SOURCE: “Humanist Attitudes to Convention and Innovation in the Fifteenth Century” in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall 1981, pp. 193-207.

[In following essay, Gravelle discusses the arguments of several fifteenth-century humanists on the subject of ancients versus moderns, particularly regarding questions of language.]

Several scholars have shown that humanist study of language contributed to the development of historical consciousness.¹ The present essay presents several philological discussions about convention and innovation that further illustrate the humanists' acute sense of historical change, a subject that has not been directly addressed in previous studies.² There was no unanimity among the humanists on innovation, and the topic inspired some lively disagreements. Still, there is evidence that many humanists placed a positive value on change and innovation. This evidence is found in their discussions of the variety and mutability of linguistic and historical conventions.

For the most part, the humanists did not want to exclude post-classical conventions of speech from what they considered good style. Had they, they might well be guilty of the old charge that they killed Latin as a living language or made it inaccessible to all but an elite. Had they viewed the Golden Age of Latin as the repository of all truth and eloquence, they would have been doomed to see their own age as, at best, an imperfect copy of it and to see themselves as the inferiors of the ancients. Instead, the humanists understood that conventions vary from author to author, age to age, and culture to culture. With this understanding of convention, they not only accepted innovation as inevitable but thought of it as desirable. And many humanist statements show them confident of their equality to the ancients in intelligence, wisdom, and eloquence.

Humanist attitudes to innovation and understanding of convention are revealed in their discussion of three important philological questions. The questions concerned the legitimacy of inventing and using new words, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, and whether ancient Latin literature was written in the language of an educated minority or in the everyday language of the Roman people. My intention here is to present the humanists' discussion of these questions, in letters and treatises, not comprehensively but selectively, to illustrate their attitudes to convention and innovation. And I deal only with the early Quattrocento, from Petrarch to Valla and Biondo.³

The three questions—about new words, ancients and moderns, and the Latin literary language—involve another question, which concerns the principles of correct speech and writing prescribed by such ancient thinkers as Varro, Cicero, and Quintilian. The relevant principles are antiquity, authority, and common usage. And the question is this: Should speech conform to examples set by the distinguished authors of antiquity or to everyday conventions? One interpretation of a humanist's position on this question is that of Rudolf Pfeiffer, who argues that Valla's new idea was “to fix a strict definition of the ancient ‘usus loquendi’ from Cicero to Quintilian, and to demand that the recognized veritas, the truth, should be valid for the present and for all time.” Such ideas signaled “the approaching end of Latin as a freely living uncontrolled language.” Valla's idea, then, as Pfeiffer argues, marks a turning point in humanist attitudes to the authority of the past.⁴ If the most radical and bold of the humanists believed so much in the authority of antiquity and in fixing convention for all time, then one would not expect much from other humanists in the positive treatment of innovation and changing conventions. There is evidence, however, that this does not represent Valla's opinion nor that of some other humanists. Valla was not so much departing from earlier thought as refining it.

From its beginnings, humanism offered an historical perspective that rejected the absolute authority and timelessness of ancient conventions. Thomas Greene has shown Petrarch's sensitive historical consciousness, his creative use of imitation, and his readiness to quarrel with Cicero and ancient authority.⁵

Among other early humanists, Salutati made important contributions to an affirmative attitude to innovation and change. Although, in the question of the equality of ancients and moderns, he vacillates between optimism and pessimism about the moderns, he usually explains the modern failure to equal the ancients in certain arts (such as oratory) by changes in institutional practice: “Today you should not ask of anyone, except perhaps preachers, that vehement oratory which consists in action, in which we understand Cicero excelled, because civil questions, which then demanded all the power of eloquence, now in our custom are not treated by orators but by men skilled in civil law with arguments drawn from the laws.”⁶

Salutati is most sanguine in his famous letter to Poggio of 1405, which was prompted by Poggio's denigration of Petrarch and the moderns. This letter contains one of the first instances of humanist vindication of everyday usages against the criteria of authority and antiquity. As Salutati argues, if the ancients themselves did not stifle innovation by following the authority of past great men, then why should the moderns? He asks of Poggio, “Give me one small reason, besides empty glory and the opinion of antiquity, why we should prefer the old and vanquished to the later and more recent.”⁷ On the question of the ancients and moderns, he says that the moderns are equally eloquent in the arts that are in frequent employment in modern times—preaching, teaching, and disputing. Among the moderns, Luigi Marsigli was as eloquent before a congregation as the ancients were before the bench. Rather extravagantly, Salutati says that if Marsigli wrote nothing, neither did Pythagoras, Socrates, or Christ.

