II
The new science and
the traditions of humanism
ANTHONY GRAFTON
Constantijn Huygens was one of the most virtuous of the seventeenthcentury virtuosi who collected antiquities, devised scientific instruments and
cultivated a taste for natural curiosities. He painted, wrote poetry in several
languages and played the lute for the king of England. The most modern
English thinkers and writers appealed to him: he translated John Donne into
Dutch and copied out Francis Bacon's theories about progress. He loved the
humanist art of Rubens, but recognized the young Rembrandt's supremacy
as a history painter. His unfinished classic in Dutch, the Dagwerck,
celebrated the discoveries of the new science, which he tried to connect with
the domestic life of the Dutch Golden Age, the sunny world of scrubbed tile
floors, tables covered by rich rugs and crystalline windows so memorably
depicted by Vermeer.
Huygens came honestly by his wide range of skills and interests: he was
raised to have them. His father had him taught to speak French by the direct
method as a child and encouraged him to study science, music and painting.
As a teenager he enrolled at Leiden, the most modern university of his day.
There he attended not only courses in Latin on canonical texts but also
courses in Dutch on modern mathematics and military engineering. Even
the professors of classical humanities wrote Dutch poetry. Soon Huygens
became a habitue less of universities than of courts, ambassadors' residences
and scientific societies. He seems as prototypically modern a figure as
Descartes; and like Descartes, he saw the story of his own progress as worth
recording in a carefully constructed autobiography.1
At this point, however, the resemblance ends. Descartes described in
the Discours de la methode ('Discourse on Method', 1637) the formation
of a revolutionary, one who had deliberately turned away from the
humanist learning and scholastic philosophy of the colleges and built the
world anew. Huygens, by contrast, described the formation of a moderate, one who combined humanist and scientific interests, classical and
modern tastes without strain. He was as delighted to remember how he
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learned to write Latin verse as how he learned to use the microscope. He
saw no opposition between his up-to-date and his traditional endeavours.
And he wrote his memoirs in what he still considered the language of
science and learning: not French or Dutch but Latin, and not plain Latin
at that but an elaborate, formal prose studded with allusions and
quotations. Even when Huygens wished to praise a quintessentially
modern enterprise - like Hugo Grotius's treatise in the vernacular on the
principles of Dutch law - he did so as a classicist, remarking that Dutch
farmers would be most grateful to Grotius 'sua si bona norint' - 'if they
knew their own good'. He rightly assumed that his contemporaries would
recognize his quotation from Virgil's Georgics (11.458).
An active command of elegant Latin still mattered deeply in the Holland
of the Golden Age. It gave those who possessed it an entree to the
international Republic of Letters. It expressed ideas and reported events
with a precision that the vernacular lacked. And it proved perfectly
adequate for dealing with the most modern concepts and inventions - at
least if, like Huygens, the Latinist was willing to ransack texts and lexica for
plausible ways of referring to 'military engineers' (architectones castrenses)
and other non-classical beasts. Latin eloquence, the core skill and mental
discipline of the Renaissance humanist, lived.
For a variety of reasons, until the last generation or so most historians of
civilization, literature and art assumed that Renaissance humanism died as
the sixteenth century wound to a close. On the one hand, the cutting edge of
change in early modern literature did not seem to belong to the Latin
language, whose elegances the humanists cultivated with so much painstaking attention. By the sixteenth century, after all, Italian had become not
only a literary language but a classical one in its own right. The young
aristocrat had to read, speak and write it as well as Latin, and its canon of
once smooth-hulled classics, from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio down to
Ariosto and Tasso, had developed a thick new barnacling of literary and
philological commentary. The French poets of the Pleiade, the tragic and
comic playwrights of the London theatre and the young Dutch poets in the
circle of the University of Leiden all showed in their turn, to widespread
satisfaction, that one could imitate, emulate and satirize the ancients in their
languages as well. Just as close imitation of Greek models had turned the
primitive babble of early Rome into a language of high literature, so close
imitation of Greek, Latin and Italian precedents could make any modern
vernacular a vehicle fit for epic or lyric, history or tragedy. The easily
imitated oxymorons and ekphrases of Petrarch's lyrics, for instance, found
creative imitators in every European language. Latin was still needed, at
least by professional intellectuals.2 But the age of creative writing in
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classicizing modern Latin - the age that stretched from Petrarch to Erasmus
and a little beyond - had presumably reached its natural end.
On the other hand, it also seemed reasonable to infer that the content of
the humanist curriculum had become either elementary or sterile - or both
- by the turn of the seventeenth century. True, the creators of the Scientific
Revolution enjoyed in almost every case that fine classical education, based
on a thorough study of Greek literature, which, according to Thomas
Gaisford's famous remark, 'not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but
leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument'.3 But a
standard genealogy of modern thought, one inherited from its seventeenthcentury creators, suggested that the new philosophy that called everything
into doubt grew in soil fertilized by the ashes of the humanist tradition.
Montaigne, himself the beneficiary of an idiosyncratic but excellent
humanist training, showed in his last essay (III. 13: 'On experience') that
the whole enterprise of trying to find guidance for modern behaviour in
classical texts required readers to rip their supposed authorities out of time
and context. Individual lives and situations, societies and religions differed
so radically that one could not reasonably hope to make the past shed
light on the present.4 He also subjected the wasted time required by a
normal humanist education to a searching critique, which reformer after
reformer would paraphrase or quote.
Where Montaigne questioned and subverted, two of his faithful readers
inserted dynamite and lit the fuse. Bacon treated Renaissance humanism,
like scholasticism before it, as a fatal disease of learning. The humanists had
failed to see that the world had changed, that modern voyages were more
extended, modern empires more far-flung and modern technology more
powerful than those of the ancients. They had confused the 'antiquity' of
the Greeks and Romans - the fact that their texts had existed for a long time
- with the authority that human beings gain as they age - an authority that
can be invested only in people, who continue to learn as they age, not in
books, which are impervious to experience (if not to damage). The philology
of the humanists, with its obsessive citation and imitation of authorities,
had been an intellectual distraction from the thinker's true mission of
extending man's empire. The humanists had entirely failed to see how much
they could have learned from the practical men of their own day, whose
theories about the natural world rested on practical experience, not mere
textual exegesis — and who lived their intellectual lives, with every appearance of satisfaction, in the vernacular.5 Descartes, for his part, admitted that
the historical learning he had acquired at the Jesuit college of La Fleche had
a certain value: it had taught him that values and behaviour differed from
place to place and age to age. But travel could have taught the same lesson,
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and probably in a fresher way. As for the study of past philosophers, it
showed only that - as Montaigne had already seen - they disagreed with
each other on so many central points that none of their systems could claim
the status of offering certain knowledge.
