Tignosi da Foligno: l’opera e il pensiero’, Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Perugia, 9 (1971–72), 359–495 Sère, Bénédicte, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge, Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Âge, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008) Van Steenberghen, Fernand, Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism (Leuven: Nauwelaerts, 1955) Weijers, Olga, ‘La Structure des commentaires philosophiques à la Faculté des arts: quel­ ques observations’, in Il commento filosofico nell’occidente latino (secoli xiii–xv), ed. by Gianfranco Fioravanti, Claudio Leonardi, and Stefano Perfetti, Rencontres de philosophie médiévale, 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 17–41 Wieland, Georg, Ethica—Scientia practica: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Ethik im 13. Jahrhundert (Münster: Aschendorff, 1981) —— , ‘Happiness: The Perfection of Man’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 673–86

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nyone graduating from modern editions to sixteenth-century printed copies of a classical or post-classical text is soon going to notice that they have all sorts of rather unfamiliar paraphernalia. You will before long get accustomed to the underlinings with which early modern readers were wont to ‘deface’ their books, and also to quaint and enigmatic manuscript marks in the margins, such as pointing fingers. The margins are normally very busy. In largerformat volumes printed in the fifteenth century and in the first third or so of the sixteenth century, they are likely to be crammed with commentary. But after that, you will find the margins of even quite small-size volumes mysteriously spattered with single words or short phrases, sometimes in manuscript, very often printed, and clearly meant to refer to the sentence or verse with which they are juxtaposed. These words and phrases will explain proper names; or they will denote the topic discussed, described, or exemplified in the text; or they may name a rhetorical figure (allegory, periphrasis); or they may indicate how a development of the subject, an argument, or a particular emotional effect is generated (narration, argument from lesser to greater, argument from similitude, pathos from gender or age). Sometimes in margins one also finds printed quotation marks, even though the piece of text adjoining them is not in direct speech. All these manuscript marks and brief annotations look like clues to reading habits and critical preoccupations with which we are not immediately familiar. The solution Ann Moss ([email protected]) is Professor Emerita of French at Durham University and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her publications include Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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to the conundrum has in fact invariably been provided on the volume’s title page, where very frequently you will find the announcement that the book’s contents have been ‘digested into commonplaces’ (loci communes). At the front or the back of the book, there will indeed be an ‘index of commonplaces’, an alphabetical list of the topics treated, along with page references. ‘Commonplaces’ are so often used as a selling point for books that they are clearly important, but for the modern reader the word is totally opaque or open to misinterpretation as ‘platitudes’. Our task here is to recover the early modern sense of ‘commonplace’, relate it to ethics, and discover its cultural significance in the Renaissance. The early modern reader would be immersed in commonplaces almost from the moment he could read. Or, rather, from the moment he could read Latin. We are dealing here almost exclusively with male readers and, initially at least, with very young boys, from about the age of seven, in the lower classes of the Latin school (from which girls were excluded). In the sixteenth century, they would almost certainly be following some variant of the curriculum promoted by enthusiasts for the fifteenth-century Italian humanists’ programme of recovering classical Latin usage by way of a detailed study of classical Latin texts. An education in classical Latin prose and poetry (with some morally suspect authors reserved for adult years of discretion) was considered to be formative in two eminently desirable ways. It guaranteed the acquisition of correct and eloquent language, and, by definition, by precept, and by examples, it inculcated the highest moral standards.1 Simply reading texts under instruction was not enough to make sure they were internalized and their lessons retained. It was Erasmus, in his De duplici copia verborum ac rerum of 1512, who gave perhaps the earliest systematic, and certainly most influential, description of a mechanism designed to store the verbal and moral fruits of reading and keep them ready for use. Erasmus instructs the schoolboy to provide himself with several sheets of paper, later to be bound into a notebook. Then he is to ‘make himself as full a list as possible’ of place-headings (loci) for insertion at the top of each page. Erasmus continues: These headings you will take partly from the main types and subdivisions of the vices and virtues, partly from those things which are of particular note in human affairs and which are apt to crop up most frequently when we have to put forward a case. These headings should be arranged by similars and opposites, for things which are related naturally suggest what comes next, and the memory is prompted in a like manner by opposites. [Erasmus gives examples of such headings: pietas, fides, beneficientia (dutiful devotion, faith or trust, beneficence) and their opposites, 1 

For a lively account of the humanist education revolution, and a slightly sceptical view of the claims made for it, see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities.

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together with subdivisions, such as, in the case of pietas, dutiful devotion proper to God, to country, to parents, children, and teachers.] After you have prepared yourself a sufficient number of headings and have next subdivided them one by one into their appropriate sections and labelled each section with its commonplace caption [word or short phrase], then whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is especially striking, you will be able to note it down in its appropriate place: be it a story, or a fable, or an example, or a new occurrence, or a pithy remark, or a witty saying, or any other clever form of words, or a proverb, or a metaphor, or a similitude. This will ensure that what you read will stay more firmly fixed in your mind and that you will learn to make use of the riches you have acquired by reading […]. Finally, whenever occasion demands, you will have ready to hand a supply of material for spoken or written composition, because you will have, as it were, a well organized set of pigeonholes, from which to extract what you want.2

Now we can understand the text underlinings and the marginal notes and signs in early modern printed books. They are all prompts for the construction of what Erasmus has just described: the commonplace book. Erasmus did not invent the commonplace book. Medieval schoolboys had learnt their Latin (not necessarily classical Latin) from collections of brief quotations. Medieval Bible concordances had assembled excerpted passages of Scripture under topics arranged alphabetically in order to service the very specialized rhetoric of the late medieval sermon. In the humanist fifteenth century, students bent on learning classically correct Latin acquired from examples of its usage in the best authors were much aided by collections of phrases and synonyms culled from Cicero and the poets.3 But Erasmus and many a teacher after him codified such practices, made them more efficient, and turned them into a technology of reading, knowledge assimilation, information retrieval, and text production that would underwrite the education programme right across western Europe at every level. The practice of ‘commonplacing’ spread so widely and became so deeply rooted not only because it was a highly efficient methodology, but because it transposed so easily from its manuscript origins into print. Publishers immediately seized on a market opportunity, and commonplace books were printed in ever increasing numbers and ever increasing dimensions to supplement or replace the individual’s collecting efforts. In the commonplace book that every student was instructed to keep (and many a one bought), quotations culled from his reading or dictated by the schoolmaster were collected and distributed under headings in such a way that they could be easily retrieved and used again. It was the method whereby one 2  3 

Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, ed. by Knott, pp. 258–61. For a history of commonplace books, see Moss, Printed Common-Place Books.

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con­sciously appropriated the matter of a book, first by dismembering it, then by fitting its constituent parts into a pre-ordered spectrum of areas of knowledge. Whenever we find an abstract noun or short phrase in the margin of an early modern printed text, it is there to indicate the heading under which the reader is advised to file the passage juxtaposed. And if the reader wants a shortcut to material for his commonplace book, he has only to look up in the ‘index of commonplaces’ the heading he wants to illustrate, where he will find what the author in hand has to contribute on the subject. As we have just seen, Erasmus’s preferred matter for place-headings was ethics in the broadest sense: vices and virtues and their subdivisions, things of note in human affairs. Vices and virtues, and all varieties of human behaviour, individual and communal, the domain of ethics (personal morality), economics (domestic management), and politics (governance and affairs of state), were indeed to remain the staple substance of generalist commonplace books. In parallel with this, and in accordance with laws of demand and supply, it was writing and speaking on moral issues in the broadest sense, in every genre, that was to be the area of discourse most heavily larded with commonplaces during the early modern period. The method of collecting material under topic-headings soon spread, however, to subjects of inquiry that intersected with the moral sphere but were not totally contained within it, to theology, natural sciences, history, and so on. Discipline-specific commonplace books were produced to regulate the interrelationship of each discipline’s constitutive elements. Even so, the primacy of the moral commonplace book and its early influence on the developing minds of students preoccupied with sorting material to match its headings tended to foster the assumption that all knowledge could be plotted onto a preconceived moral grid. Erasmus next referred to the order in which commonplace headings were to be arranged. Some editors and private collectors regarded the headings in commonplace books as a summa of knowledge and elaborated schemes to replicate the hierarchical order of Nature from God to things inanimate, allocating to man and his concerns a disproportionate place in the middle. Such schemes could potentially reduce the whole universe to arbitrarily invented commonplaces or, conversely, suggest that commonplaces were embedded in the deep structures of nature. There were also prior models for distributing specifically moral topics: the Ten Commandments, the Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins, the catalogue of virtues and vices in the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, the spectrum of virtues and related opposites in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, or the order in which Valerius Maximus had listed his Exempla. To employ such a model was to adopt a universal moral framework, in addition to matching excerpts to headings. The framework chosen might be Christian or it might be pagan. Christian and

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pagan moral schemes coexisted in the humanist schoolroom, but there was not necessarily complete symbiosis between the two, and the minds of impressionable students were doubtless moulded according to the ideological framework recommended to them or inscribed in the commonplace books at their disposal. Well before the end of the sixteenth century, however, the desire to make commonplace books searchable and the information within them easily retrievable meant that topics were very often arranged alphabetically. Alphabetical order is morally neutral. The spaces under the headings were filled with extracts in which the boni authores, that is to say the linguistically approved authors of Latin and Greek antiquity, defined and illustrated the moral topics listed in the headings. In all those manuscript annotations made to printed texts, underlinings, quotation marks, pointing hands, we catch the assiduous student noting useful extracts to transfer to his commonplace book. The fact that, normally, the extracts were ascribed to their source in a ‘good author’ invested them with a certain authority. Furthermore, commonplace books were not just collections of opinions and illustrations. They were also repositories of formulaic ways of expressing those opinions to maximum and memorable effect: definitions, descriptions, pithy remarks, examples from history and fiction, proverbs, apophthegms, metaphors, and similitudes. As instructions for making commonplace books became more and more elaborate, students were sometimes recommended to keep a notebook specifically for examples of rhetorical modes and categories of expression. Marginal notes of examples of rhetorical figures key into such a notebook. The student is acquiring an abundant stylistic resource as well as a rich treasury of useful and transferable matter. The commonplace book, after all, was both the product and the instrument of Erasmus’s pursuit of ‘abundance of words and things’. Indeed, it was not just a storehouse, but an agent of production. Erasmus had said that the young commonplacer would have to hand a ready supply of material for written and spoken discourse, easily retrieved from the very searchable commonplace book, and either inserted directly into a new composition or ‘varied’ by paraphrase. Erasmus notes how particularly useful this will be when ‘you have to put forward a case’. This implies that the commonplace book was especially valuable in the construction of persuasive and argumentative discourse. And, indeed, in the early modern period, structured discourse, not least moral discourse, was generally considered to be persuasive in intent. The stratagems of persuasive argument most favoured by the humanists, and taught at the same time as the young boy was constructing his commonplace book, were also known as loci, ‘places’. These were dialectical stratagems derived from attention to arguments from definition, genus and species, conjugates, similarity, difference, causes, effects,

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adjuncts, opposites, comparison, and so on. The place of argument most obviously filled by the commonplace book was argument from testimony. To make this move, the writer or speaker had only to look up quotations in his commonplace book, lift them out, and adduce them as proof. In addition, however, the headed excerpts could be used to support one or more of the other dialectical proof ‘places’ listed above. As well as rhetorical moves for soliciting emotional assent, the dialectical strategies for persuasion used by ‘good authors’ are often signalled in the margins to texts. The commonplacing reader found a place for these too in his notebook, referencing his excerpts to places of argument and thus supplying himself with weapons in spoken and written debate. Exactly one hundred years after Erasmus sketched the blueprint for them in De copia, an English grammar-school master, John Brinsley, in his Ludus literarius, was confidently working on the assumption that commonplace books ‘of morall matters’ had a central role in the acquisition of language and production of discourse.4 His pupils’ first exercises in constructing connected Latin, both prose and verse, are to write very short passages that come as near as possible to extracts from classical authors culled from printed commonplace books. The method is for the teacher first to dictate an English translation of the chosen extract, then to get the children to put this into Latin, in words that belong to the diction of good, classical Latin, but whose order replicates word order in English. Their final task is to turn this into a word order that corresponds to the way words and clauses are collocated in classical rhetoric or into verse that follows the rules of classical prosody. Later they will construct more extended compositions, or ‘themes’, on moral or political topics, especially concerning virtues and vices. For this, as well as words, they will need matter, for which they will find an abundant resource under appropriate entries in commonplace books. To organize this material into discourse that will convince its audience, apprentice writers (or speakers) are taught to analyse the quotations on which they draw into the places of argument that underpin them and to note the rhetorical figures their excerpts use to persuasive effect. These arguments and figures they will then reproduce in their own work: their readinesse in their first Authours of morall matters, as also in Tullies sentences, and Flores poetarum […] with the helpe of the places of Invention, will commonly yeelde matter sufficient.5 4  Brinsley, Ludus literarius; there is a more detailed account of Brinsley’s use of common­ place books in Moss, Printed Common-Place Books, pp. 215–21. 5  Brinsley, Ludus literarius, p. 187.

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Flores poetarum and ‘Tullies sentences’ were the most frequently reprinted commonplace books in nearly all countries throughout our period. The ‘flowers of famous poets’ collected by Octavianus Mirandula had started life at Venice in 1507 as an anthology of excerpts from classical poets, arranged by authors, but indexed by topics. In 1538, at Strasbourg, it was recast as a commonplace book in the strict sense, with ethical headings and subheadings arranged in alphabetical order.6 The matter contained in its collected quotations is indicated by the first entries under the letter ‘a’: abstinentia, adolescentia, adversitas, adulatio, aetates, affectus, afflictio, ambitio, amicitia, amor. Later editions added other headings and other quotations from other authors. Over the next hundred years and for many a young boy it continued to be a first dictionary of moral concepts and a source of moral opinions, authorized by writers he was taught to respect and reinforced by his attempts to imitate them in words, if not in deeds. ‘Tullies sentences’, or extracts from Cicero, was the prose equivalent of Mirandula. It had originated in Toulouse in 1541, but proliferated throughout western Europe (including Brinsley’s England) with additions that differed according to its various printing traditions. The basic form of this commonplace book arranged extracts from all Cicero’s works in sections that correspond to some of the formulae for expression to which Erasmus had drawn particular attention: sententiae (pithy definitions, aphorisms, gnomic sentences), apophthegms (sayings attributed to historical personages), and similitudes.7 Within these sections, the headings, both single words and phrases, are rather loosely organized in interrelated groups, for example: parents and children, leading to man’s natural desire to learn, then headings on art and letters, and next the praise of wisdom, followed by stupidity, then prudence. This is the chain of ‘similars and opposites’ recommended by Erasmus in De copia, useful, as he said, for memorizing, but also as a prompt for the rhetorical amplification of any topic. Not only will the writer find matter under the headings directly corresponding to his theme, but a little browsing will allow him to refine and elaborate by comparison and contrast. From the 1550s, augmented versions of this commonplace book included quotations from a miscellany of poets and prose writers under rather randomly arranged single-word subject headings: virtus, prudentia, fortitudo, amicitia, paupertas et divitiae, and ten others. Brinsley’s incorporation of the vernacular into his methodology for teaching Latin grammar at elementary level would not have found favour (in theory) with many humanists at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but it was much more prevalent among their successors. Commonplace books were also vehicles for this 6  7 

Mirandola, Illustrium poetarum flores. As illustrated, for example, in Cicero, Sententiae illustriores.

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dual language approach to the appropriation of ancient culture and its ethical norms. In 1574, François de Belleforest published a bilingual version of ‘Tullies sentences’ in French and Latin at Paris, destined to be reprinted over many years. Belleforest was an inveterate translator and compiler, best known for his popular collection of ‘tragical histories’ taken from the Italian.8 His Sentences illustres de M. T. Ciceron could well have found a market with schoolboys looking for a crib, but the normal customers for Belleforest’s productions were literate, nonLatinate adults who set fashions in the cultural environment and in verbal style. He dedicates his compilation to the son of a high-placed aristocrat, the Prince de Condé, and so insinuates it into the grandest political and social circles. He removes his bilingual commonplace book from the classroom and presents it as a mirror for adults accustomed to affairs of state. These new readers pass through his mirror into exactly the same moral universe as the monolingual Latin original had constructed from quotations illustrating the various species of prudent and imprudent conduct. This world is now thoroughly naturalized in French. Indeed, if one keeps one’s eye on the broader outer column of each page, where the French text appears boldly in roman type, one can easily disregard the narrower inner column with the Latin in italics. Similarly, such scholarly apparatus as remains accompanies the Latin rather than the French, and apophthegms that were once assigned to those who had uttered them become detached maxims. French is breaking from the tutelage of the Latin schoolroom, while absorbing its morals and its manners. Commonplacing, learnt at school, was supposed to be a habit acquired for life. Publishers found lucrative business in supplying ever larger volumes of commonplaced extracts for the edification of adult browsers, to furnish their minds and resource their discourse. The largest and most comprehensive of all such volumes were two edited by Josephus Langius, his Loci communes seu potius florilegium (later called Anthologia sive florilegium), first printed at Strasbourg in 1598, and his Polyanthea nova, first published at Lyon in 1604.9 Both were massive com8  For Belleforest’s productions, see Simonin, Vivre de sa plume au xvi e siècle. The full title of his bilingual commonplace book, which more or less replicates the original Latin of the French, English, and Italian post-1555 editions is Les Sentences illustres de M. T. Ciceron, et les Apophthegmes, avec quelques sentences de pieté, recueillies des euvres du mesme Ciceron. Aussi les plus remarquables Sentences, tant de Terence que de plusieurs autres autheurs et les Sentences de Demosthene de n’agueres tirées du grec, et mises en latin (Paris: Pierre de La Nouë, 1574). 9  To give them the full titles by which their publishers habitually introduced their content on the title-pages: Anthologia sive florilegium rerum et materiarum selectarum. Praecipue: sententiarum, apophthegmatum, similitudinum, exemplorum, hieroglyphicorum. Ex sacris literis, patribus

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pilations, printed frequently and concurrently well up to the end of the seventeenth century. Why did Langius duplicate his first effort? Because between 1598 and 1604 he converted and became a Catholic. The Polyanthea nova exhibits its Catholic credentials by advertising the fact that it is a reworking of a precursor of commonplace books, a monolingual Latin dictionary called Polyanthea compiled by Dominicus Nanus Mirabellius, originally published at Savona in 1503. This Polyanthea had had a significant role in the historical development of the commonplace book, its form being derived partially from alphabetical concordances to the Bible used by late medieval preachers and partially from encyclopaedic dictionaries of Latin vocabulary compiled by fifteenth-century humanists. It consisted of definitions and etymologies of alphabetically ordered words, with special emphasis on concepts that fell within the sphere of ethics, illuminated by extracts from sacred and profane authors. Later humanists recognized it as close in kind to their favourite learning and production aide, and there had been previous attempts to revitalize it. Langius was by far its most successful modernizer. He retained the definitions and etymologies, but onto these he grafted the material from his own Loci communes, compiled while he was still a Protestant. The volume was amplified for his Catholic readership, most notably by passages from the Church Fathers transferred from the Polyanthea and added to topics that needed a doctrinal gloss. Langius also incorporated under his headings religiously neutral quotations lifted from Catholic collections with which the original Polyanthea had already been amalgamated. Nevertheless, the simultaneous existence of Langius’s two great commonplace books, with most of their material and all their methodology in common, exemplifies the important fact that the commonplace book transcended confessional boundaries. It was a major force for cultural cohesion. The universal employment of commonplace books in the education of the ruling classes across western Europe bonded the Latin-literate elite in a community of shared points of reference, core texts, and common practice that resisted dissolution when Europe fractured along confessional lines. item, aliisque linguae graecae et latinae scriptoribus probatis collectum […] Additus est index fabularum, emblematum, ac symbolorum; and Polyanthea nova, hoc est opus suavissimis floribus celebriorum sententiarum tam graecarum quam latinarum refertum: quod ex innumeris fere cum sacris tum profanis autoribus, iisque vetustioribus et recentioribus, summa fide olim collegere, ad communem studiosae iuventutis utilitatem, eruditissimi viri, Dominicus Nanus Mirabellius, Bartholomaeus Amantius, et Franciscus Tortius. Nunc vero, sublata omni titulorum et materiarum confusione, ordine bono digestum, et innumeris prope cum sacris tum profanis sententiis, apophthegmatis, similitudinibus, adagiis, exemplis, emblematis, hieroglyphicis et fabulis auctum. For descriptions of Langius’s commonplace compilations, see Ullman, ‘Joseph Lang and his Anthologies’ (excellent on the multifarious sources of Langius’s gleanings); and Mejor, ‘Polyanthea nova von Joseph Lange’.

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Langius specialized in collecting from all the best writers, and he was even more adept at collecting from all the best previous collectors (Flores poetarum and ‘Tullies sentences’ among them). His books were compilations of compilations, targeted to the widest possible market of Latin users, whether their interests were religious or secular, though the topics involved are overwhelmingly moral in their scope, for example ‘friendship’ (amicitia), located between ambition and loss of goods (amissio bonorum). To this plenitude of material, Langius brought a meticulous ordering system that made it eminently searchable. His mainly one-word headings are arranged alphabetically, and they are cross-referenced in such a way as to encourage the student to think in terms of dialectical places of argument, contraries, affinities, and conjugates, which can flexibly expand his discourse. Under each heading, quotations, referenced to author and work, are systematically assembled in tidy groups (though not every group appears under every heading). The groups are the following: biblical sententiae; patristic sententiae; excerpts from classical poets; maxims of philosophers and orators; apophthegms; similitudes; exemplary figures found in the Bible; exempla from secular authors; and, lastly, hieroglyphs (symbols), emblems, and Aesopic fables. As Erasmus had suggested, the different formulaic media for expressing moral observations mattered as much as the moral message they forcefully conveyed. The presence of emblems among these groups signals a rather novel departure for a commonplace collection.10 But such was the influence of the commonplace book that, by the middle of the sixteenth century, emblem books (beautifully produced picture books of rather enigmatic images with accompanying elucidation in prose and verse) were being structured like commonplace books. In 1548, Barthélemy Aneau had rearranged the immensely popular Emblemata of Andrea Alciato under moral commonplace headings for an edition published at Lyon and had indexed them as he had ordered them, under ‘God and religion’, virtues and vices, and other such items.11 The following year, when Aneau produced a French version of his edition, he explained that the emblems were grouped in commonplaces, categorized under general headings that referred to the most important things, and proceeding from the highest to the lowest, from God to trees.12 The 10 

For a description of the emblems (text only, and mostly collected out of the Emblemata of Alciato) that occur in both of Langius’s compilations, and in their subsequent enlargements by other editors, see Moss, ‘Emblems into Commonplaces’. 11  Alciat, Emblemata; there is a modern facsimile of the 1551 Bonhomme edition, which reproduces the order by commonplaces and the index: Alciat, Les Emblèmes, ed. by Laurens. 12  Alciat, Emblemes, p. 5.

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common­placed emblem book sits easily astride any division between Latin and vernacular culture and replicates both the moral substance, the particular moral headings, and ordering systems found in commonplace books. This is demonstrated with great panache in the publishing history of perhaps the most intellectually and aesthetically sophisticated of all emblem books, Q. Horatii Flacci emblemata, the emblems of Horace.13 The copperplate engravings for this book were designed by Otto Van Veen, a painter of some distinction, teacher of Rubens, friend of Justus Lipsius, and associate of the circle around Justus Lipsius that was so focused on matters of moral inquiry. The subject matter of his pictures is derived from lines by Horace quoted on the opposite page. Van Veen transmutes every hint of allegorical abstraction contained in these lines into a fully coherent language of allegorical figures dramatically and elegantly posed against signifying backgrounds of scenes from classical fable or natural landscape that are normally generated by a literal reading of the quoted extracts. The erudition that informs these pictures, many of which seem to derive their allegoresis from the more recondite entries in the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, is rather lost in the simplifying vernacular verses that geared this book to an international market.14 But the Latin component of the work marks it clearly as a commonplace book, as well as an emblem book. A feature these books had traditionally in common, and one that is represented here, is the use of short, gnomic sayings, functioning in the commonplace book as headings and in the emblem book as the ‘motto’ usually inscribed above the picture to encapsulate its moral message. In Van Veen’s book, such phrases are printed in Latin at the head of the page opposite the engraving. Examples are ‘Virtutis gloria’ (the triumph of virtue); ‘Nimius paupertatis metus libertati noxius’ (too much fear of poverty puts freedom in jeopardy); ‘Sua nemo sorte contentus’ (no one is content with his lot). Just as in a commonplace book, these phrases constitute the index, and a glance at the index quickly reveals that the book’s material is arranged in loosely connecting groups of moral topics, as Erasmus had recommended and countless commonplace books had copied. Under the Latin 13 

Horace, Emblemata. The publisher of the 1607 Latin-only edition simultaneously produced an edition for the vernacular market with verses in Dutch and French to elucidate the emblem pictures. There was a further edition at Antwerp in 1612, amplified for international sale with explanatory verses in Spanish and Italian, as well as Dutch and French; then, after a gap, editions by Franciscus Foppens at Brussels in 1682 and 1683, with verses in Italian, and new ones in Dutch and in French; an edition published at Amsterdam in 1684 left out the Spanish and Italian, but added German to Dutch and French, and was doubtless targeted to a Protestant readership. 14 

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phrases are one or more quotations from Horace (one of which is normally the genesis for the picture), supplemented by related excerpts from classical Latin poets and prose writers. These constitute the top half of this page, and the layout of quotations gathered under topical headings signals that this picture book is to be used as a commonplace book. Later editions of the work add more and more quotations, extending its repertoire to the Bible, the Church Fathers, and modern Latin poets. The emblem book’s traditional ‘conversation’ between text and image has been substantially complicated and enriched by the varied voices of the commonplace book. Purchasers were getting two of their favourite resources for moral reflection for the price of one. Emblems were the newcomers in Langius’s categories for collecting excerpts. His other categories, apart from symbols perhaps (all taken from the Hieroglyphica of Pierio Valeriano), were already more firmly established. Collections of exempla (examples of conduct) go back a long way, often at first assembled in uncoordinated heaps, but more and more systematically arranged as the sixteenth century progressed.15 Langius himself mined some of his exempla profana in the huge collection edited by Theodor Zwinger and first published in 1565: Theatrum vitae humanae.16 Another feature that Langius has in common with Zwinger’s Theatrum is the method of analysing concepts by plotting them onto a diagrammatic scheme that divides and subdivides a topic visually by the use of brackets, starting from the single concept on the left-hand side of the page and ending on the right in an array of clearly related, itemized subsections. In his Polyanthea, Nanus Mirabellius had laid out definitions of key words for preaching by means of such ramifying brackets. His purpose had been to underwrite and resource the rhetoric of the late medieval sermon, with its coordinated divisions and dis15  Consult, for example, Textor, Officina, first published in 1520, then edited by the indefatigable commonplacer Conradus Lycosthenes in 1552, and exploited by Langius; Brusonius, Facetiarum exemplorumque libri VII. Brusonius had ordered his exempla under alphabetical heads, but his compilation was not reprinted at the time. Once edited by Conradus Lycosthenes, however, corrected, tidied up, and indexed by commonplaces, it had a new lease on life from 1559 onwards. Behind all humanist collections of exempla lies their ancient prototype, Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, a prime target for commonplacing. 16  Zwinger, Theatrum vitae humanae. The Theatrum was subsequently published in hugely expanded versions, culminating in a complete overhaul and reorganization in 1631, effected by a Catholic theologian, Laurentius Beyerlinck, who expurgated its Protestant ‘errors’ and rearranged its material under alphabetical heads and subheads, ‘corresponding to the order of the Polyanthea’, thus sealing a union between Zwinger and Langius. For a full description of the work, see Blair, ‘Historia in Zwinger’s Theatrum vitae humanae’.

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tinctions of terms. Langius had retained his bracketed divisions, even though the rhetoric they served was by then virtually obsolete. But Langius’s late sixteenthcentury readers would have had no trouble in reading them because they were accustomed to seeing them in works influenced by Peter Ramus. Ramist texts made something of a fetish of this method of exposition, applying it to dialectical and rhetorical theory and to every other branch of knowledge. Zwinger had done the same in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, published 1566 to act as a philosophical complement to the Theatrum.17 There, Zwinger employs ‘Ramist’ ramified diagrams to uncover and make visible the carefully joined skeleton of argumentation fleshed out in the text of the Ethics. In the Theatrum, each book is prefaced by such diagrams, and the various subsections generated by them produce the commonplace headings within which the collected exempla are contained. The headings are thus systematically arranged so as to replicate the classification of moral behaviour found in the Nicomachean Ethics and, furthermore, as a consequence of the ways by which the ramified divisions are derived, the schematic definitions of Aristotle’s logic: genus and species, cause and effect, and so on. So the sense of the order of the Theatrum is primarily philosophical, rather than rhetorical. It corresponds to an order inscribed in nature, to how the moral universe is constituted, rather than prompting rhetorical discourse to argue for or against a proposition. At the same time, the plethora of examples adduced under each heading threatens on every page to turn order into creative chaos, as the historical and the fabulous mix and mingle to supply in abundance the requirements of a rhetoric addicted to copia. The same tension between container and contained may be sensed, in an attenuated form, in a vernacular collection of examples ordered under commonplace headings: Wits Theater of the Little World, edited by Robert Allott for publication at London in 1599.18 Its title doubtless deliberately recalls its famous predecessor, although it is not a serious rival to Zwinger’s Theatrum. Wits Theater is not organized with schematic rigour, but it does replicate a system for arranging topics on a universal scale long familiar from previous commonplace books. Its headings begin in the heavens, proceed through a catalogue of Aristotelian virtues and more general moral topics, to end with the Seven Deadly Sins, the devil, and hell. The headings are crammed with translated examples from a host of ancient and Renaissance Latin authors, in which ‘as in a glasse, [are] to be seene […] such presidents, as eyther may be followed for vertuous or eschewed as 17  Aristotle, Aristotelis Stagiritae de moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem; for a short description of the work, see Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, pp. 109–12. 18  Allott, Wits Theater.

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vicious’.19 Though it could be used rhetorically as a repository of moral examples with which to furnish discourse designed to persuade, in effect what Wits Theater provides is ‘facts’ on every conceivable topic, ‘epitomized histories’, as Allott calls his examples. These ‘histories’ are not only summarized, but loosely paraphrased from the original Latin authors, and thus well distanced from the almost forgotten source texts. Moreover, they escape not infrequently from the containing moral headings to constitute chapters of a general history of the world. The commonplace book, particularly in its vernacular manifestations, is losing its distinctive organizing system and reference grid. It is turning into a random miscellany. Allott’s Theater of examples was, as he explains in his preface, the third of a trilogy of vernacular commonplace books. The other two also corresponded to sets of formulaic expressions, sententiae and similitudes, favoured by Erasmus and used by Langius to classify his quotations. Politeuphia or Wits commonwealth, printed at London in 1597, is a ‘a methodicall collection of the most choice and select admonitions and sentences [i.e. sententiae] compendiously drawne from infinite varietie, divine, historicall, poeticall, politique, morall, and humane’.20 As far as the ordering of its headings is concerned, this compilation replicates even more exactly than Wits Theater the parameters typical of many Latin commonplace books on moral topics, from which, indeed much of its material is drawn. Matter already pre-packaged in such compilations is arranged under labels taken from them in an order they had made familiar to the Latinate reader. From ‘God’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Angels’, ‘Virtue’, ‘Peace’, and ‘Truth’, we move forward (and downward) through the species of virtue, the emotions, good practice in speech and moral behaviour, to the various vices, ‘Heresies’, ‘Devils’, and ‘Hell’. In other respects, however, Politeuphia asserts near independence from the classical realm of the Latin commonplace book. It advertises its pedigree of ‘great antiquitie’, but the only direct evidence of this is that each headed section ends with two sentences in Latin and that some, but very few, of its collected sententiae are ascribed to an ancient author, pagan or patristic. So, we are supplied with a collection of prose definitions and aphorisms, presented as purely vernacular pearls of wisdom that on occasion resemble nothing so clearly as a typically random hoard of native English proverbs.

19 

Allott, Wits Theater, sig A 2v. I quote from the preface addressed to John Bodenham in Ling, Politeuphia. John Bodenham was the original compiler and Ling brought his work to conclusion. Ling produced a second, slightly expanded, version of his collection that was printed well into the next century, for example in 1669. 20 

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An altogether more sophisticated compilation of moral sententiae collected out of Latin poets and Greek poets in Latin prose translation was produced by Theodor Zwinger in 1575, entitled Morum philosophia poetica.21 The excerpts are very systematically organized in chapters relevant to the compilation’s eighteen books on such subjects as mind, bodily goods and evils, good fortune and bad, prudence, fortitude, temperance, generosity, honour, justice, and, where appropriate, their attendant opposites. An initial diagram shows how these separate books are derived from an analysis of the type of the moral maxim (gnoma or sententia) into matter, form, genus, species, and so on. The chapters themselves contain commonplace headings (tituli) for carefully grouped moral subjects, each heading preceded by a diagrammatic analysis of the topic into bracketed divisions. With added complexity, this analysis dictates the ordering of excerpted sententiae beneath the tituli in subsections that correspond to elements of Aristotelian logic, such as matter, form, essence, accident, genus, species, cause, active and passive states, affirmation, negation, true, false. The reasoning behind this very complicated presentation of what is in essence an ethical commonplace book is provided in a long prolegomenon (pp. 5–72). There Zwinger sets out to explain the conjunction of ethical theory and practical philosophy, definition and precept, dialectic and rhetoric, all within the framework of Aristotelian logic and exemplified by the gnomic aphorisms, the sententiae, that illustrate his tituli, his moral places. Just as complex, and just as interesting, is the treatise entitled Similitudinum methodus which Zwinger used as the introduction to his commonplace book of similitudes published in the same year.22 Many of the examples of similitude ‘commonplaced’ under headings in this book go back some way, to Erasmus, in fact, who had published his own collection, derived from Plutarch and others, as Parabolae sive similia in 1514. He had ordered them by author and not provided any topical headings. Conradus Lycosthenes had turned the collection into a proper, fully searchable commonplace book in an edition published at Basel in 1557, redistributing the excerpts under alphabetically ordered headings that nearly all relate to ethics, economics, or politics, and make very explicit the ethical content of the excerpts. Zwinger now re-edits the work, adding a wealth of additional material (much of it from early Christian writers) left in manuscript at Lycosthenes’ death, and retaining its alphabetical arrangement by headings. In his 21 

Zwinger, Morum philosophia poetica; see the full title under Works Cited. Zwinger, Conr[adi] Lycosthenisr rubeancensis similium; the similitudinum methodus is at pp. 3–112. 22 

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preface to the original collection, Erasmus had been quite clear that rhetoric was the context for the deployment of similitudes, to delight and teach and move.23 By 1575, teachers and practitioners of rhetoric looked once more with confidence to the principles of dialectical reasoning learnt from Aristotle (though not the formal logic of the scholastics) to stiffen discourse designed to persuade and convince. For Zwinger ‘argument based on similitude is a form of reasoning and properly belongs to logic’.24 His Similitudinum methodus locates similitude within the logical paradigm of the syllogism. More generally, it binds the probabilistic dialectic of places of argument (of which similitude was one), as well as similitude’s capacity for ethical instruction, and figurative language itself, back into strict logic, with all the potency for conviction that that implies. Similitude plays a rather different role in the vernacular collection Palladis Tamia or Wits Treasury which Francis Meeres brought out in 1598 as a companion volume to Wits commonwealth of sententiae and, eventually, to Wits Theater of examples.25 The preface explains that similitudes are the form of speech proper to orators, elegant, eloquent, and ingenious. This compilation is a riot of similitudes taken from every conceivable part of creation, and apparently translated from a multitude of texts, pagan and Christian, ancient and modern, as well as from what looks like oral lore. A large number of the entries are referenced, though it is easily ascertained that Meeres had found both texts and references in a finite number of Latin commonplace books. Far from complying with the dictates of logical rigour, or even subscribing to the convenience of alphabetization, the headings that introduce some semblance of order into this motley collection trace a more than usually erratic course between the things of heaven and the things of hell. Above all, Meeres aims to feed extravagant rhetorical display. A certain style, indeed a stylistic ethos that favoured amplitude, redundancy, and excess, was being created for the vernacular. The Latin commonplace book had already done this for Latin since the time of Erasmus. Now, the vernacular commonplace book replicates the process in English, but it outrageously outdoes its Latin model in its accumulation of figured expressions, and it is rare indeed to find vernacular commonplace books that impose the restraining regimen of 23 

The preface is at pp. 87–94 of the admirably informative edition of Erasmus, Parabolae sive similia, ed. by Margolin; this also has a full account of the history of Lycosthenes’ revised edition. 24  Zwinger, Conr[adi] Lycosthenisr rubeancensis similium, p. 7. 25  Meeres, Palladis Tamia, ed. by Allen. Like the other two volumes of the trilogy, Wits Treasury had quite a long life in print: a new edition with a new preface was published in 1634.

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the dialectical operators. On another front, this vernacular commonplace book in particular opens up cultural frontiers to take in vernacular authors, and does so quite methodically. It is most famous for the comparisons it draws between Greek, Latin, Italian, and contemporary English poets. Vernacular literature is brought into the ambit of the elite culture whose characteristic code had been Latin. Invasions from vernacular literature begin to penetrate the boundaries of that culture, but they will establish legitimacy there by conforming to the norms of the commonplace book. Indeed, rather better-produced volumes of commonplaced excerpts from contemporary vernacular poets helped to engineer a cultural revolution. These compilations asserted in effect that vernacular literature had the same moral seriousness as ancient literature, the same moral scope, and the same claim to be taken as a model of expression and quoted for its moral acumen. Robert Allott published Englands Parnassus in 1600, and the authors collected under its headings included Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson.26 And editions of poems, plays, and even novels in the European vernaculars came adorned with quotation marks and pointing hands, already marked up for the commonplace book. Commonplace books did not expand the horizons of ethical inquiry. Even Zwinger’s theoretical essays on gnomic sayings and similitudes tended to map ethics onto logic and rhetoric, the artes sermocinales, or arts of discourse, rather than place it in the conceptual universe of philosophy. Yet, the culture engendered by commonplace books was immensely influential. Their organization, their headings, and their excerpts map the collective mind and moral consciousness of educated people in western Europe between the late 1520s and about the middle of the seventeenth century. In one sense, the commonplace book can be seen as an agent of standardization and control. Every new book read, every new theory elaborated, was susceptible of being filleted to fit the pre-existing headings in the commonplace book. On the other hand, the individual collector was the owner of his own resource and could exploit the open-endedness of the commonplace book and its flexibility. New quotations, and indeed, new headings, could always be added. Contradictory quotations could be listed under a single heading, undermining each other by their juxtaposition. The owner of a well-stocked commonplace book could display its riches to dazzle, prove his membership of a conservative elite, or play the sceptic, as he chose. In the hands of a master of movable quotations, like Montaigne, it was an instrument for questioning all received ideas. 26 

Allott, Englands Parnassus; a Parnasse des poetes francois modernes, ed. by Corozet, had already appeared in Paris in 1571.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Alciat, André, Emblemata Andreae Alciati […] locorum communium ordine ac indice novis­ que posteriorum eiconibus aucta (Lyon: Bonhomme and Rouille, 1548) —— , Les Emblèmes, ed. by Pierre Laurens (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997) —— , Emblemes d’Alciat de nouveau translatez en françois vers pour vers jouxte les latins: Ordonnez en lieux communs, avec briefves expositions (Lyon: Bonhomme and Rouille, 1549) Allott, Robert, Englands Parnassus: or the Choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets (London: Ling, 1600) —— , Wits Theater of the Little World (1599; fascimile repr. New York: De Capo Press, 1971) Aristotle, Aristotelis Stagiritae de moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem: tabulis perpetuis, quae commentariorum loco esse queant, explicati et illustrati […] (Basel: Oporinus and Episcopius, 1566) Brinsley, John, Ludus literarius: or, the Grammar Schoole (London: Man, 1612; fascimile repr. Menston: Scolar, 1968) Brusonius, Lucius Domitius, Facetiarum exemplorumque libri vii (Roma: Mazochio, 1518) Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Marci Tullii Ciceronis sententiae illustriores. Apophthegmata item, et Parabolae sive Similia: aliquot praeterea eiusdem piae sententiae (Paris: Estienne, 1546) —— , Les Sentences illustres de M. T. Ciceron, et les Apophthegmes, avec quelques sentences de pieté, recueillies des euvres du mesme Ciceron. Aussi les plus remarquables Sentences, tant de Terence que de plusieurs autres autheurs et les Sentences de Demosthene de n’agueres tirées du grec, et mises en latin par François de Belle forest (Paris: Pierre de La Nouë, 1574) Erasmus, Desiderius, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, ed. by Betty I. Knott, vol. i. 6 of Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. by J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink and others (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988) —— , Parabolae sive similia, ed. by Jean-Claude Margolin, vol. i. 5 of Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. by J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink and others (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1975) Horace, Q. Horati Flacci emblemata. Imaginibus in aes incisis, notisque illustrata, studio Othonis Vaeni (Antwerpen: Verdussen, 1607) Langius, Josephus, Loci communes seu potius florilegium (Strasbourg: haeredes Rihelii, 1598); later editions are entitled Anthologia sive florilegium —— , Polyanthea nova (Lyon: Zetznerus, 1604) Ling, Nicolas, Politeuphia: Wits Commonwealth (London: Ling, 1598) Meeres, Francis, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, being the second part of Wits Common­ wealth, ed. by Don Cameron Allen (London: Short for Burbie, 1598; repr. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1938) Mirandola, Ottaviano, Illustrium poetarum flores per Octavianum mirandulam collecti, et a studioso quodam in locos communes nuper digesti, ac castigati (Strasbourg: Ribelius, 1538)

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Le Parnasse des poetes francois modernes, contenant leurs plus riches et graues sentences, dis­ cours, descriptions, et doctes enseignemens, ed. by Gilles Corrozet (Paris: Corrozet, 1571) Textor, Joannes Ravisius, Officina partim historijs partim poeticis referta disciplinis (Paris: Chaudière, 1520) Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri ix (Venice: Aldus, 1502) Zwinger, Theodor, Conr[adi] Lycosthenisr rubeancensis similium loci communes ex omnium scrptorium genere omnium ordinum studiosis accommodati, nunc demum inventi ac editi cum Theod. Zvingeri bas. Similtudinum methodo (Basel: Episcopius, 1575) —— , Morum philosophia poetica ex veterum utriusque linguae poetarum thesauris cogno­ scendae veritatis et exercendae virtutis ergo a Theod. Zvingero octodecim libris methodice deducta (Basel: Episcopii, 1575) —— , Theatrum vitae humanae (Basel: Oporinus and Froben, 1565)

Secondary Studies Blair, Ann, ‘Historia in Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum vitae humanae’, in Historia: Em­ piricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 269–96 Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) Kraye, Jill, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, in Vocabulary of Teach­ ing and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Olga Weijers, CIVICIMA, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 96–117 (repr. in Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), item vi) Mejor, Mieczyslaw, ‘Polyanthea nova von Joseph Lange: ein Exempel der neulateinischen Florilegia’, in Acta conventus neo-latini hafniensis, ed. by Ann Moss and others, Medi­ eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1994), pp. 651–62 Moss, Ann, ‘Emblems into Commonplaces: The Anthologies of Josephus Langius’, in Mundus Emblematicus: Studies in Neo-Latin Emblem Books, ed. by Karl A. E. Enenkel and Arnoud S. Q. Visser, Imago Figurata: Studies, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 1–16 —— , Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Simonin, Michel, Vivre de sa plume au xvie siècle, ou la carrière de François de Belleforest (Genève: Droz, 1992) Ullman, Berthold L., ‘Joseph Lang and his Anthologies’, in Middle Ages, Reformation, Volkskunde: Festschrift for John G. Kunstmann, University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 26 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 186–200

Informal Ethics in the Renaissance Peter Mack*

I

nformal ethical teaching may be defined as the discussion of ethical topics with a view to instructing the audience, in a non-systematic way, outside the educational system.1 Several different types of Renaissance text provided informal ethical teaching, including some of the most successful books and genres of the period. A list of texts would include courtesy manuals, like Baldassarre Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528),2 Antonio de Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1528),3 Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor (1531), and Stefano

*  This essay is only a preliminary study of a subject which is coming to seem of crucial importance for Renaissance literature, philosophy, and social history. The field is potentially so wide that writing about it mainly serves to emphasize what I do not know. I am grateful to David Lines for prompting me to reconsider this subject and to Thomas Docherty for his helpful comments. Some parts of this chapter are cannibalized from ‘Histories, Conduct Manuals, Romances’, chap. 5 of Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp. 135–75. 1  For discussions of the role of grammar schools and universities in ethical teaching, see the essays by David Lines (the section on ‘Formal Institutions’), Luca Bianchi, and Ann Moss in this volume. On the role of informal contexts, see the section on ‘Informal Contexts’ in Lines’s essay in this volume. 2  Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier. 3  Guevara, Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio. Peter Mack ([email protected]) is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, and Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition, University of London. His books include Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 1993), Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). His latest work is History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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Guazzo’s Civil Conversation (1574);4 manuals on personal conduct like Erasmus’s Enchiridion (Instructions for a Christian Soldier, 1501) and Juan Luis Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman (1523); collections of ethical maxims like Leonhard Culmann’s Sententiae pueriles (1544) and William Baldwin’s Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547); and collections of proverbs like Erasmus’s Adagia (1500–36).5 Most Renaissance histories, many collections of stories, Montaigne’s Essais (1580–95), and Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (1590–96) were written largely for the sake of moral teaching. Even romances and collections of stories whose main purpose was entertainment, such as Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1558) and Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) raised issues from which readers could draw moral lessons.6 Plays were remarked on and defended for the moral teaching they offered. Informal ethical teaching also played a role in the visual arts. Emblems and allegorical paintings and prints often encapsulate moral teaching. A list of the subjects discussed within informal ethical teaching in the Renais­ sance might include the following:

 Self-knowledge  Self-control  Restraint of anger and other vices (e.g. pride, avarice, gluttony, drunkenness, covetousness, lust)  Contentment with necessities or little more  Modesty  Constancy in relation to Fortune and/or Adversity  Cultivation of Virtues (e.g. Courage, Generosity, Fairness)  Compassion  Love  Friendship  Sharing  Equality  Justice  Good Government 4 

Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. by Quondam; Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the Eng­lish Re­nais­sance; Grinstead, ‘Renaissance Ideas of the Court’. Lievsay and Quondam list sixty-seven editions in various languages. 5  Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus. 6  For Marguerite de Navarre (and the moral and political power of short stories in general), see Ullrich Langer’s essay in this volume.

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 Responsibility  Care  Opposition to Social Ills  Peace  Religion and Piety  Marriage  Parents and Children  Education: Wisdom, Literature, Arts, Useful Skills  Acceptance of Death  Consolation  Time  Moderation  Conflicts between Virtue and Practical Advantage  Reputation and Honour. Although, so far as I am aware, this precise list has never been written out before, it contains items which are so ingrained in post-Renaissance sensibility, so readily accepted as belonging to moral discourse, that we need to emphasize not its right to be considered as part of ethics (which Aristotle might have contested) but its miscellaneousness, its inconsistency, its lack of a firm logical articulation, its incompleteness, and the tensions which exist between different elements. The concept of modesty is in tension with the classical ideas of magnanimity and of personal excellence. The courage with which one man upholds his convictions or takes his opportunities may be seen by another man as pigheadedness or foolhardiness. Practical ethics is often a matter of reconciling principles which can themselves be seen as at best partial goods. Rarely is it possible to derive good conduct from first principles by syllogistic reasoning in the manner of an Aristotelian science.7 The choice of unsystematic and miscellaneous forms may reflect our writers’ awareness of the limitations of a priori reasoning in the field of practical conduct.8 Some items of this long unsystematic list are discussed in ancient formal ethical treatises, of which the prime example is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.9 Some of them are considered in the ethical treatises which Cicero composed in his retirement, largely, scholars suppose, through summary of and translation from 7 

Aristotle understood this: Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b13–28. On this point see also Eckhard Kessler’s essay in this volume. 9  Jill Kraye provides a clear and comprehensive survey of Renaissance attitudes to the ancient schools of ethical thinking in Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’. See also the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 8 

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Greek sources. Many of these topics are discussed in Seneca’s deliberately informal Moral Epistles and some of them are subjects of Plutarch’s Moralia. Seneca is usually taken as one of the primary sources for Stoicism (whose more systematic teaching has, to some extent, to be reconstructed from fragments), whereas Plutarch is an opponent of Stoicism. Seneca often ends his letters by endorsing sympathetic quotations from Epicurus.10 Some parts of the guidance offered in our Renaissance texts can be connected with the teaching of particular schools, but more often it seems to be part of the generalized wisdom which found a place in the teaching of all the schools of ancient philosophy. Our sources rarely connect the practical teaching back to the philosophical principles which a particular school used to justify an idea. Such unsystematic guidance in the practical conduct of life is part of Europe’s inheritance from the ancient world, but it is a part which particularly flourished in the Renaissance. Although I have defined informal ethical teaching in part by placing it outside insitutions of formal education such as schools and universities, both its methods and its materials are closely linked to the grammar school. Its major components are moral aphorisms and moral stories which were the staples of grammarschool literary training. Histories, conduct manuals, collections of quotations, and fictions, written and circulated largely in the vernacular languages, extended the methods of grammar-school moral and linguistic training into the reading and recreation of adults.11 Rather than attempt a rapid survey of this large and important collection of literary genres, this chapter will describe the educational origins and some of the ancient sources of informal moral education and discuss five central texts from the sixteenth century, representing different genres and languages: Erasmus’s Adagia, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne’s Essais, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Writing: Aims, Modes, and Sources Humanist educational theorists generally agreed that education served to promote religion, moral virtue, wisdom, and eloquence. They thought that these qualities were linked and that the training best suited to produce them was a study of classical languages and literature. The primary role of the grammar school was to teach the pupil to read, write, and speak Latin, but ethical mate10  Starting points on these two important texts would be Russell, ‘Letters to Lucilius’; Volk and Williams, Seeing Seneca Whole; Ziegler, ‘Plutarchos’; Russell, Plutarch. 11  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp. 135–75.

