The Nature of Humanism
The Italian term umanista – meaning “a university teacher of the humanities,” such as rhetoric and poetry – began to be used extensively in the fourteenth century. The use of the word “humanism” to refer to the worldview underlying the Renaissance is a later devel- opment. Yet this worldview is not so much a set of ideas as a general method. Humanism at this time is best understood as a quest for cultural eloquence and excellence, rooted in the belief that the best models lay in the classic civilizations of Rome and Athens. Its basic method can be summed up in the Latin slogan ad fontes (“back to the sources”). A stream is at its purest at its source. Humanists argued for the by-passing of the “Middle Ages” – that telling phrase, by the way, is a humanist creation, designed to belittle this irritating historical interlude between the glories of the ancient world and their renewal in the Ren- aissance – in order to allow the present to be renewed and reinvigorated by drinking deeply at the wellspring of antiquity.
It is beyond doubt that the Renaissance witnessed the rise of classical scholarship. The Greek and Latin classics were widely studied in their original languages. Although some early studies suggested that humanism originated outside a university context, the evidence now available points unquestionably to a close link between humanism and the universities of northern Italy. It might therefore seem that humanism was essentially a scholarly move- ment devoted to the study of the classical period. This, however, would be to overlook the question of why the humanists wished to study the classics in the first place.