Salutati argues that since good speech is speech in everyday language, a modern who tries to sound exactly like an ancient is not speaking well. Thus he asks Poggio (and Poggio's unknown acquaintance who participated in the attack on Petrarch) a question:

And since, as the source of eloquence, Cicero, would have it, all reason of speech is found in the mean and in some common usage and is versed in the customs and language of men, and since in speaking it is a great vice to shrink from the vulgar kind of speech and the conventions of common sense, therefore are not you and he and all the others making a mistake when you desire that majesty of speech in the moderns so anxiously that unless they surpass or at least savor of antiquity, you acerbically condemn them?⁸

Salutati is saying that Poggio's thinking is anachronistic and reactionary. His own attitude to change is positive: “Had there been no change from the times of Ennius … that ancient uncouthness would still be with us.”⁹

In this letter Salutati initiates an important discussion and challenges the force of antiquity and authority. There is, however, a danger inherent in Salutati's position which later humanists perceive. The danger is that innovation can be impeded as much by convention as it can by strict adherence to the authority of the past. The awareness of the danger emerges as the discussion of usage versus authority continued in later writers. For example, Pontano would later criticize the position of Leonardo Bruni, following Salutati. In the mihi-michi controversy, Bruni preferred michi because of the usage of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio rather than the classical mihi.¹⁰ As Pontano points out, had Bruni been content with the usage of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, he would not have achieved a better Latin style than his predecessors, as he plainly did.¹¹ The Renaissance would have ended with Boccaccio.

Bruni's own understanding of usage was not consistently worked out. That is evident in his opinion in the famous debate of 1435 in the antechamber of Eugenius IV about whether there had been a common speech in ancient Rome different from literate Latin.¹² Also present were Poggio, Flavio Biondo, Andrea Fiocco, Antonio Loschi, and Cencio Rustici. Bruni expounded his conviction that gladiators and bakers could not have spoken grammatical Latin. He was opposed at the time, and later other humanists—Guarino, Valla, and Filelfo—wrote on the question against his opinion.¹³

The debate spurred these humanists to consider a number of important philological questions. There are two somewhat different issues addressed in the debate, and it is important to distinguish them. The first question is this: Which should determine expression: general and mutable usages or the authority of great writers and antiquity? The second, and more profound, question concerns the very nature of language and grammar: Do only the educated speak according to rules, that is, grammatically, or is grammar only the observation of general linguistic usage? In other words, is correct speech learned only through the precepts of grammarians or is it found in everyday speech? This second question is considered here only when it pertains to convention and innovation.

Guarino Veronese's contribution to the debate is a long letter explaining it to Leonello d'Este. He refutes Bruni and concludes that all literatures—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as vernacular—reflect general usage and not a special language taught by grammarians.¹⁴ Speech must conform to everyday usage to be comprehensible. For all his ardent admiration of the classics, Guarino was no antiquarian. Only to imitate the ancients is appropriate neither in writing nor in life. That this was his conviction is manifest from a passage from his Vita Platonis, written in the 1430s. Without originality and innovation, we would still be living in trees and sailing about on rafts:

I would say that, just as it is commendable and praiseworthy to follow things sufficiently clearly elucidated and thought out by our ancestors, so it is very stupid to insist on following another's footsteps and never to put forth one's own foot. What future would there have been in building houses, undertaking navigations, and painting pictures, had we been content with the art of the ancients? Would we not still live in caves and trees? Would not sailing be confined to rafts and skiffs? And does that not seem ridiculous?¹⁵

Lorenzo Valla made the questions of innovation and convention central concerns and brilliantly clarified and explained problems propounded by earlier humanists. He understood that the question of innovation was tied to other questions. Had nature fixed a standard of wisdom and eloquence in antiquity, and were the ancients men of superior intelligence? Or were eloquence and wisdom historical variables to be discussed in terms of changing historical conventions? To follow exclusively the authority of antiquity as if it were law implied the inferiority of the moderns—an opinion Valla rejected. Valla says in response to the accusation that he thought himself wiser than Varro, whom Cicero and Augustine thought the best of the Latins: “Oh, incredible insanity, as if these two had judged future men and not only those who had been or were. What if someone after them should be more learned than Varro, more excellent than Virgil or a better historian than Sallust and Livy? Would you deny him to be more learned, excellent, and better because the ancients had not so judged?”¹⁶