Many other prophets of the new science joined the chorus of those who
groaned at the thousands of hours they and others had lost scribbling
halting verse in a dead language or hoping vainly to find solid knowledge in
antiquated books. Galileo used his brilliant Italian to present the results of
his investigations to a wide public. He made wicked fun of those who
'think', as he wrote to Johannes Kepler, 'that philosophy is a sort of book
like the Aeneid and the Odyssey, and that truth is to be found not in the
world or in nature but in the collation of texts (I use their terminology)'.6
The members of the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club and the Fellows
of the Royal Society, the Paris Academie des Sciences and the Roman
Accademia dei Lincei agreed that the results of experiments and voyages
were most clearly and plainly presented in the vernacular. A host of
proposers tried to make up for the one great problem that the downfall of
Latin posed - the loss of an international language - by devising universal
symbolic or hieroglyphic or pictorial languages, not to mention methods for
learning all European vernaculars in a couple of weeks each.7 Even Sir Isaac
Newton, who used his fluent Latin as the appropriate dress for the great
baroque world picture of the Principia, used English for the pullulating
experimental details of his Optics. Even G. W. Leibniz, who corresponded
in Latin with half of learned Europe, used French to develop his modern
metaphysics. These examples - and many more could be cited - suggest that
in the seventeenth century Latin humanism played the crowd-pleasing role
of the star in a dramatic execution scene. Just when the humanists had
rediscovered most of the ancient texts that would see the light before the
second Renaissance of the papyrologists, captured the new medium of
printing and established their position at the start of the educational food
chain, the basic futility of their central disciplines was publicly exposed and
denounced - and by the most authoritative voices of their day.
Many humanists, finally, admitted, if not that their studies were useless,
at least that their age had run its course: 'the age of criticism and
philosophy', said the classical scholar J. F. Gronovius in the 1650s, 'has
passed, and one of philosophy and mathematics has taken its place'.8 Even
those who continued to insist on the possibility of and the need for historical
knowledge generally accepted that the forms of argument and presentation
needed updating. Thus Pierre-Daniel Huet tried to make his anti-Cartesian
Demonstratio evangelica (1679), in which he revealed the biblical origin of
the ancient myths, rigorous and convincing in a way that could meet the
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criticisms of the Cartesians, convinced as they were that all philology was a
waste of time.9 He also tried to make the vast echo-chamber of the
accumulated humanist commentaries on classical texts coherent and accessible by editing a series of editions of the classics, in the first instance for the
French dauphin, in which only the notes that remained of interest were
reprinted, after being boiled down. If humanist scholarship was to survive,
in short, it needed to adopt at least the protective colouring of philosophical
rationalism. Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College and master of
textual criticism, insisted, in a famous phrase in his commentary on Horace,
that 'ratio et res ipsa' ('reason and the case in point') mattered far more to
him than the testimony of 100 old manuscripts. He also devoted a famous
series of Boyle Lectures to arguing for the philosophical and theological
advantages of Newton's cosmology - which, he clearly saw, was no revival
of an ancient theory but a new creation with no ancient counterpart.10 No
wonder that most standard narratives of the intellectual history of early
modern Europe insist on the transition 'from the humanists to men of
science', or on the change from a principle of authority to one of free
investigation. This modern periodization has ample period support.
In fact, however, humanism long survived the sniping of its critics and the
depression of its advocates - and even contributed a surprising amount to
some of the intellectual enterprises that eventually replaced it. During the
last generation, intellectual historians have come to see more and more
clearly that late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century announcements of the
death of humanism were a considerable exaggeration. Characteristic humanist enterprises, both philological and philosophical, continued to be carried
out, sometimes on a grand scale, throughout the age of the new science. If
some of them showed evidence of wear, and their advocates signs of
edginess, others revealed a clear capacity to serve modern needs.
Throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the need
for young men trained to work in government expanded. From the ever
larger courts of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England to the little police
states of the Holy Roman Empire, bureaucracies grew, paper circulated in
larger quantities and monarchs demanded more and more detailed advice
about political options and social policies.11 The humanist curriculum
continued - so most teachers and most government officials agreed - to
provide the skills and qualities young men needed to carry out these vital
tasks. Across Europe, educational theorists continued to argue with unmistakeable energy and conviction that the best formation for a young man lay
in the close study of the same classical disciplines that Leonardo Bruni and
Guarino of Verona had defined, following Cicero and Quintilian, as key
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skills for one who hoped to lead an active life. The young man who wished
to serve his prince as a judge or an ambassador, so the influential Helmstedt
scholar Arnold Clapmarius explained, must begin by attaining real mastery
of Latin, even if he could already read the language and had only three years
to spend on all the disciplines: 'you n e e d t o possess it in a polished and
elegant form, unless you want to philosophize in the way of vulgar writers. I
approve entirely of their intelligence, so long as they produce their ideas in
an eloquent form. But they do the reverse, and instead of shedding light on
their learning, they obscure it with their awkward brushwork.' Real
mastery, in turn, meant not only a written command of the language, but
oral fluency: 'It is my advice that you should always speak Latin with your
roommate. If either forgets, let him pay a penalty.' Only those who had
attained this level - which required systematic reading of the comedies of
Plautus, to amass a store of colloquialisms - could hope to avoid the
humiliation suffered by many Germans, who, since they normally spoke no
Latin, found themselves crippled by nervousness when they had to do so,
because they had to take such scrupulous care to avoid solecisms.12
Clapmarius's belief in the need to immerse oneself in Latin, to strain for
active command of a dead language, was not unusual: G. J. Vossius, the
influential teacher of rhetoric at the Amsterdam Academy, also wanted his
students to begin their studies by mastering as pure a Latin as possible.