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rial was co-opted. Once the accidence had been learned by heart, the sentences through which syntax was learned and which pupils were drilled to vary had a strong moral content:12 Know yourself. Cultivate your relatives. Honour your parents. An old man is twice a child. It is hard to conquer nature. Nature is content with little. Custom is always very strong in all matters. A brave soul is not upset by adversity.13

Later on they move to more advanced and complicated sentences of the same type. All these examples are taken from schoolbooks containing the Sententiae pueriles, the Distichs attributed to Cato, and the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus. Whoever becomes angry brings danger on himself. It is foolish to grumble about misfortune when the fault is your own. To spare the evil is to injure the good. It is most praiseworthy to forbear to harm when you are able to. By doing nothing men accustom themselves to evil.14

It is important to notice that these sentences include repetition and self-contradiction and that they are presented to the reader in a deliberately miscellaneous way, typically organized by length of phrase, alphabetically by first letter only, or by a combination of the two. The pronouncements are not systematic or individually authoritative. Rather they are lodged in the mind by repetition, as available for use in conversation or writing but also as negotiable in relation to other phrasings or even opposed ideas. Because of the way they are learned these proverbs may also function as masks which a pupil might try on in relation to contemplating or justifying a particular line of conduct. There may be a gap 12 

Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp. 11–47; Crane, Framing Authority. Culmann, Sententiæ pueriles: ‘Cognosce teipsum’, ‘Cognatos cole’ (fol. A2 r); ‘Reverere parentes’ (fol. A2v); ‘Bis pueri senes’ (fol. A3r); ‘Difficillimum vincere naturam’ (fol. A3v); ‘Natura paucis contenta’ (fol. A5r); ‘Consuetudo in rebus omnibus semper est potentissima’ (fol. B3r); ‘Fortis animi est non perturbari in rebus adversis’ (fol. B3v). 14  ‘Petit, qui irascitur, periculum sibi.’ ‘Stultum est queri de adversis, ubi culpa est tua.’ ‘Bonis nocet, quisquis pepercit malis.’ ‘Nocere posse et nolle laus amplissima est.’ ‘Homines nihil agendo agere consuescunt male.’ Syrus, ‘Sententiae’, pp. 102, 72, or quoted from the 1835 edition in Smith, Shakespeare’s Proverb Lore, pp. 21, 69, 73. 13 

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(perhaps room for a kind of play) between the proverb someone speaks and their evolving opinion about a particular course of action.15 The pupils’ first continuous readers were Aesop’s Fables. In their reading of more advanced texts pupils were trained to collect moral axioms and exemplary stories, recording them in their notebooks for reuse in their own compositions. Pupils were exercised in writing letters and in the Progymnasmata (Composition exercises) of Aphthonius.16 The first of these exercises was the fable, in which the pupil was taught to join an exemplary narrative with a moral axiom. Axioms and narratives are among the ingredients of many of these exercises. When pupils progressed to more advanced writing, composing commonplaces or themes, the subjects chosen for their writing were almost always ethical. Ethical subjects also featured prominently in the headings under which they were supposed to assemble the fruits of their reading in commonplace books.17 While the characteristic elements of informal moral education were taken from grammar-school training, many of the ideas of these texts were derived from a wider reading in classical literature, sometimes mediated through existing collections of stories and axioms. Many of the writers with whom we are concerned take over doctrines from Aristotle’s Ethics, either through direct reading or via intermediaries. Some of Plato’s ideas made an impact on these works, particularly in Marsilio Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s theories about love. Cicero’s philosophical writings offered a model of a practical approach to moral issues. Plutarch’s collections of sayings and stories, his biographies focused on character and moral choices, and his relaxed and digressive approach to questions of practical import (for example in How to Restrain Anger) encouraged Renaissance authors to imitate (and steal from) him. Seneca’s moral epistles provided axioms and stories which, while reflecting his Stoic outlook, emphasize the common ground between the ancient schools of ethics. Some of his moral essays collect together materials on topics which also concerned Renaissance writers. Diogenes Laertius provided anecdotes and quotations suitable for embellishing literary compositions on ethical topics. The Distichs attributed to Cato and the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus offered suitable material and an ancient precedent for the Renaissance collections of proverbs and moral axioms. Valerius Maximus’s ethically organized collection of historical stories, Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, gave Renaissance readers and historians much useful subject matter, 15 

I am grateful to Thomas Docherty for this idea. Aphthonius, Progymnasmata; Clark, ‘The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata’. 17  Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp.  127, 235; Moss, Printed Common-Place Books, pp. 53–55, 74–80. See also the essay by Ann Moss in this volume. 16 

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pointers about how to use it, and a model for their own compilations of historical examples, which were in turn used and recommended as aids to composition.18 Renaissance moralists also drew on medieval traditions, for example on the genre of mirrors for princes and on collections of narratives, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Fall of Princes. Stories, proverbs, and axioms were also recycled between different Renaissance ethical texts, embodying the principle of Renaissance rhetorical reading that texts transmit fragments from previous reading ready for reuse in new compositions.

Erasmus’s Adagia Erasmus’s Adagia began as a list of proverbs with explanations intended to help pupils in their reading of Latin authors and to provide them with pithily expressed phrases with which to decorate their own compositions. In later editions he added an introduction defining the proverb (‘A proverb is a saying in popular use, remarkable for some shrewd or novel turn’) and explaining the usefulness of the study of proverbs, greatly expanded the number of proverbs discussed (up to a total of 4151 in the last edition of his lifetime), and wrote several longer entries which constitute moral essays in their own right.19 Most of the entries, which are brief, serve only to explain the meaning of the proverb (which in most cases has no ethical content) and to give examples of its use in classical literature. In the case of proverbs with some ethical force, explaining the meaning and use often involves justifying and even (where the sentiment is sympathetic) asserting the value of the idea. In the first adage of all, encouragement and explanation seem to go hand in hand with a polemic against modern Christians. ‘Between friends all is common.’ Since there is nothing more wholesome or more generally accepted than this proverb, it seemed good to place it as a favourable omen at the head of this collection of adages. If only it were so fixed in men’s minds as it is frequent on everybody’s lips, most of the evils of our lives would promptly be removed […] [in the Laws] Plato is trying to show that the happiest condition of a society consists in the community of all possessions […]. But it is extraordinary how Christians dislike this common ownership of Plato’s, how in fact they cast

18  For the impact of ethical considerations on writers of histories and biographies, see Alison Frazier’s essay in this volume. 19  Erasmus, Adages, ed. by Barker, pp. x–xxiii and 5. Augustijn, Erasmus; Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common.

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stones at it, although nothing was ever said by a pagan philosopher which comes closer to the mind of Christ.20

Several of the proverbs are straightforward moral injunctions whose brevity and point makes further explanation desirable. I.6.94. ‘Spit into your own bosom.’ In our own day this adage is current in many parts of the world. They tell a man who criticizes other people’s faults to spit into his own bosom, as though warning him to remember his own private errors and desist from arrogant attacks on the way other men live. […] I.6.95 ‘Know thyself.’ To the same line of thought belong those three sayings which are easily the most famous of all the utterances of wise men, so much so that, as Plato bears witness in the Charmides, they could be seen inscribed by the Amphictyons in front of the doors of the temple at Delphi as maxims worthy of the god. The first of these is Gnothe seauton, Know thyself, which recommends moderation and the middle state, and bids us not to pursue objects either too great for us or beneath us. For here we have the source of all life’s troubles: every man flatters himself, and blinded by self-love takes to himself without deserving it all the merit that he wrongly denies to others.21

With Festina lente (‘Make haste slowly’) the admiration for the pointed paradoxical expression and the digressions into hieroglyphics and the meaning of Aldus’s emblem of dolphin and anchor, with the consequent remarks on the Aldine press and on printing more generally, overwhelm the explanation, which concerns, firstly thinking long and then acting swiftly, secondly restraining the emotions with reason or balancing eagerness and restraint, and thirdly putting up with delays when they are necessary or advantageous. Everyone, Erasmus concludes, who suffers either from sloth or impetuosity should remember Aldus’s device.22 Erasmus begins ‘Sparta is your province’ with an injunction to adapt oneself to and live up to the standard of whatever sphere of activity is assigned to us, but later develops it into an instruction to princes, to rule their own kingdoms well and to desist from war and conquest.23 The longest of all the adages, Dulce bellum inexpertis (‘War is sweet to those who do not know it’), is an emotional and eloquent argument against war. Erasmus contrasts the elegant behaviour of soldiers 20 

Erasmus, Adages, ed. by Barker, p. 29; Erasmus, Opera omnia, ii. 1, 84. Erasmus, Collected Works, ed. and trans. by Mynor, xxxii, 61–62; Erasmus, Adages, ed. by Barker, pp. 96–98; Erasmus, Opera omnia, ii. 2, 116–18. 22  Erasmus, Adages, ed. by Barker, pp. 132–53. 23  Erasmus, Adages, ed. by Barker, pp. 183–91. 21 

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at court with a denunciation of the trivial reasons for which war is undertaken and a depiction of the devastation caused by war.24 He uses his extensive reading and all the resources of his eloquence to attack the accepted behaviour and motivations of the rulers of his time. The Adagia began life as a dictionary of proverbs intended to assist in the reading of ancient texts and to provide materials with which first schoolboys and later men of business could decorate their Latin compositions. To show the value of some of the proverbs Erasmus felt compelled to explain and justify their moral implications. As the book grew in length, popularity, and importance he found that he wanted to elaborate and amplify some of these explanations, providing an outlet for his own moral teaching (most notably on questions related to the education of princes, the importance of self-knowledge and self-restraint, and the condemnation of war), a pleasing variety for his audience, and a model for the way in which proverbs could be used to initiate or give stylistic disctinction to declamations or treatises. As a textbook the Adagia earned a lasting place in Renaissance schoolrooms. Even in that role it provided material which pupils could use in their ethical compositions. As it expanded Erasmus elaborated within it the most forceful expression of some of his deeply held moral convictions.

Castiglione’s The Courtier Castiglione aimed at entertainment and instruction. The depiction of the perfect courtier inevitably involves ethical ideas, but Castiglione avoids systematic exposition and obvious didacticism. Moral axioms are among his sources and his ornaments, but his work is not organized according to ethical categories as a medieval mirror for princes or treatise on the virtues might have been. Ethical ideas and maxims appear in many different guises in The Courtier. They may be used to ornament the openings of books, as in the way the question of the relation between custom and reason is raised in Book One or the deceiving nostalgia of the old for the supposed golden age of their youth is used to introduce the second book, or they may form part of the badinage between speakers as in the discussion of the appropriateness of self-praise and the limitations of modesty in Book One.25 The task of describing the ideal courtier inevitably involves questions of upbringing and debate about the kinds of learning and practical skills 24 

Erasmus, Adages, ed. by Barker, pp. 317–56. Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, Books i.  1, ii.  1, i.  18; Woodhouse, Baldasar Castiglione; Hanning and Rosand, Castiglione. 25 

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which the courtier should possess.26 Virginia Cox has shown how an argument about the courtier’s prudence in presenting himself favourably is drawn through the interventions of different speakers into an unresolved debate about flattery and good counsel.27 In attempting to apply Canossa’s description of the courtier’s qualities and talents to his actual conduct, Fregoso states that the first duty of the courtier is to please his prince. Although he rejects Pietro da Napoli’s suggestion that this makes the courtier no more than a flatterer and holds out for the primacy of virtue, insisting that the good courtier should resign his post rather than act wrongly on the orders of his prince, he is gradually compelled by his interlocutors to accept that in the conditions applying in autocratic city states the courtier may have to trim his conscience to the situation in which he finds himself.28 This leaves a much wider gap between the positions of Canossa and Fregoso than the latter’s introduction had suggested that he intended. Cox shows how Castiglione uses the dialogue form to allow different views about the courtier’s conduct to be expressed forcefully while leaving the resolution of the argument to his reader. Near the beginning of the fourth book, Ottaviano takes up the question of the moral comportment of the ideal courtier, which had been stipulated at the beginning of the book but taken for granted in the ensuing conversations: I say that, among the things which we call good there are some which, simply and in themselves, are always good, such as temperance, fortitude, health and all the virtues that bring tranquillity of mind; others, which are good in various respects and for the end to which they are directed, such as law, liberality, riches and other like things […]. I think that the aim of the perfect courtier, which we have not spoken of up to now, is so to win for himself, by means of the accomplishments ascribed to him by these gentlemen, the favour and mind of the prince whom he serves that he may be able to tell him, and always will tell him, the truth about everything he needs to know, without fear or risk of displeasing him […]. Thus, having in himself the goodness these gentlemen have attributed to him, together with readiness of wit, charm, prudence, knowledge of letters and many other things — the Courtier will in every instance be able adroitly to show the prince how much honour and profit will come to him and to his from justice, liberality, magnanimity, gentleness and all the other virtues that befit a good prince; and, on the other hand, how much infamy and harm result from the vices opposed to these virtues.29 26 

Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, i. 42–52. Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue, pp. 51–58. 28  Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, ii. 18–23. 29  Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, iv. 4–5; Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. by Javitch, pp. 209–10. This edition includes critical essays in English and a bibliography. 27 

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Ottaviano assumes that virtuous conduct is adequately described by a selection of the widely recognized virtues (temperance, fortitude, justice, liberality, magnanimity, and so forth) but that the courtier will sometimes need to intervene in order to promote these virtues with the ruler. His relationship of trust and friendship with the prince will gain him a hearing, but his persuasion will work more through the topics of deliberative oratory (honour and advantage) than through pointing out the ethical issues at stake. Later Ottaviano portrays the courtier as a teacher of virtues: And if he is such as he has been said to be, he will have little trouble in succeeding in this, and will thus always be able to tell him the truth about all things; and also, little by little, to inform his prince’s mind with goodness, and teach him continence, fortitude, justice and temperance, bringing him to taste how much sweetness lies hidden beneath the slight bitterness that is at first tasted by anyone who struggles against his vices […]. And he will be able to incite his prince to these [virtues] by the example of the famous captains and other excellent men, to whom the ancients were wont to make statues of bronze [and] marble […]. In this way the courtier will be able to lead his prince by the austere path of virtue, adorning it with shady fronds and strewing it with pretty flowers to lessen the tedium of the toilsome journey for one whose strength is slight.30

Examples and the promise of rewards will be the best way of teaching virtue to the prince. They will provide the delight which makes it possible for a weak person (in order to flatter the courtier the prince is envisaged as weak, worldly, and even corrupt) to undertake the arduous path of virtue. After replying to the objection that virtue depends more on nature than on education, Ottaviano faces questions about the appropriateness of temperance for the ruler. In an argument that seems aware of Stoic ideas, he finds that there is a place for emotion in the make-up of the ruler: I did not say that temperance entirely removes and uproots the passions from the human mind. Nor would this be well, because even in the passions there are some good elements; but temperance brings under the sway of reason that which is perverse in our passions and which stands against what is right […]. Note that those who tame horses do not prevent them from running or jumping but have them do so at the right time and in obedience to the rider. Hence, the passions, when moderated by temperance, are an aid to virtue, just as wrath aids fortitude, and as hatred of evildoers aids justice, and likewise the other virtues too are aided by the passions; which, if they were wholly taken away, would leave the reason weak 30 

Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, iv. 9–10; Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. by Javitch, p. 213.

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and languid, so that it could effect little, like the master of a vessel abandoned by the winds and in a great calm.31

A relaxed consideration of the means of influencing a ruler has here led back to an important formal topic in classical ethics. Indeed Book Four incorporates within its discursive structure some large-scale arguments derived from the Platonic and Stoic schools. Rather than contributing to the debate between the philosophical schools Castiglione shows that an awareness of their arguments enables his courtier to steer a practical path between conflicting motivations. His imagined debate presents a view of what moral philosophy looks like in practice. This portrayal of philosophy outside the schools helps justify the claims he has earlier made for the classical education of the courtier. The elegant and relaxed form of the dialogue helps him juxtapose and hold together different types of approach without attempting to reconcile them or choose among them.

De Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius Antonio de Guevara’s forgery The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, supposedly containing the life, sayings, and letters of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a Europe-wide success.32 The British Library catalogues list twelve Italian editions and three French ones, but for reasons of ignorance I shall concentrate on the English translations.33 Lord Berners’s Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius (1535) was printed fifteen times. Much of the text consists of elaborately crafted speeches and letters for Marcus Aurelius which demonstrate his selfrestraint and wisdom, through the amplification of Stoic moral commonplaces: I swear by the Gods immortal that the day of my triumph being in the chariot, I was as pensive as I might be. O Rome, cursed be thy folly and woe be to him that hath brought up in thee so much pride. And cursed be he that hath invented so great pomp in thee. What greater or more unequal lightness can be, than that a Roman captain, because he hath conquered realms, altered peaceables, destroyed cities, cast down fortresses, robbed the poor, enriched tyrants, shed much blood and made infinite widows, should for recompense of all these domages be received with great triumph? […] I remembering the infinite treasures ill gotten, and hearing lamentations of the widows sorrowfully weeping for the death of their husbands, 31 

Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, iv.  18; Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. by Javitch, p. 219. 32  Redondo, Antonio de Guevara; Guevara, Obras completas. 33  Nelson, Fact or Fiction, pp. 35–36.

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and the remembrance of so many friends dead, though I rejoiced me openly, I wept drops of blood secretly.34

The combination of the imagined scene of triumph and the recollected details of the actions that earned the triumph make this an unusually effective elaboration of the theme of the vanity of worldly glory. Guevara and Berners use apostrophe, rhetorical question, enumeration of details, antithesis, and parison to elevate the style of this passage. The elaborate deathbed speech is one of Guevara’s specialities: O what little thought we take in this life until we fall grovelling with our eyes upon death […]. The vanities of us that are vain, is so agreeable to us that when we begin to live we imagine that our life will endure a whole world, and when it is ended it seemeth us to be but a puff or a blast of wind. And because then sensuality paineth for sensibility, and the flesh for the flesh, reason guided with them that be mortal telleth me that it peyneth not with the departing. If I have lived as a brute beast, it is reason that I die as a discreet man ought to do. I dying, this day shall die all my sickness, hunger shall die, cold shall die, all my pains shall die, my thought shall die, my displeasure shall die, and every thing that giveth pain and sorrow. This day the night shall be taken away and the sun shine bright in the sky. This day the rust shall be taken from mine eyes and I shall see the sun clearly.35

Guevara takes the occasion of the death speech to deliver warnings to the living about their thoughtlessness and about the vanity of life. In the fifth sentence of the extract an almost liturgical use of antistrophe reassures the reader about the intended meaning, but earlier repetition and apparent parallelism leads to a development of the argument. Although, with epanados, sense pines for sense, yet reason, reversing their proposition while repeating the verb, can tell us not to fear death. Living like an animal can be a prelude to a fuller vision of death. The apparent resolution of the early part of the extract is transformed by metaphor and contentio into the full resolution of the end. Friendship is an important theme for Guevara. Some of the Berners/Guevara axioms about friendship (along with others from sources like Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor) are reused in William Baldwin’s collection of moral aphorisms, Treatise of Moral Philosophy, which was printed seventeen times in the sixteenth century: Where any repugnancy is, there can be no amity, since friendship is an entire con­ sent of wills and desires. 34  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, STC 12436, sig. Cc3r–v. There is a reprint of this text in Guevara, Guevara in England, ed. by Gálvez. 35  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, sigs Y1v–2r.

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Therefore it is seldom seen that friendship is between these persons: namely a man sturdy of opinion inflexible and of sour countenance and between him that is tractable, with reason persuadable and of kind countenance and entertainment.36 The friend in all things trusteth to his friend, first regarding who is his friend.37 He that promiseth and is long in fulfilling is but a slack friend.38

Friends are supposed to give good counsel,39 of which princes need the benefit. In Guevara’s Golden Book, Marcus Aurelius advises his son to make a distinction between his friends and his counsellors. For pleasures he should keep company with young people, but for advice on serious subjects like military affairs, diplomacy, legislation, and appointments he should consult the old and experienced.40 He should always take counsel in important and difficult matters, listening to a range of different opinions and taking note of the difficulties pointed out as well as the solutions.41 But counsellors should always be listened to critically and with an awareness of where their own interests lie. Marcus Aurelius claims that he never afterwards listened to someone whose advice had been motivated by selfinterest.42 When one of the senators asked him why he gave his time to all types of people, Marcus Aurelius replied that people with lordship over many should not make themselves available only to a few: I have read in books and have proved it by myself that the love of subjects, the surety of the prince, the dignity of empire, and the honour of the senate, do conserve the prince, not with rigour but with gentle conversation.43 The people owe obedience to the prince, and to do his person great reverence and fulfil his commandments, and the prince oweth egal justice to every man and gentle conversation to all men.44 36  Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig. L8r; Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, ed. by Lehmberg, p. 133. 37  Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig2 L7 v–8r; Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, p. 135. 38  Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig. M1v, Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, pp. 300–01. 39  ‘The greatest reward that one friend may do to another is in great and weighty matters to succour him with counsel’: Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig. I5r. 40  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, p. 288. 41  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, p. 289. 42  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, pp. 290–91. 43  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, p. 165. 44  Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, p. 169.

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Many of Guevara’s ideas about counsel (and some of his phrases) are presented as aphorisms in Baldwin’s Treatise of Moral Philosophy: Glorious is that commonwealth and fortunate is that prince that is lord of young men to travail and ancient persons to counsel.45 Though the determination might be done by a few, yet take counsel of many; for one will show thee all the inconveniences, another the perils, another the damages, another the profit and another the remedy. And set thine eyes as well upon the inconveniences that they say as upon the remedies they offer.46 It becometh a King to take good heed to his counsellors, to find who follow their lusts, and who intend the common weal, that he may then know whom for to trust.47

Guevara’s forgery was a collection of moral commonplaces, but the effectiveness of its rhetorical elaboration, its ringing phrases, and its sentiments made it very successful both as a complete work for private reading and in the phrases which were extracted for other successful compilations of moral teaching.

Montaigne’s Essais Montaigne’s chapters frequently begin with stories or maxims taken from his reading. Generally he adds in parallel examples before asking himself whether a particular conclusion corresponds to his own experience. Typically he will then find counter-examples from his reading in history and poetry. Sometimes he will tell a story from his own experience which parallels or contrasts with one of the stories or maxims he has already written out. Montaigne was a great rereader both of his own developing work and of classical literature and modern history. In the process of rereading he frequently came across ideas he wanted to expand or qualify or new quotations or (more rarely) stories he wanted to include.48 Montaigne speaks of his book as a record of himself. At times he certainly regarded his own ideas and experiences as models, of whose truth he wanted to persuade his readers; at other times he wanted to present himself as an exception 45 

Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig. I1r. 46  Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig. I5r. This is slightly compressed from Guevara, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners, p. 289. 47  Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, sig. I1r. 48  The observations in this paragraph will be justified in Mack, Reading and Rhetoric. Start­ ing points on Montaigne are Villey, Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne; Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. by Eng; Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne; Cave, ‘Problems of Reading’; Desan, Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne.

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to the normal ways of perceiving things. Ethical teaching was only intermittently a purpose of writing the Essais but the informal moral teaching of the classical period (Seneca and Plutarch were his favourite authors) and the moral axioms and narratives current in his time were usually the starting point from which the individual chapters developed and always among the materials with which he complicated and elaborated his thought. Generally Montaigne’s approach served to elicit from his reader a more complicated and reflective response to axioms and stories, but on occasion he made ethical discoveries which he wanted to convey to his readers as forcefully as possible. In ‘On the Lame’ (Des Boyteux, Essais, III. 11) he attacks superstition and credulity: Not long ago one of our princes, whose excellent natural endowments and lively constitution had been undermined by the gout, allowed himself to be so strongly convinced by reports which were circulating about the wonderful treatments of a priest who, by means of words and gestures, cured all illnesses, that he made a long journey to go and consult him. By the force of his imagination he convinced his legs for a few hours to feel no pain, so that he made them serve him as they had long since forgotten how to do. If Fortune had allowed some five or six such events to happen one on top of the other, they would have sufficed to give birth to a miracle. Afterwards there was found such simplemindedness and such little artifice in the inventor of this treatment that he was not judged worthy of any punishment. We would do the same for most such things if we examined them back in their burrows. Miramur ex intervallo fallentia [We are astounded by things which deceive us by their remoteness. Seneca, Epistolae morales, 108. 7]. Thus does our sight often produce strange visions in the distance which vanish when we draw near. Nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur [Rumour never stops at what is crystal clear. Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, ix. 2]. It is wonderful how such celebrated opinions are born of such vain beginnings and trivial causes. It is precisely that which makes it hard to inquire into them: for while we are looking for powerful causes and weighty ends worthy of great fame we lose the real ones; they are so tiny that they escape our view.49

Montaigne’s sceptical approach enables him to perceive general lessons (which he can support by quoting philosophy and history) by reflecting on a story taken from his own experience. The close examination of so-called miracles usually results in their denial, and later in a prosaic explanation for the illusion. With typical thoroughness Montaigne wants to explain not just the miracle but the reason for its deceitful effectiveness. After an example of a deliberate fraud, Montaigne asserts the value of suspending judgement, after the manner of the ancient sceptics: 49 

Montaigne, Essais, ed. by Villey and Saulnier, ii, 1028–29; Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. and trans. by Screech, pp. 1163–64.

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In many similar cases which surpass our knowledge I consider that we should suspend our judgement, neither believing nor rejecting. Many of the world’s abuses are engendered — or to put it more rashly, all of this world’s abuses are engendered — by our being schooled to fear to admit our ignorance and because we are required to accept anything which we cannot refute […]. If I had had sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with inquiring and undecided expressions such as ‘What does this mean?’, ‘I do not understand that’ […]. Anyone who wishes to be cured of ignorance must first admit to it […]. Yes indeed there is a kind of ignorance, strong and magnanimous, which in honour and courage is in no wise inferior to knowledge.50

By combining an idea taken from his philosophical reading (the sceptical suspension of judgement) with an unease about contemporary educational practices Montaigne develops a paradoxical but also a practical encomium of ignorance. Once we are willing to admit that there are things we don’t know we shall have a basis from which to inquire and to learn. Scepticism here is a stage on the road to better, even though (or perhaps because) more provisional, knowledge. Towards the end of the chapter Montaigne tells a story which collects together the references to suspicions of witchcraft (‘I am well aware that folk get angry and forbid me to have any doubts about witches on pain of fearsome retribution’)51 he has made earlier on. A few years ago I was passing though the domains of a sovereign prince who, as a courtesy to me and to overcome my disbelief, graciously allowed me to see, in a private place when he was present, ten or a dozen of this kind of prisoner, including one old woman, truly a witch as far as ugliness and misshapenness was concerned, and who had long been most famous for professing witchcraft. I was shown evidence and voluntary confessions as well as some insensitive spot or other on that wretched old woman; I talked and questioned till I had had enough, bringing to bear the most sane attention that I could — and I am hardly the man to allow my judgement to be muzzled by preconceptions — but in the end, and in all honesty, I would have prescribed not hemlock for them but hellebore. Captisque res magis mentibus, quam consceleratis similis visa [Their case seemed to be more a matter of insane minds rather then of delinquents. Livy, Ab Urbe condita viii. 18]. Justice has its own remedies for such maladies. As for the objections put to me there, and often elsewhere, by decent men, none ever seemed to tie me fast: all seemed to have 50 

Montaigne, Essais, ed. by Villey and Saulnier, ii, 1030, Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. and trans. by Screech, p. 1165. 51  Montaigne, Essais, ed. by Villey and Saulnier, ii, 1031, Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. and trans. by Screech, p. 1167. Montaigne’s ironic aside here is especially admirable: ‘Nouvelle façon de persuader’.

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a solution more convincing than their conclusions […]. After all it is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them.52

Montaigne’s sanity and firmness in condemning witch burnings, all the more forcefully through his calculated understatement, constitutes one of the most courageous practical moral interventions of the sixteenth century. Where burning was a preferred weapon for all sides in the religious conflicts he suggests that the kind of beliefs we can have about supernatural questions can never justify such extreme cruelty. Montaigne enables and enforces his criticism by exploiting his reading, by developing (from an advantageous social and economic standpoint) the persona of an independent-minded man who comments freely on his reading and his experience, and by a combination of unflinching logical argument and sharp verbal skill.

Spenser’s Faerie Queen Where Horace held that poetry ought to combine entertainment with instruction (Ars poetica 333–46), presumably in order to justify and dignify poetry at the same time as making moral teaching more palatable, Philip Sidney claimed that poetry, which he sees as embracing all forms of fiction, is a more effective form of moral teaching than history or philosophy: The Philosopher therfore and the Historian are they which would win the gole, the one by precept, the other by example. But both not having both, doe both halte […]. [But] the peerlesse Poet [doth] performe both: for whatever the Philosopher sayth should be doone, hee giveth a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom hee presupposeth it was doone. So as hee coupleth the generall notion with the particular example […]. For indeede Poetrie ever setteth vertue so in her best cullours […] that one must needs be enamored of her.53

When Edmund Spenser determined to write the epic which would raise English literature to a place alongside Greek, Latin, French, and Italian he decided to include a strong educational element within his patriotic and Arthurian overall structure. According to his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser’s Faerie Queene was intended to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertues and gentle discipline’. Each of the books of the poem is devoted to a virtue (Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy) which the individual knight who is 52  Montaigne, Essais, ed. by Villey and Saulnier, ii, 1032; Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. and trans. by Screech, pp. 1168–69. 53  Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 164, 170.

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the hero of that book learns.54 Prince Arthur, who appears in each book, exhibits the perfection of all the virtues, usually by rescuing the knight at a point of crisis in the book. Spenser evidently conceives of his epic as an education for the reader. He describes allegorical places (such as the House of Holiness and the House of Alma) which give a comprehensive account of the component doctrines of a particular virtue, but he also presents the knight (and the reader) with situations of conflict in which they are required to exercise the virtue in order to determine an appropriate course of action. Frequently the names (for example of the opponent or the location) which would offer guidance on how to react are provided only after the knight has had to act. The reader can learn from the mistakes which the characters make as well as from their successes. Under temperance, for example, Spenser presents a conflict between Sir Guyon (the hero of Book Two) and a wild knight (Furor) urged on by a screeching old woman (Occasio).55 Guyon has to learn that he can only overcome anger (Furor) by first silencing Occasio. Only if the gentleman learns not to listen to the self-justifying reasons for taking offence will he be able to control his disposition towards supposedly righteous anger. In Canto 2, at the Castle of Medina, temperance is presented in the Aristotelian manner as depending on a medium between insufficiency and excess (ii. 2. 38), but at the same time the story of the infant Ruddymane, whose hands stained with her parents’ blood cannot be washed clean, introduces the idea of original sin (ii. 2. 2–10). As the book develops Guyon discovers that anger and lust continually reassert themselves within him and that they may even be inextricable from his personality. At the moment when Guyon fulfills his major quest of destroying the bower of bliss, home of the witch Acrasia, the poet depicts a storm of wrath and almost wanton destructiveness: But all those pleasaunt bowres, and Pallace brave, Guyon broke downe with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse, Their groves he feld; their gardins did deface; Their arbers spoyle; their Cabinets suppresse; Their banket houses burne; their buildings race; And, of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (ii. 12. 83) 54  Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by Hamilton, p. 737; Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclo­ paedia, pp. 581–84; Alpers, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene; Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory; Heale, The Faerie Queene. 55  Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by Hamilton, ii. 4. 3–15.

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The poet leaves the question carefully poised. In one way this is success. The means by which Acrasia corrupted the souls of her victims have been destroyed and the witch’s lair has been revealed for the foul place it always morally was. But at the same time Spenser allows his readers to regret the destruction of beauty, of craftsmanship, and of the gardener’s long and skilful labour. Guyon’s ‘rigour pittilesse’, which is presumably to be admired, is matched with ‘the tempest of his wrathfulnesse’ which must be a critical label in a book in which wrath is one of the great enemies. Throughout the book Spenser insists that the human beings who attempt to attain moral goodness are irretrievably damaged in themselves and in constant need of God’s assistance (ii. 8. 1–3). The practical moral advice which Spenser conveys through some of his episodes (often stated as a conclusion either by the knight’s guide or by the poet in one of his summary stanzas, frequently placed at the beginning of a canto) is very often later complicated by an awareness of the difficulty of bringing about good in a fallen world and of the fragility of moral success even when it has apparently been achieved. The moral stories and axioms which he draws from his reading have to be questioned on the basis of historical experience and explored through the resources of myth. Thus the book of justice begins with episodes in which Artegal imitates the judgement of Solomon and assigns wealth on the basis of principles of equity (v. 1. 23–30; v. 4. 4–20). But he soon comes up against the difficulty of imposing justice on those who are unwilling to accept it. The good lessons in equity which he has learned from Astraea need to be supported by the violence of the iron man Talus, who enables Artegal to impose his will on those who ignore the claims of justice. Against the communist giant who calls for an equal redistribution of the world’s wealth Talus employs force without any instruction or moderation from Artegal (v. 2. 49). At this point and during the lengthy justification of Elizabeth’s foreign policy which follows, the arbitrariness of power and the partiality of justice comes troublingly near to the surface. The imprisonment of Artegal and Britomart’s vision in Isis Church (v. 5. 20–26; v. 7. 1–24) employ romance and mythical elements to complicate the reader’s notion of justice. Within The Faerie Queene as a whole (remembering that the portions we have, which may be all that Spenser wrote, amount to little more than half of the projected poem) Spenser seems to move from a great confidence in the precepts he has inherited from antiquity and Christianity, in the power of education, and in England’s imperial mission (as befits an epic modelled in part on Virgil) to a sense of the changeability of everything human, of the limitations of success, and of the fragility of inspiration. The fleeting image of harmony witnessed by the poet Colin Clout on Mount Acidale but lost and interrupted by Calidore, the

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knight of courtesy (vi. 10. 5–29), serves as an image of the conceptual possibilities of poetic inspiration as well as of their evanescent nature and of the difficulties of bringing them into concrete form in the world. Spenser does not abandon the materials of ethical teaching but he appreciates that making a world (even a fictional world) which conforms to moral ideas may be beyond the power of the poet-educator.

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to identify the characteristics of informal ethical teach­ing in the Renaissance. It involves an extraordinarily wide range of questions arising from the conduct of practical life, from self-knowledge and dealings with friends and family to politics, time, and change. It can be conducted in plays, poems, aphorisms, narratives, dialogues, histories. Informal ethical teaching in the Renaissance can be linked to the ethics of the classical philosophical schools, but it tends to be more wide-ranging and practical in its concerns. It provides guidance which is more direct and less argued, but it also recognizes the difficulties of reconciling different ethical principles and of applying moral axioms to practical situations. Because it is not obliged to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of the moral ideas it presents, informal moral education generally avoids the problem of attempting to reconcile pagan and Christian ways of thinking, taking it for granted that its moral advice applies to Christians. Renaissance ethical writing draws on the model of the more informal classical moral texts such as Seneca’s Moral Epistles and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Moralia. Informal ethical teaching by definition takes place outside formal education, yet both in much of its material and in its methods it can be regarded as an extension of the non-linguistic priorities of the humanist grammar school. Its building blocks are moral axioms and moral stories, both of them familiar from grammarschool techniques of reading and composition exercises. Erasmus’s Adagia starts by explaining and justifying the moral teaching of proverbs and ends up writing forceful ethical arguments on the behaviour of princes and the evils of war, which serve as a model and a resource as well as teaching. Texts like Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius and Guazzo’s Civil Conversation elaborate ethical commonplaces, expressing them in impressive forms that grasp the reader’s attention and which are accordingly suited for the reader to recycle in commonplace books, collections of ethical maxims, and subsequent ethical compositions. Rhetorically forceful elaboration of moral ideas can inspire a reader. The literary exercise of attempting to argue a case in the light of conflicting axioms provides material and a method for making (and justifying) a tricky practical moral deci-

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sion. Literary training influences behaviour, which in turn can be recycled into the audience’s contemplation of a stage hero’s verbal discovery of a right course of action. Castiglione’s The Courtier uses the form of the dialogue to present and make a case for opposed ideas about the courtier’s behaviour, leaving it to the reader to reconcile ethical principles with the imperatives of contemporary practical life. In different ways Montaigne and Spenser wrote texts which interrogated received ethical ideas, testing them against recent history and the writer’s understanding of his own experience. Montaigne’s reception, comparison, and questioning of commonplaces of the philosophical schools prompted him to some new and modern moral positions. Because the materials of informal ethical teaching are not organized systematically, because there is redundancy and contradiction within the corpus, it may be particularly well suited to prompt new ethical ideas. Fictional and historical narratives can be used both to embody and to interrogate ethical axioms. Narrative can therefore be seen as a means both for making ethical ideas more understandable in relation to the life of the reader and for improving their accuracy as conclusions about life. Conversely moral ideas increase the appeal and importance of literary texts, which first convey moral ideas to an audience and later become a virtual laboratory for thinking about the difficulties and implications of ethical actions. Plays aimed mainly to entertain, but the immediacy of their enactment of events could increase the emotional force of their moral teaching.56 Because playwrights contrast the opinions of different characters, the moral teaching of a play may involve the interrogation of different positions, leaving the spectator to draw conclusions. In this chapter I have discussed some examples illustrating the importance of informal ethical teaching for Renaissance literature, for moral philosophy, and for our understanding of the ways in which Renaissance people reacted to and argued about their world. I ought to have said more about historical writing, about fiction, about writing for a non-professional audience, and about courtesy literature. I should have found a way to discuss Machiavelli’s impact on moral teaching. Informal ethical teaching in the Renaissance is a field which deserves and will reward much further study.

56 

Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Jenkins, ii. 2. 584–94; Heywood, Apology for Actors, sigs B4 , G1v–2r. r

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Works Cited Primary Sources Aphthonius, Progymnasmata (London: Marsh, 1575; STC 2nd edn, reference no. 700.3) Baldwin, William, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie: Wherein Is Contained the Worthy Say­ ings of Philosophers, Emperours, Kings, and Orators: Their Lives and Answers (London, 1547; repr. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967) Castiglione, Baldassarre, The Book of the Courtier, ed. by Daniel Javitch, trans. by Charles Singleton (New York: Norton, 2002) —— , Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Vittorio Cian (Firenze: Sansoni, 1947) Culmann, Leonhard, Sententiæ pueriles pro primis Latinæ linguæ tyrinibus, ex diversis scriptoribus collectæ (London: [n. pub.], 1639; STC reference no. 6107a) Elyot, Thomas, The Book Named the Governor, ed. by Stanford E. Lehmberg, Everyman’s Library, 227 (London: Dent, 1962) Erasmus, Desiderius, The Adages of Erasmus, ed. by William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) —— , Collected Works of Erasmus in English, ed. and trans. by Roger A. B. Mynors and others, 52 vols to date (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–) —— , Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. by J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink and others, 39 vols to date (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1969–) Guazzo, Stefano, La civil conversazione, ed. by Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols (Roma: Bulzoni, 2010) Guevara, Antonio de, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Lord Berners (Lon­ don, 1535) —— , Guevara in England: nebst Neudruck von Lord Berners’ ‘Golden Booke of Marcus Aurelius’ (1535), ed. by José Maria Gálvez (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1916) —— , Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio (Sevilla, 1528) —— , Obras completas, ed. by Emilio Blanco, 2 vols (Madrid: Turner, 1994) Heywood, Thomas, Apology for Actors (London: Okes, 1612) Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. by M. Screech (London: Pen­ guin, 1991) —— , Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Pierre Villey and Verdun-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965) Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London: Arden, 1982) Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, ed. by Albert Charles Hamilton, 3rd edn (London: Longman, 1977) Syrus, Publilius, ‘Sententiae’, in Minor Latin Poets, trans. and ed. by J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, Loeb Classical Library, 284 (London, Heinemann, 1934), pp. 14–111

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Secondary Studies Alpers, Paul J., The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) Augustijn, Cornelius, Erasmus: His Life, Works and Influence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Il Corti­ giano’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Cave, Terence, ‘Problems of Reading in the Renaissance’, in Montaigne, ed. by Ian D. McFarlane and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 133–66 Clark, Donald Lemen, ‘The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata in Sixteenth-Century Gram­ mar Schools’, Communication Monographs, 19 (1952), 259–63 Cox, Virginia, The Renaissance Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Crane, Mary Thomas, Framing Authority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) Desan, Phillipe, ed., Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 2004) Eden, Kathy, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) Friedrich, Hugo, Montaigne, trans. by Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) Grinstead, Jill, ‘Renaissance Ideas of the Court and the Popular Elizabethan Dramatists’ (unpublished MPhil dissertation, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1978) Hamilton, Albert Charles, ed., The Spenser Encyclopaedia (Toronto, 1990) Hankins, John Erskine, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) Hanning, Robert W., and David Rosand, eds, Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) Heale, Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Kraye, Jill, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 Lievsay, John Leon, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance 1575–1675 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961) Mack, Peter, Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) —— , Renaissance Argument (Leiden: Brill, 1993) —— , Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) Moss, Ann, Printed Common-Place Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Nelson, William, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) Phillips, Margaret Mann, The Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) Redondo, Augustin, Antonio de Guevara et l’Espagne de son temps (Genève: Droz, 1976)

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Russell, Donald A., ‘Letters to Lucilius’, in Seneca, ed. by Charles Desmond Nuttall Costa (London: Routledge & Paul, 1974), pp. 70–95 —— , Plutarch (London: Duckworth, 1972) Sayce, Richard Anthony, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972) Smith, Charles G., ed., Shakespeare’s Proverb Lore (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1963) Smith, George Gregory, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904) Villey, Pierre, Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1933) Volk, Katharina, and Gareth D. Williams, eds, Seeing Seneca Whole (Leiden: Brill, 2006) Woodhouse, John Robert, Baldasar Castiglione: A Reassessment of the Courtier (Edin­ burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978) Ziegler, K., ‘Plutarchos’, in Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft: neue Bearbeitung, ed. by George Wissowa, continued by Wilhelm Kroll and others, 34 vols in 66 parts, plus later supplements and indices (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1893–1972), xxi. 1: Plautus bis Polemokrates (1964), cols 635–962

Biography as a Genre of Moral Philosophy Alison K. Frazier* From the examples of many, learn Which deeds to follow and which to spurn: The lives of others are our teachers. Distichs of Cato, iii. 13

B

etween 1400 and 1600, the key philosophical texts addressed in this volume found, for the most part, their canonical forms. Aristotle and Plato, Seneca and Epicurus, Sextus Empiricus and Lucretius, all moved from manuscript to print, ranging broadly beyond the universities and the studia of the religious orders while simultaneously approaching a textual standardization that could advance academic discussion. Already by 1600, some authors enjoyed incipient critical editions and commentaries that continue to influence philosophers today. Taken as a whole, the textual evidence suggests fairly straightforward if not inexorable progress, however much vernacular translations might intrude, and however much interpretations might differ.

*  The author thanks the editors for their patience; Douglas Biow for his impatience; and

James Weiss for much-needed encouragement. This essay, conceived at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti (2005–06) and pursued during a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006–07), was brought to completion thanks to a fellowship from the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas (2009–10). Alison K. Frazier ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of History at the Uni­ versity of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Her current work includes an edited collection, The Saint Between Manuscript and Print: Italy 1400–1600, and two books: The Death of Pietro Pagolo Boscoli, and The Beginning of the World in the Italian Renaissance.

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The para-philosophical genre of biography — more cautiously called ‘biographical writing’ and, more ambiguously, ‘life-writing’ — developed quite differently.1 Simply put, that difference reflects a formal distinction between argument and narrative.2 Philosophical doctrine of various sorts does occur in a range of classical and late antique vitae, including Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia and Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. But neither those accounts nor the classically authoritative formats of the vita — the scholarly catalogue, such as Suetonius’s On Grammarians; the free-standing encomiastic narrative, such as Tacitus’s Agricola; and the account more or less embedded in historia, such as Sallust’s Catiline — were understood as canonical sites of academic philosophizing. As a result (and despite the fact that professional philosophers conceived the history of their discipline as serial biography well into the sixteenth century), the vita had only a negligible role in the university-level teaching of moral philosophy.3 Renaissance philosophy professors nonetheless had regular opportunities to consider the vitae of their iconic figures, for the introductory (accessus or praelectio) lecture on the assigned text traditionally opened with remarks on the author’s life.4 Even so, the professors seem to have neglected it — though it is not clear, in the absence of comprehensive studies of the philosophical praelectio, just why that should be the case. Two observations seem pertinent. First, the literary accessusstyle vita predominates (if this predominance is not an illusion produced by the historiography). Incunable editions of Ovid and Virgil, for example, often placed a vita among appended material, and the ‘sometimes bawdy’ plays of Terence, perhaps in defense of their classroom utility, were regularly prefaced by one.5 In contrast, none of the eighty-one incunable copies of Boethius featured a free-standing Life. Among 189 incunable editions of Aristotle, only a dozen included a vita.6 1 

The term ‘life-writing’, popularized by Mayer and Woolf, The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe, increasingly denotes what German scholars have called ego-documents. See now Weiss, ‘Friendship and Rhetoric’, esp. pp. 12–18. 2  Cf. Monk, ‘Life without Theory’. 3  Santinello and others, Models of the History of Philosophy addresses serial biography as disciplinary history. 4  These lectures should not be confused with the university-wide inaugural lecture format studied by Campanelli, ‘L’Oratio e il “genere” delle orazioni inaugurali’. 5  Quoting Gehl, Humanism for Sale, who does not discuss the vita. See now Ruiz Arzálluz, Francesco Petrarca. 6  E.g., eleven northern editions of the (ps.-Aristotelian) Problemata include a 14th-century verse vita with interlinear comments. Cf. entries on Seneca in the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue.

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Cicero fared still worse: of 348 incunable editions, only one offered an independent biography.7 A second and related observation is that the scarcity of the philosophical accessus-style vita seems to be an effect of developing philological method, as the biographical impulse was subsumed not so much into philosophia as into grammatica. This effect appears already in the accessus-style vitae that accompany Pomponio Leto’s editions of the epic poet Silius Italicus (1471) and the historian Sallust (1490), and in the value accorded exemplaristic biography in Angelo Poliziano’s praelectiones on Suetonius (1490–91).8 Its broadest thrust can be seen at the end of the period under consideration, in Andreas Schott’s Quaestiones Tullianae (1610). Schott’s textbook encouraged Jesuit teachers to move beyond introductory attention to Cicero’s vita, so that the orator’s ‘life and times’ permeated the Latin literature course, leading students through philology to a broadly ethical historicism.9 Thus, just as the classroom defined the disciplinary ground of the prefatory vita by supplying author, subject, and audience, so the classroom proposed the moral and metahistorical significance of that vita. Beyond the schools, a more diffuse but no less imperative ethics found its largest audience, as well as its youngest and most malleable one, through the vita. So it is not surprising that while major philosophical texts enjoyed a relatively clear and moderate trajectory of progress, life-writing, thanks to its broader appeal, moved in contradictory and extravagant directions. Four trends stand out, all underwritten by a complex linguistic situation: the growing confidence of literary vernaculars on the one hand, and the continuing attraction of classicizing Latin on the other. First, there is the simple fact of quantity. Medieval Western Europe produced some ten thousand vitae, mostly about saints and rulers.10 There exists no corresponding estimate of biographical production in Europe and her colonies from 1300 to 1600. One has the impression — strengthened by the ubiquity of print and translation — of an almost pathological multiplication of texts. Quantity, it has been said, is the researcher’s greatest challenge.11 7 

Quantifications in this paragraph draw on ISTC data, which I have not verified by examining each edition. 8  Osmond, ‘In the Margins of Sallust, Part III’, pp. 35–50; Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, pp. 52–55. 9  Nelles, ‘Historia magistra antiquitatis’. 10  Berschin, ‘Biography’, p. 607 (covering the fourth through fifteenth centuries). 11  IJsewijn, ‘Die humanistische Biographie’, p. 7.

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Second, and closely related, the formats used to address lives multiplied, so that differentiation, not standardization, marked Renaissance life-writing. Striking novelties included the development of the funeral sermon and the combination of the ‘true-life’ engraved portrait with life-narrative.12 Serial biography, revived in fourteenth-century vitae patrum and de viris illustribus variations, was further valorized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Latin and vernacular translations of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.13 Autobiographical writing — mostly beyond the scope of this essay — flourished in picaresque narratives and in ego-documents such as travel accounts, family diaries, and letter collections. Third, and again related, is the remarkable broadening of the demographic not only of authors but also of their subjects. Two overlapping groups, the laity (both men and women) and women (both lay and in orders), carved out ever stronger textual presences. Already by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the relative position of women as subjects and authors had begun to change dramatically with the proliferation of convent vitae. From today’s point of view, these women’s ‘lives’ constitute the leading edge of the takeoff in European biographical writing. Whether their authors were male or female, because the narratives tended to treat contemporaries they mingled autobiographical and biographical forms; that mingling, often explicit, is a further defining aspect of the biographical take-off.14 This essay focuses on the fourth symptom of Renaissance life-writing, exemplarity. Whether addressed as exemplum (anecdote), as vita (largely a collection of those anecdotes), or as a set of peculiarly western traditions of narrated virtue, the persistence and pervasiveness of exemplarity complicates any simple claims for the Renaissance ‘rise of the individual’.15 Court culture, for instance, encouraged the production of vitae not because rulers were modern individuals, but because they required the tropes of panegyric.16 Even narratives that strove to 12  Funeral oratory: McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Humanism; Moore, Patterned Lives. Illustrated narrative: Rave, ‘Paolo Giovio und die Bildnisvitenbücher’; Wilson, ‘Reproducing the Individual’; Eichel-Lojkine, Le Siècle des grands hommes. 13  Petoletti, ‘Les Recueils De viris illustribus’. On Plutarch: Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives; MacDonald, Biography in Early Modern France, pp. 26–42; Weiss, ‘Johannes Fichardus’. Diogenes Laertius is addressed below. 14  E.g. Coakley, Men, Women, and Spiritual Power; Bilinkoff, Related Lives. 15  Hampton, Writing from History, treats anecdote; Struever, Theory as Practice, addresses the discursive traditions. On the individual: Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, part 2, chap. 1; and with special reference to biography, Burke, ‘Individuality and Biography in the Renaissance’; Weiss, ‘Varieties of Biography’. 16  Thus Miglio, ‘Biografie e raccolte’. But cf. professional identity in the class producing

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depict a unique protagonist — such as the many ‘lives’ of Rudolph Agricola, or Teresa of Avila’s Vita — depended on familiarity with exemplaristic traditions for effect.17 Behind those traditions lay striking assumptions about the consumers of these ‘lives’, for unlike modern biography, which invites the reader’s sympathetic understanding of and identification with the subject, premodern vitae elicited and honed judgements about character (ēthikē).18 The result was an internal evaluative dialogue characteristic of the philosophical stance known today as ‘virtue ethics’.19 Exemplaristic discourse could, in fact, be considered the cognitive mode of virtue ethics. Its central place in biographical writing is thus especially pertinent to any discussion of alternative venues for the history of moral philosophy. The remainder of this essay addresses three vitae. Each presents a well-known exemplary type: ancient philosopher, medieval prince, and contemporary saint. The conclusion broaches a fourth account that was infinitely more successful at the time — and also in some ways the most complex of the lot. At the very least, the fact that a large and varied audience was familiar with such challenging narratives suggests that life-writing flourished in the Renaissance precisely because the internal dialogue about virtuous exemplars was sophisticated and pleasurable.20

Ficino’s Vita Platonis After beginning as a student and teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) committed himself to Plato. He studied, translated, and commented upon the Platonic corpus; he produced his own Neoplatonizing philosophical texts; and he lived in a manner that he considered to be in conformity with Plato’s teachings, even with Plato’s life.21 The interest of Ficino’s Vita Platonis thus lies in its contrary potentialities. On one hand, because Ficino was the most important Renaissance scholar of Plato, and was working in the elite environment of later Quattrocento Florence, it seems reasonable to expect a critically astute narrative. On the other hand, since Ficino himself adopted Plato’s life as a this panegyric: Enenkel, ‘In Search of Fame’. 17  Weiss, ‘The Six Lives of Rudolph Agricola’; Slade, Teresa of Avila. 18  Pelling, ‘The Moralism of Plutarch’s Lives’; Duff, Plutarch’s Lives; and on virtue ethics as a cognitive mode, Gill, The Structured Self. 19  Note 18 above, with Hursthouse, ‘Virtue Ethics’. For an application of this philosophical category to post-classical thought, see Bejczy, Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages. 20  Cf. Stierle, ‘Three Moments in the Crisis of Exemplarity’. 21  Mahoney, ‘Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Platonism’; Allen, ‘Ficino’s Lecture on the Good’.

