Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini

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Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini

Italian scholar

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Born:: February 11, 1380, Terranuova, Tuscany [Italy]

Died:: October 30, 1459, Florence (aged 79)

Notable Works:: “Achievements of the Divine Augustus”; “Argonautica”; “Astronomica”; “Cyropaedia”; “De significatu verborum”; “Institutio oratoria”; “On the Nature of Things”; “Punica”; “Silvae”

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Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (born February 11, 1380, Terranuova, Tuscany [Italy]—died October 30, 1459, Florence) was an Italian humanist and calligrapher, foremost among scholars of the early Renaissance as a rediscoverer of lost, forgotten, or neglected Classical Latin manuscripts in the monastic libraries of Europe.

While working in Florence as a copyist of manuscripts, Poggio invented the humanist script (based on the Caroline minuscule), a round, formal writing that, after a generation of polishing by scribes, served the new art of printing as the prototype of “Roman” fonts. In 1403 he moved to Rome, where he became a secretary to Pope Boniface IX. In 1415 at Cluny he brought to light two unknown orations of Cicero. At St. Gall in 1416 he found the first complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, three books and part of a fourth of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica, and the commentaries of Asconius Pedianus on Cicero’s orations. Various expeditions in 1417 to Fulda, St. Gall, and other monasteries produced P. Festus’s De significatu verborum; Lucretius’s De rerum natura; Manilius’s Astronomica; Silius Italicus’s Punica; Ammianus Marcellinus’s Res gestae; Apicius’s work on cooking; and other lesser works. He also found at Langres in 1417 Cicero’s oration Pro Caecina and perhaps at Cologne seven other orations of Cicero. It is not known where and when he discovered the Silvae of Statius. Poggio made copies of the newfound works in his elegant script, several of which still survive.

He spent four years (1418–23) in England, where his hopes of continuing his discoveries were disappointed by the inadequacy of English libraries. In 1423 he was reappointed curial secretary in Rome and made further discoveries, including Frontinus’s De aquaeductibus and Firmicus Maternus’s Matheseos libri, the latter found at Monte Cassino in 1429. He translated into Latin Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the histories of Diodorus Siculus, and Lucian’s Onos. His Classical interests extended to the study of ancient buildings and the collecting of inscriptions and of sculpture, with which he adorned the garden of his villa near Florence. He succeeded Carlo Aretino as chancellor of Florence (1453). His last years were spent in exercising this office and in writing his history of Florence.

humanism

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2025 • Article History

Key People:: John Calvin; Erasmus; François Rabelais; Thomas More; Petrarch

Related Topics:: secularism; cornucopian; anthropocentrism; humanities; Renaissance man

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humanism, system of education and mode of inquiry that originated in northern Italy during the 13th and 14th centuries and later spread through continental Europe and England. The term is alternatively applied to a variety of Western beliefs, methods, and philosophies that place central emphasis on the human realm. Also known as Renaissance humanism, the historical program was so broadly and profoundly influential that it is one of the chief reasons why the Renaissance is viewed as a distinct historical period. Indeed, though the word Renaissance is of more recent coinage, the fundamental idea of that period as one of renewal and reawakening is humanistic in origin. But humanism sought its own philosophical bases in far earlier times and, moreover, continued to exert some of its power long after the end of the Renaissance.

Origin and meaning of the term humanism

The ideal of humanitas

The history of the term humanism is complex but enlightening. It was first employed (as humanismus) by 19th-century German scholars to designate the Renaissance emphasis on Classical studies in education. These studies were pursued and endorsed by educators known, as early as the late 15th century, as umanisti—that is, professors or students of Classical literature. The word umanisti derives from the studia humanitatis, a course of Classical studies that, in the early 15th century, consisted of grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy. The studia humanitatis were held to be the equivalent of the Greek paideia. Their name was itself based on the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero’s concept of humanitas, an educational and political ideal that was the intellectual basis of the entire movement. Renaissance humanism in all its forms defined itself in its straining toward this ideal. No discussion of humanism, therefore, can have validity without an understanding of humanitas.