Though he admitted that no ancient author had treated all subjects and
found all the writers of Golden Latin prose acceptable models, he urged
them to concentrate on systematic - though not slavish - imitation of
Cicero, the greatest single master of Latin eloquence and the only master of
the highest, periodic form of Latin prose.13 The Jesuit colleges that began in
the mid sixteenth century to offer such successful instruction that they won
the children of many Protestant noble families for their curriculum (and for
Catholicism), even in parts of the Holy Roman Empire and Poland that had
threatened to adopt the new religion permanently, adopted similar ideals.
Like the Protestant academies, they specialized in active mastery of Latin
poetry and history, and imposed the speaking of Latin as a vital scholastic
discipline. But their curriculum was no more strictly classical and rhetorical
than that of the influential Protestant academies in Strasbourg and Altdorf
or of the English public schools, all of which offered their pupils much the
same mix of Latin grammar, rhetoric and prosody, spiced with historical
examples and moral lessons.14
The curriculum that young men were advised to undertake in the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries embraced many subjects. Grotius
urged a prospective diplomat to devote himself not only to the literary
arts, but also to logic, physics and even to parts of the scholastic theology
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of Thomas Aquinas. This demand perhaps reflected unusually - and
unrealistically - high standards. Grotius had himself been a brilliant
prodigy at Leiden, where he mastered textual criticism, under the tutelage
of Joseph Scaliger, at the ripe age of twelve, and became one of the most
original intellectuals of the time, the writer of massive treatises on
Christian theology and international law. But Grotius stood in the main
line of educational writing when he defined the small core of subjects that
the young politician absolutely had to study. Vossius maintained that the
future 'politicus' must master rhetoric above all: only with the help of
this instrument of persuasion could he hope to win friends and influence
people in private or to address them effectively in public. Grotius agreed
absolutely: the young man should begin by studying Cicero's letters,
which showed 'how to fit the general precepts to particular topics'. Then
he must read Aristotle's Rhetoric in the light of his ethical and political
works, which showed 'how streams of moral and political wisdom should
be gently drawn down to form the craft of persuasion'. Study of the
orations of Cicero and Demosthenes would provide worked examples of
these more sophisticated precepts.15 Clapmarius also recommended the
study of rhetoric in this sophisticated form, sternly insisting that his
young men must learn ethics and politics, as well as Latin, before they
could venture to compose anything so demanding as an oration. Close
study of moral philosophy and rhetoric, attentive reading of the central
ancient texts, carried on in an orderly and systematic way, would make
the young man virtuous and eloquent - a 'vir bonus dicendi peritus', just as
Roman and Italian educational theorists had always said. These doctrines
have the ring of familiarity: mutatis mutandis, Bruni or Erasmus could have
advanced similar arguments for making the study of ancient literature and
the classical discipline of rhetoric the core of an education for civil life. It is
not surprising, then, that Bruni's De studiis et litteris (1424) and Erasmus's
De ratione studii (1511) were reprinted, along with more up-to-date texts,
in seventeenth-century collections on educational theory.16
The production of classicists naturally required close study of the classics.
Like earlier humanists, those of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries were certain that classical texts embodied ethical and prudential
principles of eternal value. Grotius, for example, advised his mature
students to study the tragedies of Euripides, the comedies of Terence and the
Satires of Horace. The young, he admitted, would see in such works only
'the purity and brilliance of their language'. Older students, however, would
appreciate these texts' more important quality - their provision of ethical
lessons as valid now as they had been in antiquity: 'they will regard there, as
in a mirror, the life and conduct of humanity'.17 Caspar Barlaeus, a brilliant
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Neo-Latin poet, agreed as he recommended that the young try to transform
the best of Horace's Odes into their 'blood and marrow', finding in them
not only the beautiful language that naturally appealed to boys but also
incomparably sound doctrines on piety, morality and the disasters that
ensue after civil war, which only mature men could hope to appreciate.
Most of the methods that teachers recommended were as traditional as
these justifications for reading the classics. They had read their Montaigne
as well as their Cicero and Quintilian, and emphasized the need to make the
classical curriculum practicable for young men born to high political and
military rather than a purely literary and philological life. Promising young
men must not be overworked: they must - as Vittorino da Feltre had shown
long before - be allowed time for physical exercise and other honest forms
of leisure. More important still, they should not be 'dried out' and
transformed into desiccated pedants. The teacher should not, for example,
expect the ordinary young scholar to commit long works in Latin prose - as
opposed to verse, more easily remembered - to memory.18 Often this meant
that reading the classics had to become a collaborative enterprise: a young
scholar by profession must help the young nobleman to gain access to the
elements of classical culture. Like Guarino of Verona, who had advised his
patron and star pupil Leonello d'Este to find a poor but able lad to help him
compile systematic notebooks on his classical reading, Grotius advised his
prospective diplomat not to study a logic text himself, but to have his 'study
helper, who has more free time, read some outstanding expert on this art
and remember to report to you anything worthy of note that he finds'. This
coadjutor, not the young noble, should also undertake the tedious but
necessary task of working through the ancient and modern commentators
on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics and abridging their remarks for his
pupil.19 The tutor, who accompanied his young charge to school and
university, went over lessons with him and took him on travels later on, was
a familiar figure in noble families across Europe. So was the professional
anagnostes, or reader, who read classical texts with the mature king or
nobleman, explaining the continued relevance of classical precepts and
examples for the modern active life and helping in the compilation of study
aids. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, told his brother Robert in a famous
letter on the study of history that that 'excellent man', Mr Henry Savile,
could help him at this task - thereby giving a glimpse of the humble tasks
which could occupy, in his earlier years, a man who later rose to be Provost
of Eton College, the creator of a magnificent edition of the works of
Chrysostom, a great book-collector and an original mathematician.20 To
this profession belonged Henry Cuffe, whose lessons on Aristotle's Politics
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were blamed by Essex for having brought him to rebel against Elizabeth;
not to mention Thomas Hobbes, who carried out similar jobs for no less a
patron than Francis Bacon.21