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model, it seems just as probable that the vita must reveal what Ficino most loved about the philosopher’s life — and urge imitation of those virtues. That latter expectation would have been shared by the majority of Ficino’s contemporaries. Today’s readers (along with a distinct minority of Ficino’s contemporaries) expect a critical assessment. Approaching the vita in hope of intellectual fireworks, scholars leave disappointed: the narrative seems unworthy of both author and subject. The Vita Platonis is usually described as an epistolary Life. That designation is correct, insofar as it respects Ficino’s final presentation: in late 1477, the philosopher placed the Life of Plato in his letter collection.22 But the vita was first conceived more than a decade earlier as a praelectio or introductory lecture. A single manuscript (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 5953), bears witness to its classroom use when Ficino, just starting as a university lecturer, introduced his citizen-audience to a newly recovered body of classical philosophy through lectures on the Philebus.23 Thus, in its earliest version, Ficino’s Life of Plato was an instance of that least-studied of humanist praelectiones: the vita of a philosopher, by a philosopher, for a philosophically inclined, or at least enthusiastic, audience. This earliest version of about 1500 words, which has never been printed, was paired originally with prefatory remarks de philosophia, on philosophy as a subject of study.24 In adopting the format of introduction to the subject plus Life of the author at hand, Ficino observed the general outline of the Byzantine rather than the western scholastic tradition — a choice that indicates a certain self-consciousness.25 In De philosophia, the professor praised his subject so as to encourage and flatter his students. He reminded them that philosophy is ‘knowledge of the divine’; that those who philosophize must be intellectually curious and truthful; that magnanimity, courage, an even temper, justice, insight, and a sharp memory were required. His students were already, he intimated, beneficiaries of an intro22  Consult Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum on dating and manuscripts. Latin in Ficino, Opera omnia, letter IV:19, at fol. 763; English in Ficino, Letters, ed. by LSE members, iii, 32–48. I am preparing an edition of Guarino Guarini’s ‘life’ of Plato in which I discuss Ficino’s vita Platonis more fully. 23  Field, ‘The Platonic Academy of Florence’; Levi, ‘Ficino, Augustine, and the Pagans’; Lackner, ‘The Camaldolese Academy’, pp. 30–31; Ficino, The Philebus Commentary, ed. and trans. by Allen, pp. 8–9. 24  I reconstruct the vita from Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum, i, 30–31 and Ficino, Letters, ed. by LSE members, iii, 106–11, with p. 88, n. 1, on letter 18. 25  For a later humanist similarly following Byzantine tradition, see Pincelli, Antonio Brenta.

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ductory ‘moral education […] call[ed] Ethics’. They knew that ‘to meditate on death […] is the duty of one practising philosophy’, ‘that philosophy is a gift of God’, and that the philosopher is ‘an intermediary between God and men’ — even ‘a most happy imitation of God’. Philosophy, Ficino concluded grandly, ‘is the ascent of the mind from the lower regions to the highest, and from darkness to light’.26 Turning to Plato himself, Ficino abandoned this cossetting encomiastic style. The vita opens with a thick gobbet of genealogical information, mostly cribbed from Ambrogio Traversari’s translation of Diogenes Laertius, Book iii which treats Plato. Thanks to the fulsome Diogenes, who himself had written for an audience of middle-brow enthusiasts, Ficino could re-envision the praelectio biography. In both quantity and organization of content, Ficino outstripped by far Johannes Argyropoulos’s opening lecture of 1456 on the Ethics, which meandered between bits of information about Aristotle’s Life and didactic orientations towards Aristotle’s ‘book’.27 In the degree of attention he gave to the author, Ficino bested Andrea Brenta’s praelectio Life of Aristophanes (probably late 1470s), which polished off its task in not 180 words.28 Quoting and paraphrasing Traversari, Ficino even improved on Diogenes, clarifying Plato’s double descent from Neptune and adding astrological data. He inserted a clichéd praesagium from John of Salisbury (Policraticus, i. 13. 19–21: bees placed honey on the infant’s lips), but reduced Diogenes’ two anecdotes about Plato’s early education to one (quoting Traversari on Aristotle’s dream of a cygnet). Ficino then turned to his protagonist’s gesta, briskly covering education, noting military service, a couple of virtues (chastity and graciousness), and cities that sought political consultations. It is striking that in Medicean Florence, before a patrician audience, Ficino took more time over the philosopher’s difficult relations with tyrants by describing Plato’s three voyages to Sicily. A dense list of Plato’s disciples (quoted from Traversari’s Diogenes iii. 46), followed by another independently phrased list of Plato’s writings (Diogenes iii. 57–60) presumably impressed the audience. Ficino paraphrased Traversari on three terse but crucial observations about Plato’s writing: the types of dialogues, the speakers who represent Plato’s own opinions, and style. He noted Plato’s importance for the history of philosophy education. Finally, observing a strict biographical format, Ficino restructured Diogenes to close with Plato’s death and testament, condensing the text of the testament to emphasize Plato’s familial and 26 

Quotations from Ficino, Letters, ed. by LSE members, iii, 28–31 (letter 18). Argyropoulos in Müllner, Reden und Briefe italienischer Humanisten, pp. 3–18, addres­ sing Aristotle’s ‘life’ at pp. 15–16. 28  Dating for Brenta in Pincelli, Antonio Brenta: In principio lectionis, p. 27. 27 

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civic responsibility (iii. 41–43). Given the oral classroom setting, this vita was precociously responsible and informative — probably the first time in the West that Diogenes Laertius had been so generously deployed. Almost a decade later, Ficino revised the praelectio account, more than doubling its length. Aimed now at private readers rather than classroom auditors, the new version was printed as a preface to Ficino’s Latin translations of Plato’s opera (1484–85 and 1491). Scholars have pointed out that Ficino neglected many opportunities in drawing up this expanded narrative. He did not enter into philological or text-critical discussion of Plato’s works. He avoided weighing the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, an argument that was raging at the time, often with reference to biographical data.29 And he did not refine Diogenes Laertius’s lengthy reports on Plato’s doctrine to reflect mature consideration of the opera, or draw out aspects of Plato’s life-experience to instantiate Platonic moral philosophy. But Ficino did make a few factual adjustments (e.g. Plato was forty when he first went to Sicily) and insert points of human interest (e.g. the philosopher had a slight hunchback). He added information on Plato’s ‘religious’ virtues, and as Ficino was now a priest himself, the restraint of these additions is noteworthy: the pagan philosopher’s piety emerged in habitual self-denials that demonstrated his ‘neglect of human things and love of divine ones’; his expressions of gratitude to God and Socrates underlined that humility.30 Ficino added a remarkably unambitious doxographical chapter, condensing Plato’s teachings into two easily remembered points: his eclecticism in observing three approaches to philosophy (following Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates) and his nearness to Christian orthodoxy in making three claims about God (God provides for all; the souls of men are immortal; there will be rewards for the good, punishments for the wicked).31 At the same time, a single excision from the classroom narrative — of a phrase indicating Plato’s wish to foment opposition to tyranny — established the pacific outlook of Florence’s Neoplatonists.32 By far the bulk of Ficino’s new material, however, consisted of anecdotes and apo­phthegmata. These were drawn chiefly from the moralizing Vita Platonis by grammarian Guarino Guarini, newly available in print.33 The easily grasped exem29 

Monfasani, ‘Marsilio Ficino and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy’. On Ficino’s 1473 ordination as priest and deacon, see Kristeller, ‘Marsilio Ficino and the Roman Curia’, p. 88. 31  Ficino, Letters, ed. by LSE members, iii, 45, with nn. 76–86. 32  Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum, i, 31, lines 7–13. 33  Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives, ii, 388–90. Guarino’s Plato appeared from about 1470 in editions of Plutarch’s Lives. 30 

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plaristic nature of this new material, the space allotted to it, and its source indicate that Ficino meant the revised account to strike a latinate but non-professional readership as similarly moralizing. If the religious virtues and doxography made the philosopher nearly a Christian, the apophthegms and anecdotes made him a quotable sage. Ficino, in short, always attended to his audience. The oral, classroom narrative had described at unusual length the historical person behind the new philosophy. The written biography fitted that pagan figure with a moral character that could circulate in Christian civil conversation.

Machiavelli’s Life of Castruccio Castracani The Life of Lucchese tyrant Castruccio Castracani (1281–1318) by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was conceived not as an oral performance but as a private document, folded into a letter from Lucca to close friends in Florence (29 August 1520).34 The accompanying letter might have resolved problems which the vernacular vita, ‘one of the most enigmatic of Machiavelli’s works’, raises for readers today.35 But that letter has been lost. As with so much of Machiavelli’s writing, the Life of Castruccio requires delicate handling. The reader first meets an abandoned infant tangled in vineyard foliage. Naked and nameless, the baby survives to acquire an identity only because he is adopted by two genealogical dead ends of the Castracani line, a priest and his widowed sister. As a young man, Castruccio must be adopted a second time, by a local condottiere, to move from the sphere of domestic and ecclesiastical to military and public virtue. There follows an interlude of princely display as Castruccio takes virtuous advantage of fortune’s offering (three battles) to construct his territorial state. But fortune reclaims the stage at his death. Unmarried and childless by choice, the hero is without lineage fore and aft. His dying speech is a concession that he has no political offspring either: his new state is stillborn. Castruccio leaves the world of the vita as bereft as he entered it. The ‘ideological’ structure of the Life is thus fortuna — virtù — fortuna.36 But the tyrant’s death and the dissolution of his state do not actually conclude the narrative. That job belongs instead to a lengthy chain of aphorisms or detti. 34 

Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee. The vita, first published as an appendix to The Prince (1532), was subsumed into analysis of that treatise until well into the nineteenth century. 35  Bausi, Machiavelli, p. 247 (my translation). 36  Guglielminetti, ‘Biografia ed autobiografia’, p. 858; Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, p. 110.

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Machiavelli sets out the apophthegmata one after another, without breaks or transitions, a format not found in Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Pseudo-Walter Burley’s popular reworking of Diogenes, or any other Quattrocento humanist biographies. In placement and purpose, the list resembles the miracles that conclude official saints’ ‘lives’: like the miracle-list, the detti bestow a posthumous fortuna, something Castruccio otherwise lacks. But this novel form of fortuna consists of words, not deeds, and those words are borrowed plumage, scrounged up and pasted on by the author. The author’s self-assertion appears still more forcefully in a second difficulty that accompanies this initial conundrum of the roles of virtù and fortuna. The Prince had claimed to reveal the verità effetuale, or effectual truth. Drawing on ancient and contemporary exempla, Machiavelli argued there that the real virtues, the ones that established and preserved states, were the opposite of the imaginary pieties proclaimed by religion. Castruccio agrees that the political virtues are not Christian. But the vita redefines the Prince’s notion of ‘effectual truth’ by radically disassociating the true from the factual.37 From start to finish, the vita is not just fictional but violently anti-factual.38 The historical Castruccio was not a foundling but the scion of the prominent Castracani family; he was not raised in a priest’s household but in a noble one; he was neither adopted nor trained in military arts by Francesco Guinigi; he was not a victor over the Guelfs at Fucecchio (but at Altopascio and Carmignano, both unmentioned); he was not in relations with a Bastiano di Possente, a Jacopo di Gia, an Andrea de’ Rossi, a Credi di Vanni Giusti, or a Pier Angelo Micheli (all names of Machiavelli’s contemporaries); he was not unmarried and not childless; he was not the adoptive father of Pagolo Guinigi, and so did not leave his state to that young man; and he did not die at forty-four (though Lorenzo de’ Medici did).39 Surely Machiavelli’s first readers in the Orti Oricellari could not miss such rank falsehoods.40 Or could they? This question illuminates the burden of ethical judgement that Machiavelli laid upon his friends, not to mention subsequent readers. What did the Orti Oricellari group know about fourteenth-century Florentine history, and specifically about the period from 1316 to 1328 when the historical 37 

Thus Macfarland, ‘Machiavelli’s Imagination of Excellent Men’. See Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, commentary. 39  Cf. Bausi, Machiavelli, p. 247. 40  The first readers are known from Buondelmonti’s letter to Machiavelli, edited and discussed by Paolo Trovato in Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, pp. 16–19; see also Machiavelli, Machiavelli and his Friends, trans. and ed. by Atkinson and Sice, notes to letter 263. 38 

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Castruccio threatened the city’s stability? Scholarship on Machiavelli’s sources for the Life has long focused on the vernacular Nuova Chronica by Florentine Giovanni Villani (d. 1348) and the elaborated Latin Vita Castrucii (ed. pr. 1496) by Lucchese humanist, jurisconsult, and republican Niccolò Tegrimi (d. 1527).41 Recently, however, an argument has been made that the vita drew upon a descriptione of Castruccio by Machiavelli’s chief official contact in Lucca, Bartolomeo Cenami.42 Whatever the sources, Machiavelli violated them — although lacking Cenami’s descriptione scholars can only speculate about how much of this violation was original with Machiavelli. Thus the older speculative impasse — did Machiavelli intend mythography or did he just not have enough research time? — has been replaced with speculation about why and how Cenami might have retold the Castruccio story to his own benefit, and about how and why Machiavelli might then have revised Cenami. In this situation, where unknowns predominate, Zanobi Buondelmonti’s letter acknowledging receipt of the vita (6 September 1520) remains an important witness. Buondelmonti describes the responses of the sophisticated first readers, who almost certainly knew the content of the Prince and the Discourses. They knew the same ancient history that Machiavelli knew, and possibly knew it better. They knew, too, that Machiavelli was hoping for a commission from the Medici to write a history of Florence. They had, in short, good reason to expect a historical approach to the vita. Did these first readers recognize the intrusion of non-historical material? It is hard to believe that the young Jacopo Nardi, if not other patricians in the group, were unfamiliar with the Villani chronicles or with Leonardo Bruni’s Villani-based account of Castruccio in books v–viii of the Historiarum florentinarum libri XII, even if they had not read Niccolò Tegrimi’s Latin Life.43 It is hard to believe that they did not know the legends that made Castruccio a figure of chivalric magnanimity, brimming with detti. But it is frankly impossible to believe that the Orti Oricellari group knew anything about Cenami’s descriptione — unless Machiavelli included it with the gift of the original manuscript of Castruccio or described it in the lost cover letter. 41 

Compare Green, ‘Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio’ and Macfarland, ‘Machiavelli’s Imagination of Excellent Men’. 42  Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, p. 46, plate on p. 50. On Cenami: Bausi, Machiavelli, pp. 250–51, esp. n. 16. 43  Bruni, Historiae florentini populi, trans. and ed. by Hankins. Note that after writing his ‘life’ of Castruccio, Tegrimi passed several times through Florence on ambassadorial appointments when Machiavelli headed the Second Chancery. Moreover, like Machiavelli, Tegrimi wrote a single biography, using it to win a historiography appointment.

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The manuscript Life of Castruccio circulated among the friends in three rounds. Buondelmonti and Luigi Alamanni thought that overall (generalmente) the narrative was good, but that it could be improved in places. They baulked specifically at the too lengthy and obviously borrowed list of aphorisms or detti.44 Then they identified problems of word choice, apparently still referring to those aphorisms (circha alle parole) rather than in other parts (circha all’altre parte) — all these things (tutte cose) it would be great fun to discuss face to face with Machiavelli.45 Buondelmonti also reported that Jacopo Nardi and Batista della Palla praised the account strongly (lodanlo assai), and then that Pierfrancesco Portinari and Alessandro (degli Albizi?) commended it overall (generalmente).46 But he noted as well that each reader had hesitations or misgivings (ciascuno si fermava o dubitava). These concerned language (now lingua rather than parole), narrative exposition (now historia rather than parte), and the author’s meanings (sensi) and ideas (concetti).47 All were better addressed face to face. Machiavelli could expect a long conversation. The problems Buondelmonti named were not minor. He indicated difficulties about language — which might mean word choice, phrasing, level of style, or might even be a recommendation to write in Latin. He recorded hesitations over Machiavelli’s historia, either historical content (representation of the past) or narrative exposition (the serialization of events). And he expressed disquiet about the author’s sensi and concetti, ambiguous terms that suggest major aspects of the composition — its reasonings, intentions, meanings, concepts, proposals, plans, structures. Their hopes for a critical ‘history’ disappointed, the sophisticated first readers may have searched instead, like any contemporary audience, for mimetic and encomiastic language appropriate to the vita of a prince. At this point, the borrowed aphorisms would have become conspicuous; certainly they were the safest topic to address in a letter. After all, Buondelmonti would be speaking with Machiavelli not of inaccuracies unwittingly picked up from Cenami’s descriptione, but of intentional, pervasive falsifications — things easily corrected by glancing at Villani or Bruni (texts that a prospective historian of Florence ought to know). Such things, and especially their ‘meanings’ and ‘intentions’, might indeed be better addressed face to face. 44 

Trovato in Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, p. 17, lines 7–14. Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, lines 16–17: ‘delle quali tutte cose ci riserbereno aparlare a bocha con più piacere assai’. 46  Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, lines 18–20; the main point of this sentence is to convey the men’s greetings. 47  Machiavelli, La vita di Castruccio Castracani, ed. by Brakkee, lines 21–23. 45 

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For its restricted and possibly rather puzzled first audience, Castruccio proclaimed a lesson far beyond the teaching of any exemplar in the Prince. Machiavelli did not now claim that ‘effective truth’ was the clear-eyed observer’s representation of worldly realities. Rather, he broached a point that was almost the opposite: that ‘effective truth’ was neither a property inherent in the historical actor nor the objective result of informed observation. It was rather a creative force lodged in the god-like author. On the eve of the Medici commission for the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli’s encounter with Cenami’s descriptione encouraged him to assert the author’s power to manipulate the present by means of the exemplary past. There was no need, in short, to abuse fortuna, or even to compete for her embrace. Machiavelli simply claimed her identity.

Bembo’s Life of Caterina Vigri In the period under discussion here, the Gospels, flanked by a myriad of derivative narratives both textual and pictorial, constituted the West’s most powerful biographical model of virtue.48 Our exemplar is Christ, declared Erasmus. In him the lessons for a blessed life are gathered altogether. It is him without exception whom we should imitate.49 Of course, the clarity of Erasmus’s instruction was merely apparent. Not only were there competing traditions of virtue, even within the Bible itself, but Christ’s model was itself complex — as productive of heterodoxy as orthodoxy. The saints, whose ‘lives’ also embodied at once submission and transgression, posed similar dilemmas. To preserve the utility of these seductive exemplars, theologians formulated a distinction between the imitable and admirable aspects of virtue, imitanda and admiranda. The everyday citizen of the res publica Christiana was advised, for instance, to admire and ponder Francis of Assisi’s abject poverty, mystical stigmata, and martyrological ambitions — but would do better not to imitate them.50 Thus the ubiquitous claim that saints’ lives teach imitation is not entirely true. Imitation is far too dangerous an instruction to be bandied about: virtue means strength or power; to imitate virtue means to claim a similar power, and in the case of saints, that power by definition exceeds the bounds of the natural. The 48 

Space forbids further discussion: see McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi’. 49  On Christ as exemplar, see especially Erasmus, Enchiridion, trans. by Fantuzzi, passim, but especially the ‘Sixth Rule’, pp. 84–93 (p. 84). 50  Dalarun, The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi.

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dangers of this equation impinged especially upon the practices and writings of the Renaissance mystics. Managed well, the mystics’ charisms — prophecies, visions, spiritual discernment, healings, and resurrections — could lead to canonization. The late Trecento Dominican Catherine Benincasa of Siena set the model and was followed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by many admiring and imitating Catherines, even in competing orders. But managed poorly, the same miraculous gifts could result in charges of madness and demonic possession, in humiliation and persecution. Few of the ‘other Catherines’ achieved Benincasa’s success; some, like the Ferrarese Dominican Lucia Brocadelli da Narni (1476– 1544), ended in grief.51 To write the vita of a long-dead, academically respectable philosopher for a limited and learned public was, in other words, a relatively simple exercise. An author undertaking the Life of a contemporary charismatic faced the singular challenge of representing divine omnipotence settled in a ‘vile’ subject — an ‘illiterate’ woman purposefully, symbolically, and sometimes actually hidden at the very periphery of church, state, and family networks. As in the case of the Observant Franciscan nun Illuminata Bembo (c. 1410– 93) and her subject, Caterina Vigri da Bologna (1413–63; can. 1712), the charismatic’s earliest biographer was usually a confessor or companion assigned precisely in expectation of a fulsome, reliable, eyewitness vita.52 Bembo had known her consorella for perhaps forty years. She drew on Vigri’s writings — including songs of praise (laude), breviary marginalia, and a didactic treatise on the Seven Spiritual Weapons — but mostly Bembo relied on her own recollections of Vigri’s life. In Bembo’s hands, Vigri is an exemplar and has much to teach, but she is not imitable. The punning title of Bembo’s narrative — Specchio di Illuminazione — makes the point. Vigri is a mirror into which Illuminata gazes for enlightenment, inviting readers to gaze as well. Gazing ignites the observer’s will, for by seeing Vigri ‘with bodily eyes’ (‘cum li ochi corporali’) the reader perceives God’s power ‘with intellectual eyes’ (‘cum li ochi intellectuali’).53 But the sight is daunting. Illuminata casts the historical, recollected, and narrated Vigri as ‘a deep abyss full of charity’. She is an exemplar of ‘the best humility’ in dress, speech, and work; she becomes a ‘chalice of holy obedience’ in surrendering her will to superiors female and male; she lives a chastity so complete that — out of reverence for 51 

Matter, ‘Lucia Brocadelli: Seven Revelations’, pp. 212–34, with further bibliography; and Herzig, Savonarola’s Women, pp. 97–127. 52  See note 14 above. Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, chap. 5; Martinelli, Il processo di canoni­ z­zazione di Caterina Vigri. 53  Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, paragraph 8, mixing chivalric, martial, and martyro­ logical language.

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Mary’s nursing Christ — she has never seen her own breasts.54 These graces may be imitable, but they culminate in admirable and potentially dangerous charisms: perfect prayer, spiritual discernment, miracles, visions, and prophecies.55 It is true that Vigri is a pragmatic mystic, favouring simple instructional lists and providing clear notice of her shortcomings.56 But that does not lessen her fellow-nuns’ discouragement. Bembo reports the consorelle in distress at their inability to imitate Vigri’s grace: ‘O, if only I too could love God as you do, I would be content!’57 Bembo herself laments, cataloguing her own failings in the Specchio: a stammering tongue, spiritual smallness, blindness, tepidity and laziness, negligence, poor memory, inability to withstand the slightest difficulty, opportunism, self-delusion:58 Now, you who write, observe and consider well […] and look with the intellectual eye if you find in yourself any glimmer of what abounded in her. But look: do not fool yourself ! […] May God, if I deserve it, help me!59

The author perceives her subject’s perfections with Neoplatonic clarity, but she cannot assimilate the perception. Recording Vigri’s Eucharistic bliss, visions of the Christ-child, and divine charity, Bembo admits confusione.60 The mirror function, despite its promise of clarity, is failing. She prays for ‘illumination’ simply in order to profit from the model plainly before her.61 As a connoisseur of selfabnegation (the motive trope of women’s rhetoric in this period), Bembo echoes her subject’s stance. But simultaneously, she models the active use of the mirror, the Specchio: if Vigri cannot be imitated, Bembo certainly can. The knowledgeable convent reader makes the distinction and measures the difference between the two women, joining the dialogue of exemplarity. Following Bembo in contemplation of the mirror’s surface, the nuns achieve a depth of self-knowledge.62 54 

Mostaccio, intro. to Bembo, Specchio, pp. xlv–lix surveys the virtues. Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 2.12, 3.7, 4.9, 6.36, etc., and on prayer, esp. chaps 5–6. 56  The lists are especially well known: Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 1.11–26 (fifteen things to do if you want to love God as Caterina does); 3.11–21 (ten things pleasing to God); 5.2–6 (five things to help you say the Office well); 6.12–18 (seven preparations for prayer). 57  Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 1.2. 58  Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, preface paras. 9 and 12; 1.5; 5.20; etc. 59  Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 2.29. 60  E.g. Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 1.7–10 (Eucharistic mysticism). 61  Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 2.31. 62  Mostaccio, intro. to Bembo, Specchio, pp. xxviii–xliv, esp. p. xliii. 55 

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As an exemplar, Vigri functions much like a rule, for the depths of her Life reveal themselves only to the committed (thus the tendency of casual readers to find this and similar texts repetitive and obvious). In this case, a historical rule is at issue: the one composed by St Clare of Assisi (1193–1253) and ‘rediscovered’ by fifteenth-century Observant reformers such as Caterina Vigri.63 Clare appears twice as a founding exemplar in Bembo’s Specchio.64 In Vigri’s own Sette Armi, Clare’s ‘Rule’ is named once but no references to Clare’s life appear.65 Instead, Vigri foregrounds Francis of Assisi to urge imitable virtues associated with humility, such as the need for suffering and for denial of one’s own will. 66 Masculine exemplarity reappears as a powerful typological key when Vigri draws a parallel between founder Christ and follower Paul, and founder Francis of Assisi and follower Bernardino of Siena. Vigri does not explicitly place herself into this typological lineup, but her early convent readers needed no prompting to identify similarly linking pairs Francis and Clare or Clare and Caterina. Bembo’s Specchio daringly implies yet another pair: foundress Caterina and follower Illuminata. The complex portrait of the saint, her author, and her consorelle in Bembo’s Specchio was recognized with a courtly flourish by the saint’s second biographer, Bolognese humanist Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (c. 1445–1510).67 His vernacular vita, placed in the collection Gynevera de le clare donne, offered a more traditional depiction of her sanctity, suited to readers outside the convent community (shortly afterwards, humanist schoolteacher Giovanni Antonio Flamini would formalize a still more traditional Latin vita).68 Arienti concluded his lengthy entry with a familiar humility trope, admitting that he would need Cicero’s skills to relate the saint’s virtues. But in his final lines, Arienti proposed a most unfamiliar parallel, suggesting that Bembo was Cicero’s equal in facundia (copiousness or invention).69 Arienti may have flattered his female patron by thus acknowledging a woman author, but he also set aside the ‘ignorant and carnal little worm’ (as Bembo called herself ) to celebrate the artifex in her own 63 

Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, chap. 4. Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, 7.7 and 8.20; cf. 2.24 and 4.4. 65  Caterina de’ Vigri, Le sette armi spirituali, ed. by Degl’Innocenti, part 7. 66  E.g., Caterina de’ Vigri, Le sette armi spirituali, ed. by Degl’Innocenti, 6 and 7. See also Arthur, ‘Images of Clare and Francis’. Cf. Caterina de’ Vigri, I Sermoni, with intro. by Sgarbi, sermons 32–33 (scholars do not agree on the authenticity of the sermons attributed to Vigri). 67  Martinelli, ‘De Catherina Beata da Bologna’. 68  On Flamini (1464–1536), see Frazier, Possible Lives, ad indicem. 69  Arienti, ‘De Catherina Beata da Bologna’, pp. 244–45. 64 

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right.70 In this way too, as an author, the Venetian patrician’s daughter Illuminata Bembo became an imitable model. Her Specchio circulated widely among northern Italian convents. It entered print in the late sevententh century, when canonization proceedings for Caterina Vigri rendered it authoritative as eyewitness testimony, on a par with the physical attributes of Vigri’s corpse.71 And at that point, Bembo’s imitable exploration of admirable exemplarity in the metaphor of the specchio was subsumed into the category of the historical.

Aesop’s Many ‘Lives’ Exemplarity, as the above vitae suggest, has the potential for great sophistication. Combining sensitivity to the reader’s internal dialogue with fluency in specific traditions of virtuous discourse, Ficino, Machiavelli, and Bembo offered different levels and types of moral thought for a range of audiences. Their narratives are particularly rich in two characteristic late medieval tensions: admirable and imitable virtues on the one hand, and historical and fictional representations on the other. These same tensions mark the greatest success story of Renaissance biography — the Life of the fabulist Aesop. Scholars today may dismiss the historical reality of the author Aesop, but it was mostly taken for granted right through the Renaissance. And why not? Aesop’s name appears without caveat in authoritative Greek sources, including Herodotus, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Lucian, Diodorus Siculus, and the Suda — all newly fashionable, and some newly recovered, taught, and translated in just this period.72 The popularity of the fables, moreover, made the vita a necessity: if Aesop did not exist, teachers would have had to invent him.73 Medieval teachers already knew the Life of Aesop, versions of which continued to be affixed to printed editions of the verse Aesopus moralisatus (the ‘commented’ fables) into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.74 But the vita Aesopi most widely distributed in the Renaissance was the lengthy prose version that humanist 70  Quotation from Bembo, Specchio, ed. by Mostaccio, preface 2 and 5; on Bembo, see Mostaccio’s introduction. 71  Pomata, ‘Malphighi and the Holy Body’. 72  Jedrkiewicz, Sapere e paradosso nell’anticità, pp. 42–45; Vie d’Ésope, ed. by Jouanno, pp. 9–14. For a helpful, brief introduction, see Holzberg, ‘The Fabulist, the Scholars, and the Discourse’. 73  Aesop at all levels of the curriculum: Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 17, 111–12, 114–16, and 197 (without mention of the vita). 74  Gehl, A Moral Art, pp. 122–32.

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schoolteacher and translator Rinuccio da Castiglione Aretino (c. 1395–c. 1456) translated into Latin from an elaboration by the Byzantine poet, translator, textual scholar, and schoolteacher Maximus Planudes (c. 1260–1310).75 Even after Aldus Manutius had produced a better translation (1505), Rinuccio’s held the field. Rinuccio’s Life of Aesop began as an elite production forwarded by educationminded cardinals and popes, but soon spilled out of that curial environment.76 Published at Milan (1474, 1476) and Rome (1475), it was expanded by Heinrich Steinhöwel for his spectacularly successful German edition of the fables (1476– 77).77 Rinuccio’s vita Aesopi then travelled on in a Middle French version by Julien Macho (1480) — itself revised into Middle English for the Caxton edition (1484), and into Dutch (1485) — and in a Castilian version for the Zaragoza edition (1489).78 Overall, the incunable fables passed through ‘a greater range of languages than […] any other author, […] even […] the Bible’, in the fifteenth century.79 The vita almost always travelled alongside them. Distrusting this Life, Martin Luther preferred to select only fables for grammar students.80 But a Lutheran version was produced by Joachim Camerarius (d. 1574), and thus the vita Aesopi came to spend time on the Index of Prohibited Books.81 The Jesuit press on Amakusa in the late sixteenth century produced a Japanese Life of ‘Aesop the European’ to accompany the translated fables (intended also, it seems, to help Jesuits learn Japanese).82 More or less simultaneously, and perhaps with similarly Janus-faced purpose, Aesop appeared in Nahuatl in Mexico City. Although the manuscript situation does not make it possible to ascertain that a vita Aesopi accompanied the fables, some version of the Life was almost certainly retold in classrooms as part of the moral lesson.83 And so for about two 75  Fryde, The Early Palaeologan Renaissance, pp. 221–22, 226–67. Planudes produced a version of the W recension; most scholarship today addresses the older and longer G recension. 76  Lockwood, ‘De Rinuccio Aretino Graecarum Litterarum Interprete’, and Lockwood, ‘In domo Rinucii’. 77  Dicke, Heinrich Steinhöwels ‘Esopus’ und seine Fortsetzer. 78  For the reception history, which included Hungarian and Icelandic versions, see Dicke, Heinrich Steinhöwels ‘Esopus’ und seine Fortsetzer; Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, chap. 1. 79  Davies, ‘A Tale of Two Aesops’, p. 258 n. 8. 80  Luther, Briefe und Aesop-Fabeln, ed. by Schulze and Simon. 81  Carnes, ‘Fable in the Service of the Reformation’. 82  Carnes, ‘Esopo no fabulas’, p. 101. 83  Aesop, Aesop in Mexico; I thank Prof. Gordon Brotherson for advice on the Nahuatl manu­script situation.

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centuries the Life of Aesop was a deeply rooted memory for almost every educated person in the European world. That force stayed intact until well past the period under consideration here. Only in the seventeenth century, as Jean de La Fontaine devised his own Life of Aesop to preface his edition of the fables dedicated to the six-year-old son of Louis XIV (1668), as Richard Bentley established a new critical approach to the fables and their author (1697), and as Giambattista Vico deduced Aesop’s mythological status (1710), did the situation change.84 Rinuccio’s was not a critical vita and the derived vernacular accounts were even less so. But the importance of Aesop’s Life lay elsewhere.85 The medieval accessus had established the fabulist’s moral authority as a freedman of outstanding wit, zealous constancy, and reliable creativity — despite his breathtaking ugliness.86 Rinuccio’s narrative familiarized readers with his picaresque complexity: a pagan, a black African slave, a near-mute until an act of kindness won him a miraculously ready tongue, and a relentless trickster in word and sometimes lewd deed. After winning freedom from his stolid philosopher-owner, Aesop pursued courtly success, based on his dangerously frank speech; that led finally to his unjust and violent death at the hands of the citizens of Delphi (in some versions, filled with remorse, they erected a golden statue in his honour).87 Just what were Europe’s global children to learn from this ambivalent exemplar? Scholars today draw analogies between the life of Aesop and the representation of Jesus in the Gospels — they are seeking to understand the origins of the Gospel genre.88 That was not, of course, the question facing Renaissance readers. Yet the analogy of Aesop and Christ may have occurred to them, too. It is hard, today, to look at the frontispiece that accompanies several early editions, where Aesop stands surrounded by iconic objects depicting the stations of his vita and cues to the fabulae, without thinking of representations of Christ surrounded by the arma Christi, the instruments of his Passion.89 Both men embraced poverty; both were masters of the veiled utterance, didactic and discomfitting; both suf84 

Smith, ‘Aesop, a Decayed Celebrity’. See also Patterson, Fables of Power, chap. 1. There is room here only to suggest how the vita Aesopi might link to arguments advanced in Zafiropoulos, Ethics in Aesop’s Fables. 86  Aesop, Esopus cum commento optimo et morali, sign. A2r (EEBO). 87  On Aesop as pharmakos or ritually killed word-artist, see Compton, Victim of the Muses, chaps 2 and 15. 88  E.g. Pervo, ‘A Nihilist Fabula’. 89  On the frontispiece: Boivin, ‘La Vie d’Esope’, p. 84; a reproduction in Davies, ‘A Tale of Two Aesops’, fig. 3. 85 

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fered attacks from those whom their speech and example threatened; both were wrongfully put to death; both left biographical examples attached to widespread educational practices. Did teachers draw out the similarities? Did children play at being Aesop as young St Athanasius played at being a bishop and young St Teresa played at being a martyr? Did the perception of the author as a powerful social figure change, as a result of this childhood familiarity? The internal dialogue of virtue ethics was in any event actively solicited by the exemplar’s ambiguities and mixed messages, even in situations — among children, among non-Europeans — where the virtues on offer must have been bewildering. Ficino’s Plato, Machiavelli’s Castruccio, even Bembo’s Caterina are relatively well-known accounts today, deployed in classrooms to anchor certain kinds of arguments about the Renaissance. They signal, respectively, the recovery and dissemination of Greek philosophy as a signal western achievement; the statement of political realism at the dawn of the European nation-state; and the subversive potential of gender in dialogue with religion, a theme that would continue into the Counter-Reformation. Aesop as pagan philosopher, slave trickster, courtly advisor, and martyred sage engages the virtues that define each of those exemplaristic traditions. From earliest schooldays, training in ethics might begin with biography.

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Works Cited Manuscripts Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 5953

Primary Sources Aesop, Aesop in Mexico: Die Fabeln des Aesop in aztekisher Sprache, ed. by Gordon Brother­ son and Günter Vollmer (Berlin: Mann, 1987) —— , Esopus cum commento optimo et morali (London: Pinson, 1502) Arienti, Giovanni Sabadino degli, ‘De Catherina Beata da Bologna’, in Arienti, Gynevera de le clare donne, ed. by Corrado Ricci and Alberto Bacchi della Lega (Bologna: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1888), pp. 204–45 Bembo, Illuminata, Specchio di Illuminazione, ed. and intro. by Silvia Mostaccio (Florence: SISMEL-Galluzzo, 2001) Bruni, Leonardo, Historiae florentini populi, trans. and ed. by James Hankins, I Tatti Re­ naissance Library, 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) Caterina de’  Vigri (of Bologna), I Sermoni, with intro. and commentary by Gilberto Sgarbi (Bologna: Barghigiani, 1999) —— , Le sette armi spirituali, ed. and intro. by Antonella Degl’Innocenti (Florence: SISMEL-Galluzzo, 2000) Erasmus, Desiderius, Enchiridion, trans. and annot. by Charles Fantuzzi, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. by John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), viii: Spiritualia , pp. 1–128 Ficino, Marsilio, Letters of Marsilio Ficino, ed. by members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London, 14 vols (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975–2009) —— , Opera omnia (Basel, 1576; facsimile repr. Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962) —— , The Philebus Commentary, ed. and trans. by Michael J. B. Allen, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 226 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; repr. Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000) Luther, Martin, Briefe und Aesop-Fabeln, ed. by Manfred Schulze and Walter Simon, 2 vols (Zürich: Belser, 1983) Machiavelli, Niccolò, Machiavelli and his Friends, trans. and ed. by James Atkinson and David Sice (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996) —— , La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca, ed. by Riekie Brakkee, Letterature, 13 (Napoli: Liguori, 1986) Pincelli, Maria Agata, Antonio Brenta: In principio lectionis Aristophanis praeludia. La prolusione al corso su Aristofane (Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1993) Vie d’Ésope: Livre du philosophe Xanthos et de son esclave Esope, ed. by Corinne Jouanno (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2006)

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Secondary Studies Allen, Michael J. B., ‘Ficino’s Lecture on the Good’, Renaissance Quarterly, 30 (1977), 160–71 Arthur, K. G., ‘Images of Clare and Francis in Caterina Vigri’s Personal Breviary’, Fran­cis­ can Studies, 62 (2004), 179–92 Bausi, Francesco, Machiavelli, Sestante, 9 (Roma: Salerno, 2005) Bejczy, István P., ed., Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s ‘Nico­ machean Ethics’ 1200–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) Berschin, Walter, ‘Biography’, in Medieval Latin, ed. by Frank A. C. Mantello and George Rigg (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1996), pp. 607–17 Bilinkoff, Jodi, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) Boivin, Jeanne-Marie, ‘La Vie d’Esope: un prologue original du recueil de fables de Julien Macho’, Reinardus, 14 (2001), 69–87 Burckhardt, Jacob, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860) Burke, Peter, ‘Individuality and Biography in the Renaissance’, in Die Renaissance als erste Aufklärung, ed. by Enno Rudolph, 3 vols (Tübingen: Siebeck, 1998), ii: Die Renaissance und die Entdeckung des Individuums in der Kunst, pp. 65–78 Campanelli, Maurizio, ‘L’Oratio e il “genere” delle orazioni inaugurali dell’anno acca­ de­mico’, in Lorenzo Valla, Orazione per l’inaugurazione dell’anno accademico 1455– 1456: Atti di un seminario di filologia umanistica, ed. by Silvia Rizzo (Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1994), pp. 25–61 Carnes, Pack, ‘Esopo no fabulas: More Notes on Aesop in Sixteenth-Century Japan’, Reinardus, 14 (2001), 99–113 —— , ‘The Fable in the Service of the Reformation’, Renaissance and Reformation / Re­naissance et Réforme, 20 (n.s., 8) (1984), 176–89 Coakley, John W., Men, Women, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) Compton, Todd, Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006) Dalarun, Jacques, The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi: Toward a Historical Use of the Franciscan Legends, trans. by Edward Hagman (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2002) (first publ.in Italian, Milano: Biblioteca Francescana, 1996) Davies, Martin, ‘A Tale of Two Aesops’, The Library, 7 (2006), 257–88 Dicke, Gerd, Heinrich Steinhöwels ‘Esopus’ und seine Fortsetzer: Untersuchungen zu einem Bucherfolg der Frühdruckzeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1994) Duff, Timothy E., Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia, Le Siècle des grands hommes: les recueils des Vies d’hommes illustres avec portraits du xvième siècle (Leuven: Peeters, 2001)

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Enenkel, Karl, ‘In Search of Fame: Self-Representation in Neo-Latin Humanism’, in Medi­eval and Renaissance Humanism, ed. by Stephen Gersh and Bert Roest (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 93–104 Field, Arthur, ‘The Platonic Academy of Florence’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed. by Michael J. B. Allen, Valerie Rees, and Martin Davies (New York: Brill, 2002), pp. 359–76 Frazier, Alison Knowles, Possible Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) Fryde, Edward, The Early Palaeologan Renaissance (1261–c.1360) (Leiden: Brill, 2000) Gehl, Paul, Humanism for Sale [accessed 22 November 2009] —— , A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) Gill, Christopher, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) Godman, Peter, From Poliziano to Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) Green, Louis, ‘Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio and its Lucchese Model’, Italian Studies, 42 (1987), 37–55 Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) Guglielminetti, Mario, ‘Biografia ed autobiografia’, in Letteratura italiana, ed. by Asor Rosa, 5 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1982), v: Le questioni, pp. 829–86 Hampton, Timothy, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) Herzig, Tamar, Savonarola’s Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Holzberg, Nicholas, ‘The Fabulist, the Scholars, and the Discourse’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 6 (1999), 236–42 Hursthouse, Rosalind, ‘Virtue Ethics’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [accessed 19 November 2009] IJsewijn, Josef, ‘Die humanistische Biographie’, in Biographie und Autobiographie in der Renaissance, ed. by August Buck (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983), pp. 1–19 Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, British Library [accessed 21 April 2013] Jedrkiewicz, Stefano, Sapere e paradosso nell’anticità: Esopo e la favola (Roma: Ateneo, 1989) Knox, Lezlie, Creating Clare of Assisi: Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medieval Italy (New York: Brill, 2008) Kristeller, Paul O., ‘Marsilio Ficino and the Roman Curia’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 34A (1984), 83–98 —— , Supplementum Ficinianum, 2 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1937) Lackner, Donald F., ‘The Camaldolese Academy: Ambrogio Traversari, Marsilio Ficino, and the Christian Platonic Tradition’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed. by Michael J. B. Allen, Valerie Rees, and Martin Davies (New York: Brill, 2002), pp. 15–44

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Levi, Anthony, ‘Ficino, Augustine, and the Pagans’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philo­sophy, his Legacy, ed. by Michael J. B. Allen, Valerie Rees, and Martin Davies (New York: Brill, 2002), pp. 99–113 Lockwood, Dean, ‘De Rinuccio Aretino Graecarum Litterarum Interprete’, Harvard Stud­ies in Classical Philology, 24 (1913), 51–109 —— , ‘In domo Rinucii’, in Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Edward Kennard Rand, ed. by Leslie Webber Jones (New York: self-published, 1938; repr. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), pp. 177–90 MacDonald, Katharine, Biography in Early Modern France, 1540–1630: Forms and Functions (London: Legenda, 2007) Macfarland, James C., ‘Machiavelli’s Imagination of Excellent Men: An Appraisal of the Lives of Cosimo de’ Medici and Castruccio Castracani’, American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), 133–46 Mahoney, Edward P., ‘Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Platonism’, in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance, ed. by Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 231–44 Martinelli, Serena Spanò, ‘De Catherina Beata da Bologna di Sabadino degli Arienti (1472)’, Hagiographica, 14 (2007), 231–41 —— , ed., Il processo di canonizzazione di Caterina Vigri (1586–1712) (Firenze: SISMEL, 2003) Matter, E. Ann, ‘Lucia Brocadelli: Seven Revelations’, in Dominican Penitent Women, ed. and trans. by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, Daniel E. Bornstein, and E. Ann Matter (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), pp. 212–34 Mayer, Thomas F., and Diane R. Woolf, eds, The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) McManamon, John, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Humanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989) McNamer, Sarah, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi’, Speculum, 84 (2009), 905–56 Miglio, Massimo, ‘Biografie e raccolte biografiche nel Quattrocento italiano’, in Acta conventus neo-latini Amstelodamensis, ed. by Pierre Tuynman (München: Fink, 1979), pp. 775–85 Monfasani, John, ‘Marsilio Ficino and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed. by Michael J. B. Allen, Valerie Rees, and Martin Davies (New York: Brill, 2002), pp. 179–202 Monk, Ray, ‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Under­ standing’, Poetics Today, 28 (2007), 527–70 Moore, Cornelia, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Sermon in Early Modern Ger­ many (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006) Müllner, Karl, ed., Reden und Briefe italienischer Humanisten (Wien: Hölder, 1899; repr. München: Fink, 1970)

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Nelles, Paul, ‘Historia magistra antiquitatis: Cicero and Jesuit History Teaching’, Renais­ sance Studies, 13 (1999), 130–72 Osmond, Patricia, ‘In the Margins of Sallust, Part iii: Pomponio Leto’s Notes on ars historica’, in Antiquaria a Roma: intorno a Pomponio Leto e Paolo II, ed. by Giuseppe Lombardi (Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2003), pp. 35–50 Pade, Marianne, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2 vols (Køben­ havn: Museum Tusculanum, 2007) Patterson, Annabel, Fables of Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) Pelling, Christopher, ‘The Moralism of Plutarch’s Lives’, in Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-fifth Birthday, ed. by David Innes, Harry Hine, and Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 205–20 Pervo, Ronald I., ‘A Nihilist Fabula: Introducing The Life of Aesop’, in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. by Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, and Judith Perkins (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), pp. 77–120 Petoletti, Marco, ‘Les Recueils De viris illustribus en Italie (xive–xve siècles)’, in Exempla docent: Les exemples des philosophes de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, ed. by Thomas Ricklin (Paris: Vrin, 2006), pp. 335–54 Pomata, Giana, ‘Malphighi and the Holy Body: Medical Experts and Miraculous Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance Studies, 21 (2007), 568–86 Rave, Paul Ortwin, ‘Paolo Giovio und die Bildnisvitenbücher des Humanismus’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 1 (1959), 119–54 Ruiz Arzálluz, Iñigo, Francesco Petrarca: La Vita Terrentii de Petrarca (Padova: Antenore, 2010) Santinello, Giovanni, and others, eds, Models of the History of Philosophy (Leuven: Kluwer, 1993) Slade, Carol, Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) Smith, Mahlon Ellwood, ‘Aesop, a Decayed Celebrity’, PMLA, 46 (1931), 225–36 Stierle, Karlheinz, ‘Three Moments in the Crisis of Exemplarity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), 581–95 Struever, Nancy, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1992) Weiss, James M., ‘Friendship and Rhetoric’, in James M. Weiss, Biography in Renaissance and Reformation Germany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), item i —— , ‘Johannes Fichardus and Humanistic Biography’, in Acta conventus neo-latini Turonensis, ed. by Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Vrin, 1980), pp. 263–75 —— , ‘The Six Lives of Rudolph Agricola: Forms and Functions of the Humanist Bio­ graphy’, Humanistica lovaniensia, 30 (1981), 19–39 —— , ‘Varieties of Biography during the Italian Renaissance: Individuality and Beyond’, in Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, ed. by Penny Schine Gold and Benjamin C. Sax (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 25–40 Wheatley, Edward, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer and his Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000)

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Wilson, Bronwyn, ‘Reproducing the Individual: Likeness and History in Printed Portrait Books’, in The World in Venice, ed. by Wilson Bronwen (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005), pp. 186–255 Zafiropoulos, Christos, Ethics in Aesop’s Fables (Leiden: Brill, 2001)

Part III Themes

Happiness Antonino Poppi*

M

uch like virtue, friendship, and justice, happiness constituted a fundamental building block of the ancients’ theories of ethics. But happiness uniquely brought together human action and man’s ultimate purpose, resulting in completeness and self-sufficiency. The Greeks called happiness eudaimonia, a term which indicates the fortunate condition of someone who is fully satisfied and fulfilled in his inclinations and aspirations, whether these be physical or spiritual. There was unanimous consensus in defining happiness as the greatest good in life, universally and instinctively sought in and for itself by every living creature. But when it came to determining its content or which gifts could fully satisfy the human heart, agreement was much harder. Different schools of moral thought therefore affirmed themselves in Antiquity, almost all of them simultaneously deriving and distancing themselves from that of Socrates; the main strands included the Cyrenaic, the Epicurean, the Platonic-Aristotelian, the Stoic, and the Sceptical, each with its own vision of human life and of the good which could render life happy.1

*  Translated from the Italian by David Lines and Simon Gilson. 1 

Annas, La morale della felicità, pp. 17–42, 451–57, and passim.

Antonino Poppi ([email protected]) is Professor Emeritus of Moral Philosophy at the University of Padua. His publications include Studi sull’etica della prima Scuola francescana (Padova: Centro Studi Antoniani, 1996), L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: La Città del Sole, 1997), Introduzione all’aristotelismo padovano (Padova: Antenore, 2nd ed., 1991), La filosofia nello Studio francescano del Santo (Padova: Centro Studi Antoniani, 1989), and Ricerche sulla teologia e la scienza nella Scuola padovana del Cinque e Seicento (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001).

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Happiness in Antiquity and the Middle Ages Greek tragedies and sacred mysteries both underlined the inconsistency and fragility of human life, dominated by misfortune and chance (tychē) to such a degree that people wished never to have been born and to leave this life as soon as possible. By contrast, the reflections of the ancient philosophers defended the possibility of a happy life through the acquisition of knowledge and virtue; through these and a focus on interiority, people could become stable and autonomous, capable of resisting the blows of fortune and the fluctuations of worldly life. Among the ancients, only the Cyrenaics extolled the maximization of momentary and unbridled pleasure. The other philosophical schools rejected this position and fused together pleasure, virtue, and rationality, typically privileging one of these components. In the Hellenistic era these philosophical schools fought for spiritual pre-eminence. They identified philosophy simply with the search for the meaning of life and for individual happiness in internal solitude, and they reached great heights of ethical-theoretical knowledge in Plotinus. St Augustine himself, once he had refuted the internal contradictions of the Academics’ scepticism, declared that if there was a reason for philosophizing, it could only be the search for man’s beatitude, that is to say for his happiness.2 The obviously elitist result of such an intense and secular meditation could satisfy only a few figures, distinguished by their nobility of soul and thoughtfulness. Its price was the disavowal of various fundamental human needs and conditions (including suffering and evil) which are intextricably linked with the contingency of history, of human freedom, and of nature itself. For all practical purposes the happiness of the ancients, limited to the sphere of individual earthly experience, remained a distant dream, focused on strenuous efforts to achieve rest and imperturbability (ataraxia). The goal itself, with all of its heroic appeal and counter-intuitiveness, was constantly being disproved by human experience and yet was constantly reaffirmed in the name of an (inflexible) ideological position.3

2 

Cf. St Augustine, De civitate Dei, xix. 1; De Luise and Farinetti, Storia della felicità; White, Brief History of Happiness. 3  Augustine asked himself, how is it possible to argue that a man is happy because he patiently accepts his unhappiness? Which happiness can guarantee the contemplative act of an absolute abstract continuously interrupted by daily affairs and threatened by the fading of the primary goods of life? (cf. De civitate Dei, xiv. 5, xix. 4–5).

