1. Interest in these matters is reflected in The Late Italian Renaissance , ed. Eric Cochrane (London 1970). [BACK]

2. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny , rev. ed. (Princeton, 1966); Vittore Branca, "Ermolao Barbaro e l'umanesimo veneziano," in Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano (Venice, 1963), 193; Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 5-7. [BACK]

3. We owe this perception above all to Paul Oskar Kristeller, especially in The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), repr. in Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York, 1961). The ideological implications of rhetoric emerge more fully in Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 497-514; Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness (Princeton, 1970); and, more ambiguously, Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: Ciceronian Elements in Early Quattrocento Thought and Their Historical Setting (Princeton, 1968). The work of Baron (n. 2 above) has been of particular importance for exploring the political and social implications of rhetorical humanism. [BACK]

4. Much on this point may be gleaned from Richard McKeon, "Rhetoric in the Middle Ages", Speculum 17 (1942), 1-32; but now see also James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1974). Also cf. Seigel, 173-213. [BACK]

5. Cf. Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970), 28. On other occasions Valla translated logos as sermo ; see Salvatore I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla, Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972), 297. Erasmus followed Valla on this point, whose deep significance is discussed in J. C. Margolin, Recherches érasmiennes (Geneva, 1969), 35, and James K. McConica, "Erasmus and the Grammar of Consent," Scrinium erasmianum 2 (1969), 90. [BACK]

6. Cf. Camporeale, 345. [BACK]

7. Kelley, 19-50, is particularly illuminating on this aspect of Valla's historicism. [BACK]

8. A significant exception is the appeal in Leon Battista Alberti's I libri della famiglia , ed. Cecil Grayson, in Opere volgari 1 (Bari, 1960), 132, to Protagoras on man as the measure of all things; here at any rate there appears to be some faint recognition of the sophistic origins of the rhetorical tradition. [BACK]

9. Quoted by Struever (n. 4 above), 105. [BACK]

10. Cf. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (n. 3 above), esp. 10, 22-23. [BACK]

11. Alberti, Della famiglia 45; in quoting this work I use the translation of Renée Neu Watkins, The Family in Renaissance Florence (Columbia, S. C., 1969). [BACK]

12. Francesco Petrarch, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia , tr. Hans Nachod, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man , ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago, 1948), 96. [BACK]

13. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier , tr. Charles S. Singleton (New York, 1959), 54; cf. 57. [BACK]

14. Cf. Alberti, Della famiglia 84 (n. 11 above), explicitly relying on Cicero: "Nothing in the world is so flexible and malleable as the spoken word. It yields and inclines in any direction you choose to move it." [BACK]

15. Camporeale (n. 5 above), 150-151. [BACK]

16. Struever is illuminating on this point (n. 3 above), 67-68 and passim. [BACK]

17. Quoted by Michael Seidlmayer, Currents of Medieval Thought , tr. D. Barker (Oxford, 1960), 157. Cf. Petrarch's application of this impulse to his conception of God's solicitude: "He watches over me personally and is solicitous for my welfare. . . . He cares for each individual as if he were forgetful of mankind en masse " ( Epistolae familiares 12.10, tr. Morris Bishop, Letters from Petrarch [Bloomington, 1966], 191). For similar sentiments in Valla see the passages quoted by Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago, 1970), 1.141 and 143. [BACK]

18. De secreto conflictu curarum mearum libri III , ed. E. Carrara, in Francesco Petrarch, Prose (Milan, 1955), 132. [BACK]

19. Quoted by Struever (n. 3 above), 59. [BACK]

20. Alberti, Della famiglia , 168 (n. 11 above). [BACK]

21. Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque bono , ed. Maristella de Panizza Lorch (Bari, 1970), 114. [BACK]

22. Struever (n. 3 above), 60. [BACK]

23. Quoted by Trinkaus (n. 17 above), 1.67. [BACK]

24. Hans Baron, "Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," John Rylands Library Bulletin 22 (1938), 18. [BACK]

