» Adam Kirsch: A Rebirth of the Renaissance

My interest in the study of the humanities was first awakened with a study of Petrarch and Dante on a summer exchange at Oxford years ago. So I was intrigued when I saw this title, "Rereading the Renaissance Texts" by Adam Kirsch in the Harvard Magazine (courtesy Arts and Letters Daily). Turns out that Harvard Press is adding--indeed has been adding since 2001--to this new library of texts of the "Neo-Latinists", better known as the Italian writers (Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, etc.) of the Renaissance whose vernacular works we humanities students continue to value and love.

This new series of pale-blue volumes (as the Loeb Classical Library Greek are green, and the Roman, red) is timely; it reappraises us of the origins of our liberal education. Because, if you haven't noticed, things have been changing. As the writer, aptly begins:

The only thing most teachers and students of the humanities agree on, it often seems, is that these are troubled times for their field. For a whole variety of reasons—social, intellectual, and technological—the humanities have been losing their confident position at the core of the university’s mission. This represents an important turning-point, not just for education, but for our culture as a whole. Ever since the Renaissance, the humanities have defined what it means to be an educated person. The very word comes from the Latin name of the first modern, secular curriculum, the studia humanitatis, invented in fourteenth-century Italy as a rival to traditional university subjects like theology, medicine, and law.

According to Princeton historian Anthony Grafton, one of today’s leading scholars of the Renaissance, “the studia humanitatis, the humanities....encompassed quite a specific range of subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, the arts that gave a command of Latin, the language of learning, and oratory, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.” For centuries after, these disciplines were considered indispensable for any well-educated person. Still more important, they helped to define an ethical ideal: they were “forms of thought and writing,” Grafton explains, “that improved the character of the student.” To study the humanities was to grow more independent and intrepid, both intellectually and morally; it was the royal road to becoming a complete human being. In the words of the critic George Steiner, A.M. ’50, modern education has been defined by the principle “that the humanities humanize.”

Even today, most members of institutions like Harvard would instinctively endorse, in some form, the proposition advanced six centuries ago by the Italian Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio: “We call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free [liber] man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” But today, every part of Vergerio’s confident creed is coming under increased attack. For one thing, “liberal studies” can appear less useful, to the student and to society as a whole, than concrete scientific and technical knowledge. Better to emerge from college as a budding biologist or financier, our practical-minded culture incessantly tells us, than as a mere reader of books. Meanwhile, the humanities themselves have become infinitely more self-critical in recent decades, so that “virtue” and “wisdom,” unproblematic terms for Vergerio, are now contested battlegrounds. Reading canonical texts, many people now believe, is not the road to freedom, but a subtle kind of indoctrination.

Kirsch's article is good and worthy if only for pointing out these significant books and writers long forgotten--for example, Leon Battista Alberti, a "Renaissance man", developer of the mathematical understanding of perspective; Kirsch reports Jacob Burckhardt's opinion:

"In all by which praise is won,” he wrote, “Leon Battista was from his childhood the first.

But Kirsch has also a couple of fine things to relate about Petrarch and his love of books. In a day when books were quite limited, copies made tediously and at great expense (Gutenberg was still a 100 years off), Petrarch, having mastered all the available Latin writers, tried and failed to learn Greek in order to read something new.

"I am possessed by one insatiable passion, which I cannot restrain—nor would I if I could...I cannot get enough books,” he wrote to a relative in 1346.

And in relating this story about Petrarch, Kirsch does us a service, by reminding us of the significance of books, that is, the reading of books in the liberal education. This too we, in an age dominated by the flickering screen, an age superior to its forebears, more heedful to a quick return than to wisdom, could profit from.

Petrarch’s paean to his books still defines the humanities’ most elevated ideal of reading as a communion of souls: “Gold, silver, gems, fine raiment, a marble palace, well-cultivated fields, paintings, a splendidly caparisoned horse—such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and lively companions to us.”

A particularly fine thing to say, I think you will agree, "reading as a communion of souls."