What was lost to the Middle Ages and restored in the Renaissance, according to Momigliano, ‘‘was the Varronian idea of ‘antiquitates’ - the idea of a civilization recovered by systematic collection of the relics of the past’’ (Momigliano 1966b: 5). Before Petrarch, the last exponents of that Varronian project were ‘‘late antique’’ authors like Servius, Macrobius, and Symmachus and, with a difference, Augustine in the City of God (Momigliano 1990: 69-70). Servius and Macrobius were two of Petrarch’s most prized sources. Marginalia show him using the City of God as he did those pagan authorities, as a guide to pre-Christian Roman culture (Nolhac 1907, i: 197-8). The same goes for other Latin Fathers. Thus a passage from Jerome’s Chronicle contributes to a ‘‘field survey’’ of Rome. Petrarch also used the Chronicle for reconstructing Latin literary history: ‘‘Within the encyclopaedia of the Chronicle, [he] discovered a complete epitome of the history of [‘classical’] Latin literature. Indeed, this was the only manual of literary history available to him’’ (Billanovich 1954: 17).
Although the Chronicle was not Petrarch’s only source for Latin literary history, it was his only substantial source for the history of pre-Christian Latin ‘‘letters,’’ and that - rather than any body of Christian writing or ‘‘sacred literature’’ - was the main focus of his literary-historical interest. Varro’s Imagines, an illustrated directory of eminent Greeks and Romans, had laid the basis for the bio-bibliographical compendia of such later Latin writers as Suetonius (Blum 1983: 55-80). That genre was still alive in the schools and salons of the fourth century, when it furnished Jerome with many of the supplementary ‘‘Roman’’ notices in the Chronicle. Then, shortly before Augustine (in the City of God) revived the Roman antiquarian tradition in order to bury it, Jerome gave the coup degrace to the ‘‘classical’’ bio-bibliographical tradition in his catalogue of ‘‘Ecclesiastical [i. e., Christian] Writers,’’ also known as De viris illustribus. This summary chronological account of Christian authors and their works - from St. Peter to Jerome himself - set the pattern of Christian literary history and bibliographical reference for the Latin Middle Ages (Blum 1983: 79-130; Rouse and Rouse 1991: 469-94; Sharpe 2003: 117-18, 281-3). It was being reworked as late as the thirteenth century, following the principle of continuous accommodation that we have noted as a feature of medieval Latin culture. Petrarch broke with that principle, composing a De viris illustribus that had nothing to do with Christian writers, and going back to Jerome’s Chronicle to excavate the records of a Latin literary history that no one in almost a millennium had considered in its own right (see also Witt 2000: 282-6).
As Augustine’s City of God aided Petrarch in an archaeological enterprise that bypassed the ‘‘late antique’’ levels of Roman civilization, Jerome encouraged him and his successors in a literary-historical enterprise from which Christian authors as such were practically excluded. After Petrarch, pursuing the path he had marked, the Paduan humanist Sicco Polentone (1376-1447) produced a massive synthesis of Latin literary history from Livius Andronicus to the present. Ecclesiastical writers of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages are nearly invisible in his Scriptorum illustrium linguae latinae libri XVIII. The only ones cited with any regularity (Jerome, Augustine, Isidore) appear solely as authorities on earlier - i. e., ‘‘classical’’ - literary history, alongside Quintilian, Aulus Gellius, and Macrobius (Ullman 1928; Vessey 2004).
That was not, however, Petrarch’s only legacy. Spurred by his example, the next few generations of Italian humanists returned with new eyes to the ancient Christian texts that, in one form or another (frequently abbreviated, excerpted, misattributed, or interpolated), had long been part of the common stock of Latin learning. Recent scholarship has made much of this ‘‘patristic humanism.’’ ‘‘Reinvigorated study of the Church Fathers formed an integral part of the humanists’ overall agenda to revivify the ancient world,’’ writes Charles Stinger. No less than their pagan counterparts, ancient Christian authors were regarded ‘‘as individual sources of experiences or interpretations whose meaning and significance needed to be historically constructed and critically assessed’’ (Stinger 1997: 473-5; see also Stinger 1977). Another modern historian claims that ‘‘[t]he discovery, rediscovery, and reevaluation of Christian antiquity was an integral part of the more general humanist rediscovery and reevaluation of ancient art and letters’’ (Rice 1988: 17).
Such statements are useful antidotes to the old view of Italian humanism as a ‘‘pagan’’ movement. Yet we should be wary of crediting humanists after Petrarch with too clear-sighted a view of‘‘Christian antiquity.’’ Petrarch’s immediate followers were no more successful than he had been in reconciling a ‘‘modernist’’ narrative of the decline of the Roman Empire with traditional belief in the continuity of Roman Christianity from the time of Augustus. New historiography and old providentialism remained on separate planes. Meanwhile, the main tendency of early humanist reappropriation of the Fathers was to emphasize the latter’s solidarity with ‘‘classical’’ values, especially in the use of rhetoric and literary fictions. So much is clear from the repeated attempts to explain away Jerome’s vision of a conflict between Christianity and Ciceronianism (Jerome, Ep. 22. 30; Rice 1985: 85-7; Lardet 2000: 220-6). The humanists’ objective was to make good ‘‘classicists’’ of the Fathers, against the norms of Scholastic theology, rather than (in antiquarian mode) to reconstitute anything like an ‘‘ancient Christian’’ culture from extant materials.
World History
