Renaissance literary theory and practice

by Charles Sears Baldwin

The Poetica (1561) of Julius Caesar Scaliger surprised no one by bringing the history of Latin poetry to date without even mentioning the Middle Age. He might include his own poems; he need not include the medieval hymns. Scorn of the Middle Age was a Renaissance literary commonplace. The history of literature has to be rewritten from age to age, first to satisfy such prejudices, then to dispel them. The art that survives these reinterpretations, the books or the paintings that still compel admiration and study, are vindicated, whatever their period, as classics. Meantime the perception of these has been repeatedly obscured both by preoccupation with some idealized great period and by pride in one’s own time.

What, then, has the longer perspective of history shown to be the literary progress of the Middle Age and the distinctive direction of the Renaissance? Two answers have been found in the fourteenth-century borderland: (1) the culmination of medieval development in the literary triumph of the vernaculars, and (2) the beginning of a new literary influence in the revival of Greek. Two more belong to the fifteenth century: (3) the vogue of that humanistic Latin which rejected the medieval freedom for conformity to the style of an idealized great period, and (4) the establishment of printing.

The literary triumph of the vernaculars is forecast in Dante. The supreme achievement of the Divina Commedia is eloquent at once of the Middle Age and of the literary future. The vogue of Boccaccio and the wider influence of Petrarch were not of their Latin, but of their vernacular writings. The traditional superiority of Latin, indeed, as the language of literature not only lingered; it was upheld by humanism; but the tradition had gradually to yield to the facts. The fourteenth century closed with the convincing achievement of Chaucer in English. To French also, though individual eminence was less, the century promised the literary future. The long medieval course of Latin had reached its term. The new literary day was for the new languages. None the less that new day was medieval, not merely in date, but in being the culmination of a medieval progress. The language of literature, medieval experience had learned, must be the language of communication. So it had long been in Latin; so it had become, within medieval conditions, in Tuscan, French, and English. No subsequent change through Greek, or humanistic Latin, or even printing, more affected the outlook and direction of literature than the medieval rise of the vernaculars from literary acceptance to literary eminence.

Greek, generally in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, was studied by both Petrarch and Boccaccio and had its professor at Florence in 1396. Its spread in the fifteenth century was stimulated both by the movement for the reunion of the “Greek” Church with Rome and by the influx of Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But it never threatened the traditional eminence of Latin. Renaissance literary dialogues were less often Platonic in form than Ciceronian; and the direct influence of Theocritus on revived pastoral is hard to distinguish from the indirect influence through the Bucolics of Vergil. Still more important to remember is that Greek influence, direct or indirect, stopped short of Greek composition. Greek dramaturgy, perhaps the cardinal Greek influence on later times, remained ineffective in the Renaissance. The Poetic of Aristotle did not oust the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Slowly grasped, Greek dramaturgy hardly shaped plays before the seventeenth century. The sixteenth century was still repeating Horace and following Seneca or carrying on the experience of the miracle plays or learning by stage experiment. Nor was verse narrative, even when called epic, attentive to the Aristotelian doctrine of sequence. The integration of Tasso’s Jerusalem, which found its model in the Aeneid, is quite exceptional. The manuscripts circulating in the fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, as well as the texts later printed, show as ready a welcome for the decadent Greek literature of Alexandria as for the great names of Athens. With Homer came in not only the Anthology, but even those “Greek romances” which are aggregations of melodrama. The Renaissance vogue of Plato involved from its beginning the cultivation of the neo-Platonists. On the other hand, Greek added to higher education a language experience that held its place for some three hundred years and was expected of all scholars.

Renaissance scorn of the Middle Age was not merely a general complacency; it was especially a repudiation of the freedom of medieval Latin. Latin style must conform to the habits of its great period; and this restoration was a prime object of Renaissance classicism. In 1472 Guillaume Fichet, scholar and rhetorician, wrote to another rhetorician, Robert Gaguin:

I feel the greatest satisfaction, most learned Robert, in the flourishing here at Paris, where they used to be unknown, of poetic compositions and all the parts of eloquence. For when in my youth I first left the Baux country to study at Paris the learning of Aristotle, I used to be much astonished at finding so rarely in all Paris an orator and a poet. No one was studying Cicero night and day as many do now. No one knew how to write verse correctly or to scan the verse of others. For the school of Paris, having lost the habit of Latinity, had hardly emerged from ignorance in the field of discourse. But from our days dates a better epoch; for the gods, to speak poetically, and the goddesses are reviving among us the art of speaking well.[1]

In 1476 Lorenzo Valla prefaced a manual widely current in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, De elegantia linguae latinae, with his shame at medieval Latin and his confidence in the restoration.

But as I would say more, I am choked and inflamed by grief, compelled to weep as I behold from what estate and to what estate eloquence has fallen. For what lover of letters or of the public weal could restrain his tears at seeing it debased as when Rome was captured by the Gauls: everything so overturned, burned, dislocated that hardly survives even the very citadel? These many centuries not only has no one spoken Latin aright, but no one reading it has understood; the books of the ancients have not been grasped and are not grasped now; as if with the loss of the Roman Empire had been lost all pride in speaking and knowing Roman, and the splendor of Latinity, faded by mould and rust, were forgotten.... But the less happy were those former times which produced no single scholar, the more we may congratulate our own times, in which, if we but strive a little further, I am confident that not only the Roman city, but still more the Roman language, and with it all liberal studies, shall be restored.

The Middle Age, then, could not write Latin. Not John of Salisbury, not Dante, not even Aquinas was really eruditus! Fifty years later the judicious Bembo reports the restoration as accomplished.

Latin has so far been purged of the rust of the untaught centuries that today it has regained its ancient splendor and charm.[2]