The neoclassicism of the Italian humanists and their conviction that they had spearheaded a return to intellectual and aesthetic glory proved contagious elsewhere. Most other countries, however, lacked those elements which had made humanism flourish in Italy: an abundance of Roman ruins, city-states and sophisticated courts, and a sense of close connections between classical Rome and the present. When acceptance occurred, the classicism of the humanists was inevitably modified by national conditions. Such acceptance was not merely of literary and aesthetic import but became an ingredient in the slow nation-forming process. While humanist criticism corroded national-origin traditions, it enhanced the prestige of other national traditions such as those concerning a country’s laws.
The quest for German history. German humanism, including a humanist historiography, found its major support at the imperial court and in the cities. As secretary of Frederick III, Enea Silvio Kccolomini (later Pope Pius II) resided at the court for years and exerted influence on behalf of the humanist cause. He introduced Germans to Tacitus’s Germania, with its flattering portrait of morally pure Germans, small-unit self-government, and a purely German, non-Trojan origin.
Half a century later, around 1500, the court of Maximilian I with its curious mixture of German traditionalism, incipient national feeling, and Italian innovations was loosely connected with a circle of scholars who attempted to write German history in the humanist manner. Conrad Celtis edited Tacitus’s Germania, discovered Roswitha of Gandersheim’s epic on Otto I as a source for German history, and above all, attempted to imitate Biondo’s achievements with his Germania illustrata. However, Celtis failed to complete the task, as did Johannes Cuspinianus (Spieshaymer). The latter’s main work, the Caesars and Emperors of the Romans (up to Maximilian), turned out to be more erudite and dynastic than nationalistic.
Similar difficulties in reconciling humanist erudition and cosmopolitanism, dynastic preferences, and regional loyalties also beset the first survey of the German past, Wimpheling’s Epitome of German History, Johannes Nauclerus’s Memorabilia (a universal history), and Aventinus’s Bavarian Chronicle. Respect for the empire and German pride made all three men insist on the old idea of a transfer of the fourth empire from Rome to the Germans. The traditional longing for noble ancestors led Aventinus to reaffirm a Trojan ancestry. Less fanciful were the Three Books on German History by Beatus Rhenanus, whose German sympathies were matched by his admiration for Flavio Biondo’s scholarship. He produced good editions of works by Tacitus and Velleius Paterculus and even analyzed the development of the German language in his quest to find a less fimciful origin of the Germans. But his somber message and uncompromising erudition restricted his readership mostly to other scholars.
By 1520 German historiography had acquired many humanistic attributes, and the new printing presses enhanced the trend. Then the Lutheran Reformation and decades of religious controversy changed the intellectual world radically. Some humanists escaped involvement in the religious controversy by Rhenanus’s route of pure scholarship. In a famous example Conrad Peutinger edited a Roman road map of the third century that Celtis had discovered. Known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, it became a manifestation of the new interest in what we now call the auxiliary fields; working on inscriptions, collecting manuscripts and coins, and editing sources.
Other scholars tried valiantly to preserve their dedication to critical scholarship while professing the Lutheran creed. Johann Philip of Schleiden (Sleidanus) had learned political lessons as a diplomat and his lessons as a scholar in translating Froissart’s chronicle and Philippe de Commynes’ memoirs into Latin. All of that helped shape his Commentaries on the Condition of Religion and State under Emperor Charles V, a work so impartial that his Protestant sponsors did not like it. Also, it emphasized the diplomatic and political aspects so strongly that reading the Commentaries, one would never guess that the Reformation controversy involved ideas, passions, and the masses. But his quasi-universal clironicle On the Four World Empires, with its sixty-five or so editions, made him the teacher of history to generations of German students. It was a traditional world chronicle, based on Daniel’s vision of four empires, and contained enough condemnations of the popes and praise of the German emperors to suit the partisan passions of the day.
The search for a new French history. In the 1480s and 1490s Italian humanism inspired a small but influential group of French scholars gathered around Guillaume Fichet, a professor at the Sorbonne. One of its members, Robert Gaguin, planned but found no sponsor for a grand humanist history of France. So he produced instead a compendium on the Origin and Deeds of the French, which turned out to be mainly a digest of the Grandes Chroniques, in a style and Latin that pleased the new humanist tastes. He doubted the Trojan origin of the
French but expressed his doubt so gently that scholars still argue whether or not Gaguin intended any criticism at all. In contrast, Paolo Emilio, a humanist from Verona whom Louis XII had entrusted with writing a history of the French, lacked Gaguin’s reverence for the French tradition and found many suspicious stories in the Grandes Chroniques, including those claiming a Trojan origin for the French. His On the Deeds of the French (to 1488) influenced French historiography through its novel viewpoints and its artful Latin. Yet the next important step in French historiography occurred, unexpectedly, in the field of law.