Reading had to be systematic as well as collaborative. The young man
should learn as early as possible - so Barlaeus explained - to keep careful
notes on what he read:
Meanwhile, as they read, they should have notebooks at hand, in which they
may copy out the more elegant phrases and sentences; or let them have some
blank pages bound in at the end of the books they read, and on them they may
note down the number of the page in question and the heading of some
remarkable topic. Then, when need arises, they will be able to make reference
to it.22
Meticulously kept notebooks on the graces of Latin style, in which classical
ways for beginning and ending a sentence, making a transition or quoting
an authority were organized by type, so Vossius explained, could produce
real copiousness in Latin, preventing the student from revealing the poverty
of his linguistic resources by repetition.23 And equally meticulous notes on
historical reading - as Jean Bodin taught in his influential Methodus ad
faciletn historiarum cognitionem ('Method for Readily Attaining Knowledge
of History', 1566) - would provide the knowledge of peoples and customs,
constitutions and laws that the jurisconsult or politician must have at his
fingertips.24 In every case, the categories into which the student divided the
matter he collected were essential: only these would enable him to impose a
logical order on the spiralling mass of details he would gather as he read
any major classical text - not to mention enabling him to find them again
when necessary. As Sidney told his brother:
... but that I wish herein is this, that when you read any such thing, you
straight bring it to his head, not only of what art, but by your logical
subdivisions, to the next member and parcel of the art. And so, as in a table,
be it witty words, of which Tacitus is full, sentences, of which Livy, or
similitudes, whereof Plutarch, straight to lay it up in the right place of his
storehouse, as either military, or more especially defensive military, or more
particularly defensive by fortification, and so lay it up. So likewise in politic
matters.. ,25
The late humanist and his pupil - like the humanists of the fifteenth and
early sixteenth century - trained themselves to read with their pens ever
ready in their hands. Word-for-word paraphrases of set texts, entered by
hand between the lines of specially printed school editions, made them
readily accessible. So, even more, did the longer remarks that teachers
dictated and that students recorded in the wide margins or on interleaved
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sheets of their texts. And all this material, endlessly sorted and copied,
processed and reprocessed, moved inexorably from margins to notebooks
and back again into school compositions and formal treatises. When the
natural philosopher John Jonston described the work that had gone into his
Thawnatographia naturalis (1630), he claimed not to have explored the
natural world but to have done an immense amount of reading and
excerpting, drawing on both the ancient Natural History of the Elder Pliny
- itself avowedly a work of compilation - and the great modern texts of
Georgius Agricola and Girolamo Cardano.26 In doing so he merely
described more explicitly than usual a method of intellectual work adopted
by generations of writers and readers - from the political thinkers Bodin
and Lipsius to the great essayist Montaigne, who published not only his
essays, laden with artful quotations, but also the formal summary judgements that he had entered, like a good pupil of his humanist masters, in his
copies of ancient and modern historians. The literary methods of Guarino
and Erasmus, in short, survived and flourished: the student, armed with a
notebook and a set of /od, places or categories, in which to store material
for rapid retrieval, set out as confidently in 1630 as his counterparts had
one or two centuries before to break the classics up into bite-sized segments
and organize them for aggressively confident reuse.
Naturally, this literary regime could easily reduce itself - in uncreative
hands - to a sterile exercise in bricolage, the endless recycling of the same
commonplaces to no creative effect. Even the ablest students spent a vast
amount of time and energy on meticulous, almost verbatim adaptations of
particular classical texts. Johannes Kepler, for example, while a student at
Tubingen in the 1590s, spun a laboriously clever epithalamium for a law
student out of the ancient Laus Pisonis: parts of his work, as was common,
effectively amounted to a patchwork of lines from the original.27 Textbooks
often provided little more than lists of ways to perform a particular literary
task - quoting an authority, for example - in a suitably classical way.28 And
even loyal believers in the value of classical learning complained bitterly of
the length of time it took to be initiated into the mysteries of artistic Latin.
Jan Amos Comenius, for example, devised his celebrated Orbis sensualium
pictus (The Visible World', 1666), in which simple pictures directly
expressed the meanings of the words that referred to them, not to replace
but to abridge the rule-based teaching of the humanists.
If the framework of humanist pedagogy was astonishingly traditional,
however, its content was both contentious and protean. Controversies
continued to rage about every element in the humanist curriculum. MarcAntoine Muret and Justus Lipsius argued that the Latinist of the later
sixteenth century should find his models not only in the oratory of the
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Roman republic but also in the close-knit, sententious writing of Tacitus
and Seneca. Lipsian Latin, in particular, became a fad in Protestant and
Catholic Europe alike: but it also came under sharp attack. The great
Calvinist scholar Joseph Scaliger was appalled by Lipsius's numerous
abrupt phrases and minimal use of conjunctions: 'I do not know', he
plaintively told the students who lodged with him, 'what sort of Latin this
is.'29 Scaliger set out systematically to extirpate trendy Tacitisms from the
Latin written by students at Leiden - and thereby found himself in
agreement, unexpectedly, with the Jesuit pedagogues he loathed, who
insisted that Lipsius's 'Laconism' was not the right way to attain the stylistic
qualities of wit and paradox that they thought students should strive for.30
Not only the niceties of style, but also the structure of the curriculum as a
whole, came in for sharp debate. Reformers like the Protestant martyr Peter
Ramus and his followers, who attained considerable influence in Cambridge
as well as Paris, urged educational authorities and students to take up a new,
pragmatic version of dialectic and rhetoric. The teacher should treat every
literary text, including the poems of Horace and the Psalms of David, as a
systematic argument, which could be reduced in principle to a series of logical
statements. Regent masters in Paris colleges and Continental universities
found this a splendid way to teach the skills of argumentation through the
literary classics. They presumably considered it useful, as well as witty, to
treat 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('It is sweet and fitting to die for
one's country'), Horace's often-quoted exhortation to spill one's gore in a
patriotic way, as simply one move in an argumentative game.31
But the Ramists also ran into opposition in many quarters, in part from
Aristotelians who detested Ramus's effort to alter the traditional structures
of dialectic and rhetoric. Many humanists insisted that literary texts should
be analysed in a literary way, that the teacher should pay more attention to
metaphors and turns of speech than to structure and forms of argument.