25. Alberti, Della famiglia 25, 72 (n. 11 above). [BACK]

26. Cf. Klaus Heitmann, Fortuna und Virtus: Eine Studie zu Petrarcas Lebensweisheit (Cologne, 1958). [BACK]

27. Quoted by Carlos G. Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague, 1970), 182. [BACK]

28. Cf. Hanna H. Gray, "Valla's Encomium of St. Thomas and the Humanist Conception of Christian Antiquity," in Essays in History and Literature Presented to Stanley Pargellis , ed. Heinz Bluhm (Chicago, 1965), 37-51. [BACK]

29. This exchange is quoted by Eugene F. Rice, Jr., "Erasmus and the Religious Tradition," in Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas , ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1968), 180. Cf. his letter to Amerbach, 31 August 1518, in Opus epistolarum Erasmi , ed. P. S. and H. M. Allen (Oxford, 1906-58), 3.385, where he describes eloquence as the handmaiden of wisdom. [BACK]

30. Quoted by Noreña (n. 27 above), 278. This is also, of course, Pico's point in his famous letter to Ermolao Barbaro, tr. by Quirinus Breen, in "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on the Conflict of Philosophy and Rhetoric," Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), 384-412. [BACK]

31. Castiglione (n. 13 above), 70-71, 32, 140. Cf. Struever (n. 3 above), 190, on the transition from "civic-mindedness" to "urbanity." [BACK]

32. Quoted by Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York, 1943), 69. For a similar shift in the meaning of decorum for painting and literature, cf. Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420-1540 (London, 1972), 280. [BACK]

33. Quoted by J. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of the Reformation , tr. F. Hopkin (New York, 1953), 105. For this dimension of the Ciceronian controversy, see also George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago, 1951), 11-31. In the light of this revised attitude to rhetoric, Erasmus's mistaken view of Valla as essentially a grammarian assumes special significance; cf. Camporeale (n. 5 above), 5-6. [BACK]

34. Cf. the documentation in Seigel (n. 3 above), 258. [BACK]

35. Letter to Barbaro in Breen (n. 30 above), 395-396. [BACK]

36. Ibid ., 397. [BACK]

37. Cf Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1958), 13-38. [BACK]

38. Quoted by Burke (n. 32 above), 158. [BACK]

39. Cf. Erasmus, Enchridion militis Christiani , tr. Ford Lewis Battles, in Advocates of Reform , ed. Matthew Spinka, Library of Christian Classics, 14 (London, 1953), 303, 305, 334, 335. But Erasmus may have withdrawn somewhat from this position in his later years; see, for example, his late work De sarcienda ecclesia concordia , in Opera omnia , ed. Jean Leclerc (Leiden, 1703-1706), 5.470-471. [BACK]

40. Quoted by Wind (n. 37 above), 39. [BACK]

41. John W. O'Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform (Leiden, 1968),40. [BACK]

42. Thomas Browne, Religio medici (London, 1906), 39. [BACK]

43. Cf. Ficino's preoccupation with unity, displayed by Kristeller (n. 32 above), esp. the quotations on 68, 88, 92, 105-106. [BACK]

44. Trinkaus (n. 17 above), 1.104, notes a similar contrast between the cosmological foundations of scholastic and the anthropological foundations of humanist thought. I am suggesting here that a comparable distinction can be made between later and earlier humanism. [BACK]

45. John Colet, Enarratio in primam epistolam S. Pauli ad Corinthios , tr. J. H. Lupton (London, 1874), 57-58. [BACK]

46. Erasmus, Opera (n. 39 above), 5.484-485; I quote in the translation of Raymond Himelick, Erasmus and the Seamless Coat of Jesus (Lafayette, Ind., 1971), 57. [BACK]

47. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man , tr. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in Renaissance Philosophy of Man (n. 12 above), 249. [BACK]

48. Cf. Kristeller (n. 32 above), 84. [BACK]

49. See Mario Fois, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla nel quadro storico culturale del suo ambiente (Rome, 1969), 492. [BACK]

50. For Ficino (and Colet), see Leland Miles, John Colet and the Platonic Tradition (London, 1961), 20-21; for Giles, see O'Malley (n. 41 above), 58; and for Lefèvre, Eugene F. Rice, Jr., "The Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity: Lefèvre d'Étaples and His Circle," Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962), 128. [BACK]