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Such a partial and precarious happiness called for new perspectives on man’s ultimate end and highest good. As the Gospel broke into the hearts and minds of pagans who had been converted to the teachings of Christ, a new era began, bringing about a progressive and wholesale transformation of ancient culture and a new Christian understanding of God, the world, and human beings, called to an intimate communion and personal enjoyment of God’s eternal love. In this new vision, everyone’s life is a journey towards heaven, the only true homeland. Man’s permanent restlessness and his heart’s irrepressible yearning for an absolute and infinite good point to and invoke a happiness which is both transcendent and supernatural. Illuminated by these truths of the new faith, the Church Fathers did not adopt (nor, however, refute en bloc) the moral doctrines of the ancient philosophers; instead they began a delicate work of critical discernment, which was then continued by the Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages. The works of Thomas Aquinas form the best synthesis of the conclusions of philosophical reason and Christian revelation concerning the supreme good and human happiness, from the patristic legacy to the scholasticism of the mid-thirteenth century. Thomas’s powerful systematization was the result of a successful marriage of an attentive understanding of the classical sources with the truths of faith. In Thomas’s Summa theologiae, Aristotle’s eudaimonia finds its fulfilment in beatitudo, understood as the union of man with God. For it is God himself who is the ultimate good and the supreme end of every being and of every action that takes place in the universe. Following St Augustine, Thomas clearly demonstrates that the transcendental yearning of man’s intelligence and will for the infinite cannot be satisfied by any finite good immanent in history, but only by the rapturous enjoyment of a transcendent and infinite good, namely God himself.4 These doctrines, which fully informed the Middle Ages, set up an instinctive hierarchy of values, in which the pre-eminent place was given to supernatural realities. Earthly activities were, at least in principle, subordinate to these. Although it did not disregard earthly affairs, the societas christiana of these centuries was therefore oriented towards a monastic mentality of spiritual ascent, in which the heavenly sphere was pre-eminent. These considerations could easily lead to a position of contemptus mundi and to lament the miseria humanae conditionis, obscuring the biblical vision of the goodness of creation and of the insuperable dignity and beauty of man even in his physical dimension and in his commitment to building a harmonious human society. 4 

See Poppi, ‘Salvezza e beatitudine’, pp. 265–304; Lauster, Dio e la felicità.

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The Novelty of Humanism This patristic-medieval tradition was the starting point for Renaissance reflections on the supreme good and human happiness. At the same time, there was a lively dialectic of continuity and innovation, stimulated by the enthusiastic rediscovery of classical sources which had been generally ignored or had been only faintly influential in the Middle Ages. Although humanism and scholasticism hardly represented a radical clash between barbarity and the rise of civilization, it is nonetheless true that a new understanding of man, as well as of his achievements and destiny, was now developing. As they immersed themselves in the texts of the ancients, the humanists gained a new sensitivity to the existential problems of life and death, of freedom and responsibility, of work and wealth, of family life and political involvement, of the value of word and speech in public life. These matters had been almost wholly absent from the highly abstract, logical, and systematic thinking of the scholastics. Crucial factors included the humanists’ direct contact with the classics, the rise of new political institutions (such as the signorie), and the explosion of artistic, literary, and religious experiences so different from those of the medieval period. All of these induced the humanists to reclaim the autonomous value of earthly realities and human agency, which were no longer seen as dangerous (i.e. as potentially leading one away from the supernatural goal of life). Rather, they were reassessed as sources of a simple joie de vivre which — however relative and imperfect — cried out to find its fulfilment in heavenly beatitude. None of the humanists, in fact, endorsed the Epicurean view of pleasure as the ultimate end tout court, nor for that matter the Stoic ideal (almost one of martyrdom) which involved embracing virtue for itself alone. Their preference fell between these two extremes, resting either on the Platonic ideal of disembodied contemplation or on Aristotle’s more realistic eudaimonism, both of which are discussed fully below. Ultimately, however, humanists resolved the problem of happiness (which had once again come to the fore, with the same urgency as it had held in the ancient world) by approaching it through the lense of Christian faith, which provided the only valid answer to human questions. These ‘new men’ may have been captivated by the strength and splendour of classical culture, but they could hardly dismiss over a millennium of Christian civilization, as if no radical upheaval (i.e. the coming of Christ) had occurred since the times of ancient Greece and imperial Rome. A striking example of the new Renaissance view of man as a unity of body and spirit, as a combination of earthly impulses and the hope of future transfiguration, is Giannozzo Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (1451/52). This

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work, which explicitly contradicts the theme of the ‘misery of the human condition’ described by Pope Innocent III, reflects a new climate of opinion shared also by Matteo Palmieri’s Della vita civile (c. 1434–36) and by his contemporary Leonardo Bruni’s biographies, dialogues, and translations from the Greek. Indeed, nearly all Renaissance thinkers try to reconcile pagan and Christian values; on occasion a few might affirm that the ethics of a certain ancient school cannot be improved upon by human reason, but they then explicitly assign a greater validity to the affirmations of the Christian faith.5

Happiness in Pleasure This approach can be seen in the way in which humanists reproposed ancient theories of happiness.6 We start with Epicurean ethics, which — even chronologically — is the furthest away from the evangelical viewpoint and which placed man’s supreme good in pleasure (hēdonē). This view, as well as Epicurus’s personality, had already been subjected in pagan antiquity to ferocious attacks, which conveniently misrepresented various aspects of his doctrine and engaged in a vicious damnatio memoriae. The followers of Epicurus had been described as unworthy of the title of humans, since they were closer, in fact, to being pigs. The Church Fathers, unaware of Epicurus’s ascetic views and personal approach to pleasure, confused Epicurean hedonism with that of Aristippus. Petrarch instead, in the light of various Epicurean views transmitted by Seneca, began to defend the ancient philosopher against these accusations; indeed, he felt him in some respects quite close to his own moral vision. But it was especially after the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (1417) and the translation of Book x of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (1420) that views began to change.7

5  See Garin, ‘Introduzione’; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp.  301–16; and the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in the present volume, which also addresses the various Renaissance combinations of the strands of thought discussed below. 6  On several of the figures discussed below, now see Ebbersmeyer, Homo agens, as well as her essay in this volume. 7  For further comments on the reception of Epicureanism, see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume.

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Cosma Raimondi Cosma Raimondi’s letter in defence of Epicurus (c. 1429) maintains that the only philosophical position truly compatible with human nature is one which sees the supreme good as the unitary pleasure of body and soul. After all, we have been formed by nature in such a way that nothing suits us better than to remain physically and spiritually healthy, unaffected by any physical or spiritual evil. Raimondi therefore exclaims, ‘How wise [Epicurus] was! What more can be said on the matter? What else can happiness consist of ? A man whose soul is in turmoil cannot be happy, no more than someone whose body is in pain can fail to be miserable.’8 Raimondi observes that all human senses and faculties are obviously preordained to pleasure. Our eyes allow us to enjoy beautiful objects, our ears to take in the sweetness of songs and sound, and the same is true of the other senses. Even knowledge of the highest truths brings with it great joy, but when the Peripatetics place happiness only in disembodied contemplation they err because they overlook the connection between the joys of contemplation and the pleasures tied to the body and to external goods. Furthermore, if we also consider all the other activities (e.g. artistic, literary, military) which we anxiously pursue night and day, we shall see that everything takes place with a view to gaining pleasure or in the hope of greater enjoyment. As for virtue itself, which tells us which pleasures we should seek and which ones we should avoid, why should it be so esteemed and desired if it does not have in view a pleasurable life? So Epicurus was right to consider pleasure the highest good, since we are moulded for it; and if we consider the numerous and abundant goods that nature has produced for man, we can hardly doubt that ‘the highest felicity is found in pleasure’.9 Raimondi thus disagrees completely with the Stoics, who place happiness in virtue itself and argue that the wise man is even happy when his body is racked by unspeakable pain; in his opinion there is nothing more absurd or foolish than declaring someone to be happy just because his soul is virtuous, while his body is tormented. Since people are made up of two parts, happiness cannot be truly experienced unless both the body and the soul enjoy the goods necessary for their perfection and completeness. The Stoics’ defence of such an unnatural compart8 

See the Latin–Italian text of ‘Cosmae Raimondi Cremonensis ad Ambrogium Tignosium quod recte Epicurus summum bonum in voluptate constituerit maleque de ea re Academici, Stoici, Peripatetici senserint’, in Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 134–49 (p. 136); and Raimondi, ‘A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi’, trans. by Davies, p. 239. 9  Raimondi, ‘A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi’, trans. by Davies, p. 242.

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mentalization of the individual is a sign of inhuman austerity and a lack of sensitivity. Raimondi therefore often refers to them as ‘lunatics’ (furiosi), whereas the Academicians who do not recognize that anything can be certain he labels ‘sick’ (insani). One should not believe, however, that in considering pleasure the highest good Epicurus wished to authorize licentiousness; rather, he too considered virtue as indispensable to his teaching, since virtue guides the bodily senses to enjoy pleasure at the appropriate time and within the appropriate limits.10 During this forceful affirmation of the Epicurean view that pleasure is completely natural and central to the end of human life, Raimondi warns, ‘I wish it to be understood that I am not now considering that absolute and true philosophy which we call theology. This entire enquiry concerns the human good of mankind and the various competing views of ancient philosophers on the matter.’ 11 Likewise Raimondi does not wish to discuss whether Epicurus’s opinions may be in contrast with the Christian vision of life; the problem is, for him, simply a philosophical one, that of defining the most realistic and rational position concerning mankind’s end and ultimate happiness. In a contemporary letter to a Benedictine monk, Francesco Filelfo instead not only rehabilitates Epicurus (whom he describes as ‘temperant, learned, and serious’), but explicitly argues that ‘an honest pleasure is not actually much inferior, if we think about it, to true Christian enjoyment’, inasmuch as hēdonē belongs both to the body and the soul and is nothing untoward when reason keeps it within bounds. After all, the highest and most praiseworthy pleasure is found in the contemplation of divine truths through wisdom, and in right action as this is sustained by the moral virtues and directed by prudence.12 Lorenzo Valla In Raimondi’s writings, the Epicurean view of pleasure receives an evident Christian twist which considerably distances it from its original roots. It is very much in this sense that Lorenzo Valla reinterprets it two years later in his celebrated dialogue first bearing the significant title De voluptate (1431), and pub10 

See Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 146–49, and critical documentation in Annas, La morale della felicità, chap. XVI (‘Epicuro: virtù, piacere e tempo’), pp. 459–80. 11  Raimondi, ‘A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi’, trans. by Davies, p.  239; Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, p. 136. 12  See ‘Franciscus Philelphus Bartholomaeo Fracanzano’, in Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 150–61.

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lished a couple of years later in Pavia as De vero falsoque bono (1433). In this work the scintillating discussion between Bruni and Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli), so full of allusions to the classical world, serves to prove, on the basis of both philology and human experience, the inadequacy of the Stoic view of virtue.13 Rather, goodness (honestas) is understood as a mere utilitarian calculation, according to established Epicurean notions — after all, everything in nature is ordered for the attainment of pleasure, and any pleasure whatsoever is good for man (‘omnis voluptas bona est’). As for the Aristotelians’ commonly accepted view that contemplation is the pinnacle of a happy life, Valla replies that there is no difference between the philosopher’s joy in contemplating the heavens and that of humble women or children who ecstatically gape at market stalls or go to theatre-shows or games. In any case, Aristotle’s observation that the gods’ activity of contemplation proves its excellence sounds very much like blasphemy, since contemplation is nothing other than a process of growing understanding through reflection — something which, obviously, does not become divinity.14 It falls to the third member of the conversation, Niccolò Niccoli, to draw together the threads of the debate by arguing that loving God is the only true form of goodness (honestas). As he notes, this goodness is not an end in itself as the Stoics claimed, but rather a step towards communion with God. Furthermore, voluptas may be identified with Christian beatitude, as can be seen from the numerous passages in Scripture where the righteous are promised that they will ‘drink from the river of [God’s] pleasures’ (Psalm 36. 9): as Niccoli says, ‘This indicates that pleasure (not goodness) should be sought for itself both by those who wish to be delighted in this life and by those who wish to do so in the life to come.’15 But Valla explicitly clarifies his thinking about this new, alternative model of Christian happiness by warning that our earthly happiness must always be subordinate to the happiness we shall enjoy one day in heaven. Indeed, at times we shall need to renounce and sacrifice earthly happiness as something uncertain 13 

‘Ex quo plane constat honestatem vocabulum quoddam esse inane et futile, nihil expediens, nihil probans et propter quod nihil agendum est! Nec propter honestatem ii qui nominati sunt aliquid egerunt […] ostendendum est eos de quibus mentio habetur nullam honestatis, omnem utilitatis habuisse rationem, ad quam omnia referenda sunt’: Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. by Lorch, ii. XV. 2–3 (p. 62); in this edition the interlocutors are changed to Catone Sacco, Maffeo Vegio, and Antonio da Rho. 14  Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. by Lorch, ii. XXVIII. 6–9 (pp. 76–77). 15  ‘[…] ex quo debet intelligi non honestatem sed voluptatem propter se ipsam esse expetendam tam ab iis qui in hac vita quam ab iis qui in futura oblectari volunt’: Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. by Lorch, iii. IX. 3 (p. 110).

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and deceptive compared with the firm and eternal happiness reserved for those who live in joyful expectation.16 This kind of conclusion matches only superficially, however, with that of the founder of the ‘Garden’, inasmuch as the anthropology and theodicy on which it is based presuppose not only a sharp division between body and soul, but also the immortality of the soul and the existence of a God who orders nature and rewards virtue. All of these assumptions are completely alien to Epicurean thought. Later Reactions In the later Renaissance these early humanist attempts to Christianize Epicurus’s ethics and theology reverberated throughout Europe,17 leading to a more critical approach to the defamatory accusations spread in antiquity on his character and teaching. A significant example is Francisco de Quevedo’s learned Defensa de Epicuro contro la común opinión (1635), which treats Epicurus as broadly useful in Christian teaching, including on points such as the immortality of the soul and divine providence.18 The humanists’ reappraisal of Epicurean naturalism, however, probably attained its most complete theoretical expression in two works by Pierre Gassendi (De vita et moribus et placitis Epicuri, and Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, both 1649). In these works the French thinker, following in the footsteps of Epicurus, sets against the Platonic-Aristotelian summa a new synthesis of thought. At the same time, Gassendi too gives Epicurus’s endorsement of voluptas a Christian orientation towards supreme (i.e. heavenly) bliss, which is reached through the exercise of virtue. Thomas Hobbes’s naturalistic hedonism, almost contemporary with that of Gassendi, is rooted instead in an emphasis on individual human passionality. Hobbes marks an irreversible turning point away 16  Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. by Lorch, iii. X–XI (pp. 110–11); he can therefore conclude: ‘Et confutavi sive damnavi utrorunque dogma epicureorum atque stoicorum docuique apud neutros atque adeo apud nullos philosophos esse vel summum vel expetendum bonum, sed potius in nostra religione consistere, non in terris assequendum sed in celis’ (iii. XV. 1 (p. 116)). 17  See, for example, Nobili, De hominis felicitate, where, despite disagreeing with Epicurus’s doctrine, in the last chapter of Book ii he identifies happiness with genuine voluptas: ‘Ea autem quam mens ex virtute agendo, aut res praestantissimas contemplando capit, vera ac germana voluptas est, ac divino illi beatarum mentium gaudio simillima’ (p. 151); he assigns to voluptas also a spiritual connotation, as fully outlined in his two subsequent books De vera et falsa voluptate. 18  See Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’. On Quevedo also see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume.

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from the classical/Christian view of happiness, since he jettisons the idea that harmony and fulfilment mark those who reach their end (telos); rather, Hobbes opens the way to a solipsistic restlessness consisting of a ceaseless struggle to lay hold of happiness. This effort’s success is only very partial and imperfect, since happiness is in fact an unattainable goal.19 Whereas, in the Catholic world, it was possible to view pleasure (which included man’s spiritual dimension) as the supreme good, in Protestant theology pleasure was regarded with diffidence if not hostility, on the basis that corrupt human nature can find its true end (i.e. happiness) only through faithful obedience and the regeneration of the Holy Spirit.20 Already in his Moralis philosophiae epitome (1537) Philipp Melanchthon repeatedly expressed his distaste for Valla’s exaltation of the false and unworthy doctrine of Epicurus against that of all other philosophers. Melanchthon offers a lengthy confutation of Epicurus’s logic in declaring that pleasure is the ultimate end of human nature. By so doing Epicurus assigns to man’s corrupt condition the status of an absolute standard. Melanchthon sees similar problems in Valla’s view that pleasure is a means by which nature seeks its own preservation, whereas virtue (as the case of Socrates testifies) results in self-destruction. Melanchthon observes that this reasoning contains a fallacia accidentis, for the death of Socrates was caused not by virtue, but by the injustice of the Athenians.21

Happiness in Virtue Contrary to Epicurean views, Stoic ethics immediately found a warm welcome in early Christianity, to the extent that many viewed the writings of Cicero and especially Seneca as inspired by the gospel of Christ. The Stoics saw virtue as the supreme good and vice as the only real evil. They felt compelled to follow nature as a manifestation of divine reason. They praised the intense self-control which 19 

See De Luise and Farinetti, Storia della felicità, chap. XV (‘Hobbes: l’ansia di felicità dell’uomo moderno’), pp. 205–18; chap. XVI (‘Il ritorno di Epicuro’), pp. 219–22. 20  See Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 314, 385; Bellucci, ‘Natural Philosophy’; Strohm, ‘Ethics in Early Calvinism’. See also the essay by Risto Saarinen in this volume. 21  ‘Quare Valla merito vituperatur a prudentibus, quod cum satis contumeliosus fuerit in caeteros philosophos omnes, uni assurgit Epicuro. Cum autem Epicuri sententia et falsa sit et indigna bonis viris, ac praecipue christianis, prorsus eam repudiandam et explodendam e scholis esse censeo’: Melanchthon, Moralis philosophiae epitome, p. 19; from ‘Quid sentiendum est de Epicuri opinione qui defendit voluptatem esse finem bonorum’ (pp. 19–26), a refutation which also appears in the first book of the 1550 Ethicae doctrinae elementa.

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extinguishes the passions. They were indifferent to external goods and to fortune. They promoted an egalitarian view of society in which every individual world citizen enjoyed equal freedom. In all of these ways, Stoic philosophy came very close to the ascetic and political ideals of late antique and medieval Christianity, a fact which contributed to its widespread admiration. In the fifteenth century an additional factor was the translation of the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (Book vii concerns the school of Zeno) and Politian’s translation of Epictetus’s Manual. But the Stoics’ fascination with an extreme and heroic dedication to duty, as well as the affinities mentioned above, could not blind Renaissance writers to the great distance between the Stoics’ immanentistic metaphysics and fatalistic anthropology and those of Christianity. For this reason their admiration of Stoic positions is nearly always tempered by deep-rooted reservations — first of all concerning virtue as the only true, self-sufficient good, equivalent to supreme happiness. A virtuous disposition, Renaissance writers argued, is only a means leading to happiness, and in any case happiness cannot be limited to the spirit but must involve even the most humble, physical aspects of human existence. For these reasons, they considered the Stoics’ indifference to earthly goods and the blows of fortune as unrealistic and illusory, leading many critics to mock their ideal of the wise man, who was supposedly happy even while being broken on the wheel. Likewise, the Stoics’ teaching on the serenity and imperturbability of the soul (apatheia) was considered both inhuman and self-contradictory, along with its corollary that the passions must be uprooted. After all, they reasoned, passions are the soil from which virtue springs.22 Coluccio Salutati expresses these very objections in his reply (21 February 1401) to Francesco Zabarella. The only, meagre consolation that Zabarella could offer the Chancellor of Florence on the occasion of his son’s death was that vice is the only true evil and that — since death comes to us all — it is useless to complain. ‘But how can one not mourn his son’s death?’ asked Salutati. This dramatic experience led him away from his earlier Stoic leanings, and he sought refuge instead in the more reasonable Aristotelian position, which assigned moral worth to the passions. Salutati found additional support for this re-evaluation in the Gospel’s description of Christ as a man who deeply loved, felt pity and wrath, suffered, and wept.23 22  For further comments on Renaissance attitudes towards the passions, see Sabrina Ebbers­ meyer’s essay in this volume. 23  See an extract of this letter in Salutati, ‘A Letter to Francesco Zabarella’, trans. by Witt; and Garin, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 26–30 on the figure of Salutati.

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Other humanists arrived at different conclusions. Leonardo Bruni’s Isagogicon moralis philosophiae (1425) attempted an impossible reconciliation of Epicurean, Stoic, and Aristotelian positions on the supreme good.24 Leon Battista Alberti expressed his Stoic orientation in his open admiration for the heroic moral strength of the virtuous man, who does not give in to the uncertainty of fortune but builds his happiness on his search for beauty and truth.25 Angelo Poliziano, in a famous letter to Bartolomeo Scala (c. 1480), used his discussion of Simplicius’s commentary on Epictetus’s Manual as an occasion to exalt the rarefaction of the Stoics’ view of man, which saw the body as simply an external instrument of the soul. He also allowed the possibility of giving vent to one’s emotions in specific tragic circumstances, as long as this was done in moderation.26 Montaigne denounced as presumptuous the Stoic teaching which assigns virtue wholly to human effort and happiness to one’s own merit. Christians know, after all, that salvation and happiness are gifts of God’s grace — a concept which the movements springing from Martin Luther’s Reformation would especially insist upon.27 Pietro Pomponazzi The figures discussed above were men of letters, and as such they were typically more sensitive to fine points of philology than to the rigours of philosophy. It may therefore be more surprising to see a famous Aristotelian like Pietro Pomponazzi opt for Stoic solutions, both in his well-known treatise De immortalitate animae (1516) in connection with happiness, and in De fato in connection with human freedom.28 In chapter XIV of his work on the immortality of the soul, Pomponazzi asserts in the first instance that human happiness is the result of individual participation in the triple intellect (speculative, active, productive). The speculative intellect is characteristic of the gods, while man has only a weak and inconstant version of it. The productive intellect is common to man and beast and necessary for human survival. The intermediate, active intellect is proper to man, who exercises it through the moral virtues. It is the only one 24 

The Latin text of Bruni’s Isagogicon moralis disciplinae is published with an Italian translation by Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 104–11. 25  On Alberti, see Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 37–39, 248–53. 26  See Poliziano, ‘A Letter to Bartolomeo Scala’, trans. by Kraye. 27  See Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 366–67, 369–70. 28  On Pomponazzi’s adherence to Stoic determinism, see Poppi, ‘Fate, Fortune, Providence’, pp. 653–60.

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which can bring about happiness to individuals and cities, since everyone is under an obligation to live well and avoid vice, while it is hardly necessary for all to be philosophers or skilled craftsmen. If human beings are to be happy and at peace, therefore, everyone must participate fully in the practical or active intellect, since it is only through the moral virtues that a united and peaceful society can be created. As for the speculative and productive intellects, it is enough that people participate in them partially.29 Since man is mortal (‘simpliciter mortalis’), he must not aspire to such an immortal and complete happiness as the contemplative life of the gods; nevertheless he need not fear death, ‘since fear of the inevitable is pointless, and in death he sees nothing evil’.30 Pomponazzi observes that, although man is mortal, he enjoys greater happiness in practising virtue — even to the point of giving his life for his country and his friends, to the high praise of the community — than in giving himself over to vice with its resulting blot of infamy. After all, death is ‘a nothingness’; the only good is virtuous action, whereas the only evil is vice. Both must be followed or avoided independently from what may await us after death. Pomponazzi adds that God would not be unjust if there were no afterlife and therefore no reward for the good or punishment for the wicked in the hereafter. After distinguishing the essential from the accidental forms of reward and punishment, Pomponazzi argues that the essential reward of virtue is virtue itself, which makes man happy and secure, whether in favourable or adverse circumstances. Conversely, the essential punishment of vice is vice itself, which is the most miserable condition imaginable, as described by Aristotle in his portrait of the tyrant.31 Clearly these aspects of happiness analysed by Pomponazzi derive from a Stoic anthropology. In this perspective, man is a temporary expression of a strictly determined natural world, and he is destined to dissolve in the eternal cycle of nature’s forms, which he is unable to transcend. Pomponazzi sought to propose a 29 

‘Quare universalis finis generis humani est secundum quid de speculativo et factivo participare, perfecte autem de practico. Universus enim perfectissime conservaretur, si omnes homines essent studiosi et optimi, sed non si omnes essent philosophi vel fabri vel domificatores’: Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, ed. by Gentile, p. 93. 30  ‘[…] cum vanus sit timor de inevitabilibus; nihilque mali conspiciat in morte’: Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, ed. by Gentile, p. 96. 31  ‘Praemium essentiale virtutis est ipsamet virtus, quae hominem felicem facit […] poena namque vitiosi est ipsum vitium, quo nihil miserius, nihil infelicius esse potest […] Itaque omnis virtuosus virtute sua et felicitate praemiatur’: Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, ed. by Gentile, pp. 100–01.

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version of happiness on a human scale — practical, midway between contemplative flights and a purely material activity — but was nonetheless aware of the fragility of such a solution. After arguing that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul cannot be settled by reason alone, in the last chapter Pomponazzi strongly emphasizes the importance of trusting Christian revelation and the great doctors of the Church. Here Pomponazzi affirms the immortality of the soul with no hesitation whatsoever; he is aware of how essential this premise is to human life and action, in that it orients them either towards the contingent and earthly or to the transcendent and eternal.32 Justus Lipsius In contrast with Pomponazzi’s hesitations, the Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius strongly praised the Stoic ideal of the wise man as something to strive for, even though he conceded that it was ultimately unattainable. Lispius saw Stoicism as an answer to the tragic crisis of the European wars of religion, since it considered control of the passions (adfectus) as the only real avenue to peace. After all, it is only by distancing themselves from external goods and cultivating virtue that people can quell the tumultuous passions which will otherwise lead to hate and conflict. In his Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604) Lipsius reasserts the main principles of Stoicism, defending them from the attacks of rival philosophical schools. He emphasizes the distinctive doctrine that ‘virtue is the supreme good’ along with its corollary that ‘happiness consists only in virtue’ and has no need of external goods, which are hostages to fortune. Virtue has its seat in reason and is therefore within our power — it is beyond the vagaries of fate, it is solidly fixed, and we therefore need not fear losing it, unlike wordly goods. Lipsius notes that Epictetus’s observations concerning a wise man’s inner freedom, security, and peace coincide beautifully with the teaching of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. For them wisdom, or virtue, is the only good, is blessed by God, contains in itself all the other goods, and cannot be either increased by bodily goods or diminished by the arrows of fortune. As a result, the writer asks ‘Could Zeno have explained these cardinal doctrines any better?’33

32 

Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, ed. by Gentile, cap. XV, pp. 118–23. See Lipsius, Manuductio, ii. XX (‘Sola igitur virtutem sufficere ad beatitatem, nec externa aut fortuita requiri’), pp. 113–20; ‘An potuit Zeno capitalia ista dogmata disertius efferre?’, pp. 116–17. On Lipsius, also see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 33 

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In his examination of various paradoxes relating to Stoic doctrine, Lipsius is conscious of the delicacy of the fourth one, namely that the wise man is happy even in the midst of suffering. But since the Stoics hold that pain is not an evil, it follows that happiness can be preserved even in the midst of torment. The wise man experiences pain, but he does not fear it. He realizes that it is not physical realities which make things good or bad, but rather virtue. So outside of the soul evil cannot exist. Even if one were to find himself in the bull of Phalaris, he could rightly exclaim, ‘How sweet this is! How little it affects me!’ (‘quam suave est hoc!, quam hoc non curo!’). No wonder that Epicurus was able to die serenely despite the severe pain which racked his diseased body.34 Lipsius’s enthusiasm for Stoic ethics rested especially on the works of Roman writers and Church Fathers. His teaching was somewhat naive in identifying Stoicism with the Christian view of man’s action and end, without commenting on the deep differences between the two systems’ metaphysical and anthropological views. Lipsius had a profound effect on early seventeenth-century humanism in England, France, and especially Spain, where his works gave rise to a flourishing Neo-Stoic movement. A particular case is Francisco de Quevedo’s Doctrina estoica (1635), which is marked by Lipsius’s instinct for conciliation to the point of making Stoic ethics derive from the biblical book of Job.35 An especially vigorous and original expression of Neo-Stoicism was offered by Baruch Spinoza: his Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (published posthumously in 1677) treats virtue as a form of freedom, achieved through reason, from slavery to the passions. It finds its culmination in the supreme happiness of the ‘speculative love of God’ (‘amor Dei intellectualis’).

Happiness in the Contemplation of the Divine Those humanists who were sympathetic to the teachings of Epicurus or Zeno constituted a minority when compared with the followers of Plato. The Latin West had always been fascinated by Plato’s literary power and the vertical impulses of his thought, even though it was in contact with his works only through a limited number of translations and Greek commentaries. Thus a slender but influential tradition, informed by the teachings of Plato and Plotinus, had leavened patristic thought and the early Middle Ages. Knowledge of Plato’s 34 

Lipsius, Manuductio, iii. VI (‘IV parad. Sapientem vel in tormentis beatum esse’), pp. 149–51. See Quevedo, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, pp. 210–25; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 372–74. 35 

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thought remained small36 (though highly suggestive) up to the time of Petrarch and the first teachings of Greek — based on the Platonic dialogues — in the main universities of fifteenth-century Italy. (This teaching was typically offered by Greek émigrés, who had fled Byzantium and the Turkish invasions.) Plato’s god could be, and was, compared with the Creator of the Bible. And there were other obvious points of contact with Christianity, including the immortality of the soul and the view that man’s happiness can find its fulfilment only in the hereafter. It is then that the soul, freed from the prison of the body, can both contemplate the Good and enter into mystic union with the One. Although on other points there was less agreement with Christian doctrine (e.g. the community of wives outlined in the Republic), several Renaissance literary scholars and philosophers embraced Platonic teachings, seeing in them the highest expression of the possible concordance between natural reason and Christian faith. The cardinal Johannes Bessarion saw in Plato an anticipation of the religion later fully revealed by Christ. Obviously, this did not authorize anyone to make the mistake of abandoning the Scriptures and become a follower of Plato, but it was possible to take from his philosophy some principles tied to genuine Christian theology.37 Marsilio Ficino The most eminent representative of this current of thought was undoubtedly Marsilio Ficino, who in 1462 was officially charged by Cosimo the Elder to translate into Latin the entire body of Platonic works. The villa of Careggi thus became the central point from which the ancient texts of Plato and his followers radiated out throughout Europe, in a challenge to the Aristotelianism which reigned in the universities of the time. In his most theoretical work, the Theologia Platonica (1474), which deals with the immortality of the soul, Ficino explains that God’s light and goodness permeate the entire universe, divided into five levels of hypostases, in which the human soul occupies the middle rung between (at the highest end) God and the angels and (at the lowest end) bodies and mat36 

Throughout the medieval period, Plato was known directly only through the Meno, Phaedo, the Parmenides and the first chapters of the Timaeus. See the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 37  See John Bessarion, In calumniatorem Platonis, ii. 5, text in Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, pp. 280–83; and Bessarion, ‘Against the Slanderer of Plato’, trans. by Deitz and Monfasani. On Plato’s renewed fortunes in fifteenth-century Italy, see Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance.

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ter. The human soul therefore links the intelligible and the material worlds. God has placed within the soul an irreppressible yearning to know the supreme truth and the supreme good in which human happiness lies. But this desire cannot be fulfilled in this life, which is bound by the finite and the material, so it defers its fulfilment to a future, immortal life. The soul is constantly attracted to this goal by Beauty, which provokes the will to desire and love.38 Ficino remains close to the Symposium as he illustrates the phases of the soul’s ascent from the initial apprehension of the physical beauty of the body to the love for the intelligible beauty of the soul. The process culminates in the ultimate rapture of a beatific union with God’s absolute beauty and love, the only source of true joy: ‘So, if the most delightful of all delights is to possess the beloved object, what can be supposed more delightful than possessing that object which is beauty itself and goodness itself ?’39 Ficino also poses the typically scholastic question of whether this beatitude consists chiefly in the speculative act of contemplation or in the joy that results from it in the will. In his youthful commentary on the Philebus his Thomistic training inclined him towards an intellectualist position, but later on he took the opposite view, as is evident from the Theologia Platonica and from his letter on happiness to Lorenzo de’ Medici.40 Here too one can easily see both how deeply Ficino’s Platonism is steeped in Christian thought and the extent to which the original Platonic system has been rebuilt from the ground up with borrowings from revealed doctrine in view of an apologetic end — namely, to confute other philosophical schools, which by their materialism and immanentism left no room for faith. Even in the case of happiness, Ficino’s deep affinity with Plato allows him to reach an original result by fusing together two different perspectives which for him are so complementary that they ultimately become hard to separate. 38 

See the chapters of Ficino, ‘The Platonic Theology: Selections’, trans. by Deitz. Ficino, Platonic Theology, vi, 249. 40  This letter represents the synthesis of a conversation which took place between the two at Careggi, and it is like a small treatise on ‘Quid est felicitas, quod habet gradus, quod est aeterna’. See Letter 115 in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. by Language Department, i, 171–78. Whilst appreciating the Aristotelian notion of happiness as the ‘summus actus summae potentiae circa summum obiectum’, following ‘noster Plato’, Ficino denies that this can take place in this earthly life where intellect and will are always disturbed, but it will take place in the fruition and fusion with God in the next life, and there the ‘gaudium est praestantius visione’, it is the prize and aim of love, which surpasses knowledge: ‘Frui igitur summo bono ad voluntatem potius quam intellectum pertinere videtur’; see Ficino, Opera omnia, pp. 662–65. For further details (and Lorenzo’s composition), see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume, pp. 38–40. 39 

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Whereas Ficino always remained personally hostile to Aristotelianism, his disciple Francesco Cattani da Diacceto tended towards a reconciliation of Platonism with both Christianity and Aristotelianism, even though he remained faithful to his teacher’s philosophical positions.41 The conciliatory tendency was even stronger in the greatest Renaissance philosopher, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. His immense learning is reflected in the nine hundred theses which he wished to dispute in Rome with scholars from all over the world. Pico’s effort embraced, within a synthesis of stunning scope, the cultures, philosophies, and religions of all times and peoples in a heroic effort to bring peace and concord to the entire human race. In his famous introductory oration to the disputation, known as De hominis dignitate (1486), Pico not only lyrically extolls man on account of his intermediate nature between the heavenly and the earthly, but views his incomparable superiority as consisting in the freedom given to him with such generosity by his Creator. Other beings are governed by precise laws; man instead is left on his own and must determine his own nature and fate through his free will. Man is thus practically his own artificer, free to mould himself as he sees fit: the Creator tells Adam, ‘Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.’42 Such an exalted position obliges man to scorn a beastly existence and aspire with all his strength to live like the celestial spirits, displaying the unfailing judgement of the angels seated on heavenly thrones, the contemplative splendour of the cherubim, the fiery love of the seraphim; this love is the supreme happiness, whereby ‘whoso […] is a lover, is in God and God in him, nay, rather, God and himself are one’.43 In this oration delivered to the pope and cardinals, and even more explicitly in the Heptaplus (a masterful commentary on the days of creation), Pico brings together reason and faith, Christian and pagan philosophies and theologies in order to define the happiness of man, which requires first of all a willingness to resist ‘the torrential wave of pleasure which crashes upon us like a mass of water’. We must direct all our energies towards the only true end — the union of that small spark of our intelligence with that first Mind which encom41 

See Panegyricus in amorem in Cattani da Diacceto, ‘Panegyric on Love’, trans. by Deitz. Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, ed. by Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, p. 225; cf. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, ed. by Garin, p. 107. 43  In Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, ed. by Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, p. 228; cf. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, ed. by Garin, p. 113. 42 

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passes all intelligence. But this union is not possible without the mediation of Christ, the God-man, the only one powerful enough to bring man into union with divine happiness.44 Within Pico’s vision of happiness it is hard to separate the Platonic element from that furnished by Christian mysticism, even though Pico’s conception does not reach the extremes of Francesco de’ Vieri, who saw in the Timaeus a foreshadowing of the doctrine of the Trinity.45 Pico manages, even more clearly than Ficino, to fuse man’s experience of sensual love (erōs) with the pleasure resulting from union with God. Others too (including Girolamo Benivieni, Pietro Bembo, Baldassarre Castiglione, and some Hebrew thinkers) would later embrace this interpretation of happiness as a mystical experience of divine love.46 And even some notable Renaissance Aristotelians, such as as Alessandro and Francesco Piccolomini and Antonio Riccobono, recognized Plato’s teaching concerning man’s true happiness as superior to that of Aristotle, given Plato’s attention to a life beyond this earthly one and the possibility of union with the supreme good.47 Others, including the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, tried to graft Platonic and Christian considerations onto the tree of Aristotelian philosophy, an operation which is especially evident from the notes by Lefèvre’s close disciple Josse Clichtove.48 Protestant Reformers Theologians of the Reformation instead took a more cautious and demanding attitude; they pointed out that, by ignoring original sin and the corruption of human nature, Plato and the other ancient philosophers did not realize that man’s efforts could never suffice to attain to happiness and salvation. They insisted that these are only possible through God’s grace, deriving from the cross of Christ.49 44 

See Pico de Mirandola, Heptaplus, p. 323. See de’ Vieri, Compendio della dottrina di Platone translated in de’ Vieri, ‘Compendium of Platonic Teachings’, trans. by Monfasani. 46  See Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana, vol. i, chap. 8; vol. ii, chap. 2; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 353–56. 47  See Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento, pp. 29–48, 198–213, and passim. 48  See, for example, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Artificialis introductio per modum Epitomatis. The whole area of French interpretations of the Ethics is in need of further exploration; for a useful orientation, see Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume. 49  See Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 323–24, 359; Lauster, Dio e la felicità, pp. 91–98. 45 

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Melanchthon’s thinking on this point is extremely clear. His lectures on ethics constantly ask, ‘What is the relationship between philosophy and the Gospel?’ (‘Quid interest inter philosophiam et evangelium?’), as he outlines a clear distinction between what the revelation of the Gospel offers us (i.e. the remission of sins and reconciliation with God) and the usefulness of moral philosophy. The latter may indeed uncover natural laws, yet it is unable to explain the causes of our nature’s infirmity, along with its concomitant monstrosities. Nor is it able to indicate the true end of human life, which it identifies not with God, but rather with virtue as an end to itself or even with pleasure.50 The Calvinist Anthony de Waele demonstrates a clear preference for Plato over Aristotle. First he denounces a series of deficiencies and errors in Aristotelian ethics, with its exclusive concern for man and points of contradiction with the Gospels and both tables of the Mosaic Law. He then concludes that ‘if, therefore, we wish to study Aristotle’s ethics without running the risk of error, it is necessary for us to correct every part of this discipline according to the standard of the Word of God and to use the Word of God to supply whatever is lacking in this discipline’.51 As to the end of life, Anthony says, Plato’s opinion is much closer to theological truth than that of Aristotle: Plato places the supreme good in the vision and fruition of God, although he too ignores the true cause of the mind’s illumination and the will’s purification which allow one to reach this end. These are made possible only by the grace of Christ, through faith and the free gift of the Holy Spirit.52

Happiness in the Culmination of the Contemplative Life, Accompanied by External Goods Whereas Platonism especially appealed to writers and thinkers who mainly found employment outside the universities (most often in the service of princes), uni50 

Melanchthon, Moralis philosophiae epitome, pp. 9–11, and see the passages in Melanchthon, ‘The Elements of Ethical Doctrine’, trans. by Monfasani, from the Ethicae doctrinae elementa: ‘Since, however, philosophy has nothing to tell us about the cause of this infirmity or its remedies, we recognize that we require some other doctrine, beyond philosophy, namely, the announcement of promises or the Gospel. And we very much need to keep in mind the distinction between philosophy and the Gospel, which I shall speak of here and about which it is often necessary to speak’ (pp. 109–10). 51  Walaeus, Compendium ethicae aristotelicae; Walaeus, ‘A Compendium of Aristotelian Ethics’, trans. by Monfasani, p. 123. 52  See Walaeus, ‘A Compendium of Aristotelian Ethics’, trans. by Monfasani, p. 124.

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versity teachers followed the teachings of Aristotle, whose works formed, since the thirteenth century, the backbone of the Arts subjects throughout Europe. The same was true of moral philosophy, which was taught by explaining the text of the Nicomachean Ethics, sometimes even in the original Greek.53 In the Ethics, Aristotle starts by explaining the end (i.e. the human good) of this practical discipline and then describes the means (i.e. the virtues) which lead an individual to enjoy the good life in the polis. Already at the outset Aristotle dismisses the styles of life (the bioi) which confuse pleasure and honour with happiness. He also rejects, out of love for the truth, the universal and abstract idea of Good proposed by his teacher Plato. Instead, he places happiness in the activity which is most proper to man, which is the activity of virtue according to the highest faculty of the human soul (reason), which is able to embrace the highest realities, including the divine. Indeed, the perfect and self-sufficient good, sought for itself and nothing else, consists in this speculative apprehension, which must last throughout one’s lifetime; and, since this activity is to be that of a real person, bound by time and space, perfect happiness requires the goods of the body and of fortune, without which life would become most miserable, as was the case of Priamus (Book i, chaps 3–10). Aristotle himself remarks on the composite character of this ideal of happiness, which he defines as an activity of the rational part of the soul according to virtue. Such an activity is inherently pleasurable and is accompanied by external goods (whether these be necessary or merely useful). This vision brings together elements such as contemplation, virtue, and pleasure, without an attempt to focus exclusively on any particular one of them, and it always keeps the rational soul as a primary reference point.54 Aristotle thus outlines a realistic earthly happiness, which takes into account the hylomorphic nature of man and concedes that, in this world, true happiness will rarely be achieved. In this life, speculative happiness is not enough, because everyone must take into account the passions’ resist53 

See the full analysis and documentation of the Renaissance tradition of Aristotle’s Ethics, starting from the great medieval commentators, in Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance. 54  In certain Renaissance commentators the unified Aristotelian view of happiness is split into two types of beatitude: ‘alterum quod in actionibus honestis atque virtuti consentaneis, alterum quod in contemplatione, verique perspicientia consistit’ (Nobili, De hominis felicitate, p. 17). In the same way, Theodor Zwinger, who gives Aristotle’s concept of happiness a strong theological twist in the preface to his Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum, writes that, since man is both mortal and immortal, his beatitude is also of two kinds, the one worldly, the other celestial or heroic, and consists ‘partim in fruitione et possessione boni, cuius comitem esse diximus voluptatem, partim in cognitione boni, quae gloria est’ (pages not numbered).

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ance to moral virtues, in addition to material deprivation, illness, and the arrows of misfortune. It was this very ambiguity that provided the fodder for criticisms of the Aristotelian view of the supreme good. The Stoics were especially unhappy with its emphasis on the necessity of external goods for the happiness of the sage. Such a demand seemed to negate the self-sufficiency of the virtuous man, debasing his independence and nobility as he was forced to come to terms with the useful and the pleasurable.55 When Christian theologians of the thirteenth century encountered Aristotle’s writings, they reacted with either admiration or rejection. St Bonaventure saw Aristotle’s refusal to countenance the doctrine of Ideas as the source of some of the major philosophical aberrations of his day. St Thomas instead welcomed and valued almost the entire rediscovered legacy of pagan ethics. He integrated it with and filtered it through the Christian vision of the ultimate end of life and of man’s supreme beatitude (which he saw as fellowship with God). According to Thomas it was possible, through a special and divine gift, for reason and the will to see and enjoy God directly, in the here and now. Renaissance Reactions to Aristotle Thomas’s approach won the day. As mentioned above, very soon the Nicomachean Ethics became the standard textbook for moral philosophy in the Arts faculties of universities and in the schools of the religious orders. When Platonizing philologists taught the work, they admitted the need to follow Aristotle on methodological and pedagogical grounds even though they affirmed the superiority of the heavenly beatitude proclaimed by Plato. They sought to reconcile the two ancient philosophers even in the case of significant issues on which they clearly disagreed. As for the universities of the Reformation, despite Luther’s abhorrence of the Ethics, figures such as Melanchthon, Lambert Daneau, Anthony de Waele, and John Case often turned to Aristotle when dealing with the good.56 Even though, as discussed above, many theologians of the Reformation made a clear distinction between theology (which deals with the kingdom of God) and ethics (which 55 

See Annas, La morale della felicità, chap. XIX (‘Teofrasto e gli stoici: forzando la questione’), pp. 527–61. 56  Regarding contemplative happiness, which brings man nearest to divine life, John Case exclaimed in wonder: ‘Good heavens, how brightly the light of nature shines in Aristotle, who knew these things which many illuminated by the light of grace do not understand’; see Case, ‘A Mirror of Questions’, trans. by Kraye, p. 64. On Case, see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume.

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concerns the present world), many of them defended the usefulness of Aristotle’s moral philosophy, with regard both to the virtues and to man’s ultimate end: after all, ethics could prepare one for the superior law of the Spirit.57 However, not all in the Catholic and Lutheran camps shared this enthusiasm for Aristotle’s Ethics. Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Omer Talon, and others considered it to be far too incompatible with the Gospels, especially because of its emphasis on purely earthly happiness and external goods. Such a view excluded, after all, the immense ranks of the poor to whom Christ had especially directed his Beatitudes. Other stumbling blocks included the notion of virtue as the fruit of a purely human effort apart from grace, and a concept of law in which obedience to God played no role.58 On other matters, Aristotle’s wavering concerning the individual human intellect and the immortality of the soul could pose an even more serious threat to the Christian faith. This is not the place for an extended examination of the issue, but the reaction to works such as Agostino Nifo’s commentary on Averroes and the treatises of Pietro Pomponazzi points to intense nervousness on the matter, which in the works of Crisostomo Javelli was quelled by appealing to the views of Plato.59 For humanists of the fifteenth century, the problem of happiness took on a new form, reflecting social changes and the new directions imposed by an urban, merchant bourgeoisie. Although as believers they were deeply convinced that the only complete happiness for man lies in God and the hereafter, they explicitly focused on the happiness available in this world. They thus asked whether the active life of politics, commerce, and craftsmanship was superior to the contemplative life represented by the liberal arts, literature, and philosophy. According to their (none too faithful) interpretation, Aristotle had privileged the active life tied to virtues such as prudence, whereas Plato had emphasized wisdom. Figures such as Salutati, Bruni, Bartolomeo Fazio, Platina, and others recognized without difficulty the excellence of contemplation, yet they warned that, as long as we are here on earth, we have a compelling human and Christian duty to look after our neighbours in the various classes of society. We must therefore overcome the ster57 

See Saarinen, ‘Ethics in Luther’s Theology’ and his essay in this volume; Melanchthon, ‘The Elements of Ethical Doctrine’, trans. by Monfasani, p. 112: ‘The true light of reason, implanted in man by nature, accords with the law of God’; Antonius de Waele, ‘A Compendium of Aristotelian Ethics’, trans. by Monfasani, pp. 120–29; Case, ‘A Mirror of Questions’, trans. by Kraye; on Daneau’s Ethices Christianae libri tres (Genève, 1577), see Strohm, ‘Ethics in Early Calvinism’, especially pp. 276–79. 58  See Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 342–48. 59  Nifo, De beatitudine animae.

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ile individualism which drives us to solitude, reflected in the monks’ fuga mundi. To a friend who had decided to abandon civic involvement because of a crushing bereavement, Salutati wrote that ‘contemplation is better, I agree; yet it is not always so, nor for everyone. The active life is inferior, but often preferable’, 60 as one can see from numerous examples in Scripture, in the life of Christ, and in the teaching of St Augustine. Cristoforo Landino, on the other hand, insisted together with some other followers of Ficino on the complementarity of the two lives. He assigned pre-eminence, however, to the contemplative life, as a meaningful reward for having fulfilled one’s various daily duties.61 This new approach to the problem of happiness had some pedagogical and academic ramifications, provoking professional disputes regarding the superiority of the humanistic subjects versus the scientific ones, or of the practical subjects versus the purely theoretical ones. These were connected with lively debates about study programmes and how best to form mature men and virtuous citizens.62 The case made by fifteenth-century humanists in favour of the active life was argued again, this time with stronger speculative rigour, in several discussions by literary men and philosophers of the sixteenth century, in particular in a few dialogues by Sperone Speroni (Del modo di studiare, 1530; Dialogo della vita attiva e contemplativa, 1542) and in Alessandro Piccolomini’s pedagogical treatise De la institutione di tutta la vita de l’homo nato nobile, e in città libera (1542). The latter work notes that, unlike Plato who believed that happiness can only be reached in the hereafter, Aristotle recognized that both forms of happiness are possible in this world — the theoretical and the practical. Doubtless the first of these is more important, but we are more interested in civic happiness, which is more proper to man and consists in acting virtuously, guided by prudence, according to the law of the Gospel. Therefore, he concludes, ‘Neither the law of Christ, nor the teachings of Aristotle, maintain that speculation and reason are sufficient to become happy and perfect. Rather, it is action (l’operar) which leads us to such perfection.’63

60 

Salutati, Epistolario, ed. by Novati, iii, 305. See the texts of Landino and others in Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento. 62  See especially the texts (in Latin with Italian translation) in Garin, La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento. 63  See Poppi, ‘Il prevalere della vita activa’, pp.  177–205 (p. 204); the quotation from Piccolomini (‘non men la leggie di Cristo, che i precetti d’Aristotele, voglion che non basti lo speculare e lo intendere, per diventar felice e perfetto; ma che l’operar sia quello che a tal perfettion ne conduca’) is found in the first Venetian edition of 1542, fol. 16r. 61 

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Francesco Piccolomini Francesco Piccolomini, an Aristotelian who taught at the University of Padua, also followed this conciliatory line with Platonism, but with greater philosophical and historiographical acumen and speculative depth. In his original summa of moral doctrine (1576) he asks whether the supreme good is to be found in action or in contemplation, and therefore which intellectual virtue one should pursue, whether prudence or wisdom. He concludes that, in absolute terms (but also relative to our earthly life) wisdom is more worthy and therefore to be preferred; but with regard to the necessities of human life, prudence is more necessary. So both virtues and types of life are indispensable for our existence; although they differ in nobility, they are both insufficient by themselves.64 Piccolomini’s Universa philosophia de moribus (1583) is among the most important treatises of moral philosophy of the sixteenth century. In it Piccolomini explicitly dedicates the ninth step of the work (c. eighty pages in folio) to an analysis of the supreme good, as the end towards which the virtues, treated in the earlier steps, tend. Faced with the enigma of a happiness sought after with intense passion by all, but reached by none, Piccolomini begins with a prayer to the ‘celestial minds’ who contemplate the Good; he asks them to enlighten him, thus helping him to understand the Good and the end of life. All agree — Piccolomini continues — that true happiness (eudaimonia) shines in all its splendour only in God, who is happiness itself (ipsa beatitudo); on the other hand, there is a great difference of opinion as to whether man can be happy in this life, and this point is hard to solve. Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics affirm this possibility, against the evidence of human limitations and suffering in this world. Theologians instead insist that true happiness is only attainable in the hereafter.65 Despite objections from many quarters, Piccolomini endorses Aristotle’s view of happiness, which consists not in virtue alone, but in the good and perfect act which derives from a virtuous disposition, which lies at its base. Free from impediments and complemented by the goods of nature and fortune, that 64  See Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, v, chap. 40, p. 308; cf. Poppi, ‘Il problema della filosofia morale’, pp. 59–78, and Poppi, ‘Il prevalere della vita activa’, pp. 205–13. 65  Thus he concludes: ‘cum singulae philosophorum de summo bono sententiae a caeteris sectis, quae sunt iudices plures et congruentiores, damnentur, iure colligere valemus opiniones omnes philosophorum de summo bono esse inanes et falsas; nec alia de causa nisi quia apud nos id quaerunt quod a nobis longissime distat’ (Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, ix, chap. 4: ‘An homo in hac vita valeat esse foelix’, p. 473); cf. Piccolomini, ‘A Comprehensive Philosophy of Morals’, trans. by Kraye.