Humanitas meant the development of human virtue, in all its forms, to its fullest extent. The term thus implied not only such qualities as are associated with the modern word humanity—understanding, benevolence, compassion, mercy—but also such more assertive characteristics as fortitude, judgment, prudence, eloquence, and even love of honour. Consequently, the possessor of humanitas could not be merely a sedentary and isolated philosopher or man of letters but was of necessity a participant in active life. Just as action without insight was held to be aimless and barbaric, insight without action was rejected as barren and imperfect. Humanitas called for a fine balance of action and contemplation, a balance born not of compromise but of complementarity.

The goal of such fulfilled and balanced virtue was political, in the broadest sense of the word. The purview of Renaissance humanism included not only the education of the young but also the guidance of adults (including rulers) via philosophical poetry and strategic rhetoric. It included not only realistic social criticism but also utopian hypotheses, not only painstaking reassessments of history but also bold reshapings of the future. In short, humanism called for the comprehensive reform of culture, the transfiguration of what humanists termed the passive and ignorant society of the “dark” ages into a new order that would reflect and encourage the grandest human potentialities. Humanism had an evangelical dimension: it sought to project humanitas from the individual into the state at large.

AristotleDetail of a Roman copy (2nd century bce) of a Greek alabaster portrait bust of Aristotle, c. 325 bce; in the collection of the Roman National Museum.

The wellspring of humanitas was Classical literature. Greek and Roman thought, available in a flood of rediscovered or newly translated manuscripts, provided humanism with much of its basic structure and method. For Renaissance humanists, there was nothing dated or outworn about the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, or Livy. Compared with the typical productions of medieval Christianity, these pagan works had a fresh, radical, almost avant-garde tonality. Indeed, recovering the classics was to humanism tantamount to recovering reality. Classical philosophy, rhetoric, and history were seen as models of proper method—efforts to come to terms, systematically and without preconceptions of any kind, with perceived experience. Moreover, Classical thought considered ethics qua ethics, politics qua politics: it lacked the inhibiting dualism occasioned in medieval thought by the often-conflicting demands of secularism and Christian spirituality. Classical virtue, in examples of which the literature abounded, was not an abstract essence but a quality that could be tested in the forum or on the battlefield. Finally, Classical literature was rich in eloquence. In particular, humanists considered Cicero to be the pattern of refined and copious discourse, as well as the model of eloquence combined with wise statesmanship. In eloquence humanists found far more than an exclusively aesthetic quality. As an effective means of moving leaders or fellow citizens toward one political course or another, eloquence was akin to pure power. Humanists cultivated rhetoric, consequently, as the medium through which all other virtues could be communicated and fulfilled.

Humanism, then, may be accurately defined as that Renaissance movement that had as its central focus the ideal of humanitas. The narrower definition of the Italian term umanisti notwithstanding, all the Renaissance writers who cultivated humanitas, and all their direct “descendants,” may be correctly termed humanists.

Other uses

It is small wonder that a term as broadly allusive as humanism should be subject to a wide variety of applications. Of these (excepting the historical movement described above) there are three basic types: humanism as Classicism, humanism as referring to the modern concept of the humanities, and humanism as human-centredness.

Accepting the notion that Renaissance humanism was simply a return to the Classics, some historians and philologists have reasoned that Classical revivals occurring anywhere in history should be called humanistic. St. Augustine, Alcuin, and the scholars of 12th-century Chartres have thus been referred to as humanists. In this sense the term can also be used self-consciously, as in the New Humanism movement in literary criticism led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More in the early 20th century.

The word humanities, which like the word umanisti derived from the Latin studia humanitatis, is often used to designate the nonscientific scholarly disciplines: language, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, art history, and so forth. Thus, it is customary to refer to scholars in these fields as humanists and to their activities as humanistic.

Humanism and related terms are frequently applied to modern doctrines and techniques that are based on the centrality of human experience. In the 20th century the pragmatic humanism of Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, the Christian humanism of Jacques Maritain, and the movement known as secular humanism, though differing from each other significantly in content, all showed this anthropocentric emphasis.

Not only is such a large assortment of definitions confusing, but the definitions themselves are often redundant or impertinent. There is no reason to call all Classical revivals “humanistic” when the word Classical suffices. To say that professors in the many disciplines known as the humanities are humanists is to compound vagueness with vagueness, for these disciplines have long since ceased to have or even aspire to a common rationale. The definition of humanism as anthropocentricity or human-centredness has a firmer claim to correctness. For obvious reasons, however, it is confusing to apply this word to Classical literature.