No less important than the Burgundian Court were the newly founded University of Louvain (1425) and the steadily growing contacts with Italy at ecclesiastical, economic, diplomatic, and scholarly levels. Merchants, clerics, diplomats, and wandering scholars set out from Italy or returned from there full of enthusiasm for the new learning. Petrarch was the most celebrated, but not the first, Italian to make known the treasures of the ecclesiastical institutions at Liege where, during his travels of 1333, he discovered in addition to the spurious Ad equites Romanos (To the Roman knights), Cicero’s important authentic oration Pro Archia (In defense of Archias), that glorification of poetry that he put to use in his own Collatio laureatio-nis, the speech he gave when he was crowned poet laureate. He was preceded by his friend Matteo Longhi, archdeacon of Liege, who in 1325 had brought to Avignon a rare copy of Statius’ Achilleis (now Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus, M 85).
Whilst, in Italy, Petrarch gave the decisive impetus for the return to classical antiquity, in the Low Countries Geert Groote essentially focused on a return to the sources of the Christian life. His followers, the Brethren of the Common Life, aimed at a better understanding of the Bible and of Christian authors in the first place, which could hardly be achieved without a sound knowledge and appreciation of the classics. It was in their schools that the young Erasmus first caught the odor melioris doctrinae (scent of better learning). But before Erasmus was born, the dean of the Cathedral at Utrecht, Willem van Heze, heard that a colleague of his, Jacob of Borselen, was planning to set out for Italy. Van Heze gave Jacob two book-lists, one with the orations of Cicero, which were already in his possession, the other with the works of Cicero and of other authors that van Heze wished to acquire. When Poggio Bracciolini was presented with these lists and noticed in the first one a title he did not recognize, a fifth Catilinarian by Cicero, he was greatly interested, although he immediately suspected, and rightly so, that it could be a hitherto unknown oration by Cicero or an oration composed by someone else. Still, in his letter of December 31, 1451, he praised Willem as a man of great erudition and dedication to humanistic studies, and promised to procure for him whatever texts he wanted, hoping to wheedle out of him a copy of the unknown oration.
In spite of his obvious inclination toward the classics, Willem van Heze does not seem to have had much impact on his cultural circle. Much more important in that respect was the role of Rudolph Agricola, from Baflo near Groningen (1444-85). Back in his homeland after a 10-year stay in Italy, first at the University of Pavia, then at the Court of Duke Ercole d’Este in Ferrara, he felt at a loss and extremely unhappy. Every day, so he wrote in a letter of September 20, 1480, to his friend Alexander
Hegius, his practice, and hence his love, of studying was diminishing. From the moment he left Italy, his knowledge of ancient authors started to slip from him and his ability to express himself elegantly was fading away. But perhaps he was suffering at that time from a kind of postpartum depression after having finished the three books of his magnum opus, the De inventione dialectica (On dialectical invention, first published in Louvain in 1515), one of the first responses to scholastic logic and the generally recognized starting point of the history of philosophy in the Low Countries. Agricola also left more than 50 elegant letters and some exegetical notes and valuable conjectures on some of the Latin authors he cherished (Pliny the Younger’s Letters, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Seneca, Tacitus). No less important was his enthusiasm for Greek literature, which earned him the title of founder of Greek studies in the Low Countries. Agricola may have started the study of Greek at Pavia, but it was at Ferrara that he really plunged into it, playing the organ at the Court in order to finance the purchase of Greek books, and even refusing the call from the University of Louvain to occupy the newly established chair of poetics. By doing so he became the first northern European to have acquired such a sound knowledge of Greek that he was able to translate a number of literary texts by Lucian, pseudo-Plato, Isocrates, and Aphthonius into Latin.
Agricola transmitted his enthusiasm to Alexander Hegius and even to the young Erasmus, who caught a glimpse of the famous Frisian at Deventer and testified that Rodolphus Agricola primus omnium quandam aurulam melioris literaturae nobis invexit ex Italia (Agricola was the first to bring a breath of better literature from Italy; Allen vol. 1, p. 2). Erasmus continued in the same line as his predecessor but did not go to Italy for his studies. He was also more than 30 when he learnt more than the foundations of Greek, stating that ‘‘Latin scholarship, however elaborate, is maimed and reduced by half without Greek. For whereas we Latins have but a few small streams, a few muddy pools, the Greeks possess the purest of springs and rivers running with gold’’ (Allen, letter 149). This late start did not prevent him from making available to the world an impressive number of Greek authors, editing or translating Aristotle, Euripides, Isocrates, Libanius, Lucian, Plutarch, and Xenophon.