The pamphlet wars that blazed up wherever Ramus and his followers went
illuminate their progress rather as exploding land-mines illuminate the
progress of an army attacking entrenched positions: resistance almost everywhere was vigorous. The survival of the ideal of eloquence, in short, did not
remotely imply unanimity about its content. Indeed, the heat and extent of
the debate are the best indicator of the vitality humanism retained especially in those cases, as in France around 1600, when divisions about
the nature and purpose of eloquence corresponded to a large extent with
political and religious divides. When the Gallican lawyers of the Paris
parlement and the Jesuits they briefly drove from Paris disagreed about the
proper models of Latin prose, they also debated alternate political and
social ideals of life. Not even the sharpest humanistic debates of the fifteenth
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century over the virtues of republics and monarchies reveal deeper divisions
over principle than those that took place, still in Latin and still taking
classical writers as their main figures, two centuries later.32
For all the range of argument that attended problems of style and
substance, however, a single, visibly homogeneous model for the core of
humanistic learning took shape in institutions as apparently different as the
medieval colleges of the University of Paris and the new Protestant
'illustrious academies' that sprang up in Strasbourg, Altdorf and other cities
that wanted the prestige and income that an institution of higher learning
could bring, as well as a safe and reliable training for their sons. In most of
these institutions - as opposed to new environments like the French court,
where new models of vernacular eloquence flourished - the teaching of
rhetoric centred, much as it had in the fifteenth century, on the analysis of
works of Cicero. Within his canon, however, the emphasis shifted, moving
from the orations which had fascinated the civic humanists of fifteenthcentury Italy to the letters. Written rather than oral texts, apparently
personal and informal rather than public and theatrical, these offered the
student a vast range of models of prose rather than the highly formal one of
Cicero's oratory. They also seemed more appropriate models for young men
whose future tasks would involve far more document preparation than
public speaking. Accordingly, students at early stages of their education,
from Strasbourg to Rome, spent large amounts of time reading, translating
and imitating Cicero's letters. Humanism modernized itself, responding to
practical needs with pragmatic, sensible solutions.
One side of this modernization took the form of an increasing attention to
material objects, both as found in nature and as reworked by man. This
interest grew in part from classical texts. No text fascinated the humanists
more, from the fifteenth century onwards, than Pliny's Natural History, and
this great encyclopedic work, though itself mostly compiled from written
sources, offered a wealth of information about the development of sculpture
and the range of natural objects and species. Though Pliny remained the
richest source of information about the arts in antiquity, Aristotle's works
on animals and Theophrastus' on plants, translated into Latin in the mid
fifteenth century, complemented it with further material, much of it derived
from direct inspection of the natural world. Humanists collected gems,
fragments of ancient sculpture and modern art objects, shells and fossils.
Connoisseurship became almost as central a skill of the educated young
man as Latin eloquence.33
By the middle of the sixteenth century, humanist households regularly
contained not only a library but a collection, the contents of which were as
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painstakingly sorted and labelled as the contents of the owner's schoolbooks
had been sorted and copied into notebooks: in 1543, for example, the
historian and collector Count Wilhelm Werner von Zimmern showed
Sebastian Miinster, who visited him in his castle of Herrenzimmern bei
Rottweil, 'an enormous treasury of texts, especially the historians, an
almost infinite number of antiquities, golden and silver vessels shut away in
a niche in the wall, a stock of simples adorned with varied confections'.34
The Paduan antiquary Lorenzo Pignoria was one of relatively few Italian
scholars of the period around 1600 to enjoy the whole-hearted respect of
humanists throughout the Protestant north as well as patrons in his own
region. He had not only a fine library, which included manuscripts of Dante
and Boccaccio, humanist Latin poetry and a treatise on pumping machines,
but also a museum stocked with coins, medals, shells, busts, papyri and a
whole 'iconotheca', or collection of paintings of illustrious men - not to
mention a graphic work by Diirer 'showing the image of a woman, of
wonderful skill' - Melencolia I, perhaps?35 His collection differed only in
extent, not in character, from that of his older contemporary Joseph
Scaliger, who doted on the headless bird of paradise he had been given by
Dutch merchants in an uncharacteristic fit of generosity, used drawings he
had made as a young man in Italy and southern France to introduce his
students to the study of antiquities and found mummies and papyri
rivetingly interesting. The better-endowed or better-supported colleges had
museums of their own. The Jesuit Collegio Romano of the mid seventeenth
century, for example, swarmed with the giant bones and wooden model
obelisks collected or fabricated by its dominant intellectual figure, Athanasius Kircher. Not only the critics of traditional book-learning, in sum, took
a serious interest in the material world. Humanists did so as well. They
ventured, with varying success, to interpret relics of the ancient world, like
the Egyptian cult object known as the Mensa Isiaca and the pagan temples
of ancient Scandinavia, which were not explicitly described in preserved
texts. And they compiled exhaustive studies of the development of the visual
arts in antiquity, which made clear their belief that the educated young
Latinist must be able to discuss the work of artists as well as that of writers,
in detail and with a sophisticated conceptual apparatus. In this belief - if not
often in their own abilities as draughtsmen and architects - the late
humanists showed themselves the direct heirs of Leon Battista Alberti.36
No single discipline shows the interplay of tradition and innovation in late
humanism more clearly than history. On the one hand, humanist teachers
and historians around 1600 clearly saw themselves as the heirs of the Greek
and Roman statesmen who had defined what history should be. They
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agreed, that is, that the historian should try to form readers for public life.
To that end he should deal, above all, with political events of great
importance. From these he should extract for especially precise treatment
examples of good and evil, effective and ineffective conduct, which his
readers would be able to imitate (or avoid) in their turn. The way of
precepts, so the humanists endlessly repeated, was long and winding; but
the way of examples was short and direct. Exempla not only revealed which
principles worked and which did not, but impressed them on the malleable
mind and memory of the young reader with a force no general presentation
could attain - and gave him a stock of quotations and allusions which
would serve him in good stead when he had to speak or write on public
issues. 37
These convictions, firmly based on Livy and Polybius, echoed from one
end of the humanist Republic of Letters to the other. Philip Sidney expressed
them with characteristic force in the letter to his brother Robert:
In that kind you have principally to note the examples of virtue and vice, with
their good or evil successes, the establishment or ruins of great estates, with
the causes, the time, and circumstances of the laws then written of, the
enterings and endings of wars, and therein, the stratagems against the enemy
and the discipline upon the soldier; and thus much as a very historiographer.
