Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

In Italy, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, intellectual interests and literary activities had expanded beyond the scholastic circles of the universities, and were beginning to influence larger divisions of society. The year 1300 witnessed the production in Florence of the Divine Comedy of Dante, and marked an epoch in the history of Italy and in the literature of the world. During the two centuries which followed, Florence remained the centre of a keener, richer, and more varied intellectual life than was known in any other city in Europe.

With the great intellectual movement known as the Renaissance, I am concerned, for the purposes of this study, only to indicate the influence it exerted in preparing Italy and Europe for the utilisation of the printing-press. The work of the Renaissance included, partly as a cause, and partly as an effect, the rediscovery for the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the literature of classic Greece, as well as the reinterpretation of the literature of classic Rome.

The influence of the literary awakening and of the newly discovered masterpieces would of necessity have been restricted to a comparatively limited scholarly circle, if it had not been for the invention of Gutenberg and for the scholarly enterprise and devotion of such followers of Gutenberg as Aldus, Estienne, and Froben. It is, of course, equally true that if the intellectual world had not been quickened and inspired by the teachers of the Renaissance, the presses of Aldus would have worked to little purpose, and their productions would have found few buyers. Aldus may, in fact, himself be considered as one of the most characteristic and valuable of the products of the movement.

The Renaissance has been described by various historians, and analysed by many commentators. The work which has, however, been accepted as the most comprehensive account of the movement and the best critical analysis of its nature and influence, and which presents also a vivid and artistic series of pictures of Italy and the Italians during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy. These volumes are so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the period, and the author’s characterisations are so full and so sympathetic, that it is difficult not to think of Symonds as having been himself a Florentine, rather than a native of the “barbarian realm of Britain.”

I take the liberty of quoting the description given by Symonds of the peculiar conditions under which Italy of the fifteenth century, in abandoning the hope of securing a place among the nations of the world, absorbed itself in philosophic, literary, and artistic ideals. Freshly imbued with Greek thought and Greek inspiration, Italy took upon itself the rôle played centuries earlier by classic Greece, and, without political power or national influence, it assumed the leadership of the intellect and of the imagination of Europe.

“In proportion as Italy lost year by year the hope of becoming a united nation, in proportion as the military instincts died in her, and the political instincts were extinguished by despotism, in precisely the same ratio did she evermore acquire a deeper sense of her intellectual vocation. What was world-embracing in the spirit of the mediæval Church passed by transmutation into the humanism of the fifteenth century. As though aware of the hopelessness of being Italians in the same sense as the natives of Spain were Spaniards, or the natives of France were Frenchmen, the giants of the Renaissance did their utmost to efface their nationality, in order that they might the more effectually restore the cosmopolitan ideal of the human family. To this end both artists and scholars, the depositories of the real Italian greatness at this epoch, laboured; the artists by creating an ideal of beauty with a message and a meaning for all Europe; the scholars by recovering for Europe the burghership of Greek and Roman civilisation. In spite of the invasions and convulsions that ruined Italy between the years 1494 and 1527, the painters and the humanists proceeded with their task as though the fate of Italy concerned them not, as though the destinies of the modern world depended on their activity. After Venice had been desolated by the armies of the League of Cambray, Aldus Manutius presented the peace-gift of Plato to the foes of his adopted city, and when the Lutherans broke into Parmegiano’s workshop at Rome, even they were awed by the tranquil majesty of the Virgin on his easel. Stories like these remind us that Renaissance Italy met her doom of servitude and degradation in the spirit of ancient Hellas, repeating as they do the tales told of Archimedes in his study, and of Paulus Emilius face to face with the Zeus of Phidias.[413]...

