The humanists completed the recovery of classical learning, a process which had unfolded over centuries. Starting in the eleventh century, those who wanted new ideas turned ad hoc to classical authors whose works still remained available. The scholastics studied Aristotle to learn logic. In the twelfth century, the court of Countess Marie de Champagne invented the notion of courtly, or romantic, love, inspired by the erotic poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and others. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the architects of the Gothic cathedrals based their design on Plato’s Timaeus, the only one of Plato’s dialogues then available in Latin.
In the fourteenth century, Petrarch became one of the first to search out and rescue manuscripts of lost classical texts that were lying forgotten in the libraries of monasteries. Petrarch didn’t just model some of his own lyrics on the newly recovered Horace; he adopted the role of “the poet” based partly on what Horace and other ancients tell us about where poets fit in the cultural life of ancient Rome. In 1341, Petrarch arranged a public ceremony on the steps of the Capitol in Rome where he was crowned as the first modern poet laureate—a public official placed a laurel wreath on Petrarch’s head as if he were a victor in the ancient Pythian games in honor of Apollo.
In the first half of the fifteenth century, scholars fleeing the Byzantine empire when it came under attack from the Ottoman Turks fed a ferocious appetite in Italy for learning the ancient Greek language and for collecting Greek manuscripts. Philosophers in the West suddenly had access to all of Plato and therefore had a fresh system of thought to supplant the scholastics’ by-then stuffy Aristotelianism. Poets gained access to Homer in the original. They had known that Homer was Vergil’s model, but they knew little else about him; he was only a legendary figure. Now they could read Homer for themselves and see that he might even surpass Vergil.
All of these activities spawned the new discipline of humanism, which applied critical methods to ancient texts. Using techniques that form the basis for training in Classics today, the humanists searched out manuscripts, prepared authoritative texts, and situated them in their proper period. They wrote scholarly treatises to explain the significance of the new finds.
The work of Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) on the “Donation of Constantine” furnishes a famous example. The popes had long asserted their primacy over all of Christendom, a claim based in part on this document in which the Roman emperor Constantine I in the early fourth century bequeathed the leadership of Christendom to the bishops of Rome in perpetuity. Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus represented an important authority. However, the bishops of Constantinople, who head the Eastern Orthodox Church, rejected the claim, pointing to their equally ancient lineage as one of the original seven primates of the ancient Christian world.
The dispute between Rome and Constantinople came to a head in 1054 when the pope sent a copy of the “Donation” to his counterpart in Constantinople and insisted on obedience. The bishop of Constantinople refused, and the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches split apart for good. This schism became an important issue in the fifteenth century as the Catholic West debated whether to help the Orthodox Byzantine Empire fight off the Turks. Some people feared that if Constantinople fell, the Turks would invade Western Europe next while others thought the Eastern Orthodox Church was getting what it deserved for splitting from the rightful authority of the pope. At this moment, Valla used textual analysis to prove that the “Donation of Constantine” was a forgery. It used the vocabulary of medieval Latin. The language of the document had come from a much later period than the fourth century, when Constantine lived, and therefore couldn’t have been written by him.
The church ignored Valla’s findings—in fact, it continues to perpetuate the myth of Constantine even today. But the status of the church had altered. People no longer accepted the pronouncements of the church without challenge. The humanists, many of them members of the clergy, lent their weight to those who criticized the church’s abuses, such as conflicts of interest between the church’s political and spiritual power; the disparity between the great wealth of bishops and cardinals and the poverty of the ordinary people they were supposed to serve; the sale of church offices; the fraud of selling indulgences, and so on.
Humanists such as Erasmus, himself a priest, wrote satirical dialogues and pastoral poems to expose these abuses. Moreover, the humanists could publish these texts to a much wider and more secular audience. The quickening economic pace of the Renaissance and the beginnings of capitalism created a new class of professionals who were educated and engaged in the world. They could afford to buy books because the invention of printing in 1453 reduced the cost of producing them by 90%. The first independent reading public since antiquity came into being.
The Future of Reading 