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perfect and lasting act produces in its subject a joy and tranquillity which make him supremely happy.66 In the light of numerous Aristotelian passages and of Aristotle’s reservations concerning Plato’s Philebus, however, Piccolomini shows that pleasure does not (as St Thomas thought) belong to the essence of human happiness. Rather, as John Duns Scotus pointed out, with pleasure it is the same as with beauty: beauty is not the result of the proportioned disposition of the members of the body, but radiates out of this as a consequence. In the same way, pleasure, which is an important aspect of happiness, is its outcome, just like a flower, and unites us more closely and sweetly to the object of the supreme good.67 Already from these considerations one can guess Piccolomini’s attitude towards the Stoic view of happiness.68 If this receives some credit in one chapter (viii. 10), in the next Piccolomini instead argues that the Stoics are out of touch with reality and that their notions are contrary to the evidence of the senses and contradict their own principles.69 Piccolomini next tackles the problem of how happiness unites man with God. His discussion — which depends on Plato’s Epinomis and on the Neoplatonic doctrine of the One’s descent to the mind, to the souls, and to matter — outlines the process by which the intellective soul ascends from the world of the sensible, through religion and piety, in order to find union with the Mind. It is from the Mind that it receives fullness of being, of life, of eternal happiness as it becomes similar to God, in a mystic ecstasy similar to that described by the theologians. And even Aristotle (though tied only to what is proper to man and achievable 66 

According to Piccolomini ‘constat demum sententiam peripateticorum magis esse consimilem communi usui loquendi, sensibusque, ac experientiae magis respondere’ (Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, ix. 12, p. 485). 67  Moreover he concludes, ‘summo hominis bono haec tria iure optimo competere debent: proxima eius principia sunt virtutes; essentia et forma est actio ex virtute prodiens; affectiones eius sunt iucunditas, interna animi tranquillitas, constans quaedam securitas, et similia’ (Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, ix. 19, p. 495). 68  ‘Colligendum itaque cum stoicis esse videtur: id quod ad recte, honeste, laudabiliter et bene vivendum est satis, etiam esse satis ad felicitatem; virtus huiusmodi est, ea itaque sola ad felicitatem est satis’: Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, viii. 10, p. 401. For an overview of Piccolomini’s attitude towards the Stoics, see Kraye, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism’, pp. 70–75. 69  ‘Praeclarae profecto sunt stoicorum sententiae, splendidissimisque verborum apparatibus illustratae, a rei tamen natura abhorrent, sensibus adversantur, cumque eorum principiis manifestissime pugnant’: Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, viii. 11, p. 401; as is apparent, the author reveals here a fundamental opposition between the two schools, rather than a simple nominal difference.

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through natural means) sees our union with God in the exercise of moral virtues and of contemplation, or, in other words, in affection and knowledge.70 As he discusses in which faculty of the soul happiness properly resides, Piccolo­ mini then recalls Aristotle’s view that happiness is found in man as a compound, inasmuch as action concerns both body and soul. The theologians, instead, have divided themselves into the Thomist camp (which places happiness in the intellect) and the Scotist (which emphasizes the inclination of the will). Piccolomini favours the former, since he believes the supreme good consists in contemplation, so that happiness ‘more truly pertains to the intellect’ (‘verius intellectui competit’). 71 Piccolomini’s intellectualism thus leads him to disregard Christianity’s fundamental emphasis on freedom and love (nearly unknown in the ancient world), and despite his numerous caveats he essentially incorporates the entire dimension of the affects into the intuitive act of contemplation. The Coimbra Commentary Another Renaissance synthesis of Aristotelian teaching on happiness is the commentary on the Ethics published by the Jesuits of the College of Coimbra in 1593 — this work’s third disputation treats ‘De felicitate’. This is not a full literal analysis of Aristotle’s work, in the spirit of some medieval commentaries. Rather, it presents a few main themes of the work with special relevance to the course in theology, which in the Jesuit ratio studiorum came upon the heels of moral philosophy. The nine clear disputations are complemented by a fine use of philology and by the authority of the Ethics’s chief interpreters, especially Thomas Aquinas. In the articles on Question III, happiness is described (following Aristotle) as an operation of the soul, not a faculty or a disposition (habitus) as some interpreters would have it. In order to resolve the standard theological riddle as to its location within the soul, happiness is divided into supernatural and natural; both of these can be further subdivided: the former, into supernatural happiness pertaining to this life or to that to come; the latter, into practical and speculative forms of natural happiness. The Coimbra commentary, authored by Emmanuel de Goes, describes man’s supreme and supernatural happiness in the hereafter as consisting in the contemplation of God (‘intuitiva divinae naturae contemplatio’), not in the fruition of 70 

Cf. Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, ix. 31–37, pp. 513–24. ‘Quia praesertim summum bonum est, vel cum theologis illud futurae vitae, vel cum Aristotele contemplatio praesentis vitae, ideo colligo eos rectius loqui qui summum bonum potius ad intellectum quam ad voluntatem pertinere affirmant’: Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus, ix. 40, p. 531. 71 

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the will (as postulated by Duns Scotus) nor in the combination of vision and fruition affirmed by St Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Alexander of Hales. Supernatural happiness in the present life consists instead in the acts of love by which we draw near to God and to heaven’s full happiness. As a result, this happiness lies in the will and not in the intellect. Finally, natural happiness is the result of the exercise of the speculative intellect and not of practical action, since contemplation is the most noble and perfect operation of the soul by which we can hope to possess God in this life.72 By now the concept of happiness is very different to that of the ancients: pride of place is assigned to the supernatural beatitude of Christian revelation, with the sustaining role played by the theological virtue of charity. The question of Aristotle’s purely earthly happiness (whether theoretical or practical) is very much relegated to the background. This outcome is clearly the result of a new vision of man. Biblical and evangelical considerations continue to treasure the valuable contributions of antiquity, but also deeply change (and, indeed, renew) the image of man and his ultimate end in the West.

Unattainable Happiness The tensions and contradictions among the various schools discussed in this essay show that at the root of their different solutions to the problem of happiness lies an insoluble logical problem. It is no wonder, then, that already from Antiquity sceptics denied the possibility of firm knowledge; indeed, they held that only by suspending judgement and refusing to adhere to any particular opinion (epochē) could one be free from the spectre of false appearances and from the dogmatism of the other philosophers. In other words, they espoused a concept of ‘negative happiness’.73 With great difficulty Stoics, St Augustine, and others proved that radical scepticism is not only self-contradictory, but also destroys man’s humanity by denying him the exercise of reason, the very thing which is proper to him. 72  Cf. Aristotle, In libros Ethicorum ad Nicomachum, pp. 19–35; Coimbra Commentators, ‘Commentary on the “Nicomachean Ethics”’, trans. by Kraye; Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 362–64. Supernatural happiness in this life is the result of the theological virtue of charity, which activates the subject to move towards the happiness which will come about in the immediate vision of God: ‘Quod ad supernaturalem huius vitae beatitudinem spectat, cum istiusmodi beatitudo sit tendentia quaedam ad supremam illam felicitatem de qua disseruimus, utique oportet eam in actione charitatis supernaturalis potissimum contineri, quia talis tendentia maxime fit per actus meritorios, quos partim elicit, partim imperat charitas’ (Aristotle, In libros Ethicorum ad Nicomachum, pp. 29–30). 73  See Annas, La morale della felicità, ch. XVII (‘Gli scettici: imperturbabilità senza opinioni’), pp. 481–97.

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In the Renaissance and the early modern period, a growing lack of confidence in the possibility of objective metaphysical thinking led to a resurgence of sceptical positions, as is clear especially in Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond (1580). Echoing Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne argues that, if happiness is tied to knowledge, then happiness is unattainable, given that firm knowledge is impossible. We are not destined to the pure contemplation (theoria) dreamed of by the philosophers, but rather to imperturbability (ataraxia). We must therefore live in serene acceptance of our human limitations, aware that happiness can only be a gift of God which elevates and transforms our nature.74 The real difficulty involved in such an approach (which in effect abandons the search for a solution to the problem of happiness) is not just one of knowledge, as if one might arrive at the correct solution if only our thinking processes were more trustworthy. The real roots of the conundrum lie much deeper, in the sphere of man’s own being, and are related — as the humanists were well aware — to the human condition as an intermediate level of being, suspended between the finite and the infinite, between matter and spirit, between body and soul. We are open to and yearn for the infinite in both our cognitions and affections, yet we find only limited and unsatisfactory answers which match the finiteness of our being. If our strength is insufficient to help us cross the bridge leading from the lowest to the highest ontological extreme, then the prospect of achieving complete happiness seems impossible, perhaps even irrational. We must content ourselves then with an imperfect happiness which shifts under our feet, which becomes greater or smaller according to the opportunities or risks connected with nature and fate. The only other alternative is to proudly consider ourselves to be happy on the basis of our clear conscience and virtue, even though all of the world’s suffering should bear down upon us. But in either of these situations it would be more proper to speak not of happiness, but of a painful resignation to (or a forced acceptance of ) an inevitable reality. We would still carry in our soul the pain of an incurable wound, of an unanswered prayer. The only real solution to such an existential condition is to realize that human reason stands in a vertical relationship to the supreme good, that is, God. For it is only from above that one can await with expectation an undeserved invitation to participate freely in happiness — God’s own happiness, which is fellowship with His life.75 74 

See Silver, ‘Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond’. St Augustine clearly understood this enigma of the human condition when writing the famous introduction to his Confessions (i. 1): ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you’ (my translation). 75 

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Works Cited Primary Sources Antonius de Waele, ‘A Compendium of Aristotelian Ethics’, trans. by John Monfasani, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 120–29 Aristotle, In libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum aliquot conimbricensis cursus dis­ putationes in quibus praecipua quaedam ethicae disciplinae capita continentur (Venezia: Vincenzi & Amadino, 1602) Bessarion, John, ‘Against the Slanderer of Plato: Book ii, Selections’, trans. by Luc Deitz and John Monfasani, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 134–46 Case, John, ‘A Mirror of Questions on the Whole of Aristotle’s “Ethics: Book x, Chapters 7 and 8”’, trans. by Jill Kraye, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 59–67 Cattani da Diacceto, Francesco, ‘Panegyric on Love’, trans. by Luc Deitz, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 157–65 Coimbra Commentators, ‘Commentary on the “Nicomachean Ethics”: Disputation iii, Question 3’, trans. by Jill Kraye, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 80–87 Daneau, Lambert, Ethices Christianae libri tres (Genève: 1577) Ficino, Marsilio, Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. by Members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, 14 vols (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1981) —— , Opera omnia (Basel, 1576; repr. in facsimile, Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962) —— , Platonic Theology, ed. by James Hankins with William Bowen, trans. by Michael J. B. Allen with John Warden, 6 vols, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–06) —— , ‘The Platonic Theology: Selections’, trans. by Luc Deitz, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 30–36 and 148–55 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, Artificialis introductio per modum Epitomatis in decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis, adiectis elucidate commentariis […] (Paris: Stephanus, 1512) Lipsius, Justus, Manuductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam libri tres (Antwerpen: Moretus, 1604) Melanchthon, Philipp, ‘The Elements of Ethical Doctrine: Book i, Selections’, trans. by John Monfasani, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 109–13

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—— , Moralis philosophiae epitome (Lyon: Gryphius, 1542) Nifo, Agostino, De beatitudine animae. Euthici Augustini Niphi philotei Suessani. In Aver­ rois de animae beatitudine ad aetatis nostrae decus sanctum Maurum patritium Vene­ tum naturae interpretem (Venezia: Scoto, 1524) Nobili, Flaminio, De hominis felicitate libri tres. De vera, et falsa voluptate libri duo. De honore liber unus (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1563) Piccolomini, Francesco, ‘A Comprehensive Philosophy of Morals, Level ix: The Supreme Good: Selections’, trans. by Jill Kraye, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philo­ sophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 68–79 —— , Universa philosophia de moribus a Francisco Piccolomineo Senense, philosophiam in Academia Patavina e prima sede interpretante. Nunc primùm in decem gradus redacta et explicata (Venezia: De Franceschi, 1583) Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti vari, ed. by Eugenio Garin, Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano, 1 (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1942) —— , Heptaplus: De septiformi sex dierum geneseos enarratione ad Laurentium Medicem, in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti vari, ed. by Eugenio Garin, Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano, 1 (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1942), pp. 323–39 —— , ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul O. Kristeller, and John H. Randall, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 223–54 Poliziano, Angelo, ‘A Letter to Bartolomeo Scala in Defence of the Stoic Philosopher Epictetus’, trans. by Jill Kraye, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 193–99 Pomponazzi, Pietro, De immortalitate animae, ed. by Giovanni Gentile (Messina: Princi­ pato, 1925) Raimondi, Cosma, ‘A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi in Defence of Epicurus against the Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics’, trans. by Martin Davies, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 238–44 Quevedo, Francisco de, ‘Defence of Epicurus against Commonly Held Opinions’, trans. by Luc Deitz and Adelheid Wiehe-Deitz, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 245–66 Salutati, Coluccio, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. by Francesco Novati, 4 vols (Roma, 1891–1911) —— , ‘A Letter to Francesco Zabarella: Selections’, trans. by Ronald G. Witt, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 179–91

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Valla, Lorenzo, De vero falsoque bono, ed. by Maristella De Panizza Lorch (Bari: Adriatica, 1970) Vieri, Francesco de’, Compendio della dottrina di Platone, in quello, che ella è conforme con la fede nostra (Firenze: Marescotti, 1577) —— , ‘Compendium of Platonic Teachings Which Are in Conformity with the Christian Faith: Chapter 8’, trans. by John Monfasani, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 167–76 Walaeus, Antonius, Compendium ethicae aristotelicae ad normam veritatis christianae revocatum (Leiden: Elzevir, 1620) —— , ‘A Compendium of Aristotelian Ethics Accommodated to the Standard of Christian Truth: Selections’, trans. by John Monfasani, Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. by Jill Kraye, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), i: Moral Philosophy, pp. 121–29 Zwinger, Theodor, Aristotelis de moribus ad Nicomachum libri decem, tabulis perpetuis, quae Commentariorum loco esse queant, explicati et illustrati (Basel: Oporinus et Epis­ copus, 1566)

Secondary Studies Annas, Julia, La morale della felicità in Aristotele e nei filosofi dell’età ellenistica, Italian trans. by Matteo Andolfo (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1998) (orig. English edn, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)) Bellucci, Dino, ‘Natural Philosophy and Ethics in Melanchthon’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 235–54 De Luise, Fulvia, and Giuseppe Farinetti, Storia della felicità: gli antichi e i moderni (Torino: Einaudi, 2001) Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, Homo agens: Studien zur Genese und Struktur frühhumanistischer Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010) Garin, Eugenio, ed., La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento: testi editi ed inediti (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1947) —— , ed. and trans., Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1942) —— , ‘Introduzione’, in Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, ed. and trans. by Eugenio Garin (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1942), pp. 3–75 —— , Storia della filosofia italiana, 3 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1966) Hankins, James, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990; repr. with corrections, 1991) Kraye, Jill, ‘Eclectic Aristotelianism in the Moral Philosophy of Francesco Piccolomini’, in La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, Atti del colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt (Padova, 4–6 settembre 2000), ed. by Gregorio Piaia, Miscellanea erudita, 64 (Padova: Antenore, 2002), pp. 57–82

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—— , ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86 Lauster, Jörg, Dio e la felicità: la sorte della vita buona nel cristianesimo (Brescia: Queri­ niana, 2006; first publ. as Gott und das Glück: Das Schicksal des guten Lebens im Christentum (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2004)) Lines, David A., Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Uni­ver­ sities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002) Poppi, Antonino, ‘Fate, Fortune, Providence and Human Freedom’, in The Cambridge His­tory of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 641–67 —— , ‘Il prevalere della vita activa nella paideia del Cinquecento’, in Rapporti tra le Uni­ ver­sità di Padova e Bologna: ricerche storiche di filosofia, medicina e scienze, ed. by Lucia Rossetti (Trieste: Edizioni LINT, 1988), pp. 97–125 (repr. in Antonino Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: La Città del sole, 1997), pp. 177–213 —— , ‘Il problema della filosofia morale nella Scuola padovana del Rinascimento: pla­ tonis­mo e aristotelismo nella definizione del metodo dell’Etica’, in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance: xvi.me Colloque international de Tours (1973) (Paris: Vrin, 1976), pp. 105–45 (repr. in Antonino Poppi, L’etica del Rinascimento tra Platone e Aristotele (Napoli: La Città del sole, 1997), pp. 11–87) —— , ‘Salvezza e beatitudine: La crisi della felicità e il piacere come tentazione’, in Antonino Poppi, Etiche del Novecento: Questioni di fondazione e di metodo (Napoli: Edi­zioni scientifiche italiane, 1993) Saarinen, Risto, ‘Ethics in Luther’s Theology: The Three Orders’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 195–215 Silver, Bruce, ‘Montaigne, an Apology for Raymond Sebond: Happiness and the Poverty of Reason’, in Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein (Boston: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 94–110 Strohm, Christoph, ‘Ethics in Early Calvinism’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. by Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 255–81 White, Nicholas, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)

Passions for this Life Sabrina Ebbersmeyer Introduction According to the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, ‘reflection on the passions’ forms ‘the foundation of the whole of moral philosophy, whether private or public’.1 For this reason, he devotes more than a third of his work De anima et vita (1538) to investigating the nature and modes of the passions. 2 Vives’s appraisal is quite representative of sixteenth-century views, but it is hardly selfevident if one considers the history of western philosophical thought. Although no one ever denied the enormous impact of the passions on human behaviour, passions were usually regarded by philosophers as dysfunctions of the mind and therefore as perturbations and disturbances. They were seldom seen as possessing intrinsic worth.

*  I would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for its generous support of my research

project Das Irrationale der Vernunft, which led to the writing of this essay. I would also like to express my thanks to David Lines for his helpful suggestions and his patience in improving my English. The study by Perler, Transformationen der Gefühle appeared too late to be taken into consideration. 1  See the dedication of De anima et vita to the Duke of Béjar in Vives, De anima et vita, fol. 3v. 2  Vives, De anima et vita, Liber tertius: ‘de affectionibus’, pp. 145–264 (the preface to this edition has folios while the rest of the book has pages). Sabrina Ebbersmeyer ([email protected]) is Privatdozentin in Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She is the author of Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft: Studien zur Rezeption und Transformation der Liebestheorie Platons in der Renaissance (München: Fink, 2001) and Homo agens: Studien zur Genese und Struktur frühhumanistischer Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter 2010). She is currently completing a Dilthey Fellowship research project on reason and emotion in seventeenth-century philosophy.

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The question of how the passions may (or, indeed, whether they should) be reconciled with reason and a rational conduct of life is a crucial one. As natural inclinations, emotions disturb our social relationships and often collide with generally accepted societal norms. On the other hand, these faculties also motivate and direct our actions. Passions seem to be a precondition for our inner, social, and political life and at the same time a menace to it. Should they be eradicated, submitted to, or directed by reason? Is the irrational always inferior to reason or can it also be beyond reason — and if so, in what measure and to what extent? All of these questions have been raised by philosophers and answered in a more or less satisfactory manner. When Renaissance philosophers started to develop new perspectives on the phenomenon, they were confronted with influential traditional positions. One of the most influential theories of the passions was developed by Stoic philosophers. Within Stoic philosophy, passions are considered as false judgements which should be avoided. As perturbations of the soul they are likened to physical diseases.3 The Stoic position was assimilated in early Christian thought, where it was joined with the Christian concepts of sin and temptation.4 In the Augustinian tradition, the passions are signals of man’s sinful nature; they belong to the world of the flesh and are therefore regarded as potentially dangerous.5 This position was supplemented by the influential Christian assumption that affectionate love towards God is an appropriate emotion and that (according to several thinkers) loving the divine surpasses the rational understanding of it. This deeply rooted conviction found its expression in a prominent and strong mystical tradition. An additional perspective was provided by medical texts, which treated the passions due to their physiological consequences.6 The medieval reception of Aristotle altered this picture. Although Aristotle mentions the passions only briefly in his De anima7 they play an important role in his Nicomachean Ethics, where moral virtues are designated as a ‘mean’ between certain passions or actions.8 However, passions are not treated in the Ethics as a subject on their own. Only Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a text translated into Latin com3 

Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, ed. by Gigon, iv. 10–57. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind. On Stoic positions and Christianity, see also Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume. 5  See Augustine, Confessions, x. 30–39. 6  See for instance Constantine the African and ‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī, The Pantegni and Related Texts, ed. by Burnett and Jacquart. For the Galenic sources, see Gill, ‘Die antike medizinische Tradition’. 7  Aristotle, De anima, i. 1, 403a3–403b19 and 403a16–27. 8  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ii. 6, 1106b16. 4 

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paratively late,9 contains a more detailed account of the passions.10 But the perspective on the subject is rather specific: emotions are analysed insofar as they play an important role in speeches delivered to the public or to a judge, with the intent to influence the audience. The Rhetoric was commented on by only a few philosophers during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.11 Inspired by the Aristotelian account of the passions, Thomas Aquinas wrote a long section about the passions of the soul within his Summa theologiae.12 This Passiones animae is by far the most extensive medieval treatise on the passions. Though Thomas’s taxonomy of the emotions, which partly relied on earlier texts, became hugely influential in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, new approaches were also developed, mainly in the voluntarist psychology of the Franciscan tradition.13 During the Renaissance several philosophers increasingly departed from the scholastic Aristotelian paradigm of philosophy. They thus gained the opportunity to treat the emotions differently, either by rejecting Aristotelian concepts or by relying on alternative approaches, such as Epicureanism, Platonism, or Galenic medicine. In addition, Renaissance philosophers — especially the humanists who emphasized earthly matters — started to re-evaluate life in this world, and in consequence, also the passions related to worldly objects. Furthermore they became increasingly interested in analysing human behaviour as it really is, and not as it should be.14 With this change of attitude the investigation of the passions developed in a rapid and complex way. The varied translations of the Greek pathos as affectio, affectus, passio, perturbatio, and sometimes furor, which do not always cover exactly the same meaning, is one further indication of the complex and heterogeneous ways of treating the passions. In this paper I try to outline 9 

In the second half of the thirteenth century three Latin versions of the Rhetoric were prepared, but only the one by William of Moerbeke, probably made around 1266, is transmitted in a large number of manuscripts. See Schneider, Die mittelalterlichen griechisch-lateinischen Übersetzungen, pp. 1–12 and 92–98. 10  Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii. 2–11. 11  Egidio, Rhectorica Aristotelis; Guido Vernani, Sententia Rhetoricae Aristotelis, or Summa super Rhetoricam, three manuscripts are known; see Lohr, ‘Medieval Aristotle Commentaries: Authors G–H’, pp. 191–92; Jean de Jandun, Questiones super libris Rhetoricorum Aristoteles, six manuscripts, see Lohr, ‘Medieval Aristotle Commentaries: Authors Jacobus–Johannes Juff ’, pp. 214–15; John Buridan, Questiones super tribus libris rhetoricorum Aristotelis, three manuscripts, see Lohr, ‘Medieval Aristotle Commentaries: Authors Jacobus–Johannes Juff ’, p. 181. 12  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-1. 22–48. See King, ‘Aquinas on the Passions’. 13  Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, pp. 177–286. 14  On this point, see especially Eckhard Kessler’s essay in this volume.

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three main stations of these developments: (1) the humanist approach to human nature, (2) the impact of Platonic love theory on Renaissance thought, and (3) the increasing interest in the passions within the treatises on the soul. More detailed accounts of certain subjects and authors must await further research.

Humanists on the Passions: Reconsidering the Affective Nature of Human Beings Although the humanists refused to design complex and coherent theories and to think in a systematic manner, still they reflected deeply on human nature and developed new perspectives on it. This was also the case when it came to the passions. To describe their thinking either as Stoic, Aristotelian, or Epicurean may sometimes be helpful, but in the present case it would miss the central feature of humanist thought — that is, their devotion to real and concrete problems and their readiness to deploy any argument or philosophical position as long as it was useful in a given case.15 For the humanists’ views on the role of passions it will be helpful to start with one of their earliest critics of scholastic philosophy. Petrarch criticizes current philosophers — those teaching philosophy at the universities — for not taking into account the affective nature of man in an appropriate manner.16 Their abstract and theoretical way of academic thinking becomes problematic especially in the field of moral philosophy, where emotional engagement is necessary to move people to change their life and to follow the path of virtue instead of sinking in vice. Directing one’s life properly requires more than mere instruction; it requires setting the soul aflame for virtuous behaviour: Thus the true moral philosophers and valuable teachers of virtues are those whose first and last purpose is to make their students and readers good. They not only teach the definitions of virtue and vice, haranguing us about virtue’s splendor and vice’s drabness. They also instill in our breasts both love and zeal for what is good, and hatred and abhorrence of evil.17

15 

On the eclectic use of ancient sources, see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 16  Certainly, this charge is only partially true, for philosophers like Roger Bacon and John Buridan made explicit claims about the importance of the role of passions for moral philosophy and argued for applying rhetorical means in ethics. See Bacon, Moralis philosophia, ed. by Massa, Pars quinta, pp. 247–63 and Buridan, Quaestiones super decem libros ethicorum, Prooemium, fol. iira–iiva. 17  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, pp. 316–18.

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The task of moral philosophy is not only to teach, but to move us to love virtue and to hate vice. Moral philosophy has to take into account the possibility that one may know intellectually what is right but nonetheless do what is wrong.18 In this case, intellectual instruction alone is not sufficient; one also needs emotional engagement. ‘Anyone looking for such exhortations will find them in Latin authors, especially in Cicero and Seneca’, states Petrarch.19 Their texts not only show what is right, but also inflame the souls of their readers: everyone who has read our Latin authors knows that they touch and pierce our vitals with the sharp, burning barbs of their eloquence. By these, the sluggish are aroused, the frigid are inflamed, the drowsy are awakened, the weary are strengthened, the prostrate are raised, and the earthbound are lifted up towards lofty thoughts and noble desires.20

It may seem paradoxical that Petrarch’s emphasis on emotional arousal makes reference to Stoic philosophers rather than to Aristotle, the leading philosopher for scholastic philosophy, since the Stoics tend to suppress the passions whereas Aristotle holds that the passions should be moderated and cultivated. But this contradiction vanishes if one considers that Petrarch is not referring to the philosophers’ respective doxa, but to the difference in style which is deeply related to their respective purposes. In Petrarch’s view scholastic philosophy stands for pure intellectual teaching and theoretical sophistry, while the Stoics stand for healing of the soul and practical instruction. For the Stoics, healing the soul and guiding man to a happy life means essentially getting rid of disordered passions in order to attain an inner state of tranquillity. Even though Petrarch agrees with the Stoics that rational instruction can heal, insofar as wrong judgements are the cause of a passion, he still emphasizes the passions’ resistance to rational reasoning. Emotional states are not susceptible to the syllogism. Since passions cannot be overcome by mere intellectual insight, they have to be removed by more efficient means. Petrarch devotes a great deal of his intellectual activities to healing and curing the passions. Using a common analogy, he understands the passions as diseases of the soul. Whereas the body is cured by medicine, the soul is cured by moral philosophy.21 18 

Although Petrarch here intends to make a point against scholastic philosophy, one has to admit that the problem of akrasia was frequently discussed in scholastic contexts; see for instance Saarinen, Weakness of the Will. 19  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, pp. 314–15. 20  Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, pp. 316–17. 21  See for instance Petrarch’s analogy between corporal and mental contagion in Petrarch, De vita solitaria, ed. by Enenkel, p. 80 (i. 3. 15).

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The treatise Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul may be the best example of Petrarch’s intellectual engagement with Stoic psychotherapy.22 Taking up psSeneca’s idea of writing dialogues De remediis fortuitorum and expanding this undertaking to the causes of good as well as bad fortune, Petrarch composes 254 dialogues in which reason (ratio) argues for moderation with the four Stoic cardinal passions joy (gaudium), hope (spes), sorrow (dolor), and fear (metus). Two points may be worth noting. First, Petrarch does not compose dialectical dialogues which deduce step by step the right proposition and convincingly show the passions to be wrong. Rather the passions repeatedly express their diverging evaluation while reason again and again tries to invent new arguments. Although reason has the last word, sometimes it has to give up its efforts.23 Thus, Petrarch shows the relative independence of the passions from reason. Whether or not a given argument may help cannot be predicted with certainty. One has no other choice than to test it in a given situation. Second, Petrarch’s De remediis gives voice to a not yet fully explored world of sentiments: the joys and grief of a lay intellectual.24 Of the manifold dialogues in which Petrarch argues for moderating emotional excitement only a few may be named: joy about one’s own eloquence (i. 9) and sorrow about the lack of it (ii. 102); joy about being born rich (i. 17), having many books (i. 43), academic titles (i. 46), and a beautiful wife (i. 66); sorrow about having an immoral daughter (ii. 23), an unteachable, impudent pupil (ii. 41), or a house too small (ii. 63), and dying anxious about one’s fame after death (ii. 130). The pleasures and pains connected to all areas of worldly life are represented and discussed. Although Petrarch relies heavily on Stoic philosophy, especially as transmitted by Cicero and Seneca, he does not follow the Stoics blindly. The image of the Stoic wise man, liberated from all passions and residing in tranquil apatheia, may be a noble ideal for mankind, but it is not realistic and therefore does not suit as a model.25 One has to concede an affective nature even to philosophers: ‘The rabble considers philosophers and poets to be severe and stony, but in this as in many other matters they are mistaken; for they are made of flesh and continue to 22 

For the application of the term to Petrarch, see Panizza, ‘Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance’. 23  See Petrarch, De remediis, i. 43: De librorum copia and i. 101: De vindicta. 24  For the importance of dealing with grief in Renaissance humanism, see McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism. 25  See ‘Letter xxiii. 12’, in Petrarch, Le Familiari, ed. by Rossi and Bosco, iv, 186 and Petrarch, Secretum, ed. by Martellotti and others, p. 34.

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be human, [although] they reject pleasures.’26 With time the humanist critique of the Stoic ideal of apatheia grew even stronger and eventually became a topos in Renaissance treatises on the passions.27 For Coluccio Salutati it is precisely man’s capacity to experience emotions which distinguishes him from spiritual as well as from inanimate beings.28 The re-evaluation of the affective nature of man reached a new stage in the writings of Leonardo Bruni, who championed a realistic view of the emotions but referred to Aristotelian philosophy for support. Although the Aristotelian concept of virtue as a mean between two opposing passions was well known, it gained new weight when applied to the daily life of citizens. One must be angry, Bruni maintains, in the face of unjustified violence against one’s own father or daughter. Values connected to the fatherland, to parents, children, and others who are near to us require an emotional response.29 This emotional commitment is essential for supporting and directing our operations: ‘Certain impulses and stronger emotions — those which are with perfect justice aroused by a vile and disgraceful action, and which stimulate our piety and courage — are from time to time helpful and fitting.’30 Bruni is arguing not only against the Stoic position, which he explicitly refutes, but also against a certain Christian perspective, according to which the good and bad events of this life are neutralized in light of the afterlife. Bruni adopts a humanist approach to the passions; this leads not only to a re-evaluation of this world, but also to a change in man’s self-esteem: the sensual and affective nature of man is no longer seen as a burden to be transcended. On the contrary, it is recognized as an essential human characteristic. Defending the Aristotelian concept of virtue as a mean in a letter to his opponent Lauro Quirini, Bruni points out that a lack of emotional response towards the sensual pleasures of life must be regarded as ‘insensibility’ and ‘inhumanity’.31 Sensual pleasures do not seduce but render life worthwhile. They make us feel human. 26 

‘Letter viii. 3. 6’, in Petrarch, Le Familiari, ed. by Rossi and Bosco, ii, 139. See for instance Vives, De anima et vita, p. 193 and the refutation of the Stoic doctrine by Melanchthon cited below. 28  Salutati, Epistolario, ed. by Novati, iii, 352 (letter XI. 6) and iii, 306–07 (letter X. 16). See Kessler, ‘Emanzipation der Affekte?’. 29  Bruni, ‘Isagogicon moralis philosophiae’, ed. by Baron, p. 34. 30  Bruni, ‘Isagogicon moralis philosophiae’, ed. by Baron, p. 34. For the English translation, see Bruni, The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed. by Griffiths, Hankins, and Thompson, p. 278. 31  Letter from Leonardo Bruni to Lauro Quirini, in Bruni, Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. by Mehus, ii, 140–41. For Bruni’s defence of the Aristotelian position, see Ebbersmeyer, ‘Feind oder Verbündeter?’, pp. 230–32. 27 

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Given this shift of attitude concerning human nature, it is not astonishing that Epicurean philosophy — which regards the feelings of pleasure and pain as criteria for our actions — gained new interest starting in the fifteenth century.32 In his dialogues De voluptate sive de vero falsoque bono, Lorenzo Valla tests the power of the Epicurean position regarding the happy life by contrasting it with the Stoic position. Valla depicts the Epicurean stance in an extreme, almost satirical way. In contrast to the grievous and wretched constitution of the Stoic philosopher, Valla introduces a light-hearted and happy Epicurean who evaluates everything according to the criterion of pleasure and pain. He mocks the Stoic philosopher, who eventually aims at correcting nature itself, intending to eradicate the passions of human nature.33 Instead the Epicurean accepts human nature as it is and recommends directing one’s life to maximizing the feeling of pleasure, which is — as the Epicurean holds — what everybody is actually doing. It turns out that the Epicurean’s proposal leads to a world nobody would ever wish to live in, where every sort of crime (such as rape and adultery) is justified as long as the pleasure gained compensates the pain incurred. However, the persuasive power of the Epicurean position based on empirical observation and an objective view of the real behaviour of men is not easy to argue against. Valla develops a new strategy to encounter this problem: he does not refute the Epicurean position; rather, he outbids it.34 In the last part of the dialogue Valla does not affirm that it is morally bad or essentially wrong to hold pleasure as a principle, but that whoever calculates the pleasures accurately has to admit that the Christian way of life is the most pleasurable. Knowing that God exists and that the body will be resurrected after death, every Christian must measure and compare the pleasures of this life with those of the afterlife, ‘for we cannot have both’.35 The sensual pleasures of the afterlife are far more spectacular: not only is the sweetness of the common senses surpassed in an unimaginable manner, but we may expect new pleasures never experienced in this life, such as flying like birds, running like tigers, and swimming and diving like fish.36 Paradise even provides the intellectual with the fulfilment of his dearest desires, namely to master 32 

On the new availability of Epicureanism during the Renaissance, see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume and Kraye, ‘The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy’, pp. 337–38. 33  Valla, De voluptate, trans. by Hieatt and Lorch, p. 72 (i. vii. 6). 34  For Valla’s strategy, see in further detail Ebbersmeyer, Homo agens, pp. 222–55; see also Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense, pp. 152–90. 35  Valla, De voluptate, trans. by Hieatt and Lorch, p. 266 (iii. x. 1). 36  Valla, De voluptate, trans. by Hieatt and Lorch, pp. 300–02 (iii. xxiv. 13–14).

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every language and every science. There is no need to fear that Christianity brings with it a loss of pleasure.37 By simultaneously deferring the pleasures of body and soul to the afterlife and increasing them, Valla kills two birds with one stone: he saves the humanist attitude of looking at man as he really is and acknowledges his longing for sensual pleasure, while at the same time he makes the point that the highest pleasure can be reached only in the afterlife. However, his argumentation is precarious at least in two respects. First, he can claim approval only from those who already believe in the afterlife. Those Epicureans who do not subscribe to the resurrection will not be affected by his argumentation. Second, by keeping pleasure as the highest good, he subjects even God to the calculus of pleasures, since God is not loved for his own sake, but rather for the delight derived from this love.38 Some Christians might be put off by the frivolity of this reasoning. In any case, Valla was searching for a new way to reconcile man’s longing for sensual pleasure and a Christian way of life. He evoked Epicurean concepts to soften the strict, ascetic, and joyless attitude of Christian Stoicism. He was not without success. Though his work ended up on the sixteenth century’s Index of Prohibited Books,39 Valla’s attitude towards Epicureanism found quite a few followers, of whom Erasmus was probably the most illustrious.40

Platonic Love: Reconciliation of Sensual and Intellectual Desires The humanist movement gained a new stimulus and received a new direction through the reception of Platonic philosophy, and especially of Plato’s theory of love. Largely unknown to the Latin West during the Middle Ages, the Platonic theory of love had a tremendous impact on Renaissance culture when it became available through the translations of and commentaries on the Phaedrus and especially on the Symposium by Marsilio Ficino.41 Any discussion of emotions in 37 

Valla, De voluptate, trans. by Hieatt and Lorch, p. 304 (iii. xxiv. 20). Valla, De voluptate, trans. by Hieatt and Lorch, p. 274 (iii. xiii. 3). 39  See Kraye, ‘Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions’, p. 44. 40  Erasmus’s Praise of Folly offers many Epicurean arguments against Stoic moral philo­ sophy. See Panizza, ‘Valla’s De voluptate ac de vero bono’. The Epicurean concept of pleasure is also of some importance in several Colloquia and in his Epicureus; see Schmitz, Rebellion und Bändigung der Lust, pp. 141–53 and pp. 164–95. 41  See Festugière, La Philosophie d’amour de Marsile Ficine; Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love; Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance; Ebbersmeyer, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft. 38 

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Renaissance philosophy must therefore consider the remarkable influence of the Platonic theory of love during the period. Although love has been at all times a distinguished subject of special interest, not only for philosophers, but also for poets, physicians, and theologians, still the production of uncountable treatises on the subject during the Renaissance calls for an explanation. Certainly, the Platonic theory of love served as a stimulus for this intellectual movement. It gained more attention than ever before or afterwards in the history of philosophy. Famous philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Nifo, Leone Ebreo, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, and many others contributed to this discussion.42 The enthusiasm for Platonic love originated in Florence but radiated beyond its walls to the rest of Italy, though it seldom found its way into university teaching. It was far more important at courts, in literary circles, and in the newly founded academies. When the theory of Platonic love entered the courts of the Renaissance at the beginning of the sixteenth century, most of the love treatises were no longer written in Latin but in Italian. The Platonic conception was transformed and applied to heterosexual relations, as in Pietro Bembo’s Asolani (Venice, 1505), Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il libro del cortigiano (Venice, 1528) or later in Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogo della infinità di amore (Venice, 1547), where the philosophical implications became less important and the theory was used to legitimate extramarital love affairs. During the sixteenth century, love became the subject of scientific treatises and theoretical investigations, such as Mario Equicola’s Libro de natura de amore (Venice, 1525), Agostino Nifo’s De amore (Rome, 1531), or Flaminio Nobili’s Trattato dell’amore humano (Lucca, 1567). It was even praised and analysed in lectures at the Academy in Florence, for example by the physician Pompeo della Barba and by Benedetto Varchi and Francesco de’ Vieri, Jr.43 Finally the philosopher Francesco Patrizi composed a parody of the Platonic Symposium with his Amorosa philosophia.44 There was, however some intellectual resistance to this enthusiasm about love. In a common critique already expressed by Ovid and Cicero, love is seen as a 42 

Ficino, Commentaire sur ‘Le banquet’ de Platon, ed. by Laurens; Pico della Mirandola, ‘Commento sopra una canzone de amore’, ed. by Garin; Nifo, De pulchro liber; Ebreo, Dialoghi d’amore, ed. by Caramella; Patrizi da Cherso, L’amorosa filosofia, ed. by Nelson; Bruno, ‘De gli eroici furori’. 43  Della Barba, Espositione d’vn sonetto platonico; Varchi, Lezione prima sopra alcune quistioni d’amore, ii, 525; Varchi, Seconda parte delle Lezzioni; de’ Vieri, Lezzioni d’amore, ed. by Colaneri. 44  The text was not completed and was printed only in the twentieth century; see Patrizi da Cherso, L’amorosa filosofia, ed. by Nelson.

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danger to the stability of life and to inner and outer tranquillity.45 The exuberant enthusiasm of love did not fit the ethics of moderation. Accordingly love was understood as a destructive insanity. Cicero warned explicitly against falling in love.46 Not love, but friendship characterized the most appropriate personal relationship. In this Ovid and Cicero were followed by several Renaissance authors, who wrote treatises against the passion of love, such as Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Deifira ossia del fuggire il mal principiato amore (1428), Bartholomeo Sacchi’s (Platina) Contra amores (1481), Pietro Edo’s Anterotica (1492), and Battista Fregoso’s Anteros (1496). The famous Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola emphatically warned his fellow citizens in his Trattato dell’amore di Gesù Cristo (1492) against any conversation with women.47 Nevertheless, these few negative voices were drowned by a flood of treatises dealing with love in a positive way. What was the reason for this enthusiasm about love? What did the Platonic theory of love offer that others did not? There is no simple answer. Without claiming to give a full explanation, I suggest that one of the most appealing features of the Platonic theory was that it promised to reconcile man’s basic sexual desires with his most abstract intellectual desires. It enabled intellectuals to erase the sharp line between sacred and divine love for God on the one side and sinful erotic love on the other. This operation has two important implications. First, the whole sphere of worldly love (and of erotic love in particular) can be seen in a new light. Personal love is dignified as an expression of divine love. It is no longer understood as a concession to the sinful nature of man, but as an expression of a universal and divine principle. Second, the subject of intellectual love for God is no longer dominated by professional theologians; it becomes a major subject for lay intellectuals as well. Thus, love for God gains a worldly outlook. In Platonism the conceptual link between sensual and intellectual desires is the beautiful. Indeed, Plato poses no insurmountable ontological gap between what is perceived by the senses to be bodily beautiful and the divine idea of the beautiful as recognized by the mind; there is only a difference of degree.48 The Platonic philosophers of the Renaissance followed Plato on this point. Treatises about love also deal with the beautiful and sometimes are accompanied by treatises on the same topic.49 The almost sacred cult of the beauty of the 45 

See Ovid, Remedia amoris; Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, iv. Cicero, Gespräche in Tusculum, ed. by Gigon, p. 306 (iv. 75). 47  Savonarola, ‘Trattato dell’amore’, ed. by Ferrara, p. 97. 48  See Plato, Symposium, 210a–212c. 49  See for instance Nifo, De pulchro liber. 46 

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human body can also be seen in the painting and literature of the period.50 At the same time, however, there was also an ambivalence in this view: on the one hand, the material world is the lowest rung on the ladder of being, so its best attribute is to refer to a higher, purer, and more intellectual world. On the other hand, the material world is dignified as an effusion of the divine mind; its beauty therefore participates in the divine and must be worshiped. The Platonic theory of love also gave a new answer to the questions of how to rate strong sensual desires such as love and how to balance them with reason. Plato provides his followers with an optimistic view of erotic enthusiasm (mania/ furor). To feel a strong emotion of love is not necessarily a sign of corrupt judgement; rather, it can indicate a strong mind and strong intellectual capacities. This conception of furor fascinated Leonardo Bruni, Ficino, Diacceto, and finally Giordano Bruno. In Bruno’s Degli eroici furori the true philosopher is moved by heroic love, which has to be both ‘keenly felt’ (sensatissimo) and ‘lucid’ (oculato).51 Still, Plato rejects gross erotic pleasures and places a strong emphasis on the difference between refined divine love and crude vulgar love. This view is taken up and further developed by Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and many others. Concerning sensual pleasures Ficino argues for a certain sort of sublimation. In true love not every sensual pleasure is allowed, but only enjoyment through the senses of seeing and hearing and through the mind.52 Whether this means cultivation and refinement (or rather a suppression) of the vital functions of love is hard to decide. Whereas Ficino maintains in the end that the senses should be subject to reason, in the view of Sperone Speroni for instance the role of reason is not to suppress desires, but to regulate them.53 The reconciliation of sensual and intellectual love is of course fragile and hard to maintain. Ficino shows how the two interact and how difficult it is — especially at the beginning — to know exactly which sort of love one feels, since both start with seeing someone beautiful. But this sight can lead in two opposite directions: Love, as we have said, has its origins in sight. Sight is halfway between thought and touch, and hence the soul of the lover is always distracted and tossed backwards and

50 

Numerous examples are given by Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Bruno, ‘De gli eroici furori’, ii, 559–60. 52  Ficino, Commentaire sur ‘Le banquet’ de Platon, ed. by Laurens, p. 89. 53  See Ficino, Commentaire sur ‘Le banquet’ de Platon, ed. by Laurens, p. 165; Speroni, ‘Dialogo d‘amore’, in Trattatisti del Cinquecento, ed. by Pozzi, p. 557. 51 

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forwards. Sometimes a desire for physical embrace arises, and sometimes a chaste desire for the heavenly beauty; first the one and then the other conquers and leads.54

The question about regulating desires leads to asking in what way the Platonic conception of love provides a new scheme for Renaissance intellectuals to model their emotional experience and interpersonal relationships. Certainly, Platonic love helped to shape human relationships though it was restricted to certain kinds of love. At the beginning, Renaissance interpreters applied Platonic love to certain homoerotic contexts only. This is evident in Ficino’s letters to his friends but also in his Symposium commentary, where he clearly states that the specific relationship discussed by Plato is that between two men, a youth and someone his senior.55 This view was expanded to include heterosexual relationships in the writings of Castiglione and Leone Ebreo. Finally it was applied to the relationship between two women, as in Nicolo Vito’s Dialogo d’amore (1581). Personal love is seen in such a positive light that it is even understood as a guide for life, as a way which leads us to true knowledge of the world, ourselves, and God. This can be seen already in the writings of Ficino, where love is not only the subject of theoretical investigations, but also a certain modus vivendi.56 Thus the Platonic concept of love was part of a broader concept of life in which the cultivation and elaboration of personal relationships became an essential part. However, the motivation to model one’s own desires by following the Platonic ideal and to give them further meaning and importance by seeing them in the light of the Platonic structure of the universe diminished with time. Indeed, an increasing interest in describing the real behaviour of men and real love affairs led to abandoning the Platonic model. The main authority was no longer Plato or Aristotle but experience (sperienza), as in the dialogue of Tullia d’Aragona.57 The tendency to give up the elaborate Platonic conception in favour of plain and common experience becomes obvious in Montaigne: Les sciences traictent les choses trop finement, d’une mode trop artificielle et differente à la commune et naturelle. Mon page faict l’amour et l’entend. Lisez luy Leon Hébreu et Ficin: on parle de luy, de ses pensées et de ses actions, et si il n’y entend rien.58 54 

Ficino, Commentaire sur ‘Le banquet’ de Platon, ed. by Laurens, p. 163. For the English translation, see Finino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. and trans. by Jayne, p. 198. 55  Ficino, Commentaire sur ‘Le banquet’ de Platon, ed. by Laurens, p. 51. 56  For more detail, see Ebbersmeyer, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft, pp. 72–94. 57  D’Aragona, ‘Dialogo della infinità di amore’, pp. 204, 233–34. 58  Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. by Villey, iii, 874 (essay III. 5).

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Physiological Approaches to Emotions in Renaissance Psychology Although the passions of the soul tended not to be treated extensively in medieval commentaries on the De anima (the Aristotelian text lacks any detailed treatment of the passions), the philosophical investigation of the subject was stimulated by the above-mentioned extensive treatise Passiones animae by Thomas Aquinas.59 During the Renaissance, the passions became a notable subject of treatises on the soul. Comprehensive studies of Renaissance treatises on the soul in general and of the role of the passions within these treatises in particular are still not available, so any generalization would be premature.60 Still, two observations may be made: first, Renaissance humanists had prepared the ground for investigating the passions through their special attention to the real life and observable behaviour of men. Less important for them was a normative or systematic approach. Second, the increasing interest in medical analyses and the greater availability of medical authors such as Galen favoured a physiological approach to the passions. Very probably the growing influence of medical authors on the subject of the soul was supported by the close association between philosophy and medicine at the Italian universities, as was the case, for example, in Padua.61 This development led to an understanding of the passions as physiological alterations of the body. These observations can be illustrated by two authors who are generally regarded as pioneers in the field of psychology, namely the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives and the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon.62 Vives, who is occasionally referred to as ‘the father of modern psychology’, is the only modern author cited by Descartes in his treatise Passions de l’ame (1649).63 His treatise De anima et vita became influential not only on Spanish authors such as the philosopher and physician Juan Huarte de San Juan and the Jesuit Francisco Suárez, but also on Dutch and English authors.64 Melanchthon’s Liber de anima (1540) 59 

The influence of Thomas Aquinas was still at work in the sixteenth century; see King, ‘Late Scholastic Theories of Passions’. 60  As starting points for further research, see Park, ‘Psychology’; Salatowsky, De anima; Bakker and Thijssen, Mind, Cognition and Representation. 61  See Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua. 62  A question which needs further research is whether or not the works of these two authors should be understood as effects of the spreading influence of the Paduan model. For the importance of the University of Padua during this period, see for instance Piaia, La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano. 63  Descartes, Passions de l’âme, Seconde Partie, Article 127. 64  For the reception of Vives’s work, see Casini, Cognitive and Moral Psychology, pp. 12–18.