The accusation was made, of course, by Poggio. Valla's polemics are a good source of his ideas about convention and innovation and about language generally. The question of usage versus authority arises repeatedly, as does the other question as to whether everyday speech in ancient Rome was grammatical. The latter question has been treated fully by Salvatore Camporeale, who points out the inconsistency in Poggio's statements: where Poggio had disagreed with Bruni's opinion that only educated Romans spoke grammatical Latin, in his attacks on Valla he criticizes writing that does not follow grammatical precision, as if the disquisitions of grammarians, not the usage of an age, determined good speech.¹⁷

Poggio's position is that Roman illiterates were incapable of correct speech. Valla responds (with a statement on the equality of ancients and moderns):

Nor are we slower than they were, as you would have it (because in some arts we are not at all inferior), and if we are not slower but the equals of the ancients, how can it be that the crowd (I mean the Roman and therefore also the Italian illiterates) could in no way retain or follow and imitate the sound of literate speech, even if heard a thousand times and drummed in daily, in the same way as words are repeated after priests?¹⁸

Valla understands that language is not regulated by grammar fixed by authority but is changing, historical, and living. This understanding is consistent throughout his work and explicit in his work on language, the Elegances. I do not believe that Valla's purpose in writing the Elegances was “to fix a strict definition of the ancient ‘usus loquendi’ from Cicero to Quintilian, and to demand that the recognized veritas, the truth, should be valid for the present and for all time.”¹⁹ That would contradict his very concept of language, which is coherent and consistent throughout his works. Instead, he seeks to make Latin living, lucid, and precise. As he says himself: “I am not writing a law, as if things were never done otherwise, but of what is more frequently done.”²⁰ Later he would contrast the concepts of language as law and language as convention and prefer the latter. Quoting Cicero, he says, “We speak not to the much cogitated and Stoic law of verity or goldsmith's balance, as Cicero said, but to some more common scale.”²¹

Valla argues that common usage is more apt to preserve the sense and meaning of words in a concrete way than the educated jargon of lawyers, philosophers, and grammarians.²² He simply does not see Latin as a privileged language, not to be profaned by the multitude. He inveighs against professional and private jargon, removed from the usages of general culture and comprehensible only to the initiate. Valla's criticisms of jargon are frequent and trenchant. It is not some arbitrary antiquarian feeling that explains Valla's preference for the writing of the Golden Age as against the age of Priscian, Donatus, and Servius. He sees their age as one that had surrendered literary vitality to grammatical pedantry, the quibblings of grammarians. His vision of culture and history is involved here. Still, Valla is aware that he is making a relative historical judgment; he is not attempting to make a law of correct speech. As he says in criticizing Gellius: “I would not like as complacently as Gellius to call writing incorrect and affirm what is unexplored. Not to mention that he perhaps damns unjustly those who did not so much corrupt speech as only think things better said as they said them.”²³

Valla's objection to Gellius's complacency anticipates Poliziano's brilliant Oratio super Fabio Quintiliano et Statii Sylvis. Poliziano's appreciation of writers of the Silver Age is not so much a reaction against the narrow classicizing of earlier humanists, as it is a development of their insight into the relativity of conventions and taste. Poliziano says: “I do not much admire that argument that objects that the eloquence in the age of these writers was corrupt, since, if we inquire more correctly, we shall see it not so much a corrupt or depraved but simply a changed kind of speech. Nor should we so quickly call worse what is different.”²⁴

Humanist philology produced the understanding that the study of language and culture should be approached in an historical and relative way. The expression neither of any one author nor of any one age should be used as a law of correct speech—to do so is to misunderstand the nature of language itself, which is historical and conventional. Although I am not trying to fully illustrate the genesis and development of this humanist theory but only to show characteristic features, I would like to suggest that the comparative study of languages made important contributions to historical consciousness—comparisons of the speech of moderns and ancients, Latin and volgare, Latin and Greek, and Hebrew and other ancient tongues. For example, the different opinions of Bruni and Valla of Hebrew show the development of historical perspective.

