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While there were many revivals of classical texts both in the East and the West through the centuries, to speak only of the renewal of learning in the Carolingian period or in Byzantium in the ninth century or the twelfth-century Renaissance, the quest for manuscripts became more intense in the humanist period, and with the advent of printing there was a huge proliferation of texts, old and new. Most scholars identify the beginnings of humanism with Petrarch, but a new style of writing and advan...
The term ‘imitation’ in this context does not have the larger philosophical implications of the Greek term mimesis, as used by Plato and Aristotle, but rather the more restricted meaning given to it in Hellenistic times and referring to the imitation of a previous author who is regarded as a model of good style. The first Greek writer we know of who spoke specifically about this kind of imitation was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived and worked in Rome about 30 bc. He wrote three books on th...
As has often been pointed out, 23 June 1491 was an important date in the life of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). He was twenty-one years old, and Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano had stopped at the Bembo house in Venice at the end of their journey to Northern Italy, in search of manuscripts. In the rich library of Bernardo Bembo, Pietro’s father, Poliziano found an important fourth-century manuscript of Terence’s comedies (Vat. Lat. 3226), which he collated with his own edition of the Roman playwrig...
Latin letters continued to flourish throughout the Cinquecento in Italy, although at the time there was also an increase of literature written in the vernacular, due to its legitimation by Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). One of the greatest literary figures of this century was Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530). Although he is more renowned for his Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose and verse written in Italian, he devoted the last thirty years of his life to compositions in elegant L...
Erasmus of Rotterdam is one of the great educators of the Western world, and from the Renaissance, he is undoubtedly the best. As a student in Paris, he gave lessons to young men—strangers like himself—to help them improve their command of humanistic Latin, both in writing and in speaking. For this purpose, he devised various treatises to replace those in use at the time, which were based on rules learnt by rote. One of these works was De ratione dicendi (On the Method of Studying), which emphas...
Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) studied scholastic logic in Paris with two well-known teachers, the Fleming Jan Dullaert and the Aragonese Gaspar Lax, from whom he learnt the scholastic dialectic method that he would later repudiate. Although it seems that Vives never obtained even his bachelor degree (he was more interested in attending extracurricular lectures in the Arts faculty), he later gave lessons as an extra-curricular lecturer. From this early teaching career he published praelectiones (in...