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was also extremely successful. The first version of this work was reprinted at least eleven times between 1540 and 1550, whereas the revised 1553 edition — stimulated by Melanchthon’s reading of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) — was reprinted twelve times in Wittenberg alone; other printings were made in Leipzig, Basel, and Zurich.65 Without claiming to be comprehensive, the following remarks try to provide an insight into the works of these two influential and widely read authors. Vives’s Psychological Analysis Vives divided his treatise De anima et vita into three books. Whereas the first deals with the brutish soul and the second with the rational soul, the last book is entirely devoted to the passions.66 Adopting a humanist approach, Vives undertakes to investigate the soul with a decidedly practical purpose, as he states in the dedication of his work: ‘He who does not explore himself is unable to rule his own soul and has no power to direct himself to right conduct.’67 Acquiring knowledge of one’s own soul is not regarded as a scientific issue but as an essential tool to guide one’s life. In this perspective the emotions gain a new and important role, for they are responsible for our longings and failings and ultimately for our happiness. Vives’s approach, which focuses less on theoretical speculation and more on practical ends, also involves a shift concerning the methods and the proper object of the investigation of the soul: It is useless to explore what the soul is, but it is of great moment to study what it is like and what its operations are. He who instructed us to know ourselves was not thinking of the essence of the soul but of its actions. It is these that mould our morals.68

Accordingly, Vives does not emphasize definitions and systematic accounts, but focuses on descriptions and empirical observations. Like Descartes and Baruch Spinoza after him, Vives regards himself as the first to be dealing with the subject in an appropriate and adequate way. While the Stoics perverted the subject through their sophistry, Aristotle limited his explanations in the Rhetoric to what 65 

Koch, ‘Bartholomäus Schönborn’. Vives, De anima et vita, fol. 3r. 67  Vives, De anima et vita, fol. 2r–v. 68  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 39. 66 

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was useful to a politician.69 In the following, I try to outline Vives’s definition and classification of the passions and to consider his physiological approach by looking at the relationship between bodily alteration and judgement. Finally I will reflect on the ethical implications of Vives’s understanding of the passions.70 Vives understands the passions to be the effects of certain natural inclinations which were placed in mankind by the ‘king of nature’. These serve the dual purpose of conserving life and enabling us to live a good life; in other words, they are given to us ad esse and ad bene esse (in the latter case, to help us seek the good and avoid evil). The acts of these natural faculties are characterized as affects or affections: ‘The acts of those faculties which nature gave to the soul to follow what is good and avoid what is evil are called “affects” or “affections”.’’71 As these affects move the soul, though in different directions and to different degrees, Vives defines affects as ‘motions of the soul’ (motus animorum).72 Vives makes some attempts to bring the affects into a systematic order, but he is not very consistent. At first he tries a classification according to intensity: light affects should be called ‘affections’, stronger ones ‘commotions’ or ‘pathe’ (he translates the Greek term as ‘passiones’). If an affect becomes even stronger it should be called a ‘perturbation’. Some affects are transient, some long-lasting, and some derive from our corporeal complexion and bodily constitution. Vives then tries to single out some basic affects. As affects either seek a good or avoid an evil, he names the following as the most basic ones; they constitute pairs of opposites and differ according to the way in which we are attached to their respective object: Affects concerning something good

liking, allubescentia (first impression of a good)

Affects concerning something evil

irritation, offensio (first impression of an evil)

love, amor hatred, odium (to something confirmed as being good) (to something confirmed as being evil) joy, laetitia (enjoying a present good)

sadness, moeror (mourning about a present evil)

desire, cupiditas (longing for a future good)

fear, metus (worrying about a future evil)

69 

Vives, De anima et vita, p. 145. For Vives’s account of the passions, see in more detail Noreña, Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions and Casini, Cognitive and Moral Psychology. 71  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 146 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 2). 72  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 151. 70 

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These affects may be referred to present, future, past, or even possible objects. All other affects fall under these main ones or are composed by several of these. In the following chapters of his book, however, Vives follows his own systematization only loosely. The systematic account becomes less important, and the traditional classification of the passions as concupiscible or irascible is abandoned. The novel and influential quality of Vives’s work lies not so much in a new systematic account of the passions but rather, as Carlos Noreña has pointed out, in the ‘constant effort to unravel by means of concrete description the inner dynamics of emotional processes’.73 Vives pays special attention to the physiological side of the affects, in particular to the role of bodily complexion and physiological alteration. He expounds the complex ways in which soul and body are intermingled when an emotional state arises: there are natural inclinations, such as the desire to eat and to drink, which arise from an affection of the body; others include ‘the feeling of sadness when we are sick or oppressed by black bile, the feeling of joy when a copious and pure stream of blood gathers around the heart, the irritation caused by a wound’.74 These emotions precede judgement, while others follow the resolution of a judgement. However, emotional arousal sometimes takes place so quickly that a prior evaluation seems hardly possible. In fact, a judgement need not be based ‘on a rational evaluation’ (‘ex rationum collatione’); frequently it is sufficient to be moved through visions of the imagination (‘imaginationis movetur visis’): ‘A mere commotion of our fantasy, bearing some resemblance to an opinion or judgment that a given object is good or bad, is enough to disturb our soul with all emotions: we fear, rejoice, cry, feel sad.’75 Affects function as intensifiers, as happens in the case of love: love arises from a judgement about something good and beautiful, but later it reinforces this judgement to such an extent that it is hardly possible to alter the previous judgement on the grounds of new information.76 Furthermore, affects and corporeal complexions are closely connected and act mutually on each other: certain complexions support corresponding affects, while other affects lead to a suitable complexion: ‘For affects not only receive the condition of the body, but preside over it.’77 The affects can be so deeply rooted in the flesh that they alter and pervert not only the inner senses, but also the exter73 

Noreña, Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions, p. 207. Vives, De anima et vita, p. 146 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 2). 75  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 147 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 3). 76  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 169 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 24). 77  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 148, my translation. 74 

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nal ones so that ‘those who love, are angry or scared, think that they see or hear what does not have any real existence anywhere’.78 Since Vives sees the affects as acts of natural faculties, he does not interpret them as sinful effects of the flesh, but rather as natural phenomena which help guide our lives. But although affects are natural and in this respect useful tools, still the aims to which these affects aspire — self-conservation and a good life — are rather general. So it is not self-evident which affects one should follow and which one should avoid in a given circumstance. Consequently, we are frequently mistaken in the election of the good. This does not mean, however, that affects are bad in themselves, for at their core even negative affects have something positive. Anger was given to man ‘to make him desire what is best’, indignation ‘for the sake of his social life’, fear ‘to enable him to avoid, before it happens, whatever might hurt him’, and shame was given to him ‘as a tutor’.79 Pride (superbia), which was regarded as one of the most dangerous sins within the Christian tradition, possesses for Vives a kernel of goodness and fulfils some fundamental functions: It was given to man to make him recognize the excellence of his origin, to make him love himself, to help him realize he was worthy of the greatest and true goods (i.e. the spiritual goods), and to make him seek these with great effort.80

Even envy, which Vives admits is sometimes given to men by the devil, often helps them to desire and preserve important goods.81 We must admit that the affects are extremely powerful forces, not seldom more powerful than reason and even the will. The fundamental role of the affects in human behaviour is best seen in the case of love, which is treated by Vives extensively and is regarded as a basic affect relevant to the entire realm of moral action. It is, Vives argues, even more fundamental than the will: the moral agent is directed by his will, ‘but love is the ruler of the will by drawing it to its good’.82 Significant aspects of our judging and acting are shaped by the battle, not between reason and the affects, but between different affects.83 For example, a feeling of respect (reverentia) is easily overcome by other feelings such as anger, 78 

Vives, De anima et vita, p. 150 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 5). Vives, De anima et vita, p. 219 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 74); p. 233 (trans., p. 90); p. 149 (trans., p. 107); p. 257 (trans., p. 115). 80  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 264 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 121, altered). 81  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 228. 82  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 168 (Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 24). 83  Vives gives an account of the various relations between certain affects; see Vives, De anima et vita, p. 152. 79 

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envy, hatred, or love. These can be overcome only by even stronger affects, such as desire or fear, such as when we desire or fear something from the person we respect.84 To purify the soul from long-lasting and strong affects (such as love) requires even stronger remedies, for instance music, parties, and ‘good wine, even to the point of inebriation if necessary’.85 Sometimes — and if all other remedies fail — it seems helpful even to bleed the patient, ‘to let the old blood out and a new blood in, an operation that results in new animal spirits’. From this change of spirits new affects may be generated, ‘such as the passion for money and honour, fear, indignation or anger’.86 Although Vives stresses the power of the physiological condition of the body for an emotional state, he nevertheless admits that the mind is able to master the affects. It is the wise man (sapiens), who ‘keeps himself under his own law and power, so that he instantly restrains any naturally rising affect by the bridle of reason and constrains it [affect] to follow right judgement’.87 But all others would not rely exclusively on the power of reasoning while dealing with affects. They would also trust the knowledge transmitted in the work of Vives, where one can see when to excite counter-affects or when to change one’s place of living or to start a diet. Melanchthon’s Interpretation In Melanchthon’s Liber de anima this understanding of affects as physiological alterations of the body becomes even more apparent. Influenced by medical authors such as Galen and Vesalius, Melanchthon sees the affects as intermediaries between soul and body.88 Indeed Melanchthon regards the affects — together with many other faculties which were traditionally attributed to the soul — as produced by a certain alteration of the spirits in the blood.89 Under the heading ‘Quid est potentia appetitiva?’ his Liber de anima contains a detailed account of the affects and in addition an extensive refutation of the Stoic doctrine.90 84 

Vives, De anima et vita, p. 189. Vives, De anima et vita, pp. 182–83; Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 36. 86  Vives, De anima et vita, p. 183, Vives, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Noreña, p. 37. 87  Vives, De anima et vita, pp. 150–51. 88  His admiration of Galen can be seen in his ‘Praefatio in Galenum’ (1538), in Melanch­ thon, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, iii, 493. For the reception of Galen and Versalius in Melanchthon, see Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy. 89  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 88. 90  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, cols 122–36. 85 

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Melanchthon defines affects as ‘movements of the heart, following cognition, which pursue or flee from objects, which — as they either support or destroy nature — are always accompanied by extreme movements’.91 As the beginning of life is located in the heart, which may also be the seat of the soul, the conservation of life or its destruction is expressed through characteristic and acute movements of the heart.92 Those affects that support nature, like joy (laetitia), hope (spes), and love (amor) are generated from an opinion (notitia) indicating something good; those that destroy nature, like sadness (tristicia), fear (metus), anger (ira), and hatred (odium), are generated from an opinion indicating something evil.93 Since the substance of the heart is regarded as the source of the affects, the ‘temperament of the heart’ has to be taken into account. The relation between the bodily temperament and the affects is close and reciprocal; for instance, a hot and dry temperament leads easily to anger, whereas on the other hand the affect of anger generates an extremely hot (ardentissimum) humour that is yellow bile.94 Though affects are seen mainly from a physiological point of view, still the relation between affects and reason is of interest for Melanchthon. He sharply criticizes the Stoic view of the affects as judgements, but he still maintains that affects are connected to some sort of opinion and therefore contain a cognitive element.95 He considers it possible for the mind to rule over the affects. But how and to what extent? In an analogy with public government, Melanchthon outlines two ways of ruling the passions. The first is analogous to despotism (Melanchthon is using the Greek term δεσποτική);96 in this case the mind and the will force the locomotive power to control the external limbs ‘even if the affects resist in the heart’.97 The second is compared to political governance (πολιτική); this is not characterized by command.98 Rather, the will, heart, and external limbs harmonize with each other, giving rise to real virtuous action.99 Though 91 

‘Sunt autem adfectus qui proprie sic nominantur, motus cordis noticiam sequentes, prosequentes aut fugientes obiecta, qui cum aut iuvent naturam, aut destruant, semper comitantur extremi motus’: Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 124. 92  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 126. 93  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 125. 94  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 129. 95  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, cols 124 and 125. 96  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 130. 97  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 130. 98  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 130. 99  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 130.

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Melanchthon seems to favour the second way, he concedes that it is very rare and takes place only through divine agitation.100 Although Melanchthon admits that the mind has some influence on the affects, he extensively refutes key aspects of Stoic doctrine. His critique focuses on three principal points. First, he denies the identification of affects as opinions. He argues that an affect is a physiological state which cannot be reduced to a mental state. He develops this argument in three steps: (1) Affects and opinion differ in their respective subject, that is to say in the physiological part of the body where they reside, as opinion takes place in the brain and the affects dwell in the heart. (2) Each kind of pain results from a laceration of the nerves if contrary objects are touched. An affect is therefore not an opinion in the mind or the brain.101 (3) Affects cannot be reduced to opinion, since certain affects (like the care of parents for their children) also occur in brutes, which lack deliberation.102 Melanchthon’s second objection is by far the most extensive: according to the Stoics, affects are vicious by definition. For Melanchthon this is the more serious error, because it opposes the basic Christian assumption that some affects are good and virtuous in themselves, namely those affects corresponding to divine law (lex Dei), such as ‘loving God, fearing God, loving one’s children, parents, spouse, brothers and other well-deserving people, pitying the just who fall into calamity, being angry about wickedness, rejoicing in virtue, feeling regret for our own wrongdoings and those of others, and rejoicing in the happiness of the just’.103 The opposite affects, such as being angry with God or hating one’s parents, are contrary to divine law and are evil. In addition, Melanchthon subscribes to the view that ‘nothing of what God has placed in human nature is evil sui generis’.104 In order to make this point, Melanchthon must refute not only the Stoics but also those within the Christian tradition who, on the basis of passages such as St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 7. 4–8. 17, see the desires of the

100 

Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 130. Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 132. 102  Against this argumentation the Stoics may raise the objection that in two different persons the same fact can cause two different emotional reactions, something that can only be explained by assuming that the two persons have different opinions about the same fact. From this does not follow, Melanchthon replies, that for instance pain is an opinion, but rather that the evaluation of the facts differs which causes therefore different affects. Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 132. 103  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 133. 104  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 134. 101 

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flesh as enmity with God.105 Melanchthon counters this view by distinguishing vicious affects per se and per accidens: whereas affects opposing divine law (such as desiring someone else’s wife) are vicious per se, affects created by God (such as loving one’s offspring) are only vicious per accidens, insofar as they also occur in the unconverted.106 Besides, Melanchthon tries to contextualize the passage by St Paul by showing that his dictum does not concern every affect but only those which the unconverted feel towards God.107 Eventually he meditates on the use of the word concupiscence (concupiscentia), which traditionally signified the desire of the flesh and the sinful nature of man, and which was erroneously applied to all affects. According to Melanchthon, its use should be restricted to those affects that exceed the boundaries set by God. All in all, for Melanchthon Christian teaching on the affects exceeds the doctrine of the Stoics as well as that of the Aristotelians. Ignoring the real source of human perturbations, the former consider all affects to be vicious, whereas the latter see them all as virtuous.108 The third and last point Melanchthon refutes is the Stoic opinion that any affects should be eradicated from human nature. He argues this briefly from a Christian point of view: God has made human nature in such a way that eternal justice and life require certain affects, such as love of God. Consequently, affects are to be maintained. Finally, Melanchthon reflects on the scholastic division of the affects into a concupiscent and an irascible part. He traces the division back to Plato and Aristotle, but regards it as not very helpful and consequently does not use it for his own investigation.109 So far, Melanchthon has dealt with natural affects, deriving from certain corporeal alterations. Matters become more complicated when these affects collide with the so-called affects of the will, which is understood in the Aristotelian sense of the striving power of the intellectual soul. The assumption of affects of the will generates the problem of the incongruity of the will and the heart, the 105 

Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 134. See, for instance, Romans 8. 7. 106  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 134. 107  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 134. 108  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 135. This is, however, a strong simplification, as the Stoics know at least three positive affects, namely ‘will’ (voluntas, boulesis), ‘joy’ (gaudium, chara), and ‘caution’ (cautio, eulabeia); see Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, iv. 6. 11–14 and Diogenes Laertius, De vita et moribus philosophorum, vii. 116. Aristotle mentions envy (phthonos) and ‘Schadenfreude’ (epichairekakia) as passions that are always bad; see Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1386b33–34; 1388a33–34 and Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a10. 109  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, cols 135–36.

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seat of the natural affects.110 For Melanchthon, this incongruity is an effect of the fall of mankind. Before the fall, all affects were ordered by and consonant with the will, but thereafter this harmony was lost. This does not mean, however, that the nature of man should be transformed into stone and iron. 111 Taking up the definition of natural affects, Melanchthon extends it also to the affects of the will: An affect is a movement of the heart or the will, following cognition, which pursues or flees from objects, which — as they either hurt or delight nature — are always accompanied by extreme movements; pain is injured nature, whereas pleasantness or delight assists nature.112

Melanchthon shows that even the affects of the will are intermingled with certain physiological alterations. Thus, for example, the will’s act of loving (amor in voluntate) — assuming it is not simulated — is accompanied by a certain joy (laetitia), which causes a relaxation (laxatio) of the heart. Through this joy the heart and the spirits are inflamed so that love can be described as an ‘inflammation of the heart’.113 Thus love as an affect of the will is inseparable from bodily agitation. Melanchthon does not argue for putting an end to the agitations of the heart; rather, he suggests restricting them to the proper occasions from a Christian point of view.

Concluding Remarks In this paper I have tried to shed some light on the role and meaning of the emotions in Renaissance philosophy by focusing on three aspects expressed in different philosophical genres. Actually, the field is much broader than this scheme suggests; it deserves further research based on comprehensive and systematic studies including additional works, such as spiritual and medical treatises and texts written by natural philosophers. However, based on the present investigation I venture to formulate a hypothesis which may be confirmed or refuted by further research: during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a strong intellectual tendency to affirm the power of the emotions over reason and to 110 

Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 157. Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 164. 112  ‘Adfectus est motus cordis aut voluntatis, sequens cognitionem, prosequens aut fugiens obiecta, quae cum aut laedant naturam aut delectent, semper comitantur extremi motus, dolor laesa natura, vel suavitas seu laeticia fovens naturam’: Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 168. 113  Melanchthon, ‘Liber de anima’, ed. by Bretschneider and Bindseil, col. 168. 111 

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devaluate the rational means for restraining the affective forces. As a result, the effectiveness of rational theories and therapies of the emotions was doubted. This tendency can be traced in the three intellectual contexts I examined in this paper. The humanists’ growing interest in the nature of man as it is and not as it should be led to a sceptical attitude concerning the ability of reason to overcome the emotions. This scepticism was expressed in a common critique of the Stoic ideal of apatheia and of the belief that emotions can be neutralized by means of rational deliberation. The humanists admitted that human nature is strongly shaped by the emotions. They did not lament this condition, but saw it in a much more favourable light than it was usually seen by authors within the Christian-Stoic tradition. By making claims for the legitimacy of worldly emotions, the humanists opened the discourse on the emotions for further investigations on the affective nature of men. The enthusiasm about Platonic love during the Renaissance is an indication of this spreading tendency. The emotion of love even for fragile and transient human beings is regarded as a distinguished gift. It is man’s capacity for loving which enables him to transcend his actual state of knowledge. Love does not necessarily detach us from cognition or from a virtuous way of life; on the contrary, it offers a way of understanding which is beyond reason and is a useful tool for realizing a virtuous life. Finally, the humanists’ acceptance of the impact of the passions on our conduct of life went along with a growing interest in the physiological preconditions of the emotions and in their natural functions. As passions were regarded as dependent on the constitution of the animal spirits, favoured therapies included a change of climate, diet, and the mixture of the humours. It became apparent that not even the will is independent from emotions shaped by the individual bodily temperaments. We may conclude, though, that not a few Renaissance philosophers tried to admit and respect the impact of the passions on our moral and intellectual life. Furthermore, they emphasized those elements of our emotional experience which are not ruled and controlled by reason, such as our inner physiological life. The passions should not be ignored — they should be guided, but not by rational means exclusively. We must take care of our physiological condition, of the place we live in, of our food and friends. As Ficino puts it in his De vita, it is the bodily complexion which renders the philosopher sad and fearful.114 Consequently, the quality of our contemplation depends on the quality of our physiological constitution.115 From this point of view, to deny or overlook these conditions would appear incomprehensibly irrational. 114  115 

Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. by Kaske and Clarke, p. 114. Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. by Kaske and Clarke, p. 110.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Bacon, Roger, Moralis philosophia, ed. by Eugenio Massa (Turici: Thesaurus Mundi, 1953) Bruni, Leonardo, Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. by Laurentius Mehus, 2 vols (Firenze: Paperinius, 1741) —— , The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, ed. by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 46 (Bing­hamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1987) —— , ‘Isagogicon moralis disciplinae’, in Aretino Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften mit einer Chrinilogie seiner Werke und Briefe, ed. by Hans Baron, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928), pp. 20–41 Bruno, Giordano, ‘De gli eroici furori’, in Opere italiane, ed. by Giovanni Aquilecchia and Nuccio Ordine, with commentary by Miguel Granada, 2 vols (Torino: UTET, 2002), ii, 485–753 Buridan, John, Quaestiones super decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum (Paris: Ponset le Preux, 1513; facsimile repr. Frankfurt a.M.: Minerva, 1968) Constantine the African and ‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī, Constantine the African and ‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī: The Pantegni and Related Texts, ed. by Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: Brill, 1994) Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Gespräche in Tusculum: Tusculanae Disputationes, ed. by Olof Gigon (München: Artemis, 1984) D’Aragona, Tullia, ‘Dialogo della infinità di amore’, in Trattati d’amore del cinquecento, ed. by Giuseppe Zonta (Bari: Laterza, 1912), pp. 185–247 Della Barba, Pompeo, Espositione d’vn sonetto platonico, fatto sopra il primo effecto d’amore, che è il separare l’anima dal corpo de l’Amante, doue si tratta de la immortalità de l’anima secondo Aristotile, e secondo Platone (Firenze: [Torrentino], 1554) Ebreo, Leone, Dialoghi d’amore, ed. by Santino Caramella (Bari: Laterza, 1929) Egidio Romano, Rhectorica Aristotelis cum fundatissimi artium et theologie (Venezia: Octavianus Scotus, 1515) Ficino, Marsilio, Commentaire sur ‘Le banquet’ de Platon, ‘De l’amour’, ed. by Pierre Laurens, Classiques de l’humanisme, 14 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2002) —— , Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. and trans. by Sears Reynolds Jayne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1944) —— , Three Books on Life, ed. by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clarke, Renaissance Texts, 11 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1989) Melanchthon, Philipp, ‘Liber de anima’, in Melanchthon, Opera quae supersunt omnia, in Corpus Reformatorum, ed. by Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Henricus Ernestus

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Bindseil, 28 vols (Halle and elsewhere: Schwetschke, 1834–60; facsmile repr. New York: Johnson, 1963), xiii, cols 5–178 —— , Opera quae supersunt omnia, vols i–xxviii of Corpus Reformatorum, ed. by Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Henricus Ernestus Bindseil (Halle and elsewhere: Schwetschke, 1834–60; facsmile repr. New York: Johnson, 1963) Montaigne, Michel de, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Pierre Villey, 3 vols, 2nd edn (Paris: Press Université de France, 1992) Nifo, Agostino, De pulchro liber (Roma: Blado, 1531) Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco, L’amorosa filosofia, ed. by John Charles Nelson (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1963) Petrarch, Francesco, De vita solitaria, ed. by Karl A. E. Enenkel, Publications romanes de l’Université de Leyde, 24 (Leiden: Brill, 1990) —— , Le Familiari, ed. by Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, 4 vols (Firenze: Sansoni, 1933–42) —— , ‘On his Own Ignorance and That of Many Others’, in Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh, I Tatti Renaissance Library, 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 222–363 —— , Secretum, in Prose, ed. by G. Martellotti and others, Letteratura Italiana, 7 (Milano: Ricciardi, 1955), pp. 22–215 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, ‘Commento sopra una canzone de amore’, in De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti vari, ed. by Eugenio Garin, Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano, 1 (Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, 1942), pp. 459–581 Salutati, Coluccio, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. by Francesco Novati, 4 vols (Roma, 1891–1911) Savonarola, Girolamo, ‘Trattato dell’amore di Gesù Cristo’, in Operette spirituali, ed. by Mario Ferrara, 2 vols (Roma: Belardetti, 1976), i, 77–127 Speroni, Sperone, ‘Dialogo d’amore’, in Trattatisti del Cinquecento, ed. by Mario Pozzi, La letteratura italiana, 25 (Milano: Ricciardi, 1978–), i, 511–63 Valla, Lorenzo, De voluptate, trans. by A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch, Janus Series, 1 (New York: Abaris Books, 1977) Varchi, Benedetto, Lezione prima sopra alcune quistioni d’amore, in Opere, 2 vols (Milano: L’Ufficio Generale di Commissioni ed Annunzi, 1859–80), ii —— , Seconda parte delle Lezzioni (Firenze: I Giunti, 1561) Vieri, Francesco de’, Lezzioni d’amore, ed. by John Colaneri (München: Fink, 1973) Vives, Ioannes Lodovicus, De anima et vita libri tres (Basel: Winter, 1538; repr. with intro. and notes by Mario Sancipriano, Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1963) —— , The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. by Carlos G. Noreña (Lewiston: Mellen, 1990)

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Secondary Studies Bakker, Paul J. J. M., and Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen, eds, Mind, Cognition and Repre­sen­ta­ tion: The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Casini, Lorenzo, Cognitive and Moral Psychology in Renaissance Philosophy: A Study of Juan Luis Vives’ ‘De anima et vita’ (Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet, 2006) Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, ‘Feind oder Verbündeter? Das Verhältnis der früher italienischen Humanisten zum Aristoteles ethicus’, in Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? Mo­ delle der Normenbegründung von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Eckhard Kessler (Berlin: LIT, 2007), pp. 219–42 —— , Homo agens: Studien zur Genese und Struktur frühhumanistischer Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010) —— , Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft: Studien zur Rezeption und Transformation der Liebes­ theorie Platons in der Renaissance (München: Fink, 2002) Festugière, André J., La Philosophie d’amour de Marsile Ficine et son influence sur la littérature française au xvie siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1941) Gill, Christopher, ‘Die antike medizinische Tradition: Die körperliche Basis emotionaler Dispositionen’, in Klassische Emotionstheorien, ed. by Hilge Landweer and Ursula Renz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), pp. 95–120 Hankins, James, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990–91) Kessler, Eckhard, ‘Emanzipation der Affekte? Tugenden und Affekte im frühen Italie­ nischen Humanismus’, in Tugenden und Affekte in der Philosophie, Literatur und Kunst der Renaissance, ed. by Joachim Poeschke, Thomas Weigel, and Britta Kusch (Münster: Rhema, 2002), pp. 63–76 King, Peter, ‘Aquinas on the Passions’, in Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. by Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 101–32 —— , ‘Late Scholastic Theories of Passions: Controversies in the Thomist Tradition’, in Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, ed. by Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 229–58 Knuuttila, Simo, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) Koch, Hans-Theodor, ‘Bartholomäus Schönborn (1530–1585), Melanchthons de anima als medizinisches Lehrbuch’, in Melanchthon in seinen Schülern, ed. by Heinz Scheible (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), pp. 323–39 Kraye, Jill, ‘The Legacy of Ancient Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. by David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 323–52 —— , ‘Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions of Renaissance Humanism’, in Humanist Traditions in the Twentieth Century, ed. by E. S. Shaffer, Comparative Criticism, 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 37–55 Kusukawa, Sachiko, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanch­ thon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

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Lohr, Charles H., ‘Medieval Aristotle Commentaries: Authors G–H’, Traditio, 24 (1968), 149–254 —— , ‘Medieval Aristotle Commentaries: Authors Jacobus–Johannes Juff ’, Traditio, 26 (1970), 135–216 McClure, George W., Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) Nauta, Lodi, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) Nelson, John Charles, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s ‘Eroici furori’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) Noreña, Carlos G., Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989) Panizza, Letizia A., ‘Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch’s De remediis’, in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in Euro­ pean Thought, ed. by Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 39–65 —— , ‘Valla’s De voluptate ac de vero bono and Erasmus’ Stultitiae Laus: Renewing Christian Ethics’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 15 (1995), 1–25 Park, Katharine, ‘Psychology: The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 464–84 Perler, Dominik, Transformationen der Gefühle: Philosophische Emotionstheorien, 1270– 1670 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2011) Piaia, Gregorio, ed., La presenza dell’aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, Atti del colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt, Padova, 4–6 settembre 2000, Miscellanea erudita, 64 (Padova: Antenore, 2002) Saarinen, Risto, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1994) Salatowsky, Sascha, De anima: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Psychologie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam: Grüner, 2006) Schmitz, Claudia, Rebellion und Bändigung der Lust: Dialogische Inszenierung kon­kur­ rierender Konzepte vom glücklichen Leben (1460–1540) (Stuttgart: Niemeyer, 2004) Schneider, Bernd, Die mittelalterlichen griechisch-lateinischen Übersetzungen der aristotelischen Rhetorik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971) Siraisi, Nancy G., Arts and Sciences at Padua (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973) Sorabji, Richard, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) Wind, Edgar, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber & Faber, 1958)

Virtue of the Prince, Virtue of the Subject Ullrich Langer

Virtues Personal and Princely It is well known that several guiding principles of Renaissance (humanist) ethics link the governance of a state and the good life of the individual. That is, governance of the state is a natural part of the virtuous life of the individual at its head; the personal virtues of its leader are coextensive with good functioning of the state. This means not only that the prince needs to be exemplary in his exercise of the virtues, but implies also that any virtuous subject is potentially capable of running the state. Good government is not an excessively technical science, nor is the prince endowed with divinely inspired qualities not accessible to others. The best-known expression of this connection between what one would call now the personal and the political is found in Erasmus’s The Education of the Christian Prince (1516). In a section devoted to the ‘arts of peace’, the Dutch humanist insists on mutual affection between subjects and prince as essential to good government. This affection is achieved through virtuous conduct: [The prince] will make every kind of effort to gain affection from the people in his turn, but in such a way that his authority is in no way diminished. There are indeed those who are foolish enough to try to win good will for themselves with incantations and magic rings, when no spell is more effective than virtue itself and nothing more desirable, and, since it is a true good and has no end, so it wins a man true Ullrich Langer ([email protected]) is Alfred Glauser Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book, Penser les formes du plaisir littéraire à la Renaissance, appeared in 2009. He is working currently on notions of equity and on ethical claims in lyric poetry.

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and endless good will. […] So let the prince who wants to be loved by his people first of all show himself to be someone who deserves to be loved.1

The prince’s ‘personal’ conduct is in direct relation to the affection he can rely on among his people; this conduct is conceptualized through virtues whose definition is culled from classical and Christian (scholastic) sources and filtered through commentaries and various paraphilosophical texts, abundant literary material, and iconography. The concept of a ‘virtue’ is on the whole a matter of consensus during the Renaissance: it is an acquired disposition (habitus) observing a ‘mean’, involving a rational component, deliberation, and choice according to ‘right reason’, but inculcated long enough to become part of a person’s natural behaviour, an expression of faculties.2 Virtues are determined in large part by praise, in the sense that the human community, or the superior parts of it (the ‘prudent man’), praise the virtuous man for certain actions, and this praise delineates virtuous behaviour. To modern minds this means of discerning virtue is tautological, but in fact over time and among large numbers of people similar behaviour is praised, which allows a conceptual precipitate, a set of distinct virtues. I will discuss some salient virtues below, to the extent that they link individual and political life. The challenges to virtue ethics in the political arena arise less from a questioning of the concept of virtue itself, but concern most overtly the relevance of virtue to effective government. Whereas the later sixteenth century witnesses the rise 1 

Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince, ed. by Jardine, pp. 66–67, my italics. The history and reception of the concept are beyond my subject; briefly, the main definition is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (ii. 4. 15, 1106b35–1107a2), transmitted through the authority of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary and humanist and scholastic editions, translation, and commentary. For the text’s transmission in the Renaissance, see Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume and Bianchi, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele’; Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’; and Lines, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Renaissance’. Commentaries often use terms borrowed from Cicero’s moral writings (notably the De officiis), which leads to an amalgamation of Aristotelian and Roman moral language. The ‘cardinal’ virtues are ubiquitous: see Macrobius’s famous commentary on the Dream of Scipio, i. 8. Seen from a theological perspective, the status of the secular virtues is questionable: they are not to be pursued for their own sake (see Peter Lombard, Sentences, I, dist. 1 H, Utrum utendum, an fruendum sit virtutibus), are secondary to the traditional Christian virtues of hope, faith, and charity, and, a fortiori, are irrelevant in any more radically Protestant consideration of human merit in the face of God’s grace. An arguably competing account of virtue can be found implicitly among the Stoics and more pertinently in the writings of St Augustine (e.g. City of God, xix. iv); whereas Aristotle’s virtue is a sort of managed equilibrium of sensation, thought, and action in time, for the Augustinian tradition virtue consists in the eradication of vice, conceived essentially as desire. The Aristotelian tradition is on the whole more relevant to the writers I will be discussing. For the other traditions, see the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume. 2 

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of theories of sovereignty and political ‘science’ that marginalize personal virtue, the earliest such challenge comes from the ‘realistic’ political thinker Machiavelli. However, he does not dismiss the concept of virtue or the good life by proposing a different model for ethical evaluation; instead, he does make successful control of a state independent of the consistent practice of virtue. He skews his case somewhat by featuring the virtues often identified as Christian, and less so the classical ones (see below). The prince must appear to be capable of pity, faithful to his word, humane, full of integrity, and religious: indeed this can be very useful. But, when the occasion demands (that is, when his power is at stake), he must be prepared to relinquish those qualities and act against faith, charity, humanity, and religion.3 Machiavelli justifies the abandonment of virtuous behaviour by the prince by the fact that men are evil (tristi); if they weren’t, the prince could be consistently virtuous and maintain his state.4 Indeed, one of the hallmarks of The Prince is the use of the term virtù to designate not ‘virtue’ in the classical sense but a kind of forcefulness or effectiveness of the ruler faced with unexpected contingencies.5 Machiavelli’s ‘realism’ (or rather, pessimism) has become such a commonplace to modern readers that it has either obscured the ethical culture he is thought to supercede or reduced it to caricature. It seems more appropriate and interesting, then, to look closely at some of the principles of Renaissance virtue ethics and an example of its representation. The continuity between personal and political virtue is reflected in the way one conceived of the field of moral philosophy (Ethica). As David Lines points out in the introduction to this volume, it traditionally grouped together three areas, thought to be components of the same whole: virtues of the person (such as their description in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics), principles of household governance (Economics), and the description of regimes and the principles of governing them (Politics). Specific virtues of a person naturally lead this person 3  Machiavelli, De principatibus, ed. by Fournel and Zancarini, xviii (pp. 150–52) ‘Quomodo fides a principus sit servanda’: ‘A uno principe adunque non è necessario avere in fatto tutte le soprascritte qualità, ma è ben necessario parere di averle; anzi ardirò di dire questo: che, avendole et observandole sempre, sono dannose, e, parendo di averle, sono utili; come parere pietoso, fedele, umano, intero, religioso, et essere: ma stare in modo edificato con lo animo che, bisognando non essere, tu possa e sappia diventare il contrario. […] [A new prince, in order to maintain his state, is often obliged to] operare contro alla fede, contro alla carità, contro alla umanità, contro alla religione.’ The very fact that virtues can be assumed and dropped at will runs counter to the Aristotelian requirement that they be semi-natural and enduring in order to count as virtues. 4  Machiavelli, De principatibus, ed. by Fournel and Zancarini, xvii (p. 146) and xviii (p. 150). 5  See its use as final word in De principatibus, chaps i and xxiv. Despite The Prince’s sub­ sequent notoriety, the term ‘virtue’ in political discourse remains essentially classical.

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to govern a household and to govern a state. Freely exercising one’s own highest functions as a human being, which is more or less a definition of the good life, includes the good management of oneself, a household, and a state.6 All of the principal virtues in the Aristotelian schema, largely reproduced in the early modern period, are related to the good exercise of power. The virtue of prudence is the most obvious one: the choice of the best means, in an environment allowing for contingency, to realize a good end is essentially an art of politics, and it combines the organization of personal virtue with the practical attainment of goals. The virtue of justice determines relations with others, and some of its components assume the possession of means to reward or punish others. In other words, it assumes at least potentially the use of power. The virtue of fortitude or courage is the intelligent expression of physical power, and its most telling demonstration is on the battlefield; in Renaissance monarchies, ideally if not in reality, the king is the leader of the noble caste of warriors. The virtue of temperance guarantees a control of passions and pleasures: it is the tyrant who is unable to control his desire for pleasure or money, and his personal excesses are a mirror of the perverted nature of his regime. In the Renaissance, certain Aristotelian virtues were identified as being more ‘princely’, such as liberality, magnanimity, and magnificence, and they concern the means which are foremost at the prince’s disposal.7 6 

The implied continuum of self-management of the person–household management– management of the state is counter to Aristotle’s own explicit refusal to consider the same qualities to be effective in the areas of family, estate, and state or royal management (Politics i. 1. 2, 1252a5–17, and again i. 2. 3, 1253b17–20). The point of departure of the Politics is ‘partnerships’, the relations of human beings and groups with each other, and the nature of the relation changes according to the status of the partner. Thus, there is no continuum between the relation of a master to his slave and the relation of a magistrate to subordinate citizens of a republic, nor is there an analogy between governance of a household (single rule) and governance of a republic, where the governed at times will govern in turn (Politics i. 2. 21, 1255b16–21). The analogy between relations among elements of the individual person and relations between political partners is used readily by Aristotle (soul–body = master–slave, intellect–appetites = statesman/king–subordinate citizens/subjects), e.g. Politics i. 2. 11, 1254b2–10. In Plato the continuity between individual qualities and qualities of the state seems to pose less of a problem (e.g. Republic 4.435b–e). One can argue that the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics, identifying the good of the individual and the (larger and nobler) good of the state (see i. 2. 7–8, 1094b4– 12), conflicts with the distinction Aristotle makes in the Politics. 7 

On the identification of specifically princely virtues, see Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, i, 125–28 (on Quattrocento Italian writers) and 228–32 (on sixteenthcentury ‘Northern’ humanism). In his largely Aristotelian summary of moral philosophy, Scipion Dupleix explicitly identifies magnificence, magnanimity (for those pursuing ‘honneurs suprêmes’), clemency, ‘entregent’ (urbanitas, especially for the nobility), and affability as virtues for kings or princes: Dupleix, L’Ethique ou philosophie morale, v. 7–12, pp. 313–45.

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They are also intimately tied to the display of power in the form of management of wealth or in the form of social gestures such as the building of edifices. To these could be added the Christian virtues (in principle, faith, hope, and charity, but in a political setting piety, religion, and faith), clemency or gentleness8 (praotes, mansuetudo), and diverse virtues filtered down from Aristotle through the commentary tradition and often given Ciceronian Latin equivalents, such as affability (philia, comitas, affabilitas), courtesy (eutrapelia, urbanitas), and truthfulness (aletheia, veritas, veracitas).9 The relationship between the virtue of a prince and the virtue of a subject is elucidated perhaps most relevantly in the case of justice. One of the distinctions between prince and subject presumably is the fact that the latter is mostly held to obey the law, whereas the former lays down the law. The notion of the virtuousness of ‘lawfulness’ is not foreign to classical moral philosophy: ‘total’ justice, the first sense that Aristotle gives to the virtue of justice, means lawfulness, the willingness to obey laws.10 In a just society, the subjects obey the magistrates and the magistrates follow the law.11 A good lawgiver presumably submits himself to the laws of his principality, and in a certain sense derives his ‘dignity’ from doing so.12 8 

Nicomachean Ethics, ii. 7. 10, 1108a4–9. In Aristotle, praotes appears as the mean between irascibility and spiritlessness. Cicero associates clementia and mansuetudo in his analysis of the role of anger in the dealings of a magnanimous man with his political enemies (De officiis, i. xxv. 88–89). However, Cicero criticises the Peripatetics for not advocating the eradication of anger altogether (when administering justice). 9  On the last four virtues, see Nicomachean Ethics, ii. 7. 10–13, 1108a4–32. Thomas Aquinas uses the terms mansuetudo, amicitia or affabilitas, eutrapelia, and veritas, respectively, for these virtues: Thomas Aquinas, In decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum expositio, ed. by Spiazzi, ii, lectio IX, 349–53. 10  See the opening of the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics (v. 1 8–20, 1129a31–1130a13) and the initial distinctions between the unjust man and the just man, who is law-abiding since the laws established by a legislature are directed towards the common interest or those of a ruling class distinguished by its excellence and whose laws are designed to further the happiness (eudaimonia) of the political community. Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples restates this Aristotelian view of ‘total’ justice: ‘Iustitiarum haec legitima est, qua quis leges condit, conditas discernit, condita autem et decreta exequi curat, et qua eius studium in beatam vitam et commune bonum dirigit: et haec iustitia tota dicitur’; see Lefèvre d’Étaples, Moralis, fol. 25v. 11  ‘Il est requis en toute Republique bien policée, que le peuple soit subget au magistrat, et le magistrat à la loy’; Pasquier, Le Pourparler du Prince, ed. by Sayhi-Périgot, p. 90. The distinction between subjects, magistrates, and princes introduces a complexity (relevant to political theory at the time of the Reformation) into the question of justice that I cannot address here. 12  ‘Digna vox maiestate regnantis legibus alligatum se principem profiteri’ (‘It is a sentence worthy of majesty for the prince to declare himself bound by the laws in force’, Codex Iuris

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This is an important link between prince and subjects. The second sense of justice is ‘particular’, that is, does not define an attitude of the person as a whole, but concerns specific acts of justice towards others. Thus, distributive justice, the distribution of goods and punishments to those persons meriting one or the other, directs the life of the person towards social organization. It cannot be said, really, that a contemplative hermit or, for that matter, a beggar exercise the virtue of justice. Similarly, corrective justice, the regulation of exchanges, assumes the power to adjust conditions of exchange and is obviously a link between personal virtue and the exercise of power. In all these ways personal virtue and the virtue of the prince are conflated in the form of justice. A more modern (and anachronistic) version of the situation of the subject would be the apportioning of certain duties to subjects with the compensatory allocation of certain rights. Thus, the ‘virtue’ of a subject would be defined solely by the extent and the quality of his or her fulfillment of duties or rules, by the following of laws, relegating the virtue of ‘particular’ justice to the apparatus of the state and its representatives. This arguably later sense of the ethical status of subjects in relation to power separates personal virtues from values associated with the exercise of power, and should be distinguished from the humanist-classical sense of their commonality that I have been delineating.13 The attention paid by humanist writers to the education of the prince seems excessive and almost a bit self-deluding to modern readers. But the principle is quite cogent. The health of the body politic is of one nature with the moral health of its head. The moral health of the prince depends on the free exercise of the highest faculties, the virtues. The virtues, however, are not simply rational precepts grasped abstractly and applied punctually. The virtues are habits or dispositions acquired through time and practice, in an interplay of rational understanding and practical application that makes them ‘natural’ ways of acting. No one is born a virtuous person. One becomes a virtuous person not by revelation or reminiscence, nor by the comprehension of certain rules, nor, at the other end of the spectrum, by a non-rational inculcation of responses. Education, this Civilis, i. 14. 4, my translation). For a version of this Roman law principle, see de Seyssel, La Monarchie de France, ed. by Poujol, i. 12, p. 120: ‘Et sont les rois beaucoup plus à louer et priser de ce qu’ils veulent en si grande autorité et puissance être sujets à leurs propres lois et vivre selon icelles, que s’ils pouvaient à leur volonté user de puissance absolue.’ 13  An interesting instance of this difference is the ethical justification of taxation: in scholastic (and Renaissance) thought, the subjects and the Prince are bound together in a contract governed by commutative justice — the subjects furnish money in exchange for which the prince furnishes services and facilities — thus implying that the prince and the subjects are equally participating in the virtue of justice; see Van Houdt, ‘Lessius’s Views on Taxation and Justice’.

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gradual acquisition of faculties that later seem natural, is essential to the forming of the person of the prince who, in turn, is essential to the good health of the state he leads. Hence the proliferation of advice books for the prince, young or old: an heir to the medieval Fürstenspiegel or ‘mirrors for princes’, the form of the Institutio principis was used by writers as diverse as Erasmus, Rabelais, Ronsard, and Montaigne.14 Reflecting, perhaps, the most evident way of determining virtue, humanist literature concerning the virtues is often couched in the epideictic genre. The most frequent example is the liminary material of humanist publications: prefaces, letters, poems, etc., lauding the qualities of the person to whom the writer dedicates his or her work. Praise — and, very rarely, blame — of the prince is a primary vehicle for the transmission of moral values.15 More than their adversaries the scholastics, who were ensconced in the universities and often connected to ecclesiastic rather than secular hierarchies, the humanists had overtly secular political aims.16 Their positions in the state as counselors, secretaries, etc. assured them access to power that the scholastics could not enjoy.17 Praise of a prince, especially of a young prince, is not meant exclusively to confirm qualities that have been demonstrated, but to encourage the development of qualities in nuce. The prince should try to become the person projected by the praise offered to him.18 This ‘parenetic’ element of epideictic literature19 distinguishes it from mere flattery. The extent to which epideictic literature actually made any difference in princes’ actions is obviously open to debate; it seems clear, however, that the discourse of personal honour essential to the self-image of the aristocracy assumed the exercise of the virtues.20 14 

Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince, ed. by Jardine; Rabelais, Pantagruel, ed. by Defaux, chap. 8; Ronsard, ‘Institution pour l’adolescence du roy treschrestien Charles neufviesme de ce nom’ (1561); Montaigne, ‘De l’institution des enfans’, essay i. 26 (1580). The fourth book of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) can be read in a similar way. 15  See Cogitore and Goyet, L’Éloge du prince, and Cogitore and Goyet, Devenir roi. 16  Erasmus, for one, had overtly irenic aims in his writings directed to princes. See Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince, ed. by Jardine, passim, but especially pp. 65–73. 17  See Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. 18  See Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince, ed. by Jardine, p. 60: ‘When he [the Prince] listens to solemn eulogies, let him not immediately believe or approve of such praise of himself, but if he is not yet such a person as they make him out to be, let him regard it as an admonition and energetically pursue the goal of some day living up to that praise.’ 19  See Pernot, La Rhétorique de l’éloge, ii, 710–24. 20  On the question of virtue as self-definition of the nobility, see the recent case study by Sterchi, Über den Umgang mit Lob und Tadel, especially pp. 185–229.

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All this being said, the frequency and persistence of epideictic literature directed towards the prince have philosophical implications. First of all, the assumption is that the virtuous person is the one who is being praised as such. The virtuous person is not simply he who, in his inner conscience, knows that he is doing ‘the right thing’. Instead, it is important that virtue be apparent, or rather, in what to modern readers seems like a flagrant case of begging the question, it is the recognition of virtue that makes it virtue. This is the standard departure point for any moral inquiry in the Aristotelian tradition. Let us determine and define the qualities of the man who is held to be prudent, just, etc.21 Therefore, praise of the virtuous man is not an empty gesture: it is essential to the very determination of virtue. In the case of the prince, who is the pinnacle, as it were, of the teleological view of the active life, praise by subjects also means that the finality of the prince’s virtues is being achieved. For the prince’s finality is the well-being of his subjects, not his own wealth or other interest.22 Praise by subjects means that the prince is acting like a good king, not like a tyrant.23

Literature and Political Instruction Literature occupies a special place in the ethical culture of the virtues, given the parameters that I have outlined.24 In essence literature was conceived in the early modern period as belonging to the epideictic genre of rhetoric:25 to the extent that it was ‘instructive’ or ‘useful’ (and there was hardly any literary text that did 21 

Obviously, Aristotle makes distinctions between views generally agreed upon and those that are not, and distinguishes between views held by the common people and those more qualified to judge: see his discussion of the definitions of happiness (Nicomachean Ethics, i. 4, 1095a14–1096a10). 22  For one of the innumerable restatements of this distinction, see Pasquier, Le Pourparler du Prince, ed. by Sayhi-Périgot, p. 98: ‘Car tout le but, dessein, proget, et philosophie d’un bon Roy, ne doit estre que l’utilité de son peuple. Autrement, s’il veut tout attirer à soy, en façon d’une esponge, il faut […] qu’il [le] ruine à la parfin.’ 23  The vexing problem, in the case of the prince, is the distinction between praise and flattery; there is no obvious solution, but at most pragmatic counsel on how to reduce the chances of bad (flattering) advice. See Plutarch, ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend’ (in his Moralia), and Machiavelli, De principatibus, ed. by Fournel and Zancarini, xxiii, ‘Quomodo adulatores sint fugiendi’. 24  On the presence of virtues and ethical themes in literature, see Peter Mack’s essay in this volume. 25  And to a lesser extent, the deliberative genre, since it presented possibilities for prudence to be formed and thus to be used to determine future action.

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not or would not make this claim), it presented human actions that are praised or blamed. In this sense it participates in a general way in the determination of virtue, and most notably, perhaps, in the determination of virtues of the leader or prince, since the noble genres, the epic and tragedy, both concern noble characters, and indeed, moral philosophy often drew on literature for examples of virtuous behaviour. The novella is arguably the most ‘realistic’ of genres, providing a fascinating glimpse into the social world of the early modern period. As opposed to most heroes of the noble genres, on an ethical plane the stories themselves often feature characters exhibiting pragmatic skilfulness, and sometimes a frankly cynical resourcefulness. In this sense many characters in the novella display what the moral tradition would term panourgia (astutia, malitia), a skilfulness practised in the absence of a moral goal and centred on the advancement of personal shortterm and base interests, thus incompatible with justice and true prudence.26 But the ‘cynical’ tendencies of some novellas do not prevent many of them from constituting complex case studies of effective practice of the virtues by members of all strata of society. The frequent representation of virtues (and vices) as the moral matter of literature derives not from the fact that the authors were trained Aristotelians, scholastics, or even Ciceronians. Rather, virtue ethics constituted by and large a default setting of Renaissance literary-intellectual culture, a setting that was not seriously questioned before the end of the sixteenth century.27 In addition, since virtue as conceived in the Aristotelian tradition is essentially active, apparent, if not political, it lends itself all the more to literary representation. This is particularly so in those novella collections deriving from the model of the Decameron, using a frame narrative in which actions of represented characters are praised or blamed.28 For all these reasons — increased realism, juxtaposition of ethical behaviour across social classes, representability of virtue, and ethical evaluation within the genre — the novella is perhaps a more interesting avenue to understanding the workings of individual and political virtue than political theory in the Renaissance. Among all the collections we have, none is written by someone more privy to the workings of power than Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of Francis I. 29 The 26 

See Nicomachean Ethics, vi. 12. 9, 1144a28. See the classic account by Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’. On the isolated cases of criticism of virtue as determined by the mean, see Langer, ‘La Mise en question du “milieu”’. 28  See Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, and Langer, Vertu du discours, discours de la vertu, pp. 132–40. 29  For a recent biography, see Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre. 27 

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Heptaméron (published posthumously in 1558 and 1559) imitates Boccaccio’s collection explicitly, although the stories themselves are mostly contemporary to her sixteenth-century audience. The frame story presents a group of storytellers, five noble ladies and five noble men, fashioned on the nobility of the court of Francis I. Their stories feature members of all social milieux, from the humblest peasants or servants to the bourgeoisie and the highest nobility including the king himself. They represent human actions that conform to various aspects of the virtues; it is instructive, in view of the connection between the political and the individual that underlies virtue ethics, to examine the contrast between two representations of human beings confronted with trying circumstances, in one instance the King of France, and in another instance a boatwoman from a village in south-western France. The Prudent Boatwoman (Heptaméron, 1. 5) In the fifth tale of the first day, one of the male narrators, Geburon, recounts the story of a boatwoman who escaped being raped by two mendicant friars. He does so as a direct response to the preceding novella, which had concerned the successful self-defence of a ‘princess’ (possibly Marguerite de Navarre herself ) against an attack in her bedroom by a violent and amorous guest. The point is to show that the nobility does not have exclusive rights to virtue, and that love and prudence are not where one thinks they are, in the hearts of Franciscans.30 The anti-mendicant and more generally anti-clerical rhetoric preponderant in the evangelical circle attached to Marguerite de Navarre aside, the story is about the fact that humble members of society, uneducated women, through the exercise of their own prudence, can outfox men who are known (falsely, as it turns out) for their ‘finesse’. The narrative begins as follows: a boatwoman, who spends her days and nights ferrying travellers across a river close to Niort, accepts two mendicant friars into her boat and begins the passage, ‘one of the longest in France’. To entertain themselves, the friars start making propositions to her, but she refuses. Finally, the men, whose ardour has not been tempered by the fatiguing voyage, cooled by the cold water, nor discouraged by the woman’s refusals, decide to ‘take her by force’ and, should she complain, throw her into the river. The boatwoman, to whom alone the narrator accords direct speech in recounting the tale, responds: 30 

‘Vous verrez que tout le sens et la vertu des femmes n’est pas au cueur et en la teste des princesses, ny toute l’amour et finesse en ceulx où le plus souvent l’on estime qu’ilz soient’: Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. by Salminen, p. 42.