In the field of Latin literature he did the same for Cicero, Quintus Curtius, Livy, Plautus, Pliny, Seneca, Suetonius, and Terence, not to mention the Fathers of the Church, such as Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, Chrysostom, Cyprian, and Hilary. In this way Erasmus made a massive contribution to the work of making Greek and Latin literature available to the general public. This contribution continued with his impressive collection of Adagia (Proverbs), and in his original works, such as the Colloquia (Colloquies), the De recta Latini Graeciquepronuntiatione (On the correct pronunciation of Latin and Greek), or the Ciceronianus, where he came down heavily against what he saw as narrow linguistic purism obsessively focused on the usage of Cicero. But restoring classical antiquity was not his main goal. Although from childhood he was swept ‘‘by some mysterious force of nature into liberal studies’’ (Allen, vol. 1, p. 2), he considered the study of classical literature not as an end in itself, but as a means to be placed at the service of Christianity. Erasmus’ longstanding admiration for Lorenzo Valla and the discovery in 1504 of Valla’s Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum (Annotations to the New Testament) at the Premonstratensian
Abbey of Park (Louvain) convinced him that it was by no means impossible, but even advantageous to apply the philological method to the study of the Bible. His ultimate goal was to contribute to the advancement of Christianity through the presentation of the gospel in a purer and more elegant wording. So he embarked upon a risky undertaking: a new Latin translation of the New Testament, which he published in 1516. Remarkably enough it was the accompanying new Greek edition, rather hastily put together on the basis of a few manuscripts now generally regarded as of inferior quality, that was to remain the textus receptus (received text) for the next three centuries.
It was also thanks to the continuing efforts of Erasmus (and the financing by Jerome Busleyden) that the study of the so-called three sacred languages - Greek, Hebrew, and Latin - officially began in 1517, when the Collegium Trilingue (trilingual college) obtained a firm footing at the University of Louvain. But even before this date, thanks mainly to the foundation of the chair of poetics and the series of Italian scholars who occupied it until 1500, the new learning was introduced into the University of Louvain and became firmly rooted there. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Martin Dorp (1485-1525), who called himself a fellow-countryman of Erasmus, studied and taught at the Lily, the most humanistic of the four colleges in the faculty of arts. On September 3, 1508, he staged Plautus’ Aulularia, adding the missing fifth act, and in 1509 the Miles gloriosus (Boastful soldier). He also wrote a few didactic dialogues, among them one dealing with the popular theme of Hercules at the crossroads. Dorp was taught Latin by Johannes Despauterius (ca. 1480-1520), the author of a Latin grammar which for centuries was to be used throughout western Europe. Even more successful were the manuals of Greek grammar composed by Nicolaus Clenardus (1495-1542), which in less than two hundred years went through more than five hundred editions.
The most important event of that period, however, was the foundation of the Collegium Trilingue, on which other similar institutions throughout Europe, such as the College de France, were modeled. It could boast of a series of excellent professors who acquitted themselves honorably in Latin and Greek scholarship. Hadrianus Barlandus (1486-1538) was the first professor of Latin at the Trilingue. He had already proved himself to be an excellent teacher, not only by staging plays by classical authors like Plautus and Terence, the Hecuba of Euripides (in the Latin version by Erasmus), and Dido in a dramatic setting, but also by providing his pupils with Erasmus’ Latin version of several dialogues by Lucian or a collection of Aesopic fables. His successor, Cornelius Goclenius (died 1539), also distinguished himself pedagogically. He translated a dialogue by Lucian (1522) and published a new edition of Lucan’s Bellum civile (Civil war, 1531). Goclenius was succeeded by Petrus Nannius, who not only left a 10-book Miscellanea (Miscellany) commenting upon a host of Latin authors (Cicero, Horace, Livy, Terence, and Vergil), but also the first edition of the Latin version of Athenagoras, as well as the partial or complete translation of several other Greek authors (Aeschines, Apollonius of Tyana, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Synesius of Cyrene). Nannius’ successor was Cornelius Valerius (1512-78), who commented upon Cicero and Lucretius, but above all passed on his encyclopedic knowledge to the next generation, among them the Hellenists Guilielmus Canter (1542-75) and Andreas Schottus (1552-1629), and the most prominent of all, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606).