Besides this, the historian makes himself a discourser for profit, and an orator,
yea a poet, sometimes for ornament.38
Sidney took his own advice: to prepare for his embassy to the court of the
Holy Roman Emperor in 1577, he spent some time reading the first three
books of Livy with the erudite Gabriel Harvey. Harvey later recalled that
'the courtier Philip Sidney and I had privately discussed these three books of
Livy, scrutinizing them so far as we could from all points of view, applying
a political analysis . . . Our consideration was chiefly directed at the forms of
states, the conditions of persons, and the qualities of actions.' 39 In doing so
he showed himself, for all his renowned dash and spontaneity, as docile a
follower of humanist tradition as the Nuremberg scholar Philip Camerarius,
son of the famous Joachim, who liked to tell the students of the Altdorf
Academy that 'when one considers the past and pays attention to the
present, one can draw reasonable conclusions about the future. The present
is a riddle, which time solves.' 40 In offering this advice, so everyone knew,
Camerarius simply gave voice to the traditional beliefs of the Roman
historians about the value of their craft. 'Historia magistra vitae' ('history,
the teacher of life') - the age-old doctrine, expressed with matchless clarity
by Cicero, that the texture of human life remained fundamentally the same
through the centuries, so that examples from any good historian should
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serve for imitation by an intelligent later reader, lived on in the lecture
courses about how to read the historians held by thinkers who diverged as
radically as Agostino Mascardi, ex-Jesuit professor of eloquence at Genoa
and Rome, and Degory Wheare, professor of history at Oxford.
Yet the study of ancient history was anything but static in the crucial
years around 1600. In fact, it underwent a series of changes, as scholars and
teachers made a deliberate effort to adjust their practices to fit the immediate
needs of their pupils and patrons. Already at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Machiavelli and Guicciardini had called the traditional humanist
justifications for studying history into question. Both had insisted that one
should draw only pragmatic, not moral lessons from the ancient past.
Machiavelli had implicitly questioned the ability of modern readers to
follow even the former, since all individuals tended to follow one line of
behaviour, even if it proved unproductive, and to misread their own
situation as well. Guicciardini explicitly complained that even Machiavelli
had gone wrong by concentrating so exclusively on the lessons of Roman
history, since the modern world hardly resembled the one the ancient
historians had described: 'How wrong it is', he complained, 'to cite the
Romans at every turn.'41
Two generations later, humanists adapted as their own the fundamental
points of what had been intended as a critique of their predecessors. MarcAntoine Muret, whose lectures on classical texts at the Collegio Romano
attracted as much attention as his influential earlier ones had in Paris,
admitted that 'there are very few republics in our days'. From this,
however, he drew a novel conclusion: not that one should cease to study
Roman history, but rather that one should transfer one's interests from the
lost republic, evoked with such nostalgic eloquence by Livy, to the early
empire, analysed with such searching irony by Tacitus. In the empire, as in
the modern world, he reasoned, most states were ruled by an individual: to
that extent at least, he told his pupils in 1580, the 'state of affairs under
the emperors comes closer to resembling our times than that which
obtained when the people ruled. Though, thanks be to God', he went on
with his characteristic irony, 'our age has no Tiberiuses, Caligulas, Neros,
it is still useful to know how even under them there lived good and
prudent men...' After all, he reflected, the art of dissimulation was
essential to anyone living in a modern court: 'Princes often have many
qualities which a good man cannot praise, but can conceal and pass over
in silence. Those who do not know how to wink at these both endanger
themselves and generally make the princes worse.'42 Tacitus, in short,
could teach the art of silence so essential to life in the court of a Philip II
or the curia of a Gregory XIII. More generally, close attention to the
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context in which a given historian had written could overcome the
objection that examples were too generalized to be instructive.
What Muret offered as the justification for lecturing on Tacitus became
the programme for two generations of politically minded humanists. Justus
Lipsius, the brilliant young Fleming who learned - and plagiarized - much
from Muret during his early years in Rome, brought back with him to the
Low Countries the notion that historical training must rest on 'similitudo
temporum' - on the careful, analytical establishment of parallels between
countries and periods. He made it the foundation of his brilliant courses on
Roman history and antiquities, in which he explained exactly how one
could and should revive the secrets of the Roman army in modern times.
Lipsius's most brilliant pupil, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, put
these lessons into practice as he created the disciplined, professional land
army that kept the northern Netherlands free from Spain - even though his
teacher had to explain to him, repeatedly, that he had in mind not a slavish
revival of Rome's now obsolete military technology, but a systematic effort
to drill soldiers to the same level of discipline and cohesion, in small units,
that had made the Romans so formidable. Lectures and disputations on
pragmatic politics, centring on Tacitus and emphasizing how hard it was to
draw the marrow from the bones of his uniquely clipped style, made Leiden
the largest and most fashionable university in northern Europe for the first
half of the seventeenth century.43 Even after Lipsius himself moved to
Louvain and returned to the Catholic faith he had been born in, the
tradition of politically engaged, contextually sensitive teaching of history
that he founded was carried on by men like Daniel Heinsius, who deeply
appreciated Tacitus' ability, comparable to that of Thucydides, to grasp and
express the real secrets of state action. Throughout Europe, humanist
historians could claim to be the reigning experts in a subject of immediate
and obvious contemporary relevance. They had better access than anyone
else to the arcana imperil of the ancient world, the secret rules by which - as
Clapmarius explained in his most famous book - the Roman empire had
really functioned.44 It is not surprising, therefore, that Kepler, when called
upon to offer precise political advice to erudite, touchy patrons like the
Emperor Rudolf II, preferred to do so not as an 'astrologus' but as a
'politicus' - an experienced reader and interpreter of Tacitus and other
classics of political history.45
Late humanist students of history, however, did not confine themselves to
pragmatics, to meeting the charge of statesmen that their ways of reading
were too innocent. In the first place, they also set out to make the study of
the ancient historians methodical and systematic, in ways that Machiavelli
and Guicciardini - and perhaps Muret as well - never anticipated. Along218
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side the study of historical texts flourished a second branch of humanist
scholarship, equally classical in origin but often far more technical in
character: antiquarianism, the systematic effort to reconstruct the institutions and mores, religions and rituals of the Greek and Roman world, which
Alberti, Flavio Biondo and others had refounded in the fifteenth century.