The battle over the true church tradition was raging in all of Europe when in France another tradition came under attack: the centuries-old version of Roman law. Ever since the Emperor Justinian had ordered the sifting of the huge and chaotic mass of Roman laws that resulted in a systematic corpus of Roman laws, the Christian world had had in its possession the Corpus juris civilis. Of its four parts, the second, the Digest or Pandects, became the primary law book. Throughout the medieval period the Corpus had been held in awe as the body of absolute and perfect law. Medieval legal scholars had maintained that all the difficulties they encountered in applying the code to their lives were simply due to an imperfect understanding of Roman law; and since it was hardly proper to change so perfect a law in accord with new situations, one wrote glosses and commentaries ostensibly to understand the unchanging law in a new light.
The chain of glossators was broken when the humanists applied their new text criticism to Roman law. As humanists saw it, Justinian’s compilers, under the leadership of Tribonian, had taken “pure” Roman law and distorted it by introducing language and concepts of their own sixth-century world. Humanists raised the battle cry: “Back beyond Tribonian!” Back, in short, to the “pure” Roman law by means of restoring the “pure” Latin texts. That was the spirit which had moved Maffeo Vegio in his word analysis of the Digest, Pomponio Leto in his institutional studies, Pietro Crinito in his attempts at restoring Roman law, and Angelo Poliziano in his paleographical studies of the Florentine copy of the Digest. Theirs was the first assault on the assertion that the Corpus juris civilis represented Roman law in its definitive form. The awareness of change and a sense for anachronism—the powerful forces loosed by text criticism— were about to bring a historical perspective to law.
The Italian critics found an early French partisan in Guillaume Bude. His Annotations on the Pandects belonged to the annotation literature that reached from Valla to Erasmus and questioned the traditional texts of authoritative works. Tribonian was seen as an illiterate, a butcher of texts. The great Italian glossators Bartolo of Sassoferato and Franciscus Accursius deluded themselves when they thought that all they did was to interpret Roman law, whereas they really altered its meanings with their amplifications, explanations, and conclusions. Bude still adhered to the “back to the pure Roman law” ideal although he sometimes* hinted at a true historicizing of the law—the view that the law changes, together with its society. As an enthusiast of the classics, who had also written a pioneering work on Roman coinage, he was unable to abandon the ancient period as the ideal one.
The humanist method of restoring the “pure” Roman law through textual criticism came to be known eventually as the mos gallicus juris docendi method of teaching law) while the phrase mos italicus (Italian method) referred to the medieval glossators’ approach. The French method of teaching law gained new strength from the work of an Italian, Andrea Alciati. He taught for only four years at the University of Bourges, where students were attracted by his expositions directly from the texts and not from glosses or other interpretations. That Alciati returned to Italy in 1532 had to do with his unpopular defense of the papacy and his derision of the French, who glorified their institutions by classicizing them. He left behind a legal tradition that at first glance appeared to be no more than a restoration of Roman law but that actually had begun to erode the position of Roman law as the one perfect law of timeless validity. Such a change made it easier for future French legists to consider the study of medieval customary law worthwhile and thus understand that developments occur in the field of law as they do in all of human life—that law, too, had a history.
The cautious revisionism of English historiography. In the late 1400s and early 1500s Italian humanist learning came to England. Yet the English chronicle, which had just transferred its production from the monastic scriptorium to the residences of the nobility and the homes of burghers in the cities, was not at all the worse for it. The popularity of the London Chronicles, the Polychronicon, and the Brut remained high. In particular, the London Chronicles evoke the image of a broad stream of chronicles with countless tributaries; after 1500 Richard Arnold’s Chronicle and Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and of France appeared. They were no masterworks but helped assure that the chronicle tradition remained strong for many more years.
In 1501 the Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, came to England as a papal collector of the Peter’s Pence and stayed on for nearly fifty years. Vergil sought to advance his own and the young Tudor cause by composing a well-written and sympathetic history in the humanist manner. Although Vergil’s work, published in 1534, fit the day’s humanist fashion and pleased its Tudor patrons, it disturbed the English because he downgraded, mainly by deliberate neglect, the fantastic tales about the early Britons, including the stories of the Trojan origin and King Arthur. Also, Vergil’s English History began with the Roman period, and a Rome-centered view was offensive to well-entrenched tradition and English pride, particularly in a period of intensifying conflict with the Church of Rome. Still, the work remained for decades the prominent English history.
About 1513 Thomas More wrote his History of Richard III, the first English historical work carrying the marks of humanist historiography: emulation of
Roman historians; an elegant Latin; brilliantly constructed speeches; a conscious attempt to compose the narrative rather than to narrate events year by year; a stress on human characteristics and motives and a reaffirmation of history’s teaching role. The work, with its lesson on the destructiveness of tyrannical rule, was much admired when from 1543 it was published in various, frequently poor, editions.
Thus the humanist seed was scattered. A more complete inventory would show that many humanists served patrons in regions from the Atlantic into Eastern Europe, producing influential humanist historiographical enclaves in the midst of chronicle territories.
World History
