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This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, based not on scholarly paradigms or philosophical concepts but on a neglected yet indispensable perspective: the humanists' understanding of themselves. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker excavates what humanists thought was important about humanism, how they viewed their own history, what goals they enunciated, what triumphs they celebrated - in short, he attempts to reconstruct humanist identity. What emerges is a small, coherent community dedicated primarily not to political ideology, a philosophy of man, an educational ethos, or moral improvement, but rather to the pursuit of classical Latin eloquence. Grasping the significance this stylistic ideal had for the humanists is essential to understanding both their sense of themselves and the importance they and others attached to their movement. For eloquence was no mere aesthetic affair but rather appeared to them as the guarantor of civilisation itself.
About the author
Patrick Baker (FAAR '13) received his PhD in History from Harvard University, Massachusetts in 2009 and is currently a Senior Research Associate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Primarily an intellectual historian of late medieval and early modern Italy, his scholarship has focused on Renaissance humanism, the transformative reception of the classical tradition, and historiography. He has won fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and Villa I Tatti. In 2014 he published an English translation of two monographic essays by the late Salvatore Camporeale (co-edited with Christopher S. Celenza), entitled Christianity, Latinity, and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, which includes an English version of Valla's Encomium of St Thomas Aquinas. He is a member of the Renaissance Society of America, the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, and the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands. He has organized several academic conferences, including 'Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance: The Humanist Depiction of Rulers in Historiographical and Biographical Texts' (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, November 2014) and 'Beyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical Antiquity' (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, March 2015).
Summary
This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, one of the most important cultural movements in Western history. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker explores the meaning that Italian Renaissance humanism had for an essential but neglected group: the humanists themselves.