Bruni condemned Hebrew as useless and barbaric; the perversity of the Hebrews was proved by their writing from right to left.²⁵ Valla says that their writing from right to left shows the variety of historical conventions, and he criticizes the complacency of thinking one's own way of doing things the only way of doing things:

But let some [usage] exist—any usage you wish—than which none is more perfect. Does that forthwith render this usage imperfect and bad? Is there only one way of speaking correctly? There is not, unless we wish to only approve our own. The Greeks, Latins, Dalmatians, and perhaps others who write from left to right disapprove of those who do otherwise, the Hebrews, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Syrians, and whomever else, and they, in turn, disapprove of the former.²⁶

Another example of philology producing historical perspective is Valla's response to Poggio's weak argument that Roman children managed to learn their “difficult” language, just as German children somehow manage to learn their difficult, “broken, rude, harsh, barbaric, and dissonant” language. Valla asks, “To whom is a foreign language not difficult, dissonant, and therefore barbaric? Do you really think that Italian seems any less absurd to Germans than German to us or that the Germans do not work just as hard in learning our language as we in learning theirs?”²⁷

Given Valla's fine perceptions of the variety of linguistic and cultural conventions, it would be surprising to find him endorsing any rigid principles of correct speech. Instead, he tried to make Latin a living and precise language, probably because of his vision of a human community united by a common language.²⁸ Speech should conform generally to common conventions. However, these principles of speech, usage, authority, and antiquity, should never be treated as if they had fallen from heaven or reflected natural law. Conventional usage should not be invoked against innovation or originality, any more than the authority of the past. In the Dialectic Disputations, Valla proposes an innovation and anticipates the objection that it is unusual. He exclaims, “But you, not nature, make it more conventional!”²⁹

Valla's attitude to innovation is clear in his ideas on the invention of words or the use of new words unheard of in the age of Cicero. Valla addresses the issue of new words in his Recriminationes in Facium of 1445. This work is a response to the Invectivae in Vallam of Bartolomeo Facio, his colleague at the court of Alfonso V. In the Recriminationes he defends his Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum against Facio's attacks.³⁰ The determining factor in Valla's choice of words is always generally comprehensible usage. He argues that if his words are often not antique, they are not therefore corrupt, and it is more important that speech be intelligible than antique. For instance, Facio criticizes Valla's use of scala because ancient grammarians wrote scalae. Valla responds that he is “above all mindful of the fact he is writing for the king who does not so hold to the subtleties of the Latin language and has often read scala.”³¹

Valla's impatience with Facio's antiquarianism is evident throughout the Recriminationes, especially in his defense of his use of new words. Valla sees that radical changes in conventions since ancient times make innovation in language imperative. Facio criticized Valla for using a new word, primogenitus, which is “common but vulgar and inelegant.” Citing Caesar, Facio says, “This is a new word and should be avoided by eloquent men as reefs by sailors.”³² Facio proposes circumlocution or classical words. Valla responds that Facio mistakes Caesar's warning, which is against unusual and infrequent words not new ones. He says. “I do not despise it for the reason you affectedly do—you think it inelegant for one reason only—because it is only found among ecclesiastical writers whom you call vulgar. … Indeed, when writing or perhaps speaking of ecclesiastical things, I would not depart from the usage of ecclesiastics.”³³

The use of classical words for post-classical things is not only affected but also distorts historical reality. This strong sense of history and of the variety of conventions is evident throughout the Recriminationes. Valla castigates Facio for “following some words of the ancients, as if everywhere apt.” He rejects Facio's suggestion that he use ancient words for later things (here felix, faustus):

Because [these words] are found in Livy, when he speaks of Roman law, they are not therefore to be transposed to all peoples, which were not even used forever by the Romans. Read Helius Spartianus, Lampridius, Tremelius, Pollio, and other writers of the times, and you will see that the words of proclamations of the Roman princes are more ours than yours.³⁴

In the same spirit Valla ridicules summus pontifex for pope and dictator for duke.³⁵

Valla says that Facio slights the inventions of his own age by his antiquarianism. Not all knowledge and technology was discovered by the ancients; Facio defrauds the moderns of the glory of their inventions by describing innovations with old words. Valla writes in defense of his use of the word ‘bombard’:

In military science itself and certainly in the other arts and sciences, the new words thought up by later men and given to new things would take too long for me to number, such as Vegetius's matiomarbulus [martiomarbulus] and obiae, kinds of missiles unheard of and unseen by the ancients. Certainly there is nothing worse than to prefer to tolerate this poverty of words and to resort to general and improper names rather than giving a thing its own name (since there are newborn things just as newborns among men) and nothing worse than to cheat an ingenious invention of the honor of its own name.³⁶