The antiquaries of the sixteenth century compiled enormous corpora, of
ancient objects and inscriptions, which they organized not in chronological
or geographical but in systematic order. Inscriptions were arranged, first in
notebooks and then in printed editions, and carefully indexed, to illustrate
not examples of good and evil conduct but permanent features of ancient
societies: religion and ritual, family relations and parental affection, styles of
patronage and forms of priestly brotherhood. Antiquities became essential
to the study of ancient history, which they enlivened and enriched. Illustrations of objects could give a vivid, almost three-dimensional reality to what
would otherwise have remained pale and unconvincing descriptions of
gladiatorial combat or the making of encampments.46
The antiquarian enterprise became a standard support to historical
research and teaching. Lipsius, for example, not only lectured on Tacitus at
Leiden, but drew from Polybius' famous analysis in Book VI of his Histories
and a wealth of complementary sources a coherent reconstruction of the
Roman army, which he presented first to his Leiden students, as well as to
his pupil Maurice of Nassau, and then to the readers of his De militia
Romana (1596). The French jurist Francois Hotman urged his students to
learn Roman antiquities by studying Cicero, whom he explicated to them
with such success that a German baron who came to him in 1557 barely
able to utter a word of Latin produced his own book on Roman families
two years later.47
Though the marriage between history and antiquarianism proved hard at
first to consummate, it was eventually more fertile than those who served as
witnesses had expected. Traditionally, humanists saw the ancient historians
as privileged witnesses to the history of Greece and Rome. They offered
corrections for textual errors and even, occasionally, for factual ones, but
made no effort to replace the narratives of Livy or Tacitus with new ones.
But the antiquarian looked for kinds of information about the past that
ancient historians had offered only in passing. The categories he used in
compiling a collection of inscriptions, for example, were systematic rather
than moral or pragmatic, and aimed at reconstructing the basic institutions
of a past society rather than emulating the great deeds of its leaders.48
Gradually, however, some Renaissance antiquaries came to see that this
approach represented something of a challenge to the reigning one. Lipsius,
for instance, urged the student to make himself notebooks for reading
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ANTHONY GRAFTON
history, which he should divide into the same categories as he would have
divided a notebook of inscriptions: everything that he read which bore on
the beliefs or rituals, magistracies or priesthoods, military insignia or
gladiatorial games of the Greeks or Romans should be entered under those
heads. He also suggested that the student compile notes on fine examples.
But this bow to tradition does not conceal the radicalism of his approach. In
effect, Lipsius accepted that the ancient historians should not enjoy a more
privileged status than other remains of the ancient world. All of them literary texts and stone inscriptions alike - should be submitted to the same
forms of analysis. All of them should be forced, that is, to yield an analysis
of ancient history quite unlike that to be found in any ancient writer. For
only thus, said Lipsius, anticipating the much later scholars who spoke of a
'hermeneutic circle', could one hope to understand texts that merely referred
to, but did not explain in detail, the mores and institutions of the societies
they described.49
Other humanists challenged the limits of traditional historical method at
other points. The Roman antiquaries Carlo Sigonio and Onofrio Panvinio
and northern polymaths like Scaliger and the well-named chronologer
Joannes Temporarius agreed that one could not derive a full and accurate
chronology of ancient history, a firm backbone of facts and dates, from any
preserved source. They set out to use Roman monuments, the fragments of
Greek and Jewish historians and the data of the new astronomy to rebuild
this lost structure. And they succeeded not only in creating a new and
fashionable discipline - one known for making bold hypotheses about
history and myth, Egyptian dynasties and Jewish kingdoms - but also in
calling into question the accuracy and authority of the traditional narratives
of biblical and classical history.50 In the hands of Scaliger and Temporarius,
Romulus disappeared from world history, and Moses threatened to follow
him.51 Still others, like the influential satirist John Barclay, argued that the
historian should concern himself not with technical details but with the
larger question of identifying the 'genius', or spirit, which had inspired the
writers and artists, politicians and generals of each distinct historical period
- much as a different natural 'genius' should be identified and studied by the
well-informed and intelligent traveller.52 History, in other words, a preeminent discipline of the Latin-writing, learned citizens of the late humanist
Republic of Letters, was alive, flourishing and even rife with sophisticated
discussion. No wonder, then, that other disciplines flourished as well: that
the Latin writers of a relatively backward country, England, produced
substantial contributions to virtually every literary and scientific, philosophical and historical genre known in the time of Elizabeth I and James I.53
Humanism lived.
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NOTES
1 For this paragraph and what follows, see his autobiography, ed. J. A. Worp
in Bijdragen en mededeelingen van bet historisch genootschap, 18 (1897),
1-122; for a modern translation with excellent introduction and notes, see
Constantijn Huygens, Mijn jeugd, ed. and trans. C. Heesakkers (Amsterdam,
1994).
2 See, e.g., L. Forster, The Icy Fire (Cambridge, 1969).
3 Quoted by R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980),
p. 67.
4 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. P. Villey (Paris, 1965), pp. 1,065-116; for an
English translation, see Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech
(London, 1993), pp. 1,207-69.
5 See R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford, 1953;
reprinted 1966).
6 Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. von Dyck and M. Caspar
(Munich, 1937- ), XVI, p. 329.
7 H. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis, 1982).
8 Quoted by F. F. Blok, Nicolaas Heinsius in dienst van Christina van Zweden
(Delft, 1949), pp. 111-12.
9 C. Borghero, La certezza e la storia: cartesianismo, pirronismo e conoscenza
storica (Milan, 1983), pp. 170-95.
10 L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Baltimore,
1968); S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, second edition,
reprinted with corrections and additions (Padua, 1985), ch. 1; J. M. Levine,
Humanism and History (Ithaca NY, 1987).
11 See G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. B. Oestreich
and H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, 1982); M. Stolleis, Staat und Staatsrdson in der fruhen Neuzeit (Frankfurt, 1990), pp. 197-231; P. S. Donaldson,
Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge, 1988).
12 A. Clapmarius, 'Nobilis adolescentis triennium', in Hugo Grotius et al.,
Dissertationes de studiis instituendis (Amsterdam, 1645), pp. 145-6.