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But she, being as wise and prudent (saige et fine) as they were foolish and malicious (folz et malicieux), told them: ‘My friends, I am not as boorish as I pretend, but I would like to ask you to grant me two things, and then you will know that I desire more to obey you than you do to ask me.’ (p. 42)31

The woman is characterized as ‘saige et fine’, attributes that correspond to the friars’ characterization as ‘folz et malicieux’: note that she is not described as ‘chaste’ or loyal to her husband. The opposition sage–fou is doubled by the opposition fine–malicieux, as if the second attributes were consequences of the first. Indeed, the woman’s wisdom is a sort of recta ratio, right reason, which results in finesse, a sort of prudence guided by correct understanding or principle. Conversely, the friars are not guided by recta ratio, but by an absence of reason, and their actions reveal malitia, a short-term cleverness bereft of a correct understanding or a good goal. Her possession of correct understanding is reflected in her speech (and by the fact that she speaks rather than being too frightened to talk). Her language resembles legal negotiation, and her phrasing is perfectly balanced, resting on two parallelisms (to be – to seem, to obey – to ask). She demonstrates an emotional self-mastery, an incisive understanding or perception of the present situation (she cannot defend herself alone against two men), and a sense of the efficacy of means (by seeming to be even more pleased by the propositioning than the men themselves, she is giving them the promise of greater pleasure and thus motivation to agree to conditions, obscuring the fact that her position does not really make it possible for her to set conditions). She is demonstrating, in other words, the qualities of prudence under duress necessary to any command situation, when actual physical force is not an option. The conditions are enunciated in the following way: ‘I request of you first’, she said, ‘that you swear and promise to me that you will never reveal our dalliance to a living man.’ Which they promised her very willingly. Also, she told them: ‘I ask of you that one take his pleasure with me separately from the other, because I would be too ashamed if both of you saw me together. Decide which one would like to have me first.’ (pp. 42–43)

The two conditions set by the woman — that the friars never speak about what is presumably about to happen, and that they make love separately — again reflect strategic prudence, in the sense that the easy acceptance of the first condition blinds the enemy to the consequences of the second condition, and the first con31 

All translations from the Heptaméron are my own — the page numbers refer to the corresponding French text: Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. by Salminen.

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dition seems to confirm the veracitas, the truthfulness, of her proposal. The need for privacy also reinforces her veracitas, since women in general are more likely to feel shame. The fact that she leaves the choice of the succession of partners to the friars gives them the illusion that they are the ones initiating the condition, not she, again masking the reality that she is hardly in a position to request the fulfilment of any conditions at all. Two other elements of this situation support the depiction of the boatwoman as exercising the prudence of the leader. First of all, her choice to lie as a means to avoid being the victim of rape is a kind of raison d’état, the assumption of extraordinary means when everything else has been exhausted or is inapplicable. She gives the semblance of veracitas, and that of an adulterous woman, in order to obtain her goal. Sometimes a commander needs to command the laws, rather than command according to the laws, as Montaigne says, referring to Plutarch: ‘C’est ce dequoy Plutarque loüe Philopaemen, qu’estant né pour commander, il sçavoit non seulement commander selon les loix, mais aux loix mesme, quand la necessité publique le requeroit.’32 The second is the fact that the story features not her initial chaste resistance, but the prudence allowing her to escape, a more memorable and praiseworthy virtue. In the other noteworthy tales of female resistance to male aggression during the first day (especially 1. 2 and 1. 4), chastity is demonstrated by physical fortitude, not by passive suffering and submission to violence. The boatwoman’s scheme works. She deposits one man on a small island and lands with the second friar on an island nearby, asking him to look for a good spot in which to make love. When the friar leaves the shoreline to do so, she immediately pushes off and is able to reach the river’s edge safely, calling her husband and officers ‘de justice’ who capture the friars and put them to trial. The judge allows them to purge their punishment in part by providing free Masses and prayers to anyone requesting them, which, given the often impecunious state of peasants, is a real boon to the village. Marguerite de Navarre is mocking the practice by priests of being paid for Masses, but on another level the boatwoman’s escape and accusation against the friars has helped the entire village. Her prudence is integrated into the well-being of the political community. The fifth tale demonstrates a kind of prudence that as an activity is not essentially different from the prince’s virtue, although it is practiced at a much smaller 32 

Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. by Villey and Saulnier, i. 23, p. 123: ‘That is why Plutarch praises Philipoemen who, having been born to rule, knew not only how to command according to the laws, but to command the laws themselves, when an emergency of the state required it’ (my translation).

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scale and in a much humbler setting. It is not a matter of learning a set of rules, or obeying a duty, and despite the declarations to the contrary of some tale tellers, it is not a matter of God’s grace and law, but it is a matter of a human being using her highest faculties to the best end: her prudential calculation and her power of speech in the service of the preservation of her conjugal chastity. The secondary effect of this activity is the good functioning of justice in the community, as, in addition to a final beneficial punishment of the guilty, many villagers come and witness their capture, and all officials are said to cooperate in the application of justice. The Prudent King (Heptaméron, 2. 17) Marguerite de Navarre’s collection of stories sometimes features her brother Francis I, and most often in a favourable light. Such is the case with a novella that is based on a true incident, although the dating is not certain.33 It concerns the betrayal of the King by one of his counts, William of Furstemberg: despite being from the house of Saxony and thus closely related to the house of Savoy, represented by the mother of the king, Louise de Savoie, the Count is rumoured to have accepted a sum of money in exchange for his promise to assassinate Francis I. A member of Francis’s council, the governor of Burgundy (La Trémoille), speaks to Louise de Savoie about these rumours, and she asks the King to dismiss William from his court. Other warnings confirm the initial ones, and La Trémoille, fearing for the King’s safety, begs him either to allow the Count to be dismissed or to give the order to dismiss himself. Francis I commands La Trémoille explicitly not to give any hint of this matter and thinks that he could arrive at the truth about this by some other means. The reason, given earlier, for the King’s hesitation to dismiss William derives from Francis’s belief in the integrity of the Count, that is, in moral behaviour intimately linked to William’s status as ‘honneste gentilhomme’ and as a man of virtue (‘homme de bien’) (p. 166). In this case, although his own mother urges him to act against William, for Francis a proof of culpability requires more than witnesses or documents; instead, as is clear later on, it requires a personal validation. Francis I’s situation is not entirely comparable to the boatwoman’s. The King is not certain about the threat posed to him by the Count, whereas for the boatwoman the danger is ‘clear and present’. The boatwoman’s prudence is exercised in view of saving herself, whereas the King, having refused to dismiss his potential 33 

See Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. by Salminen, p. 707.

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enemy, acts in order to ascertain the ‘truth’ and to remove the threat. The King, qua king, has many means to do so, such as overt dismissal, dismissal by a third party, etc. However, as a praiseworthy king, one about whom this story is told, Francis engages his personal virtues in the test of the possible traitor. Francis confronts the Count one day, when they are alone during a hunting outing: One day as he was going to hunt, he took the best sword possible, as sole weapon, and brought with him the count William, whom he commanded to follow closely. But, after having hunted elk for a while, the King seeing that his men were far away from him, except for the Count, turned away from all paths. And when he saw he was alone with the Count in the deepest forest, drawing his sword, he said to the Count: ‘Does it seem to you that this sword is beautiful and good?’ The Count, holding it by the tip, said to him that he never saw a sword he thought was better. ‘You are right’, said the King, ‘and it seems to me that, if a gentleman had decided to kill me and if he knew the force of my arm and the quality of my sword, he would think twice about assaulting me. However, I would think him quite evil, if we were alone without witnesses, if he did not dare to execute what he had dared to plan.’ (pp. 166–67)

The King deliberately leads the alleged traitor away from his companions, forsaking his personal protection but also the delegation of justice that is available to him as king. He wishes to rely solely on his own sword, the most obvious symbol of his virtue of fortitude. The King seemingly provokes the Count, unsheathing the sword and presenting him with its tip. His challenge is not direct, however, thus in some ways allowing the Count not to take it up. The challenge also is designed not really to find out the truth of the matter, but to test the limits of the Count’s virtue of fortitude. The King seems not to seek confirmation of the rumours about the Count’s betrayal, but confirmation of the extent to which the Count is truly a ‘hardy gentilhomme’ (p. 166). The Count refuses to take up the challenge: The Count replied to him, with an astonished face: ‘Sire, the evilness of the plan would be quite big, but the folly of wanting to execute it would be no less.’ The King, laughing, put the sword back into its sheath and, hearing that the hunting party was close by, spurred on his horse as fast as he could to join them. When he had arrived, he spoke to no one about this incident, and was certain that the count William, even though he was as strong and ready a nobleman as any, was not the man to accomplish such a lofty enterprise. (p. 166)

William modifies the challenge by attributing ‘evilness’ (meschanceté) not to the lack of execution but to any plan to assassinate the King, and ‘folly’ to its exe-

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cution, thus recognizing the King’s superior fortitude. But he has also deprived Francis of any basis for judging him innocent or guilty. All the King knows is that if William is guilty, he does not have the courage to execute his intention. If he is innocent, there is no cause to worry in any event. In other words, guilt or innocence no longer matter, since William’s virtue is not sufficiently strong to attack the King, even when given a perfect opportunity. The King’s laughter and his vigorous rejoining of the hunting company on his horse are gestures symbolizing the good functioning of the virtues in the person of the King, the most courageous of the courageous. Among these virtues fortitude is not alone: he also demonstrated his magnanimity, his generosity as a knight, by offering the opponent an opportunity to show his fortitude, in a grand — we would say dramatic — gesture. Francis’s reaction to repeated suspicions of betrayal of his person is much less violent than the likelihood of the Count’s treason could imply. His laughter is a symptom of his control of anger; he is exercising gentleness, mansuetudo, by not, say, killing the traitorous Count and by not mentioning the incident to his men. Is the King’s solitary challenge to the Count prudent? Given that he had other means by which to punish the Count, and undoubtedly other means by which to ascertain his guilt or innocence, means that would be less dangerous to his person, his action is undoubtedly not what we would call prudent now. But in other senses it was a prudent action. Francis deliberately chose the best sword, he initiated the confrontation and surprised the dumbstruck (estonné) Count, and the consequences of his initiative are beneficial, as one learns later. The shaken William fears that he will be discovered, and he seeks out Florimond Robertet, the King’s secrétaire des finances, asking for an increase in his benefices and wages from the King; in the event that the King refused, he says, he will be forced to leave his service. Robertet presents Francis with the Count’s request, and the King responds in this way: The aforementioned lord [the King] told them, laughing: ‘You would like to dismiss the count William, and you see well that he is dismissing himself. Therefore, you will tell him that, if he is not satisfied with the condition that he accepted upon entering into my service, which has kept several men of good families quite happy, that is a reason for him to seek better fortune elsewhere. And, as far as I’m concerned, I will not keep him back, but will be very happy that he find an arrangement elsewhere so that he can live there according to what he deserves.’ (p. 168)

Indeed, upon learning of the King’s response, William abruptly takes leave of the court. So, given the fact that a traitor has been removed from the proximity of the King, Francis’s confrontation with him was a prudent choice of means, for the end was achieved. But the effectiveness of the King’s action is secondary, perhaps,

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to the display of virtues that it occasions. The narrator emphasizes that the King responds while laughing or smiling, demonstrating his affability and the pleasure which is synonymous with acting well. In addition, the removal of the menace occurs with the least amount of effort, since the Count is ‘dismissing himself ’. This gesture by the malcontent servant of the King is not due to any lack of justice or generosity on the King’s part, who points out that other nobles have been satisfied with the King’s wages and benefices. The Count’s unwillingness to do so is perhaps caused, Francis implies, by his avarice. Finally, although his remark is ironic (a sign of his urbanitas), Francis acknowledges the ethical schema that underlies good monarchy: the king must assure distributive justice, the distribution of goods (and punishments) to his subjects according to their merit. The Count will find a position according to his worth, ‘selon qu’il le merite’. As is true of the Decameron, the Heptaméron’s stories are preceded and followed by commentary by the tale tellers, who in this case underline the virtue of the King. Oisille, the narrator of this novella, points out the risk that Francis was incurring when he confronted the Count alone, and feels that the King wanted to test the quality and courage of his heart, that is, that he wanted to test himself (and not foremost the Count) (p. 168). Parlamente, the storyteller who is most closely aligned with the voice of Marguerite de Navarre herself, confirms this.34 The praises offered to the King will not satisfy his ‘good heart’ as much as the knowledge and experience he has of possessing the virtues (for which he is praised). In other words, we return to the ‘parenetic’ function of praise, the incitement that it constitutes to practice of the virtues. Parlamente’s comment inflects this scenario, however, emphasizing a sort of inward satisfaction consonant with Marguerite de Navarre’s own spiritual evangelical tendencies manifested in her religious poetry and her correspondence with the bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, a leading figure in the early French Reformation movements. That being said, the story is a showcase for Francis’s virtues, many of which are active in this incident: his courage does not exclude magnanimity, nor does it exclude affability, justice, gentleness, and in the end, prudence, given his management of contingency. The virtues are connected in a happy chain. Francis’s choice not to exact vengeance is an instance of royal mercy advocated by Erasmus35 and 34 

‘Sans poinct de faulte, dist Parlamente, il avoit raison, car la louenge de tous les hommes ne peult tant satisfaire ung bon cueur que le sçavoir et l’experience qu’il a seul des vertuz que Dieu a mises en luy’ (p. 169). 35  ‘[When the prince pardons a subject who has offended him,] there is no better safeguard for his greatness than that the people know him to be so vigilant that nothing escapes him, so wise that he understands the true sources of the prince’s majesty, and so merciful that he will

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is a modest version of Augustus’s pardoning of Cinna. The boatwoman’s exercise of virtue is limited to prudence and courage, but they are just as striking, and in the end not in essence different from the King’s. As a woman she could simply have been an example of chastity and its defence; that is, she could have chosen to be a martyr, suffering the attacks of the friars, or throwing herself into the river. Instead, she devises a successful stratagem by which to vanquish danger. The boatwoman was by necessity exposed to danger as an individual person, whereas the King freely chose to risk his person. However the choice is significant: the proof of his virtue is not acquired through the intermediaries of advisers or institutions, but by personal intervention and validation. This lack of a sense of social or institutional ethics, in a culture dominated by virtues of the person, makes a continuity possible between subjects and prince in the exercise of a good life: managing yourself well is like managing a family, an estate, and in the end — why not? — the kingdom.

Bodin, Botero, and the Irrelevance of Virtue The confidence in the political effectiveness of personal virtue that a writer such as Marguerite de Navarre shows comes to be questioned in the second half of the sixteenth century. It is not that the concept of virtue is modified in any paradigmatic way; instead, political discourse marginalizes virtue of the prince as an effective means of governing. In this sense the mechanisms of the state necessarily become less continuous with the practice of virtue by any individual subject. Two influential writers in which this change is manifest are Jean Bodin and Giovanni Botero, and I will turn to them briefly in concluding. Bodin’s Les Six livres de la Republique (1st edn 1576) is the best-known defence of royal absolutism in the sixteenth century, and its theses are consonant with a yearning by many French intellectuals for strong royal authority in reponse to the terrible divisions provoked by the religious conflicts in Europe. Its hallmark is a legal and logical analysis of the concept of sovereignty (in Book i, Chap. 8) that concludes that the king is by his nature as sovereign absolved of the laws of his kingdom, although he is subject to natural and divine law. The traditional theme of mutual affection between king and subjects, which for Erasmus was paramount and an outgrowth of the king’s practice of virtue, classical and Christian, is treated relatively briefly by Bodin. If the king governs by abiding by natural law and his avenge no offence against himself unless the public interest demands it’: Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince, ed. by Jardine, p. 89.

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subjects obey royal laws, and thus the law is ‘queen’, then mutual friendship will spring forth.36 Bodin paints a vivid picture of the contrast between tyranny and good monarchy, using familiar distinctions between the good king caring for his subjects and the tyrant only pursuing his own best interest,37 but in the end he admits that this contrast is manifest only in extreme cases, and that not only do tyrants sometimes make good kings, but that many princes have some of both, and that all depends on the circumstances that the prince must face.38 Princely virtues such as clemency and pity should only be exercised by the person of the prince if there are strong magistrates who will demonstrate the rigour of the law: otherwise disorder will ensue.39 Indeed, princes will be loved by their subjects if they take care of the positive side of distributive justice (the distribution of goods to the deserving) and leave the negative side (the distribution of penalties) to the judges, who will incur the subjects’ hatred.40 Foremost in Bodin’s analysis are the maintenance of authority in society and the preservation of royal sovereignty. The prince as incarnating exemplary personal virtues is a slightly anachronistic figure; other considerations are simply more pressing. The Jesuit-trained Italian writer Giovanni Botero seems to take a stance opposing Machiavelli, and to a lesser extent Bodin, in his Della ragion di Stato (1589), a work that was widely diffused and influential through the early years of the seventeenth century. Botero appears to emphasize the importance of morality in statecraft and discusses princely virtues such as justice, liberality and concern for the poor, magnanimity, and magnificence. His maxim, ‘Tenga per risoluto finalmente che la riputazione dipende dall’essere, non dal parere’41 (‘Let him be 36 

‘Si donc les subjects obeissent aux loix du Roy, et le Roy aux loix de nature, la loy d’une part et d’autre sera maistresse, ou bien, comme dit Pindare, Roine: car il s’ensuyvra une amitié mutuelle du Roy envers les subjects, et l’obeissance des subjects envers le Roy, avec une tresplaisante et douce harmonie des uns avec les autres, et de tous avec le Roy’; Bodin, Les Six livres de la Republique, ii. 3, p. 288. 37  Bodin, Les Six livres de la Republique, pp. 289–94. 38  ‘Voila les differences les plus remarquables du Roy et du tyran: qui ne sont pas difficiles à congnoistre entre les deux extremités d’un Roy tresjuste, et d’un tyran tres-meschant: mais il n’est pas si aisé à juger, quand un Prince tient quelque chose d’un bon Roy et d’un tiran. Car le temps, les lieux, les personnes, les occasions qui se presentent, contraignent souvent les Princes à faire chose[s] qui semblent tiranniques aux uns, et louables aux autres’: Bodin, Les Six livres de la Republique, p. 294. 39  Bodin, Les Six livres de la Republique, ii. 6, pp. 621–22. 40  Bodin, Les Six livres de la Republique, p. 625. 41  Botero, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Continisio, ii, ‘De’ modi di conservare la riputazione’, p. 67. In the 1598 edition we read, following Botero’s maxim, a quotation from Tacitus: ‘There is no

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certain, finally, that reputation depends on being, not on appearing’), taken on its own, seems to contradict Machiavelli’s instrumentalist attitude, where a virtuous appearance can be just as effective as the real thing.42 However, the context of the maxim and Botero’s general line of argumentation in fact do not herald a return to an Erasmian moral politics of princely virtue. His main objective, when writing about monarchy, is to ensure obedience by the subjects by making the king vastly superior to them, just as the terrestial elements obey the movements of the celestial spheres, and among the celestial spheres the lower ones obey the higher ones. For subjects do not mind obeying those who are superior, but they will not obey those who are inferior or equal to them.43 Botero rehearses the traditional question of affection between ruler and subjects, but distinguishes between amore and riputazione, the latter being much more effective in maintaining power than the former. Love is based on ‘mediocre’ virtue, consisting mainly of justice and liberality (and includes humanity, clemency, etc.), whereas reputation is based on ‘excellent’ virtue which consists of greatness and strength of spirit and mind, impressive actions, etc., and can be summarized by the virtues of prudence and valour.44 This latter category, a sort of political sublime, generates not affection but admiration and is more effective in governing, that is, in maintaining subjects’ obedience. Alongside the traditional virtues of magnificence and magnanimity (which increase admiration), Botero highlights secrecy45 and even compares secretive princes to God.46 The insistence mortal thing so unstable and fleeting as a reputation for power not based upon one’s own strength’ (Annals, xiii. 19). The addition is telling, for ‘essere’ refers less to virtue than to sheer power. 42  Machiavelli couches his discussion of princes’ virtues in terms of their appearance, not their actual possession (e.g. ‘dico come sarebbe bene essere tenuto liberale’, xvi, p. 138). See also above, note 3. This emphasis on appearances comes to be associated — wrongly, I think — with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and becomes a standard feature of aulic advice literature and satire. 43  Botero, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Continisio, i, ‘Quanto sia necessaria l’eccellenza della virtù nel Principe’ (p. 20). 44  ‘Nella prima classe [i.e. amore] mettiamo quelle virtù che sono totalmente volte a beneficare, quale è l’umanità, la cortesia, la clemenza e altre, che noi possiamo tutte ridurre alla giustizia e alla liberalità; nella seconda [riputazione] poniamo quelle che recano una certa grandezza e forza dell’animo e d’ingegno, atta e grandi imprese, quale è la fortezza, l’arte militare e la politica, la constanza, il vigore dell’animo e la prontezza dell’ingegno, che noi abbracciamo tutte co’ nomi di prudenza e di valore’: Botero, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Continisio, i, ‘Quali virtù siano piú atte a partorire amore e riputazione’, p. 22. 45  Botero, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Continisio, ii, ‘Della secretezza’, pp. 56–57. 46  ‘È anche di grande importanza la secretezza, perché, oltre che lo rende simila a Dio, fa che gli uomini, ignorando i pensieri del Prencipe, stiano sospesi e in aspettazione grande de’

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on ‘reputation’ and the relatively inferior status accorded to affection in the relations between the prince and others are explained by a certain distrust, in the political sphere, of all human ties not based on interest.47 Both Bodin and Botero are examples of a decreased relevance of virtue in political writing: the finality of political order dictates, apparently, greater emphasis on the absolute superiority of the ruler, whether this is expressed through juridical analysis or through a reworking of moral political categories. Whereas the king’s prudence, in an earlier Renaissance context, meant a guiding of all personal virtues to the end that is the well-being of the subjects, in later contexts this prudence is a calculus of the effects necessary to bring forth willingness of subjects to obey. What is lost is precisely the ethical consequence of mutual affection, the continuity between personal and political virtue that is at the heart of humanist hopes for good monarchy. This continuity is expressed in the epideictic rhetoric implicit in Marguerite de Navarre’s novellas, where praise of the boatwoman is juxtaposed to praise of her brother the king.

suoi disegni’: Botero, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Continisio, ii, ‘De’ modi di conservare la riputazione’, p. 65. 47  ‘Tenga per cosa risoluta, che nelle deliberazioni de’ Prencipi l’interesse è quello che vince ogni partito, e perciò non deve fidarsi d’amicizia, non di affinità, non di lega, non d’altro vincolo, nel quale chi tratta con lui non abbia fondamento d’interesse’: Botero, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Continisio, ii, ‘Capi di prudenza’, p. 51.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Bodin, Jean, Les Six livres de la Republique (Paris: Jacques de Puys, 1583; facsimile repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1961) Botero, Giovanni, Della ragion di Stato, ed. by Chiara Continisio (Roma: Donzelli, 1997) Dupleix, Scipion, L’Ethique ou philosophie morale, ed. by Roger Ariew (Paris: Fayard, 1994) Erasmus, Desiderius, The Education of the Christian Prince, ed. by Lisa Jardine, trans. by Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, Moralis […] in Ethicen introductio (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1535) Machiavelli, Niccolò, De principatibus, ed. by Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean Claude Zancarini, trans. by Giorgio Inglese (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000) Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. by Renja Salminen (Geneva: Droz, 1999) Montaigne, Michel de, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Pierre Villey and V. Saulnier, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978) Pasquier, Estienne, Le Pourparler du Prince, in Pourparlers, ed. by Béatrice Sayhi-Périgot (Paris: Champion, 1995), pp. 279–409 Rabelais, François, Pantagruel, ed. by Gérard Defaux (Paris: Livre de poche, 1994) Seyssel, Claude de, La Monarchie de France, ed. by Jacques Poujol (Paris: Librairie d’Ar­ gences, 1961) Thomas Aquinas, In decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum expositio, ed. by Raimondo Spiazzi, 3rd edn (Torino: Marietti, 1964)

Secondary Studies Bianchi, Luca, ‘Un commento “umanistico” ad Aristotele: L’Expositio super libros Ethicorum di Donato Acciaiuoli’, in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento, rev. edn (Padova: Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 11–39 (first publ. in Rinascimento, n.s., 30 (1990), 25–55) Cholakian, Patricia, and Rouben Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) Cogitore, Isabelle, and Francis Goyet, eds, Devenir roi: essais sur la littérature adressée au Prince (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2001) —— , eds, L’Éloge du prince: de l’Antiquité au temps des Lumières (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2003) Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) Kirkham,Victoria, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Firenze: Olschki, 1993) Kraye, Jill, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–86

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—— , ‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, in Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Olga Weijers, CIVICIMA, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 96–117 (repr. in Jill Kraye, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), item vi) Langer, Ullrich, ‘La Mise en question du “milieu” éthique chez Valla, Vivès et Mon­ taigne’, in La Renaissance décentrée, ed. by Frédéric Tinguely (Genève: Droz, 2008), pp. 105–18 —— , Vertu du discours, discours de la vertu: littérature et philosophie morale au xvie siècle en France (Genève: Droz, 1999) Lines, David A., ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Renaissance’, in The Reception of Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’, ed. by Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 171–93 Pernot, Laurent, La Rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain, 2 vols (Paris: Institut des Études Augustiniennes, 1993) Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) Sterchi, Bernhard, Über den Umgang mit Lob und Tadel: Normative Adelsliteratur und politische Kommunikation im burgundischen Hofadel, 1430–1506 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005) Van Houdt, Toon, ‘Lessius’s Views on Taxation and Justice: Scholastic Background and Humanist Applications’, in Forms of the ‘Medieval’ in the ‘Renaissance’: A Multi­dis­ciplinary Exploration of a Cultural Continuum, ed. by George Hugo Tucker (Charlottesville: Rockwood Press, 2000), pp. 91–117

Epilogue: After Renaissance Ethics Sabrina Ebbersmeyer

W

hen did Renaissance moral philosophy come to an end? In this volume, we took the Renaissance as a period beginning with the age of Petrarch and reaching up to the mid-seventeenth century. The importance of Petrarch as a starting point is fairly straightforward: his approach devalued the importance of natural philosophy (in Italy, the dominant philosophical branch in the universities), emphasizing instead the role of personal ethics. His polemics against the treatment of moral philosophy by Aristotle and within academic philosophy signal his turn towards authors of the Latin classical tradition (such as Cicero) for moral instruction. We have similarly good reasons to see the end of the Renaissance in the seventeenth century. During this period prominent philosophers explicitly distinguished themselves from previous traditions. Thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Galileo claimed to have started something new and expressed the conviction that ancient thought was useless for current philosophical thinking. However, several scholarly works in recent years have shown that authors who claimed to start with something completely new were in fact well informed about and relied to a certain extent on previous traditions. In fact, it seems as if there was no such sharp dividing line as several authors of the seventeenth century suggested. Some tendencies already perceptible during the Renaissance were taken up and intensified; others were Sabrina Ebbersmeyer ([email protected]) is Privatdozentin in Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She is the author of Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft: Studien zur Rezeption und Transformation der Liebestheorie Platons in der Renaissance (München: Fink, 2001) and Homo agens: Studien zur Genese und Struktur frühhumanistischer Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter 2010). She is currently completing a Dilthey Fellowship research project on reason and emotion in seventeenth-century philosophy.

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neglected and abandoned; at the same time, new issues came to the fore. Without claiming to be comprehensive, in the following I will offer some brief suggestions about the continuities and discontinuities concerning moral philosophy. I will start with some reflections on the conditions of philosophical discourse in the seventeenth century. It goes without saying that this is not the place to discuss the economic, political, and social changes of this time, which were of no minor importance for the further development of moral philosophy.1 However, one should recall that England was shaken by the Civil War (1642–51) and that the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), in which nearly every European state from the Netherlands to Bohemia, from Sweden to Spain was involved, had disastrous and traumatic consequences for the inhabitants of Europe and reduced the population dramatically. With regard to the institutions in which moral philosophy was nourished, one can clearly see a relative decrease in the influence of the universities. In continuity with tendencies already observable during the Renaissance, the main figures of intellectual life were not professors at universities but rather politicians, diplomats, or private scholars. None of the innovative philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, or Leibniz had ever held a chair of philosophy at a university.2 This does not mean, however, that there was not still a strong tradition of Aristotelian scholastic moral philosophy which continued to comment and work on the Nicomachean Ethics. Within this context traditional commentaries fell out of fashion, while synoptic tables and especially textbooks replaced the former genres.3 However, the rise of colleges as institutions for education during this period is remarkable. Especially the colleges of the Jesuit order developed rapidly.4 One of these was La Flèche, which was attended by Descartes and Marin Mersenne. Besides Latin, Greek, grammar, literature, and theology, their teaching programme encompassed philosophy based on the works of Aristotle.

1 

See Menn, ‘The Intellectual Setting’ and Tuck, ‘The Institutional Setting’. The relation between the new philosophers and the universities was of course more complex. Many new philosophers had a university education, and some of them were professors at universities, but mostly not for philosophy. For example, Galileo held a post in mathematics, Justus Lipsius for history, and Henricus Regius for medicine; see Menn, ‘The Intellectual Setting’, p. 75. For more detail, see the essays by Schmidt-Biggeman, ‘New Structures of Knowledge’, Porter, ‘The Scientific Revolution and Universities’, and Brockliss, ‘Curricula’. 3  See Kraye, ‘Conceptions of Moral Philosophy’. 4  The number of the Jesuit colleges increased from forty in the year 1610 to 348 in 1789; see Tuck, ‘The Institutional Setting’, pp. 18–19. 2 

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Next to the universities, the academies flourishing since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the main institutions for learned discussions and demonstrations. In the second half of the century the three most important state academies were founded, the Accademia del Cimento of Tuscany (1657), the Royal Society of England (1662), and the Académie des Sciences of France (1666). However, these were not necessarily places in which moral philosophy was promoted, sometimes quite the contrary. For instance, when Robert Hooke, the official Curator of Experiments and later Secretary of the Royal Society, writes about ‘the business and design’ of the Royal Society, he explicitly advises ‘not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick or Logick’.5 More important for ethical reasoning at this time were informal circles, which served as places for intellectual exchange. This was true, for example, of the circle around Mersenne, in which Hobbes and Descartes participated. Especially in France the salon came into fashion; there learned men and women talked about science, literature, and morals. Though women were still excluded from any formal training in philosophy, they nevertheless had the possibility — like their predecessor female humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — to participate in these more informal learned circles. In fact, the salons of certain women became very influential on learned culture; some famous examples are the salons of Madeleine de Scudéry, Catherine de Vivonne (marquise de Rambouillet), or Madeleine de Souvré (marquise de Sablé). The latter was attended by François de La Rochefoucauld, whose Réflexions ou sentences et Maximes morales (1644) were stimulated by the discussions taking place there. Women became authors of letters, novels, and maxims with moral content.6 Molière’s Les Femmes savantes (1672) provides us with a parody of the learned women of these salons. Accordingly the preferred text forms in ethical matters were not academic commentaries. The dialogue form was still in use,7 but lost its significance. Letter writing, which was one of the main features of humanist culture, was also the central medium for communication for the learned men and women of the seventeenth century.8 The essay, which had become prominent with the writings 5 

Hooke, Memorandum on the Royal Society, ed. by Weld, pp. 146–47. See for instance Madeleine de Souvré, Maximes (1679) or Madeleine de Scudéry, Con­ver­ sations morales (1680–92). For the female voice within the French moralists, see Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue. 7  See for instance Galileo, Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi (1630) or Leibniz, Nouveau Essays (1704), which are written as dialogues. 8  See for instance Fumaroli, Les Premiers siècles de la République europénne des Lettres; Couch­ man and Crabb, Women’s Letters across Europe. 6 

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of Montaigne, was a favoured literary form also for authors like John Locke and Leibniz. Latin progressively lost its significance as the language of the learned world. Though it would continue to be in use up to the eighteenth century, prominent philosophers of the seventeenth century increasingly chose to write their works in the vernacular, following a trend already made popular in the previous century. Examples are Descartes’s Passions de l’ame (1649) and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). Some themes of Renaissance moral thought were abandoned. For instance, although love remained a relevant subject for various authors during the seventeenth century, the Platonic theory of love lost its significance. 9 Other themes were taken up and transformed. The critique of scholastic philosophy, for instance, which was a central feature of the humanist movement, is also prominent in the works of philosophers like Descartes and Hobbes. In a chapter of the Leviathan entitled ‘Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy, and Fabulous Traditions’, Hobbes explicitly criticizes the ‘Morall, and Civill Philosophy of the schools’.10 Descartes compares the followers of Aristotle in his Discours de la méthode (1637) to ‘blind people’.11 His critique, however, is more severe than that of Hobbes, since it rejects not only the moral philosophy of the schools, but also the classical tradition, which he compares to ‘very proud and magnificent palaces built only on sand and mud’.12 Thus, unlike most Renaissance humanists, Descartes did not expect ancient learning to help in renewing philosophy; rather, he sought a new method based exclusively on the insights of reason. With this purpose, previous thought was marginalized. Although older writings on moral philosophy might contain something useful, their use for current thought is regarded as very small.13 Several authors expressed the desire to start something completely new. Concerning the 9 

See Boros, De Dijn and Moors, The Concept of Love. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Tuck, pp. 469–72. 11  Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, vi, 71. 12  ‘Comme, au contraire, ie comparois les escris des anciens payens, qui traitent des meurs, a des palais fort superbes et fort magnifique, qui n’estoient bastis que sur du sable et sur de la bouë’: Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, vi, 7–8. 13  Spinoza, Ethica, iii, praefatio, states: ‘Non defuerunt tamen viri praestantissimi (quorum labori et industriae nos multum debere fatemur), qui de recta vivendi ratione praeclara multa scripserint et plena prudentiae consilia mortalibus dederint; verum affectuum naturam et vires et quid contra mens in iisdem moderandis possit, nemo, quod sciam, determinavit.’ See Spinoza, Ethik, ed. by Bartuschat, p. 218. Cf. Hobbes: ‘These I say are so many signes, so many manifest Arguments, that what hath hitherto been written by Morall philosophers, hath not made any progress in the knowledge of the Truth’. See Hobbes, De cive, p. 3 (dedication to the Earl of Devonshire). 10 

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investigation of the passions of the soul, Descartes holds it even appropriate to proceed ‘just as if I were considering a topic that no one had dealt with before me’.14 This leads to a style of writing in which older sources are hardly ever cited. The aim of grounding philosophical investigation exclusively on reason was pursued by applying the axiomatic method of geometry to the field of philosophy, as Descartes had done.15 By implication, this was also therefore the method for moral philosophy, but Descartes never wrote on this subject, confining himself instead to outlining four general rules which could serve as a morale par provision.16 Hobbes chose the method of geometry for his De cive (1642).17 Spinoza’s Ethics is ordine geometrico demonstrata and deduces its propositions with necessity from certain definitions and axioms. This method — chosen because of its certainty — was praised because it provided men with ‘a different norm of truth’ (alia veritatis norma) which would help to avoid prejudices (such as that of assuming teleology within nature), which was one of the main targets of philosophers like Descartes or Spinoza.18 Besides this new attempt to ground moral philosophy exclusively on reason by applying the axiomatic method of geometry, there was an increasing openness to using empirical observation. As this volume has suggested, a tendency in this direction was already present in the Renaissance, namely in the emphasis on describing, rather than laying down rules for, human behaviour.19 This became 14 

Descartes Passions de l’ame, i. 1: ‘Il n’y a rien en quoy paroisse mieux combien les sciences que nous avons des Anciens sont defectueuses, qu’en ce qu’ils ont escrit des Passions. […] C’est pourquoy je seray obligé d’escrire icy en mesme façon, que si je traitois d’une matiere que jamais personne avant moy n’eust touchée.’ Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, xi, 327–28; Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, trans. by Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Kelly, i, 328. 15  Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, vi, 18–22. 16  Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, vi, 22–31. 17  See Hobbes, De cive, pp. 3–5. 18  Spinoza, Ethica, i, prop. 36 app: ‘Unde pro certo statuerunt deorum judicia humanum captum longissime superare: quae sane unica fuisset causa, ut veritas humanum genus in aeternum lateret, nisi mathesis, quae non circa fines, sed tantum circa figurarum essentias et proprietates versatur, aliam veritatis normam hominibus ostendisset’. See Spinoza, Ethik, ed. by Bartuschat, p. 84. 19  See for instance Poggio Bracciolini, De avaritia: ‘qui enim sunt isti qui publicum quaerant bonum, seposito privato emolumento? ad hunc diem neminem cognovi quin suum praeferret, si id quidem posset impune. Dicuntur eiusmodi nonnulla a philosophis de praeponenda utilitate communi, magis apta disputandi solertiae quam veritati, sed vita mortalium non est exigenda nobis ad stateram philosophiae: consuetum est et communi usu concessum atque ab ispius orbis ortu factitatum, ut magis afficiamur propriis quam communibus

332 Sabrina Ebbersmeyer

a topos in the seventeenth century,20 leading to a reflection on the ‘nature’ of human beings, which would serve as the basis from which empirical observations could be interpreted. Some themes rooted in late scholastic discussions were taken up and developed further during the seventeenth century. Here I can mention only two of them. In continuity with discussions already pursued by followers of Luis Molina on the one side and of Jacobus Arminius on the other, a hotly debated question concerned the compatibility of determinism with free will. Major philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz seemed to favour deterministic and compatibilistic theories, though with various argumentations.21 Another subject which gained the attention of moral philosophers was the meaning and scope of natural law. Thomas Aquinas had, of course, presented the classic and paradigmatic version of this subject; it gained new importance during the seventeenth century, where it served as a general foundation for ethics and was separated from Christian religion in authors like Grotius and Hobbes.22 But there were certainly also some new topics. One central principle in terms of which moral behaviour was explained was that of self-preservation (conservatio sui). Already in Descartes’s writings, self-preservation serves as the final goal of the composite of body and mind which forms a human being.23 It became the central concept in the ethical thought of Hobbes and Spinoza. The principal goal of every being is to keep itself in being. Ethics has to be built upon this assumption, which makes any transcendental principle superfluous. Although there had been some Renaissance authors, such as Leon Battista Alberti or Bernardino Telesio,24 who made reference to the Stoic principle of self-preservation within rebus, quod idem fatebimur omnes, nisi malimus magnifica loqui quam consueta.’ Bracciolini, De avaritia, ed. by Germano, p. 80. Or Machiavelli, Il principe, Cap. XV: ‘ma, sendo l’intento mio, scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende, mi è parso piú conveniente andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa che alla immaginazione di essa.’ See Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. by Martelli, p. 215. 20  Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. by Kaye, i, 39: ‘One of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves, is, that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really are.’ Spinoza Tractatus politicus, I, §1: ‘Homines namque non ut sunt, sed ut eosdem esse vellent, concipiunt’, in Spinoza, Opera, ed. by Gebhardt, iii, 273. 21  See Sleigh and della Rocca, ‘Determinism and Human Freedom’. 22  See Haakonssen, ‘Divine/Natural Law Theories in Ethics’. 23  Meditationes de prima philosophia, in Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, vii, 87–88. 24  Especially in the first two books of his I libri della famiglia Alberti develops and applies the

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ethical reasoning, it was not until Hobbes and Spinoza that systematic ethical theories were based upon it.25 One subject belonging to moral philosophy gained more attention than ever before in the history of philosophy: that of the passions or affects of men. A remarkable number of treatises on this subject was written during the seventeenth century, by authors within and outside of the scholastic tradition, including Catholics, Protestants, Neo-stoic traditionalists, and new philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza. To give an adequate account of the nature of the passions and to develop efficient strategies to deal with them appropriately became a central subject of seventeenth-century moral thought.26 Although the seventeenth century is especially known for the beginnings of the ‘scientific revolution’ and advancements in the field of natural philosophy, moral philosophy gained in status in the view of some prominent philosophers. In a famous simile, Descartes describes moral philosophy together with medicine and mechanics as the crown of the tree of philosophy (metaphysics is its roots; physics, its trunk). Indeed, moral philosophy presupposes knowledge of all the other sciences and represents the last and ultimate degree of wisdom.27 It holds this very place because all sciences serve the ultimate goal of all scientific and intellectual engagement, which is the ‘general good of all men’ (‘le bien general de

Stoic notion of preservation for his doctrine of the household. For more detail, see Ebbersmeyer, Homo agens, pp.  264–67. Telesio’s philosophy of nature is based on the principle of selfpreservation. The ninth book of his De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (1586) dealing with the passions and virtues and vices expounds the ethical implications of this principle. See Mulsow, Frühneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung. 25  See Hobbes, De cive, i. 1 (p. 7): ‘Therefore the first foundation of naturall Right is this, That every man as much as in him lies endeavour to protect his life and members.’ Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Tuck, chap. 14 (p. 91): ‘The Right of Nature, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life.’ Spinoza, Ethik, ed. by Bartuschat, iv, prop. 18 demon. (p. 411): ‘hinc sequitur primo virtutis fundamentum esse ipsum conatum proprium esse conservandi et felicitatem in eo consistere, quod homo suum esse conservare potest’. 26  For more detail, see James, Action and Passion and more recently, James, ‘The Passions and the Good Life’. For the French moralists, see still Levi, French Moralists. 27  See the letter-preface to Picot to the French translation of the Principia, Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, ix, 2. 14: ‘Ainsi toute la Philosophie est comme une arbre, dont les racines sont la Metaphysique, le tronc est la Physique, et les branches qui sortent de ce trunc sont toutes les autres sciences, qui se reduisent à trois principales, à sçavoir la Medecine, la Mechanique et la Morale, j’entens la plus haute et la plus parfaite Morale, qui, presupposant une entiere connoissance des autres sciences, est la dernier degré de la Sagesse.’

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tous les hommes’).28 Whatever is useful for this purpose is valuable. Moral philosophy is important because of its usefulness for human happiness.29 The period of the Renaissance can be seen as a crossover between the Middle Ages and the early modern era, which would eventually lead to the age of Enlightenment and culminate in the proclaimed autonomy of the moral agent.30 The Renaissance is characterized by strong traditions inherited from the Middle Ages — for example, Augustinianism and Aristotelian scholasticism, which were cultivated and transformed during this period. At the same time, it created new motifs and tendencies leading the way to early modern ethical thought. As a period of transition, the Renaissance included various tendencies, which cannot be reduced to a certain set of philosophical positions. We hope that our volume shows convincingly that, for understanding the development of Western ethical thought, better knowledge of the complex period of the Renaissance — with all its ambivalent and sometimes even paradoxical aspects — is indispensable.

28 

Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, vi, 61. In the last paragraph of his Passions de l’ame which is entitled ‘Que c’est d’elles [the passions] seules que depend tout le bien et le mal de cette vie’ Descartes states (Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. by Adam and Tannery, xi, 488): ‘Mais la sagesse est principalement utile en le point, qu’elle enseigne à s’en rendre tellement maistre, et à les mesnager avec tant d’adresse, que les maux qu’elles causent sont fort supportables, et mesme qu’on tire de la Ioy de tous.’ 30  For the historical background for the development of this concept, see Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy. 29 

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Works Cited Primary Sources Bracciolini, Poggio, De avaritia, ed. by Giuseppe Germano (Livorno: Belforte, 1994) Descartes, René, Discours de la méthode, in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1973; repr. 1996), vi —— , The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kelly, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91) Hobbes, Thomas, De cive (London: J. C. for Royston, 1651) —— , Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Hooke, Robert, Memorandum on the Royal Society (1663), in Charles Richard Weld, A History of the Royal Society, 2 vols (London: Parker, 1848), i, 146–48 Machiavelli, Niccolò, Il principe, ed. by Mario Martelli, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, 1 (Roma: Salerno, 2006) Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. by F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988) Spinoza, Baruch, Ethik in geometrischer Ordnung dargestellt, ed. by Wolfgang Bartuschat (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007) —— , Opera, ed. by Carl Gebhardt, 4 vols (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925)

Secondary Studies Boros, Gábor, Herman De Dijn, and Martin Moors, eds, The Concept of Love in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007) Brockliss, Laurence, ‘Curricula’, in A History of the University in Europe, ed. by Walter Ruegg, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2011), ii: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (1996), pp. 563–620 Conley, John J., The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) Couchman, Jane, and Ann Crabb, Women’s Letters across Europe 1400–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, Homo agens: Studien zur Genese und Struktur frühhumanistischer Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010) Fumaroli, Marc, Les Premiers siècles de la République europénne des Lettres (Paris: Baudry, 2005) Haakonssen, Knua, ‘Divine/Natural Law Theories in Ethics’, in The Cambridge History of Seven­teenth-Century Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ii, 1317–57

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James, Susan, Action and Passion: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) —— , ‘The Passions and the Good Life’, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philo­sophy, ed. by Donald Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 198–220 Kraye, Jill, ‘Conceptions of Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and others, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ii, 1279–86 Levi, Anthony, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585–1649 (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 1964) Menn, Stephen, ‘The Context of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: The Intellectual Set­ ting’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and others, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), i, 7–32 Mulsow, Martin, Frühneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung: Telesio und die Naturphilosophie der Renaissance (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998) Porter, Roy, ‘The Scientific Revolution and Universities’, in A History of the University in Europe, ed. by Walter Ruegg, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992– 2011), ii: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. by Hilde de RidderSymoens (1996), pp. 531–62 Schmidt-Biggeman, Wilhelm, ‘New Structures of Knowledge’, in A History of the Uni­ versity in Europe, ed. by Walter Ruegg, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2011), ii: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (1996), pp. 489–530 Schneewind, Jerome B., The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Sleigh, Robert, and Michael della Rocca, ‘Determinism and Human Freedom’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ii, 1195–1278 Tuck, Richard, ‘The Context of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: The Institutional Setting’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and others, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), i, 33–86

Index

Abraham: 50 Academic Scepticism: 31, 33, 249 academies: 5, 19, 36, 67, 68, 70–71, 74, 75, 286, 329 Académie des Sciences of France: 329 Accademia degli Infiammati: 70 Accademia degli Umidi: 71 Accademia del Cimento: 329 Accademia Fiorentina: 36, 71, 286 Accademia Pontaniana: 5 Palace Academy of King Henry III: 72–73 Platonic Academy: 67, 68 n. 44 Acciaiuoli, Donato: 41, 41 n. 41, 70, 97, 100, 137, 138, 144, 145, 154 Acciaiuoli, Zanobi: 34 Accolti, Benedetto: 11 Achillini, Alessandro: 152 action: 7, 13, 31, 67, 75, 88, 94, 109–10, 115, 117, 122, 125, 249, 254–55, 265–66, 267–68 Adam: 95, 260 Aesop: 60, 194, 231–34 affability (affabilitas): 308 n. 7, 309, 309 n. 8, 320; see also friendship affects: 269, 292–300; see also passions afterlife: 37, 47, 143 n. 34, 255, 258, 259, 261, 265, 266, 267, 269, 283, 284–85 Agricola, Rudolph: 109 n. 9, 219 Alamanni, Luigi: 226 Albert of Saxony: 134 Alberti, Leon Battista: 11, 69, 75, 254, 287, 332, 332 n. 24 Albertism: 33

Albertus Magnus: 14, 31, 65, 133, 137, 145, 151, 270 Albizi, Alessandro degli: 226 Alciato, Andrea: 178, 178 n. 10 Alexander of Hales: 141, 270 Alexander the Great: 100 Alfonso da Cartagena: 6 Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Magusi (Masoudi): 278 n. 6 Alighieri, Dante: 10, 30, 32, 38, 71, 134, 135 n. 8, 147, 154 allegories: 16, 47, 50, 179 Allott, Robert: 181–82, 185 Altopascio: 224 Ambrose, Aurelius, St: 33 Ammonius: 107 n. 2, 108 n. 4 Amsterdam: 179 n. 14 Aneau, Barthélemy: 178 anger (ira): 12, 72, 190, 193, 207–08, 253, 283, 294, 295, 296, 297, 309 n. 8, 319 Anthony, Mark: 112 anthropology: 14, 15, 85, 86, 95, 98–99, 112, 251, 252, 254, 260, 270, 271, 283 Antonio da Rho: 250 apatheia see impassivity aphorisms: 175, 182, 183, 192, 201, 203, 223–24, 226 Aphthonius: 194 apophthegms: 173, 175, 176, 178, 222, 223, 224 appearance vs possession of virtue see under virtue Apuleius: 45 n. 65

INDEX

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Aquinas, Thomas see Thomas Aquinas Argyropoulos, Johannes: 63, 65, 82, 135, 136 n. 13, 137, 140, 141, 141 n. 29, 141 n. 31, 142, 142 n. 32, 144, 154, 221 Arienti, Giovanni Sabadino degli: 230, 230 n. 69 Aristippus: 247 aristocracy: 2, 87, 311 Aristophanes: 221, 231 Aristotelianism: 3–4, 5, 12, 16, 18, 30–31, 33, 38, 40–42, 50, 61–65, 70, 71, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 96–98, 107–08, 115–25, 131–60, 159, 207, 219, 246, 250, 253, 254, 258, 259 n. 40, 260, 261, 262, 263–70, 278–79, 280, 283, 298, 306 n. 2, 307 n. 3, 308 n. 7, 312, 313, 328, 330, 334 Aristotle: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15 n. 55, 16, 18, 20, 29, 30, 34–35, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 50, 63, 64 n. 26, 64 n. 29, 65, 66, 70, 71, 71 n. 56, 73, 74, 75, 82–86, 88, 91, 96–98, 100, 109, 115–25, 131–60, 181, 184, 191, 215, 216, 221, 222, 231, 245, 246, 250, 255, 261, 262, 263, 263 n. 54, 264–70, 278, 281, 289, 291, 298, 308 n. 6, 309, 312 n. 21, 327, 328 Categories: 108 De anima: 140, 151, 278, 278 n. 7, 290 De causis: 66 De interpretatione: 108 De sensu: 152 De virtutibus et vitiis: 31, 35, 135 Economics: 2, 14, 42, 61, 63, 66, 85, 86 n. 18, 124 n. 85, 133, 137, 157, 307 Eudemian Ethics: 31, 35, 131, 135, 137, 147, 150, 151 Liber de bona fortuna: 131 Magna moralia: 31, 35, 42, 66, 82, 131, 135, 147, 151 Metaphysics: 151 Nicomachean Ethics: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 16, 20, 30–31, 34–35, 40, 41, 45 n. 65, 61–67, 70, 71, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 92, 93, 96–98, 99, 109 n. 10, 109 n. 11, 114, 124, 124 n. 85, 131–60, 172, 181, 191, 191 n. 7, 194, 221, 263, 263 n. 53, 264–65, 269, 278, 278 n. 8, 298 n. 108, 306 n. 2, 307, 308 n. 6, 309 nn. 8–10,