Valla rejects Facio's not only antique but archaic words because of the distortions of history that using them entails. In writing modern history, Valla chooses prophetare and rejects Facio's choice of ariolari. He asks, “Should I have had him say ariolari against the truth of history?”³⁷ Valla wrote of a queen in a convent; Facio said that he should have said that she was among “the virgins pledged to the Divine Dominic.”³⁸ Valla says Facio's words conjure a Diana dwelling in caves. He asks if he should use ancient substitutes for prophetas—aruspices, augures, and others—“as if I wrote not in my own age but that of Numa Pompilius.”³⁹

Valla was not the only humanist ready to draw on a variety of sources to describe changing conventions and ready to approve innovation in language to accommodate innovation in things. His contemporary Flavio Biondo shows much the same spirit. Biondo's Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romani Imperii Decades, begun in 1439, is the source used here.⁴⁰ As an historian, he was aware of the great differences between ancient and medieval institutions and was convinced of the necessity of post-classical usages in writing medieval history. Still, he wants an elegant Latin style and so says: “In many instances, circumlocution will help, but the modification of words for individual things, which absolutely must be understood as they are, is such that, were I to use ancient expressions, I myself, rereading my writings, would not understand them.”⁴¹ Conventions have changed, and classical Latin would distort truth:

In these later years of our history, great changes took place in the method of public administration and private life in the provinces and Italian cities and even greater changes in the way of waging war. Therefore, what was very easily and readily expressed in the daily speech of ancient writers—these modes of speaking, for the most part, cannot help us.⁴²

Biondo then compares the ancients and moderns. He ridicules those who think a battle less bloody or less glorious because not described in ancient terms. The comparison favors the inventiveness and intelligence of the moderns:

The industry of men of our age in besieging is no less than that of our ancestors. New names have been invented at once with the invention of new instruments, the unusualness of which many shrink from, who, unless they read of battering rams, missiles of burning pitch, slings, and scorpions, think the siege no siege at all or, at best, a very inept one. But if they would read attentively the writings of the present day, they would enjoy the comparison of the intelligence and the power of industry of the moderns and the experience and fortitude of the ancients.⁴³

Although Biondo is willing to expand Latin vocabulary with borrowings from vernacular usage, he summarily dismisses the idea of writing his work in the volgare.⁴⁴ The conviction of the equality of the moderns and ancients antedates the vindication of the volgare as equal to Latin for prose. Fifteenth-century Latin humanism was no obstacle to optimism about the modern age. For the most part, the humanists advocated a creative, not conservative, use of the past.

There are important statements in early Quattrocento humanism justifying innovation and the moderns' equality to the ancients. These statements antedate the two works that deal specifically with the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, Bartolomeo Facio's De Viris Illustribus of 1456 and Benedetto Accolti's Dialogus de Praestanti Virorum Sui Aevi of the 1460s. Both use arguments derived from earlier philological discussions, such as the explanation for the decline of oratory from ancient times by historical changes in legal and political practice.⁴⁵ Salutati had said that comparisons of ancient and modern achievements were prejudiced if they did not consider the differences in institutions and conventions.

Accolti, a lawyer, argues most effectively when he relies on the thinking of humanist philologists. The following passage owes much to the recovery of ancient rhetoric, especially to the principle of decorum:

Among orators one can hardly enumerate the varieties of speech and arguments, any more than among painters, architects, and masters of other arts. … We are forced to acknowledge by nature and the experience of things that, without a doubt, the same law or custom does not suit in all places, nor in all times, nor among all peoples. Thus, unless we are stubborn, I think it is sufficiently clear that the military art of this age is not to be censured because it differs in some ways from the ancient, as long as it is accommodated to reason, place, and time.⁴⁶

Accommodation to reason, place, and time is a classical rhetorical precept which Accolti transforms into an historical principle.

There is a different interpretation of the source of Accolti's confidence in the moderns, that of Hans Baron. Of vernacular writing, Accolti says, “I do not think it much matters whether one speaks in his maternal language or in Latin as long as he speaks soberly, beautifully, and copiously.”⁴⁷ Baron has argued that “these words reveal a profound change in humanist opinion” and that they signal a major step towards the vindication of the moderns.⁴⁸ To Baron, praise of the volgare was an essential part in the emancipation of Renaissance culture from oppressive classicism.⁴⁹ Actually, Accolti does not base his argument for the equality of the moderns on vernacular writing. Rather, the moderns rival the ancients because of their skills in Latin rhetoric and their knowledge of Greek. He cites the eloquence and learning of Bruni, Marsuppini, Rossi, Guarino, Poggio, Manetti, and Traversari.⁵⁰ The confidence of both Facio and Accolti in their age comes from contemporary Latin and Greek scholarship and not principally from vernacular writing. One is reminded of Valla's statement on ancients and moderns that ties the quickening of culture to the revival of the Latin language:

But certainly, the more wretched those earlier ages, with not one learned man to be found in them, the more we should rejoice in our own age in which, if we strive a little more, I am sure the Roman tongue will soon flourish more vigorously than the city of Rome itself, and that along with it all the sciences will be on the way to renewal.⁵¹

For much of the fifteenth century the confidence in the inventiveness, intelligence, and ability of the moderns, compared with the ancients, came from the revival of ancient languages and learning and not from any volgare opposition to classical studies.