In the field of philology Lipsius’ most outstanding achievement was his edition of Tacitus, which remains down to the present day a cornerstone for Tacitean scholarship, even if Lipsius relied more on his own intuition than on the painstaking work of collating manuscripts, an approach considered inadequate by modern standards. Another philological masterpiece was the edition of Seneca’s Opera omnia (Complete works) in 1605. But philology was not his ultimate goal: in a letter to Woverius, Lipsius proudly boasted, ego e Philologia Philosophiam feci (I made Philosophy out of Philology; Centuria quarta miscellanea, letter 84, quoted in Tournoy 1998), paraphrasing the famous letter in which Seneca criticizes those scholars for whom scholarship is an end in itself (Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, letter 108.23-38). Already as a young scholar Lipsius had started to study the philosophical works of Seneca, who was to become the principal source of the ethical system he later developed. In his De constantia (On constancy, 1583/4), he attempted to combine Stoicism and Christianity. Twenty years later, in 1604, he crowned his philosophical program with the publication of his Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (Handbook of Stoic philosophy) and his Physiologia Stoicorum (Natural science of the Stoics). In these two manuals, dealing with Stoic moral philosophy and with Stoic physics, respectively, Lipsius tried to reconcile secular ethics and Christian faith, thus laying the foundations for the rapidly growing success of neo-Stoicism throughout Europe. Lipsius mainly confined himself to Latin, considering Greek decorum magis quam necessar-ium (not so much a necessity as an adornment; Tournoy 1998). But on the other hand, serious scholarship without Greek was not an option for him. So in 1595 he published his De militia Romana (On Roman warfare), a commentary in five books on the sixth book of Polybius, and intended to be used as a practical manual for modern warfare. In fact most of his publications aimed at making antiquity relevant to his own society, exactly as his teaching aimed at using classical authors to prepare young people for the roles they would play in society. Even art had for him a merely pedagogical function, as shown by the letter in which he urged Otto van Veen (Vaenius) to paint the death of Arria (Centuria tertia ad Belgas, letter 82). In it he meticulously described the composition according to the details mentioned in Pliny the Younger (Epistulae, book 3, letter 16) and even suggested that the epigram by Martial (1.13), in which the heroine’s death is glorified, should be added.
Lipsius’ influence is also evident in the engravings cut by Cornelis Galle after the drawings Peter Paul Rubens designed for the second edition of Seneca by Lipsius, and in the title-page of the 1637 edition of Lipsius’ Opera omnia (Collected works), again by Rubens. It was mainly in Italy that the great Antwerp artist became acquainted with classical monuments and sculptures. In Mantua he had painted a huge painting, the Council of the Gods, in which an accumulation of antique sculptures studied and copied by Rubens can be detected. After his return from Italy in 1608, Rubens’s interest in antiquity turned into a cornerstone of his art. With his oeuvre the representation of classical mythology reached its most exuberant expression. Rubens in fact produced a wealth of paintings and cartoons for tapestries with mythological and historical subjects, such as the cycle of paintings retelling the history of the Roman consul P. Decius Mus (after Livy 8.6-11), or the paintings of Prometheus Bound, The Death of Adonis, The Judgment of Paris, Venus Frigida, Juno and Argus, Jupiter and Callisto, The Three Graces, and so on. The influence of the classics on Rubens can still be admired today in the house he bought in 1610, in the courtyard and the garden, decorated with paintings and busts of mythological and classical figures.
With the closing of the era of Lipsius, an end had come to the glory days of the Collegium Trilingue and to the highest levels of scholarship at Louvain University. For a century the Collegium Trilingue had proved to be a breeding-ground for a considerable number of scholars in all fields of scholarship, such as the lexicographer Kilianus (1528/9-1607); the lawyers Gabriel Mudaeus (1500-60), Viglius van Aytta (1507-77), Josse Damhoudere (1507-81), and Franciscus Balduinus (1500-73); the orientalist Andreas Masius (1514-73); the founder of Latin epigraphy, Martinus Smetius; the anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-64); the diplomat and discoverer of the Monumentum Ancyranum (the text on the wall of the temple of Augustus at Ankara that celebrates the emperor’s achievements), Augerius Busbe-quius (1522-91); the cartographers Gerard Mercator (1512-94) and Gemma Phri-sius (1508-55); and the botanists Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) and Rembert Dodonaeus (1517-85).
World History