312 n. 21, 313 n. 26, 328 Organon: 108, 119, 124, 125, 136 n. 14 Physics: 151 Poetics: 70, 108, 124, 124 n. 85 Politics: 2, 14, 42, 61, 63, 66, 71, 85, 122 n. 72, 122 n. 68, 122 n. 72, 124 n. 85, 133, 154, 157, 307, 308 n. 6 Posterior Analytics: 108, 115 n. 41 Prior Analytics: 108, 115 n. 41, 116 n. 45, 117 n. 48, 152 Problemata: 216 n. 6 Rhetoric: 7, 31, 66, 108, 108 n. 3, 111 n. 17, 115–25, 278–79, 291, 298 n. 108 Sophistical Refutations: 108 Topics: 108, 111 n. 16 Arnoldi von Usingen, Bartholomäus: 82 asceticism: 32, 253, 285 Aspasius: 138 astutia: 313 ataraxia see imperturbability Athanasius of Alexandria, St: 234 Augsburg: 72 Augustine of Hippo, St: 3, 30, 31, 39, 97, 132, 244, 244 n. 3, 245, 266, 270, 271 n. 75, 306 n. 2 The City of God: 50, 244 n. 2, 244 n. 3, 306 n. 2 Confessions: 32, 271 n. 75, 278 n. 5 De doctrina christiana: 119 n. 53 Augustinianism: 33, 34, 84, 111, 278, 306 n. 2, 334 Augustinian Hermits: 19, 82, 83, 138 Augustus (Gaius Octavius): 321 avarice: 69, 190, 320, 331 n. 19 Avenarius, Johannes: 89, 100 Averroes (ibn Rushd): 14, 108, 124, 151, 265 axioms, moral: 194, 195, 197, 201, 204, 208, 209, 210, 331 Bacon, Roger: 280 n. 16 Baldwin, William: 11, 190, 201–03 Barba, Pompeo della: 286 Barbaro, Daniele: 139 n. 25 Barbaro, Ermolao: 7, 139, 140, 156 Barnes, Joseph, printer: 40 Basel: 50, 291 University of: 155

INDEX Bastiano di Possente see Possente, Bastiano di beatitude: 37, 244, 245, 246, 250, 259, 263 n. 54, 264, 267, 270, 270 n. 72 beauty: 20, 39, 111, 254, 258, 268, 287–89 Beccadelli, Antonio (Panormita): 250 Becchi, Guglielmo: 138 Béjar, duke of: 277 n. 1 Belleforest, François de: 176 Bembo, Dardi: 36 Bembo, Illuminata: 227–31, 234 Bembo, Pietro: 261, 286 Benci, Francesco: 145 Benivieni, Girolamo: 261 Bentley, Richard: 233 Bernardino of Siena: 230 Berners, Lord Gerald: 200, 201–03 Beroaldo the Elder, Filippo: 16 Bessarion, Johannes: 68, 140, 258 Betti, Claudio: 150, 156 Beyerlinck, Laurentius: 180 n. 15 Bible: 16, 32, 44, 45, 48, 50, 63, 65, 83, 88, 99–100, 142, 143, 153, 158, 171, 177, 178, 180, 227, 232, 250, 256, 257, 262, 266, 297–98 Biglia, Andrea: 135 biographies: 9, 18, 69, 194, 215–34 Boccaccio, Giovanni: 10, 71, 195, 313, 314 Bodenham, John: 182 n. 20 Bodin, Jean: 321–22, 324 body: 32, 40, 47, 142, 248, 258, 269, 284, 288, 293, 300; see also affects Boethius of Dacia: 133, 143 Boethius, Severinus: 31, 41 n. 41, 60, 88 n. 24, 132, 216 Bologna: 16, 66, 138, 228 University of: 62, 134, 150, 152 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, St: 264, 270 Bonhomme, printer: 178 n. 11 Borrhaus, Martin: 41 n. 41 Botero, Giovanni: 321, 322–24 Bracciolini, Poggio: 69, 124, 331 n. 19 Brenta, Andrea: 220 n. 25, 221 Bretheren of the Common Life: 61 Briçonnet, Guillaume: 320 Brinsley, John: 174, 175 Brocadelli da Narni, Lucia: 228 Bruni, Leonardo: 6, 9, 63, 65, 69, 75, 82, 83, 135, 135 n. 9, 136 nn. 13–14,

339

137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 142 n. 32, 143, 144, 154, 225, 226, 247, 250, 254, 265, 283, 283, 283 n. 31, 288 Bruno, Giordano: 286, 288 Brusonius, Lucius Domitius: 180 n. 15 Brussels: 179 n. 14 Buonarroti, Michelangelo see Michelangelo Buonarroti Buondelmonti, Zanobi: 224 n. 40, 225–26 Buridan, John: 14, 31, 41, 41 n. 41, 82, 85 n. 15, 99, 124, 134, 134 n. 6, 141, 143, 151, 279 n. 11, 280 n. 16 Burley, Walter: 31, 33, 41 n. 41, 133, 137, 154 Burley, Walter (Pseudo-): 224 Byzantium: 18, 31, 137, 138, 140, 144, 220, 220 n. 25, 232, 258 Caesar, Julius: 100 Cajetan, Cardinal Thomas: 95, 96 Calvin, John: 3, 89–92 Calvinism: 59, 82, 87, 89–92 Camerarius, Joachim: 89, 98, 99, 232 Camers, Johannes: 50 Canossa, Ludovico da: 198 Cardano, Girolamo: 152 Cardinal-Lemoine, Collège du: 65 Careggi, Villa of: 258, 259 n. 40 Carmignano: 224 Casa, Giovanni della: 72 Case, John: 7, 8 n. 23, 38, 40–42, 64, 157, 159, 264, 264 n. 56, 265 n. 57 Cassiodorus, Flavius Magnus Aurelius: 88 n. 26 Castiglione, Baldassare: 2, 9, 11, 70, 71–72, 73, 189, 197–200, 210, 261, 286, 289, 311 n. 14, 323 n. 42 Castracani, Castruccio: 9, 223–25 casuistry: 93–94 Catherine Benincasa of Siena: 228 Catholicism: 3, 5, 59, 81, 82, 93–100, 153, 154, 177, 180 n. 16, 252, 265 Cato of Utica: 42, 44 Cato (Pseudo-): 60, 193, 194, 215 Cavalcanti, Guido: 36 Cebes of Thebes: 47–50 Cenami, Bartolomeo: 225, 226, 227 Cerberus: 45 n. 69 Cereta, Laura: 12

340

charity: 228, 229, 270, 270 n. 72, 306 n. 2, 307, 309; see also love Charles, prince of Viana: 154 chastity: 206, 221, 228, 315–17 Christ see Jesus Christ Christianity: 4–5, 8, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46–47, 48–49, 63, 65, 66, 82, 86–87, 90, 138, 142, 143, 153, 154, 155–58, 172–73, 195, 208, 222, 223, 245, 246, 249, 252–54, 256, 257, 258–59, 260–61, 264, 265–66, 270, 278, 283, 284–85, 297–99, 300, 332 Christina, queen of Sweden: 100, 100 n. 70 Church: 86–87, 90 Church Fathers: 5, 16, 32–33, 34, 44, 47, 83, 91, 93, 142, 153, 177, 178, 180, 245, 246, 247, 256, 257 Cicero: 3, 9, 10, 16, 29, 30, 32, 33, 60, 61, 64, 75, 82, 91, 99, 112, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 132, 137, 138, 145, 151, 171, 175, 176, 191, 194, 217, 230, 252, 281, 282, 286, 287, 306 n. 2, 309 n. 8, 327 De amicitia: 16, 33, 60, 64 De finibus: 16, 32, 60, 64 De inventione: 122 n. 72, 123 n. 79 De legibus: 122 n. 72 De natura deorum: 99 n. 67 De officiis: 16, 32, 33, 60, 64, 88, 115 n. 37, 122 n. 72, 306 n. 2, 309 n. 8 De oratore: 114 n. 31, 119 n. 53, 120 n. 58, 122 n. 72, 123 n. 79, 123 n. 80 De republica: 31, 122 n. 72 De senectute: 16, 33, 44 n. 65, 60 Pro Archia: 30 Topica: 123 n. 79 Tusculan Disputations: 16, 60, 64, 278 n. 3, 287 n. 45, 298 n. 108 Ciceronianism: 60, 115, 124, 146, 309, 313 Cinna, Cornelius Magnus: 321 circles, humanist: 5–6, 19, 68–70, 74, 75, 135, 286; see also academies; Rucellai Gardens Ciriaco d’Ancona: 135 Clare of Assisi, St: 230 clemency: 90, 308 n. 7, 309, 309 n. 8, 322, 323 Clement of Alexandria: 44 Clichtove, Josse: 65, 142, 143, 153, 155, 261 Coimbra: 269–70 Colet, John: 59

INDEX Colleges, Jesuit: 94, 328 Collegio Romano: 67 Cologne: 133 commentaries: 4, 8, 10, 16, 17, 20, 32, 35, 74, 89, 96, 98, 133–34, 145, 154–56, 306 n. 2, 328, 329 commonplaces, commonplace books: 8, 18, 74, 74 n. 69, 169–85, 192, 194, 209 compassion: 190 compendia: 4, 8, 10, 17, 33, 89, 100, 156 concordism: 4–5, 8, 33, 36, 37–40, 41–42, 44, 45, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72–73, 85–86, 90–91, 93–94, 97, 138, 143, 153, 157, 158–59, 209, 222–23, 233, 245, 246–47, 249, 250–51, 252–54, 256–57, 258, 259, 260–61, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267–70, 284–85, 297–99; see also eclecticism Condé, prince de: 176 conscience: 87–88, 90, 93–94, 198, 271, 312 consolation: 32, 191, 253 constancy: 92, 190, 233 Constantine the African: 278 n. 6 contemplation: 7, 13, 31, 40, 48, 67, 75, 111, 246, 248, 249, 250, 255, 257–62, 263, 264 n. 56, 265–66, 267, 269, 270, 271, 300 contentment: 179, 190, 229 continence see temperance contingency: 244 vs necessity: 115–18, 120–22, 123, 125 Correas, Gonzalo: 47, 48 counsel, good: 198, 202–03 courage: 190, 191, 205, 220, 283, 308, 319–21; see also fortitude courtesy: 206, 209, 308 n. 7, 309, 320 courtiers: 3, 11, 72, 75, 154, 197–200 courts: 5, 19, 67, 71–73, 74, 75, 286 covetousness: 190; see also avarice Crab, Gilert: 41 n. 41, 141, 141 n. 31 Crassus, Marcus Licinius: 112 Culmann, Leonhard: 190, 193 n. 13 Cynicism: 44, 47 Cyrenaics: 244 Daneau, Lambert: 41 n. 41, 91–92, 100, 264, 265 n. 57 Daniello, Bernardino: 71

INDEX Dati, Leonardo: 11 David: 50, 100 death: 87, 191, 201, 221, 253, 255 Delbene, Bartolomeo: 73 Delphi: 196, 233 Delphus, Aegidius: 141 n. 29 Denores, Giason: 64, 153, 156, 156 n. 75, 157, 157 n. 80, 159 Descartes, René: 30, 123 n. 77, 125, 125 n. 91, 290, 291, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334 n. 29 desire (cupiditas): 292, 306 n. 2 devotio moderna: 3, 93 Diacceto, Francesco Cattani da: 260, 288 dialectic: 115, 117, 118, 120, 184 dialogues: 8, 9, 17, 61, 68–69, 72, 74, 210, 329 Diodorus Siculus: 231 Diogenes Laertius: 33, 37, 43, 44 n. 63, 45 n. 69, 46, 91, 194, 216, 218, 221–22, 224, 247, 253, 298 n. 108 Dionysius the Aeropagite: 31, 36 disputations: 8, 67, 269 Dominicans: 19, 65–66, 134 Dominicus de Flandria: 66 drama: 21, 73, 89; see also plays Duns Scotus, John: 41 n. 41, 97, 152, 268, 270; see also Scotism Dupuy, Nicolas: 141 duty, duties: 57, 119, 198, 253, 265, 266, 310, 317 eclecticism: 4, 8, 33, 39–50, 64, 91, 97, 151, 152, 158, 192, 200, 209, 222, 280 economics see ethics, household Edo, Pietro: 287 education: 58–67, 170, 191, 192, 266 moral: 3, 5–6, 12, 19, 29, 31, 60–73, 82, 132, 197–98, 206–07, 234, 266, 281, 310–11, 327 political: 312–21 see also humanism; religious orders; scholasticism; schools; universities Edward, Prince: 73 Egidio Romano: 31, 279 n. 11 Elijah: 100 Elizabeth I, queen of England: 208 eloquence: 61, 118, 170, 192, 281, 282; see also rhetoric

341

Elyot, Thomas: 189, 201, 202 n. 36 emblems: 8, 57, 178–80, 190 emotions see passions; affects enthymeme: 115, 116 n. 45, 117, 119, 122 envy: 11, 72, 294, 295, 298 n. 108 Epictetus: 32, 36, 43, 45, 47, 48, 48 n. 86, 253, 254, 256 Epicureanism: 16, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 44, 46–47, 48, 50, 64, 111, 152, 246, 247–52, 254, 267, 279, 280, 284, 285 Epicurus: 32, 37, 44 n. 64, 46, 47, 47 n. 78, 47 n. 80, 151, 152 n. 60, 192, 215, 247–52, 257 equity: 208; see also justice Equicola, Mario: 286 equiprobabilism: 94 Erasmus, Desiderius: 9, 14, 36, 50, 61, 68, 69, 83, 88, 88 n. 26, 89, 89 n. 27, 144, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 190, 192, 195–97, 209, 227, 265, 285, 285 n. 40, 305, 306 n. 1, 311, 311 n. 14, 311 n. 16, 311 n. 18, 320, 321 Erfurt: 82, 83 essays: 74, 190, 203–06, 329–30 Este, Isabella d’: 48 ethics: 7, 13–14, 75, 92, 109, 191, 329; see also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics as a philosophical discipline: 3, 74, 84–85, 94, 132, 143; see also philosophy attitudes of conciliation in see concordism audience of: 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 21, 42, 50, 57, 64–65, 70, 73–74, 111, 136, 139, 153–55, 176, 177, 178, 221–22, 223 certainty in: 93–94, 108, 109, 115–16, 282, 331 contexts of: 3–6, 19, 57–79, 228–31 household: 1, 2, 74–75, 85–87, 172, 183, 191, 333 n. 24 in humanism and scholasticism: 2–3, 5–6, 7, 10, 12–14, 40, 63–65, 67, 68–70, 72, 74, 82, 83, 89, 91, 96–98, 107–25, 133–53, 246–47, 265–66, 280–85, 300, 310–12 languages of: 10–12; see also vernacular normative vs descriptive: 279, 284, 285, 289 research questions in: 15–21

342

social implications of: 1–3, 14, 50–51, 85–87, 90–91, 255, 263, 265–66, 305–24 sources for: 4, 13, 16, 29–56, 64, 65, 71, 75, 88, 91–92, 132, 138, 142, 149, 150, 152, 173, 177, 180, 194–95, 203, 208, 246, 257, 279, 289, 298, 306, 313, 330–31; see also eclecticism teaching of: 57–75, 97, 109, 132–35, 139, 147, 216, 263, 281; see also education, moral theory vs practice in: 14, 29, 85–86, 89–90, 109–10, 114, 246, 280–81, 289, 291 visual elements in: 8–9, 20, 47–50, 57, 92, 156, 178–79, 190 Eudemus: 137 n. 16 Eusebius of Caesarea: 33, 34 Eustratius of Nicaea: 5, 14, 31, 34, 41, 41 n. 41, 137, 138, 143, 144, 151, 154 examples, exemplarity: 64, 99, 109 n. 12, 113, 115, 116 n. 45, 117, 119, 122, 138–39, 141 n. 30, 145, 147, 170, 178, 180, 181, 194, 195, 199, 206, 218–19, 227–31, 233, 234, 266, 313 experience: 112, 114, 122, 203, 244, 250, 289, 331–32 extracts, excerpts: 74, 155; see also commonplaces fables: 178, 179, 194, 231–33 faith: 47, 67, 84, 86, 88, 306 n. 2, 307, 309 fate: 19, 91, 113 n. 26, 256, 271 Fazio, Bartolomeo: 265 fear: 72, 255, 256, 257, 282, 292, 295, 296, 300 Feliciano, Giovanni Bernardo: 34, 144 Ferrari, Ottaviano: 145, 150 Ficino, Marsilio: 35, 36, 38–40, 50, 68 n. 44, 152, 158, 194, 219–23, 231, 234, 258–59, 260, 285, 286, 288–89, 300 Figliucci, Felice: 155 Filelfo, Francesco: 141, 249 Flamini, Giovanni Antonio: 230 flattery: 198, 311, 312 n. 23 Flèche, Collège de la: 328 Florence: 6, 7, 11, 16, 40, 59, 59 n. 5, 60, 64, 68, 70 n. 52, 71, 72, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146, 219, 221, 222, 223, 225, 225 n. 43,

INDEX 226, 253, 286 University of: 6, 63, 63 n. 21, 134, 137, 145 florilegia: 4, 8, 17 Florimonte, Galeazzo: 153, 155 Foppens, Franciscus, printer: 179 n. 14 fortitude: 175, 183, 193, 198, 199, 308, 316, 318–21; see also courage fortune: 11, 40, 73, 113, 119 n. 56, 122, 183, 190, 244, 253, 254, 282 Foscarini, Lodovico: 12 Fox-Morcillo, Sebastian: 158 Francis I, king of France: 313, 318, 319, 320 Francis of Assisi, St: 227, 230 Franciscans: 19, 133, 279, 314 Frankfurt: 41 n. 40, 97 freedom: 87–88, 179, 244, 254, 256, 257 Fregoso, Battista: 287 Fregoso, Ottaviano: 198, 199 friendship: 2, 8, 11, 13, 20, 31, 42, 67, 75, 175, 178, 190, 195, 201–02, 206, 287, 322, 324 n. 47 Fucecchio: 224 furor: 288 Furstemberg, Count William of: 317, 318, 319, 320 Galen: 279, 295, 295 n. 88 Galesio, Agostino: 135, 136 n. 11, 150 Galilei, Galileo: 327, 328 n. 2, 329 n. 7 Gallineta, Lazzaro: 35 Galluzzi, Tarquinio: 67 n. 42, 97, 159 Gassendi, Pierre: 47 n. 78, 251 Gaza, Theodore: 36 Gelli, Giambattista: 71 generosity: 183, 190, 320; see also liberality Geneva: 90, 97, 152 genius: 99, 100 gentleness: 198, 309, 319–20 Georgius Hermonymus of Sparta: 135 Gerard of Odo: 14, 31, 41 n. 41, 133, 143 Geremia da Montagnone: 32 Gerson, Jean: 93 Gia, Jacopo di: 224 gifts (beneficia): 88, 96 Giles of Delft: 141 Giles of Rome see Egidio Romano Giusti, Credi di Vanni: 224 God: 39, 42, 50, 57, 84–91, 95, 96 n. 53, 99, 100, 143, 154, 172, 178, 182, 208, 221,

INDEX 222, 228, 229 n. 56, 245, 250, 251, 254, 255, 256, 258–62, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271, 284, 285, 297, 298, 323 as Supreme Good: 38, 245, 271 contemplation of: 40, 95, 257–62, 264, 269 friendship with: 13, 20 knowledge of: 39–40, 42, 289 love for: 39–40, 95, 229, 250, 257, 260, 278, 285, 287, 292, 297, 298 union with: 111, 245, 258–61, 268–69 godliness (pietas); 60, 61, 170, 191 Goes, Emmanuel de: 269 Golius, Theophilus: 157 good, supreme: 38–40, 111, 141, 141 n. 31, 151, 152 n. 60, 243, 245, 247–71, 285 goods, external: 248, 253, 256, 263, 264, 265, 267 goodness (honestas): 111, 114, 250 gospel: 84–85, 86, 266 government, good: 190, 196, 305–24; see also politics Gozze, Nicolò Vito di: 289 grace, divine: 13, 84, 94–96, 157, 254, 261–62, 265, 306 n. 2, 317 grammar: 6, 16, 48, 58, 60, 67, 69, 132, 329 Gregory Nazianzus: 33 Gregory of Nyssa: 33 Gregory I (the Great), pope: 33 Grosseteste, Robert: 61, 82, 131, 136 n. 13, 138, 142 Grotius, Hugo: 332 Grouchy, Nicolas de: 144, 146, 147 n. 45 Guarini da Verona, Guarino: 60, 220 n. 22, 222 Guazzo, Stefano: 190, 209 Guevara, Antonio de: 9, 37, 189, 192, 200–03, 209 Guinigi, Francesco: 224 Guinigi, Pagolo: 224 habitus: 13, 84, 306 Hangest, Jêrome de: 141 happiness: 1, 13, 31, 38–40, 44, 47, 50, 95, 110, 122, 132, 142, 153, 243–71, 309 n. 10, 312 n. 21 hatred (odium): 292, 295, 296 Heidelberg: 133 Heider, Wolfgang: 89, 100 n. 70 Hellebodius, Nicasius: 157

343

Henry III, king of France: 68, 72 Henry of Friemar: 134 Henry of Ghent: 152 Heraclitus: 222 Hermannus Alemannus: 124 n. 83 Herodotus: 231 Hesiod: 139 histories: 18, 69, 182, 190, 192 history: 7, 30, 41, 64, 65, 112–13, 114, 122, 138, 145, 148, 149, 172, 173, 203, 204, 206, 224, 225, 226, 227, 231, 244 Hobbes, Thomas: 251, 252, 327, 328, 329, 330, 330 n. 13, 331, 332, 333 Holbein the Younger, Hans: 49 fig, 50 holiness: 206, 207 Homer: 16, 112 n. 21, 138, 139, 145, 151 honestas see goodness honour: 39, 183, 191, 263, 295, 311 Hooke, Robert: 329 hope (spes): 20, 246, 282, 296, 306 n. 2, 307, 309 Horace: 29, 136 n. 14, 138, 179, 180, 206 Huarte de San Juan, Juan: 290 humanism: 2, 6–8, 15, 16, 17, 19, 41, 45, 61, 63, 68–70, 83, 89, 96–98, 109–25, 133–53, 246–47, 300; see also circles, humanist; ethics, in humanism and scholasticism humanities (studia humanitatis): 6, 114 humility: 12, 222, 228, 230 humours: 296, 300 Hus, Johann: 83 Hussites: 81 Ideas (Platonic): 39, 149, 151, 151 n. 59, 154, 154 n. 68, 264 imitation, moral: 227–31 immortality see soul, immortality of impassivity (apatheia): 32, 48, 92, 253, 268, 281–83, 287, 300 imperturbability (ataraxia): 244, 271 Index of Prohibited Books: 232, 285 Innocent III, pope: 247 intellect: 13, 19, 39, 85, 114, 254–55, 262, 269, 270 intentions: 112–14 Iohannes de Celaia: 41 n. 41 Isabella d’Este see Este, Isabella d’ Isidore of Seville: 123, 123 n. 82

344

Jacob Arminius: 332 Jacopo di Gia see Gia, Jacopo di Jandun, Jean of: 151, 279 n. 11 Javelli, Crisostomo: 66, 153, 158, 265 Jerome, St: 33 Jesuits: 4, 5, 61, 64, 67, 93, 217, 232, 269–70, 328 Jesus Christ: 50, 87, 88, 196, 227, 227 n. 49, 229, 230, 233, 245, 246, 252, 253, 258, 261, 262, 265, 266 John Chrysostom: 33 John of Salisbury: 221 John Scotus Eriugena: 30 Jonson, Ben: 185 Joseph: 50 joy: 12, 72, 87, 259, 268, 282, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299 judgements: 111, 120, 278, 281, 293, 295, 296; see also passions justice: 2, 8, 13, 20, 31, 72, 112, 121, 183, 190, 198, 199, 202, 205, 206, 208, 220, 308, 309–10, 313, 317, 318, 320, 322, 323 justification: 84, 85 Keckermann, Bartholomaeus: 18, 100, 159 Krakow, University of: 133 La Fontaine, Jean de: 233 laity: 59, 60, 134, 153, 218, 282, 287 Lambin, Denys: 35, 63, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 156 Landi, Giulio: 143, 153, 155, 156 Landino, Cristoforo: 10, 16, 266 Lang, Johann: 83 Langius, Josephus: 176–82 Latini, Brunetto: 10, 31, 35 n. 14 law: 20, 62, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 112, 134, 197, 262, 265, 266, 297–98, 309, 316, 321 natural or divine: 84–85, 90, 157, 321, 332 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques: 7, 18, 41, 65, 82, 83, 89, 136 n. 14, 140, 141, 142, 143, 153, 155, 156, 261, 309 n. 10 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: 328, 329 n. 7, 332 Leipzig: 89, 291 Lemaître, Martin: 141 Leone Ebreo: 286, 289 Leto, Pomponio: 217

INDEX letters, letter-writing: 9, 11, 12, 18, 45, 74, 194, 329 liberality: 198, 199, 308, 322, 323; see also generosity Liguori, Alfonso de: 94 Ling, Nicolas: 182 n. 20 Lipsius, Justus: 16, 36, 38, 43–45, 46 n. 73, 50, 75, 92, 179, 256–57, 328 n. 2 literature: 2, 6, 7, 13, 30, 58, 63, 68, 71, 74, 89, 96, 124, 138, 312–13; see also narrative Livy, Titus: 30, 151, 205 Locke, John: 330 logic: 3, 40, 66, 72 n. 61, 74, 92, 107–08, 115–18, 120, 122, 124, 132, 138, 150, 153, 183, 185, 329 London: 59, 159, 181, 182 Louis XIV, king of France: 233 love: 2, 12, 20, 36, 67, 71, 75, 190, 253, 259, 260, 261, 270, 285–89, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 299, 300, 323, 330; see also God, love for Lucan, Marcus Annaeus: 45 Lucca: 152, 223, 225, 286 Lucian: 231 Lucretius: 9, 32, 37, 46, 48, 215, 247 lust: 190, 207 Luther, Martin: 14, 34, 81–89, 90, 95, 99 n. 67, 157, 232, 254, 264 Lutheranism: 59, 81, 82–89, 90, 94 Lycosthenes, Conradus: 180 n. 15, 183, 184 n. 23 Lyon: 176 Machiavelli, Niccolò: 3, 9, 69, 70, 72, 100, 210, 223–27, 231, 234, 307, 312 n. 23, 322, 323, 332 Macho, Julien: 232 Macigni Strozzi, Alessandra: 12 Macrobius: 31, 306 n. 2 Maggi, Vincenzo: 70 Magirus, Johannes: 153, 157, 159 magnanimity: 191, 198, 199, 220, 225, 308, 308 n. 7, 319–20, 322 magnificence: 2, 20, 75, 308, 308 n. 7, 322 Mahomet: 143 n. 34 Mair, John: 141, 153 man, dignity of: 245–47, 260; see also anthropology

INDEX Mandeville, Bernard: 332 n. 20 Manetti, Giannozzo: 35, 135, 246 mansuetudo: 12, 309 n. 8; see also clemency; gentleness Mantua: 72 Mantuanus, Baptista: 82 Manutius, Aldus (printer): 35, 48, 68, 144, 196, 232 Marcellinus: 137 n. 16 Marco da Genova: 112 Marcus Aurelius: 37, 200–03 marginalia: 169, 171, 172, 173, 185 Marguerite de Navarre see Navarre, Marguerite de Marlowe, Christopher: 185 marriage: 86, 191 Martianus Capella: 123 Martinus, Magister see Lemaître, Martin Mary see Virgin Mary Mascardi, Antonio: 48 mathematics: 62, 66, 109 Matthew, Gospel of: 48, 50 maxims: 190, 203, 329 mean, golden: 31, 207, 283, 306, 313 n. 27 Medici family: 225, 227 Medici, Cosimo the Elder: 137, 258 Medici, Lorenzo de’: 38–40, 224, 259 medicine: 5, 7, 20, 62, 114, 134, 138, 150, 152, 279, 290, 295 Medina, Bartolomeo of: 94 Meeres, Francis: 184 Melanchthon, Philipp: 7, 18, 61, 63, 74, 81, 83–89, 99, 114 n. 34, 152, 153, 157, 159, 252, 262, 264, 265 n. 57, 290, 291, 295–99 Merchant Taylors’ School (London): 59 merchants: 3, 11, 19, 74, 75, 114, 265 Mercury: 45 n. 69 mercy: 320 Mersenne, Marin: 328, 329 metaphysics: 3, 33, 62, 131, 132, 134, 143, 153, 253, 329, 333; see also Aristotle, Metaphysics Mexico City: 232 Michael of Ephesus: 138 Michelangelo Buonarroti: 154 Micheli, Pier Angelo: 224 Milan: 59, 150 n. 57, 151 n. 58, 151 n. 59, 151 n. 60, 157 n. 79, 232

345

Mirabelius, Dominicus Nanus: 177, 180 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della see Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Mirandola, Octavianus: 175, 175 n. 6 Mirandolano, Antonio Bernardi: 145 mirrors for princes: 72, 195, 197, 311 moderation: 191, 196; see also passions, moderation of modesty: 190, 191, 197 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin): 329 Molina, Luis de: 19, 332 Montaigne, Michel de: 9, 36, 46, 74, 76, 185, 190, 192, 203–06, 210, 254, 271, 289, 311, 316, 330 moral philosophy: 2, 10, 15, 18, 34, 40, 41, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 74, 84, 85, 110, 131–35, 141, 263, 333–34 divisions of: 13–14, 85–86, 307–08 method of: 107–25, 331–32 purpose of: 109–10, 281 moral theology: 93–94 More, Thomas: 3 Moulin, Pierre de: 11 Mulcaster, Robert: 59 Muret, Marc-Antoine: 7, 63 n. 21, 63 n. 22, 135, 136 n. 11, 145, 146, 148, 149 music: 20, 21, 295 Muslims: 142 Musonius Rufus, Caius: 91 mysticism: 65, 228, 229, 258, 261, 268, 278 Naples: 5, 68 Napoli, Pietro da: 198 Nardi, Jacopo: 225, 226 narrative: 9, 10, 69, 173, 185, 190, 192, 194, 195, 204, 210, 312–21 Natalis, Hervaeus: 152 natural philosophy: 3, 5, 7, 40, 62, 66, 71, 72 n. 61, 131, 132, 134, 138, 150, 327 nature: 40, 193, 244, 252, 271 Navarre, Marguerite de: 9, 190, 313–17, 320, 321, 324 Neo-Platonism: 31, 35, 36, 39–40, 75, 107, 111, 138, 220, 259, 268 Neo-Stoicism see Stoicism Neptune: 221 Niccoli, Niccolò: 250 Nider, John: 93, 93 n. 46 Nifo, Agostino: 265, 286, 287 n. 49

346

Nobili, Flaminio: 251 n. 17, 263 n. 54, 286 nobility: 3, 20, 67, 68, 75 nobles: 3, 11, 72, 73, 74 Nogarola, Isotta: 12 nominalism: 110 obedience: 68, 85, 90, 197, 202, 228, 252, 265, 309, 323, 324 Occamism: 33, 82, 110, 124 orator: 112, 118–25 Oresme, Nicole: 31, 35, 141, 154 Origen: 33, 34 Orléans, University of: 89, 90 Orti Oricellari see Rucellai Gardens Oudendorp, Frans von: 45 n. 69 Ovid: 61, 216, 286, 287 Oxford: 7, 41, 61, 157 University of: 40, 41, 61, 133 Padua: 7, 35, 70, 157 n. 80 University of: 62, 63, 64, 134, 139, 150, 156, 157, 267, 290, 290 n. 62 pain: 151, 201, 204, 248, 257, 284, 297, 297 n. 102, 299; see also suffering Palace Academy of King Henry III see under academies Palla, Batista della: 226 Palmieri, Matteo: 2, 11, 247 paraphrases: 8, 41, 48, 156 Paris: 7, 124, 133, 137 n. 16, 145, 150, 176, 185 n. 26 University of: 61, 62, 65, 89, 131–33, 140, 143, 145 Parma: 155 n. 70 passions: 7, 13, 31, 72, 73, 91, 92, 114, 120, 123, 182, 251, 253, 257, 263, 277–300, 330, 333; see also affects eradication of: 281, 288, 309 n. 8; see also Stoicism mastery over: 288, 289, 296–97, 334 n. 29 moderation of: 92, 196, 199, 254, 256, 281, 282, 287, 288, 295, 299, 300 patience: 20, 72, 244 n. 3 Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco: 286 Paul, St: 31, 230, 298 Pavia: 145, 250 University of: 150, 152, peace: 85, 182, 191, 255, 256, 260, 305

INDEX Pelagianism: 84, 96 Pellegrini, Lelio: 153 Périon, Joachim: 35, 144, 146, 149, 152 Perotti, Niccolò: 36, 135 persuasion, moral: 116, 118–20, 173, 174, 184, 199 Peter Lombard: 306 n. 2 Petrarch, Francis: 2, 6, 10, 12, 29–30, 32, 38, 39, 50, 69, 71, 109–10, 111 n. 19, 112–14, 124, 247, 258, 280–82, 283 n. 26, 327 Petrarchism: 12, 75 Pietro Martire see Vermigli, Pietro Martire Phalaris: 257 philology: 6, 8, 30, 34, 60, 82, 89, 96, 99, 135, 137, 140, 143–52, 222, 250 Philopaemen: 316, 316 n. 32 philosopher: 112, 282 philosophy: 4–5, 6, 10, 13, 14, 30, 64–65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 84, 89, 94, 125, 148–53, 206, 220–21, 244 divisions of: 107–08 early modern: 125, 327–34 moral see moral philosophy natural see natural philosophy Phocylides: 45 n. 71 physics: 132, 134, 333; see also Aristotle, Physics; natural philosophy Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni: 70, 98, 140, 260–61, 286, 288 Piccolomini, Alessandro: 11, 70, 158, 261, 266 Piccolomini, Francesco: 2, 5, 38, 63, 97, 99, 100, 135, 136 n. 11, 149 n. 55, 157–59, 261, 267–69 Picot, Claude: 333 n. 27 pietas see godliness; piety piety: 191, 222, 268, 283, 309 Pindar: 322 n. 36 Pio, Gian Battista: 48 Pisa, University of: 63, 66 pity: 32, 253, 297, 307, 322 Pius XII, pope: 96 n. 53 Planudes, Maximus: 232, 232 n. 75 Platina, Bartolomeo: 265 Plato: 3, 4, 9, 29, 30, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 45 n. 65, 50, 63, 73, 75, 99, 111, 112 n. 21, 115, 149, 151, 154, 158, 194, 195, 196, 215, 219–22, 257–59 261,

INDEX 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 285, 287, 288, 298, 308 n. 6 Charmides: 196 Crito: 47 Eponimis: 268 Laws: 195 Meno: 31 Parmenides: 31 Phaedo: 31, 47 Phaedrus: 39, 285 Philebus: 220, 259, 268 Republic: 39, 258, 308 n. 6 Symposium: 36, 259, 285, 286, 289 Timaeus: 31, 261 Platonic Academy see under academies Platonism: 4, 5, 16, 20, 31, 33, 36, 38–40, 41–42, 47, 48, 50, 64, 65, 75, 96, 151, 155, 158, 194, 200, 219–22, 246, 257–62, 264, 267, 279, 285–89, 300 plays: 9, 18, 57, 73, 185, 190, 210; see also drama pleasure(s): 13, 32, 37, 39, 46, 47, 111, 151, 244, 246, 247–52, 260, 263, 268, 308 Plotinus: 35, 244, 257 Plutarch: 9, 151, 183, 192, 194, 204, 209, 218, 224, 231, 312 n. 23, 316 poems: 6, 9, 10, 12, 18, 38, 45, 48, 74, 138–39 poetry: 6, 10, 11, 41, 64, 89, 112, 112 n. 21, 138, 139 n. 21, 147, 170, 171, 174–175, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 203, 206–09, 282; see also Aristotle, Poetics politics: 2, 14, 20, 85, 86, 89, 92, 153, 172, 183, 209, 265, 305–24, 329; see also Aristotle, Politics Poliziano, Angelo: 6, 36, 63, 83, 114, 136 n. 14, 140, 143, 144, 145, 148, 217, 253, 254 Pomponazzi, Pietro: 14, 66, 254–56, 265 Pontano, Giovanni: 6, 68, 68 n. 45, 152; see also academies, Accademia Pontaniana Portinari, Pierfrancesco: 226 Possente, Bastiano di: 224 poverty: 179, 227, 233, 265, 322 Prague, University of: 133 praise (and blame): 112 n. 23, 121, 122, 197, 255, 306, 311–13, 318, 320, 324; see also rhetoric; virtue, display and recognition of

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precepts, moral: 48, 85, 132, 143, 149, 206, 208, 310 Priamus: 263 pride (superbia): 12, 190, 200, 294 princes see rulers and princes probabilism: 94 probabiliorism: 94 Proclus: 31, 35 Prosper of Aquitaine: 60 Protestantism: 3, 5, 13, 18, 20, 59, 74, 81–92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 153, 177, 179 n. 14, 180 n. 16, 252, 261–62, 264–65, 306 n. 2 proverbs: 61, 173, 182, 190, 193, 194, 195–97, 209 providence, divine: 37, 47, 251 prudence: 31, 139, 175, 183, 197, 198, 249, 265, 266, 267, 308, 312 n. 25, 313, 314–17, 319–21, 323, 324 Publilius Syrus: 193, 194 Pythagoras, (Neo-) Pythagoreanism: 44, 45 n. 65, 47, 48, 222 quaestio, quaestiones: 39, 41, 62, 67, 96, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 147 n. 48, 149, 156, 160 Quevedo, Francisco de: 37, 38, 45–47, 251, 257 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius: 119 n. 53, 123 Quintus Curtius Rufus: 204 Quirini, Lauro: 283 Rabelais, François: 69, 311 Raimondi, Cosma: 47 n. 80, 248–49 Raleigh, Sir Walter: 206 Rambouillet, Marquise de see Vivonne, Catherine de Ramism: 92, 99–100, 181 Ramus, Peter: 9, 41, 92, 155, 181 Rassler, Christoph: 94 reason: 84, 85, 90, 94, 107–08, 111, 112, 114, 120, 197, 199, 256, 270, 271, 281, 282, 288, 294, 295, 299, 300, 306 Regius, Henricus: 328 n. 2 religion: 30, 50, 81–100, 191, 192, 268, 307, 309; see also godliness; piety religious orders, studia of: 5, 10, 19, 31, 58, 65–67, 74, 133, 134 Reuchlin, Johannes: 83

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rewards and punishments: 199, 222, 251, 255, 266, 308, 310, 316, 317, 319, 320; see also justice rhetoric: 5, 6, 7, 10, 14, 16, 20, 62, 63, 64–65, 67, 69, 74, 108–25, 132, 145, 147, 149–50, 173, 178, 182, 184, 185, 199, 230, 279, 311, 329; see also Aristotle, Rhetoric Riccoboni, Antonio: 149 rights: 57, 88, 310 Rinuccio da Castiglione Aretino: 232, 233 Ripa, Cesare: 179 Robert of Courçon: 131, 132 Robertet, Florimond: 319 Rochefoucauld, François de: 329 Rome: 2, 30, 50, 68, 145, 200, 232, 246, 260, 286 University of: 7, 63 n. 21, 63 n. 22, 148 Ronsard, Pierre de: 311 Rossi, Andrea de’: 224 Rossi, Roberto de’: 135 Roussel, Gérard: 140 Rovere, Francesco Maria della: 71 Rovida, Cesare: 135, 136 n. 11, 150 Royal Society of England: 329 Rubens, Peter Paul: 179 Rucellai Gardens: 68, 224, 225 Rudolph Agricola see Agricola, Rudolph rulers and princes: 3, 11, 13, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 85, 86, 90, 100, 114, 154, 196–200, 202–03, 204, 217, 305–24 Sablé, Marquise de see Souvré, Madeleine de Sacchi, Bartholomeo: 287 Sacco, Catone: 250 sadness: 12, 292, 293, 296, 300 saints: 98–99, 153, 217, 224, 227–31 Salamanca, University of: 11 salons: 329 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus): 216, 217 Salutati, Coluccio: 32, 109 n. 8, 114 n. 28, 114 n. 29, 114 n. 30, 114 n. 33, 253, 265, 266, 283 salvation: 84, 254, 261 Samson: 100 Saturn: 47 Savoie, Louise de: 317 Savona: 177 Savonarola, Girolamo: 2, 3, 66, 287

INDEX Scaino, Antonio: 153, 155, 156 Scala, Bartolomeo: 254 Scaliger, Joseph Justus: 152 scepticism: 204–05, 244, 270–71, 300; see also Academic Scepticism Schadenfreude (epichairekakia): 298 n. 108 scholasticism: 6–8, 17, 19, 29, 39, 40, 41, 61–67, 83, 96–98, 124, 131–34, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150, 151, 159, 246, 280, 313, 328, 330, 332 schools and schoolbooks: 5, 16, 19, 58–61, 74, 75, 86–87, 114, 135, 171–72, 192–97, 216–17; see also commonplaces; education, moral; religious orders, studia of Schott, Andreas: 217 Scotism: 33, 39, 82, 95 n. 51, 110, 269 Scotus, John Duns see Duns Scotus, John Scudéry, Madeleine de: 329, 329 n. 6 Segni, Bernardo: 11, 35, 71, 153, 154, 156 n. 75 self-control: 190, 197, 200, 252, 315; see also temperance self-denial: 222, 229, 230 self-knowledge: 32, 190, 193, 196, 197, 229, 291 self-preservation: 111, 332–33 self-sufficiency: 243, 264 Seneca, Lucius Anneus: 32, 33, 36, 43, 44, 45, 46, 88, 132, 151, 152 n. 60, 192, 194, 204, 215, 216 n. 6, 247, 252, 281, 282 De beneficiis: 88 De clementia: 90 De constantia sapientis: 44 Epistulae morales: 9, 44 n. 64, 46 n. 74, 192, 194, 204, 209 Seneca (Pseudo-): 282 senses: 248–49, 268, 284, 287, 288, 293–94 sermons: 57, 218 Sextus Empiricus: 46, 215, 271 Shakespeare, William: 185, 210 n. 56 Sidney, Philip: 185, 206 Siger of Brabant: 132 Silius Italicus: 217 similitudes: 183–85 Simoni, Simone: 135, 136 n. 11, 152, 153 Simplicius: 36, 254 sin, sins: 12, 84–85, 87, 92, 93, 94, 95, 143, 172, 181, 207, 261, 262, 278

INDEX Socrates: 32, 47, 117 n. 47, 222, 243, 252 Solomon: 50 Solon: 42, 112 Soto, Dominic de: 95, 95 n. 50, 96 sorrow: 72, 282 soul: 39, 40, 47, 149, 258, 260, 268, 269, 290–99 immortality of: 14, 31–32, 42, 66, 149, 151, 153, 222, 251, 254–56, 258, 265 Souvré, Madeleine de: 329 Spalatin, Georg: 83 Sparta: 196 Spenser, Edmund: 9, 185, 190, 192, 206–09, 210 Speroni, Sperone: 266, 288 Spinoza, Baruch: 1, 14, 257, 291, 327, 328, 330 n. 13, 331, 332, 333 sprezzatura: 71 St Gallen: 124 Steinhöwel, Heinrich: 232 Stobaeus, Ioannes: 91 Stoicism, Neo-Stoicism: 4, 16, 32, 33, 36–37, 38, 40, 42, 43–44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 64, 75, 82, 88, 91, 92, 96, 97, 111, 115, 151, 152 n. 60, 158, 192, 199, 200, 246, 248, 250, 252–57, 267, 268, 270, 278, 280–83, 291, 295, 296, 297–98, 300, 306 n. 2, 332 Strabo: 49–50 Strasbourg: 61, 175, 176 Strigelius, Victorinus: 153 Strozzi, Carlo: 70 Strozzi, Ciriaco: 145 studia, religious see religious orders, studia of Sturm, Johann: 61 Suárez, Francisco: 64, 94, 290 Suda: 231 Suetonius: 216, 217 suffering: 230, 244, 253, 257, 267, 271, 316 suicide: 44, 46 syllogism: 108, 110, 115, 116 n. 45, 117, 142, 150, 184 syllogismus practicus: 90–91 synderesis: 87 tables: 8, 9, 41, 92, 100, 155–56, 180–81, 328 Tablet of Cebes: 47–50 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius: 216, 322 n. 41 Talon, Omer: 265

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Tartaret, Pierre: 141 Tegrimi, Niccolò: 225, 225 n. 43 Telesio, Bernardino: 332 temperance: 91, 183, 198, 199, 206, 207–08, 308; see also passions, moderation of Tempier, Etienne: 133 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer): 216 Teresa of Avila, St: 219, 234 textbooks, philosophical: 4, 31, 48, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97 Textor, Joannes Ravisius: 180 n. 15 Thales of Miletus: 42 Themistius: 140 Theodorus Macilius: 148 theology: 4, 5, 20, 34, 44, 62, 65–67, 71, 74, 81–100, 132, 133, 134, 141, 142, 143, 153, 172, 249, 252, 261–62, 264–65, 269, 306 n. 2, 329; see also concordism Thomas Aquinas: 1, 2, 5, 10 n. 35, 14, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 41, 42, 65, 66, 67, 73, 88 n. 24, 93, 94, 95, 97, 133, 137, 141, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 172, 245, 264, 268, 269, 279, 290, 309 n. 9, 332 Thomism: 39, 96, 258, 269 Tignosi, Niccolò: 6, 64–65, 138–39 Tostado, Alonso: 11 Toulouse: 66, 175 translations: 17, 35, 36, 63, 96, 135–36, 140, 141–42, 144, 146, 153–54 Traversari, Ambrogio: 37, 221 treason: 317–19 Trent, Council of: 81, 93 Treviso: 137 n. 16 truth: 20, 42, 107, 114, 125, 198, 224, 227, 254, 259, 318, 330 n. 13, 331 truthfulness: 182, 220, 309, 316 Trutvetter, Jodocus: 82 Tudors: 73 Tübingen: 89 Tullia d’Aragona: 286, 289 Tunstall, Cuthbert: 157 Turnèbe, Adrien: 144, 146 tutiorism: 93–94 tyranny: 222, 223, 255, 308, 312, 322 universities, 10, 19, 31, 36, 58, 61–65, 66, 67, 69, 74–75, 81, 82, 83, 87, 93, 94, 96, 131–34, 135, 139, 145, 220, 258,

350

262–63, 264, 286, 328; see also individual cities urbanitas see courtesy Urbino: 71, 72 Valeriano, Pierio: 180 Valerius Maximus: 172, 180 n. 15, 194 Valla, Giorgio: 114, 140 Valla, Lorenzo: 10, 36, 37, 82, 83, 109 n. 12, 118, 120, 151, 152 n. 60, 249–51, 252, 284–85 Varchi, Benedetto: 70, 71, 286 Vatable, François: 140 Veen, Otto van: 179 Vegio, Maffeo: 250 Venice: 68, 97, 144, 155 n. 70, 157 n. 80, 175, 286 Verino the Elder, Francesco: 71, 75 Vermigli, Pietro Martire: 5 n. 16, 41 n. 41, 153 vernacular: 5, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 31, 36, 37, 45, 48, 69, 70, 74, 82, 143, 153–58, 175, 179, 185, 330 Vernani, Guido: 279 n. 11 Vesalius, Andreas: 291, 295 Vettori, Pier: 6, 34, 63, 98, 135, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151 n. 58 Viana, Charles, prince of see Charles, prince of Viana Vico, Giambattista: 233 Vienna, University of : 50, 62, 133 Vieri the Younger, Francesco de’: 36, 75 n. 73, 261, 286 Vigri da Bologna, Caterina: 228–31 Villani, Giovanni: 58 n. 2, 59 n. 2, 225, 226 Vimercati, Francesco: 135, 136 n. 11, 145, 150–52, 153 Virgil: 16, 29, 61, 132, 138, 145, 151, 208, 216 Virgin Mary: 142, 229 virtù: 223, 224, 307 virtue: 31, 44, 46, 67, 151, 244, 246, 251, 252–57, 305–24 appearance vs possession of: 3, 307, 322–23, 323 n. 42 display and recognition of: 306, 311–12, 319–20, 322–23; see also praise generation of: 120, 199, 254, 265; see also salvation; works, human heroic: 20, 97, 98–100, 254

INDEX incitement toward: 29, 57, 64, 109 n. 13, 149, 280–81; see also persuasion, moral; rhetoric virtue ethics: 13, 219, 306 virtues: 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 13, 61 71, 73, 132, 172, 192, 224 admirable/imitable see imitation, moral cardinal: 20, 57, 68, 306 n. 2 civic: 11 familial: 11, 307, 308 individual vs political: 307–08, 310, 316, 321–25 intellectual: 72, 99, 267 moral: 20, 31, 72, 153, 269 princely: 198, 305–24 religious: 222, 223 theological: 57, 153, 270, 306 n. 2, 309 voluntarism: 110, 279; see also will Vives, Juan Luis: 190, 265, 277, 283 n. 27, 290–95 Vivonne, Catherine de: 329 Waele, Anthony de: 262, 264, 265 n. 57 war: 196–97 wealth: 50, 175, 198, 282, 308, 309; see also magnificence Wexionius-Gyldenstolpe, Michael: 100 n. 70 will: 13, 14, 19, 39, 110, 111, 113 n. 26, 114, 120, 228, 258, 262, 269, 270, 294, 298–99, 300 freedom of: 34, 84, 88, 93, 97, 153, 154, 260, 332 William of Moerbeke: 31, 124 n. 83, 279 n. 9 William of Ockham: 1 wisdom: 31, 39, 44, 48, 85, 139, 175, 192, 200, 256, 265, 267, 315, 334 n. 29 wise man: 44, 46, 253, 256, 257, 264, 282, 295 Wittenberg, University of: 81, 82–84 Wolf, Hieronymus: 48 women: 3, 5, 11–12, 19, 58, 71, 72, 100, 190, 218, 229, 258, 287, 314–17, 329 woodcuts: 49, 50, 57 works, human: 84, 87, 88, 254, 261, 265; see also salvation; virtue, generation of Wroth, Lady Mary: 190 Wyclif, John: 83

INDEX Xenophon: 216 Zabarella Francesco: 253 Zabarella, Jacopo: 97, 107 n. 2, 108, 124 n. 88 Zaragoza: 232 Zeno of Elea: 44 n. 63, 256, 257 Zimara, Marco Antonio: 152 Zurich: 291

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Titles in Series Chris Jones, Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and its Rulers in LateMedieval France (2007) Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom (2008) Franks, Northmen, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe, ed. by Ildar Garipzanov, Patrick Geary, and Przemyslaw Urbanczyk (2008) William Walker, ‘Paradise Lost’ and Republican Tradition from Aristotle to Machiavelli (2009) Carmela Vircillo Franklin, Material Restoration: A Fragment from Eleventh-Century Echternach in a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Codex (2010) Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c.1000 – 1200), ed. by Haki Antonsson and Ildar Garipzanov (2010) Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, ed. by Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson (2011) ‘This Earthly Stage’: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham (2011)

Alan J. Fletcher, The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author, and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks (2012) Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, ed. by Robert Wisnovsky, Faith Wallis, Jamie C. Fumo, and Carlos Fraenkel (2012) Claudio Moreschini, Hermes Christianus: The Intermingling of Hermetic Piety and Chris­ tian Thought (2012) The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World, ed. by Maijastina Kahlos (2012) Barbara Furlotti, A Renaissance Baron and his Possessions: Paolo Giordano I Orsini, Duke of Bracciano (1541–1585) (2012) Writing Down the Myths, ed. by Joseph Falaky Nagy (2013)

In Preparation Luigi A. Berto, The Political and Social Vocabulary of John the Deacon’s ‘Istoria Veneticorum’ Wendy Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medi­ eval England Tanya Lenz, Dreams, Medicine, and Literary Practice: Exploring the Western Literary Trad­ition Through Chaucer Charles Russell Stone, From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England