It is impossible to exaggerate the benefit conferred upon Europe by the Italians at this epoch. The culture of the classics had to be reappropriated before the movement of the modern mind could begin, before the nations could start upon a new career of progress; the chasm between the old and the new world had to be bridged over. This task of reappropriation the Italians undertook alone, and achieved at the sacrifice of their literary independence and their political freedom. The history of the Renaissance literature in Italy is the history of self-development into the channels of scholarship and antiquarian research. The language created by Dante as a thing of power, polished by Petrarch as a thing of beauty, trained by Boccaccio as the instrument of melodious prose, was abandoned even by the Tuscans in the fifteenth century for revived Latin and newly discovered Greek. Patient acquisition took the place of proud inventiveness; laborious imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The force of mind which in the fourteenth century had produced a Divine Comedy and a Decameron, in the fifteenth century was expended upon the interpretation of codices, the settlement of texts, the translation of Greek books into Latin, the study of antiquities, the composition of commentaries, encyclopædias, dictionaries, ephemerides. While we regret this change from creative to acquisitive literature, we must bear in mind that these scholars, who ought to have been poets, accomplished nothing less than the civilisation, or, to use their own phrase, the humanisation, of the modern world. At the critical moment when the Eastern Empire was being shattered by the Turks, and when the other European nations were as yet unfit for culture, Italy saved the Arts and Sciences of Greece and Rome, and interpreted the spirit of the classics. Devoting herself to what appears the slavish work of compilation and collection, she transmitted an inestimable treasure to the human race; and though for a time the beautiful Italian tongue was superseded by a jargon of dead languages, yet the literature of the Renaissance yielded in the end the poetry of Ariosto, the political philosophy of Machiavelli, the histories of Guicciardini and Varchi. Meanwhile the whole of Europe had received the staple of its intellectual education.”[414]

Symonds finds in the age of the Renaissance, or in what he calls the Humanistic movement, four principal periods: first, the age of inspiration and discovery, which is initiated by Petrarch; second, the period of arrangement and translation. During this period, the first great libraries came into existence, the study of Greek began in the principal universities, and the courts of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, Alfonso in Naples, and Nicholas in Rome, became centres of literary activity; third, the age of academies. This period succeeded the introduction of printing into Italy. Scholars and men of letters are now crystallising or organising themselves into cliques or schools, under the influence of which a more critical and exact standard of scholarship is arrived at, while there is a marked development in literary form and taste. Of the academies which came into existence, the most important were the Platonic in Florence, that of Pontanus in Naples, that of Pomponius Lætus in Rome, and that of Aldus Manutius in Venice. This period covered, it is to be noted, the introduction of printing into Italy (1464) and its rapid development. In the fourth period it may be said that scholasticism to some extent took the place of scholarship. It was the age of the purists, of whom Bembo was both the type and the dictator. There is a tendency to replace learning with an exaggerated attention to æsthetics and style. It was about the Court of Leo X. (1513-1522) that these æsthetic literati were chiefly gathered. “Erudition, properly so-called,” says Symonds, “was now upon the point of being transplanted beyond the Alps.”

The names of the scholars and writers who, following Dante, gave fame to Florence and to Italy, are part of the history of the world’s literature. It is necessary to refer here only to those whose influence was most important in widening the range of scholarly interests and in preparing Italy and Europe for the diffusion of literature, a preparation which, while emphasising the requirement for some means of multiplying books cheaply, secured for the printing-press, as soon as its work began, an assured and sufficient support. The fact that a period of exceptional intellectual activity and literary productiveness immediately preceded the invention, or at least the introduction of printing, must have had an enormous influence in furthering the speedy development and diffusion of the new art. The press of Aldus Manutius seems, as before said, like a natural and necessary outgrowth of the Renaissance.

The typical feature of the revival of learning in Italy was, of course, the rediscovery of the literature of Greece. In the poetic simile of Symonds, “Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon shines with rays reflected from the sun. The revival was the silver age of that old golden age of Greece.”[415] The comparison of Florence with Athens has repeatedly been made. The golden ages of the two cities were separated by nearly two thousand years; but history and human nature repeat themselves, and historians have found in the Tuscan capital of the fifteenth century a population which, with its keen intellectual nature, subtle and delicate wit, and restless political spirit, recalls closely the Athens of Pericles. The leadership which belonged to Italy in literature, art, scholarship, and philosophy, was, within Italy, conceded to Florence.