51. Cf. Erasmus, Institutio principis Christiani , tr. Lester K. Born (New York, 1968), 158, though he hinted at reservations about Dionysius in his letter to Jodocus Jonas, 21 May 1521, Allen (n. 29 above), 4.491-492. [BACK]

52. As noted by Ernst Cassirer, "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola," Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942), 123-145, 319-347; for the elements in Ficino and Pico characteristic of the earlier Renaissance, cf. Paul Oskar Kristeller, "Ficino and Pomponazzi on the Place of Man in the Universe," Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944), 286, and "The European Significance of Florentine Platonism,'' Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1968), 214. [BACK]

53. Quoted by Noreña (n. 27 above), 201. [BACK]

54. Castiglione (n. 13 above), 313. [BACK]

55. Erasmus, Enchiridion (n. 39 above), 319. [BACK]

56. Castiglione, 336. [BACK]

57. Erasmus, Enchiridion , 314-315. [BACK]

58. The Colloquies of Erasmus , tr. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago, 1965), 98. [BACK]

59. Huizinga (n. 33 above), 105. [BACK]

60. Quoted by Noreñia (n. 27 above), 269. [BACK]

61. Quoted by Miles (n. 50 above), 72-73; cf. Kristeller (n. 32 above), 328. [BACK]

62. Erasmus (n. 58 above), 96. [BACK]

63. Erasmus (n. 51 above), 176; italics added. [BACK]

64. Quoted by Noreña (n. 27 above), 127; for the hatred of sex accompanying this attitude, see 209-211. [BACK]

65. Kristeller (n. 32 above), 195-196. [BACK]

66. François Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel , 2.8, tr. Jacques Le Clercq (New York, 1944), 191. [BACK]

67. Kristeller, "European Significance" (n. 52 above), 215-216. [BACK]

68. Pico della Mirandola (n. 47 above), 238. [BACK]

69. Quoted by O'Malley (n. 41 above), 144-147. [BACK]

70. Castiglione (n. 13 above), 309-310. [BACK]

71. On this interest more generally in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Heiko A. Oberman, "The Shape of Late Medieval Thought: The Birthpangs of the Modern Era," in The Pursuit of Holiness , ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden, 1974), 15-19; and, in the same volume, more specifically on the circle of Erasmus, James K. McConica, "Erasmus and the 'Julius': A Humanist Reflects on the Church," 444-467. [BACK]

72. Letter to Louis Ber, 30 March 1529, Allen (n. 29 above), 8.120. On this point cf. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l'Écriture (Paris, 1959-1964), 4.432. [BACK]

73. Pico della Mirandola (n. 47 above), 237-238. [BACK]

74. Cf. Kristeller (n. 32 above), 322-323; The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Related Texts , ed. Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (New York, 1972), xix; Noreña (n. 27 above), 231-232. [BACK]

75. Cf. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Le Thomisme et la pensée italienne de la renaissance (Montreal, 1967). Cf. John W. O'Malley, "Some Renaissance Panegyrics of Aquinas," Renaissance Quarterly 27 (1974), 174-192. [BACK]

76. Letter to Jodocus Jonas, 13 June 1521, Allen (n. 29 above), 4.520. [BACK]

77. Cf. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, "Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report," Journal of Modern History 40 (1968), 1-56. [BACK]

78. Petrarch (n. 18 above), 72-74; Struever (n. 3 above), 55, 155-167. [BACK]

79. Leopold David Ettlinger, The Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy (Oxford, 1965), is suggestive on this point. [BACK]

80. I have analyzed this tension, as a perennial element in Renaissance thought, in "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Humanist Thought," in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance and its European Transformations , ed. Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden, 1975), 3-60; ch. 1 above. [BACK]

81. This point is developed in my paper "Renaissance and Reformation: An Essay in their Affinities and Connections," in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era: Papers for the Fourth International Congress for Luther Research , ed. H. A. Oberman (Leiden, 1974), 127-149; ch. 9 below. [BACK]