13 G. J. Vossius, 'Dissertatio bipartita,' in Vossius et al., Dissertationes de studiis
bene instituendis (Utrecht, 1658), especially pp. 15-18.
14 For the fullest study of the late humanist curriculum see the analysis of the
influential academy designed by Jean Sturm for Strasbourg in A. Schindling,
Humanistische Hochschule und freie Reich sstadt (Wiesbaden, 1977).
15 Grotius, Dissertationes, pp. 4-5.
16 Erasmus's De ratione studii is reprinted in Grotius, Dissertationes, pp. 319-39,
as is another early sixteenth-century treatise by Joachim Fortius Ringelberg,
pp. 252-316 with an appendix on 317; Bruni's De studiis et litteris appears on
pp. 414-31.
17 Grotius, Dissertationes, p. 4.
18 Caspar Barlaeus, 'Methodus studiorum', in Grotius, Dissertationes, p. 353.
19 Grotius, Dissertationes, pp. 2-3.
20 Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, in S. A. Pears, ed., The
Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet (London, 1845),
pp. 199,201.
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ANTHONY GRAFTON
21 See, in general, L. Jardine and A. T. Grafton, * "Studied for action": how
Gabriel Harvey read his Livy', Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30-78.
22 Barlaeus, 'Methodus', in Grotius, Dissertationes, p. 353.
23 Vossius, 'Dissertatio bipartita', p. 17.
24 Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566) and
reissued several times up to 1650; see also A. Blair, 'Restaging Jean Bodin', PhD
thesis, Princeton University, 1988.
25 Pears, Correspondence of Sidney and Languet, p. 201.
26 John Jonston, Thaumatographia universalis (Amsterdam, 1665), epistola dedicatoria. See I. Maclean, The interpretation of natural signs: Cardano's De
subtilitate versus Scaliger's Exercitationes*, in B. Vickers, ed., Occult and
Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 231-52; and,
more fully, W. Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis (Hamburg, 1983).
27 F. Seek, 'Keplers Hochzeitgedicht fur Johannes Huldenreich (1590),'
Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, mathematischnaturwissenschaftliche Klasse, new series, 155 (1976).
28 See, e.g., H. Arning, Medulla variarum earumque in orationibus usitatissimarum connexionum (Altenburg, 1652), chs. 12-14.
29 Secunda Scaligerana (Cologne, 1667), pp. 140-3, at 141.
30 See M. Croll, Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm: Essays, ed. J. M. Patrick and R. O.
Evans (Princeton, 1966); W. Kuhlmann, Gelehrtenrepublik und Furstenstaat
(Tubingen, 1982).
31 A. T. Grafton, Teacher, text and pupil in the Renaissance class-room: a case
study from a Parisian college', History of Universities, 1 (1980), 37-70.
32 See M. Fumaroli, L'Age de Veloquence (Geneva, 1980).
33 See J. Tribby, 'Body/building: living the museum life in early modern Europe',
Rhetorica, 10 (1992), 139-63; T. DaC. Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature
(Princeton, 1993); P. Findlen, Possessing Nature (Berkeley, 1994).
34 Sebastian Minister, Briefe, ed. and trans. K. H. Burmeister (Ingelheim am
Rhein, 1964), p. 67.
35 See G. F. Tomasini, De vita, bibliotheca et museo Laurentii Pignorii canonici
Tarvisini dissertatio, in Lorenzo Pignoria, Magnae Deum matris Idaeae et
Attidis initia (Amsterdam, 1669).
36 See A. Ellenius, De arte pingendi (Uppsala, 1960). The most accessible product
of these efforts is the new edition of the 1638 edition of Franciscus Junius's De
pictura veterum: The Painting of the Ancients, ed. K. Aldrich, P. Fehl and
R. Fehl, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1991).
37 See, e.g., G. Nadel, 'Philosophy of history before historicism', History and
Theory, 3 (1964), 291-315; R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt,
1984).
38 Pears, Correspondence of Sidney and Languet, p. 200.
39 Jardine and Grafton, 'Gabriel Harvey', 36.
40 J. G. Schellhorn, De vita, fatis ac mentis Philippi Camerarii... commentarius
(Nuremberg, 1740), p. 120.
41 Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman,
trans. M. Domandi (New York, 1965), C 110.
42 Marc-Antoine Muret, Scripta selecta, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1887-8), I, p. 155.
43 See T. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds., Leiden
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44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden,
1975); Stolleis, Staat und Staatsrdson, pp. 37-72; Kuhlmann, Gelehrtenrepublik; and H. Wansink, Politieke wetenschappen aan de Leidse Universiteit,
1575-±1650 (Utrecht, 1981).
A. Clapmarius, De arcanis rerumpublicarum libri sex, new edition (Amsterdam,
1644).
See B. Bauer, 'Die Rolle des Hofastrologen und Hofmathematicus als
fiirstlicher Berater', in A. Buck, ed., Hofischer Humanismus (Weinheim,
1989), pp. 93-117.
The best introduction to this development is still A. D. Momigliano, 'Ancient
history and the antiquarian', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
13 (1950), 285-315.
Schellhorn, De vita Camerarii, pp. 36-7.
See E. Mandowsky and C. Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio's Roman Antiquities
(London, 1963).
Justus Lipsius, 'De ratione legendi historiam', in Grotius, Dissertationes,
pp. 157-69. A nice example of this sort of note-taking is provided by Friedrich
Lindenbruch's 'De servis, deque eorum conditionibus, poenis, ac manumissionibus commentarius' (MS Hamburg, Universitatsbibliothek, philol. 291), which
includes ample notes on legal and literary texts, and instructions on which
historians to trust (and to examine for further information). See in general
E. Horvath, 'Friedrich Lindenbruch, Spathumanist und Handschriftsammler
des 17. Jahrhunderts', dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1988, pp. 185-6:
Lindenbruch seems to have taken these notes as a young student at the
University of Leiden, which he attended in the mid-1590s, not long after
Lipsius's departure.
D. C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant (Baltimore, 1970); A. T. Grafton, Joseph
Scaliger, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983-93), II.
H. J. Erasmus, The Origins of Rome in Historiography from Petrarch to
Perizonius (Assen, 1962).
E. Hassinger, Empirisch-rationaler Historismus, second edition (Freiburg im
Breisgau, 1994).
J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The
Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990).
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