Through their philological studies, often through discussion of technical questions about language, the humanists evolved an historical understanding of convention. They understood that forms, institutions, and usages change and proposed fairly sophisticated explanations for the evolution and desuetude of usages. With their commitment to persuasion, they believed that speech and writing should conform to everyday, comprehensible usage and adapt to change in usage. They accepted and approved innovation. General usage was considered more weighty than authority or antiquity but the humanists saw that conformity to convention as a rigid principle thwarts innovation or improvement. Therefore they advocated freedom in invention. The revival of antiquity was meant to profit the contemporary world, not to inhibit it. The models of antiquity were to be renovated, adapted, and certainly superseded if no longer relevant. The moderns were not constrained by inferiority to follow ancient authority. Many humanists tried to make Latin a lucid living language for their times. It was not humanist attitudes that killed Latin as a living language in the fifteenth century, but historical forces for beyond their control. They were gifted as philologists but were not gifted with prescience as to the languages of the modern world.

Notes

1. Eugenio Garin, “Interpretazioni del Rinascimento” (1950), Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari, 1976); Myron Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970); Aldo Scaglione, “The Humanist as Scholar and Politian's Conception of the Grammaticus,” Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), 49-70, esp. 51: “This ‘philosophy of philology’ is perhaps the most genuine message of Renaissance humanism”; Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970). See the summary by Joseph H. Preston, “Was There an Historical Revolution?” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), 353-64.

2. There is the major study by Peter Burke, Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Italy (London, 1974). He uses quite different kinds of evidence and comes to a different conclusion—that the conscious and articulated attitude to innovation was negative (p. 255).

3. Humanist discussion of these questions in the early Quattrocento constitutes a prelude to the controversy over Ciceronianism in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the controversy see Hermann Gmelin, “Das Prinzip der Imitatio in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance,” Romanische Forschungen, 46 (1932), 83-360; John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, No. 1 (Leiden, 1977), pp. 289-94; Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del Ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell'età della Rinascenza (Turin, 1885); Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero, Columbia University Contributions to Education, No. 35 (New York, 1910); Emile V. Telle's Introduction in L'Erasmianus sive Ciceronianus d'Etienne Dolet (1535), Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, No. 138 (Geneva, 1974). See also G. W. Pigman III, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus' Ciceronianus,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9 (1979), 155-77; Pigman argues that Erasmus' ideas in the controversy (which are consonant with early Quattrocento ideas) were not characteristic of sixteenth-century opinion. An interesting contribution to the history of Ciceronianism is Chapter 2 of John O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, No. 3 (Durham, N.C., 1979); O'Malley demonstrates that oratorical practice (the sermons) was true to the position that opposed rigid imitation of classical vocabulary (p. 51).

4. Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 35-36.

5. Thomas Greene, “Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic,” in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches: Essays in Honor of Thomas Goddard Bergin, ed. Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth John Atchity (New Haven, 1976), pp. 201-24.

6. Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed F. Novati (Rome, 1891-1911), I, 341: “Vehementiam autem illam oratoriam, que in actione consistit, in qua plurimum valuisse Ciceronem credimus, quia civiles illas questiones que vim totam eloquentie deposcebant non ab oratoribus, sed a iuris civilis prudentibus viris, sumptis ex legibus argumentis, nostro more tractantur, in aliquo nisi forsitan in predicatoribus hoc nostro tempore non requiras.”

7. Novati, IV (1), 133: “Unam reddite vel minimam rationem preter glorie fumum et antiquitatis opinionem, cur illos victos et cascos debeamus posteris et recentioribus anteferre.”

8. Novati, IV (1), 142: “Et quoniam, ut vult fons eloquentie Cicero, omnis dicendi ratio in medio posita communi quodam in usu atque in hominum more sermone versatur et in dicendo vitium vel maximum est a vulgari genere orationis atque a consuetudine communis sensus abhorrere, nonne inscitissime facitis tu et ille et omnes alii, qui maiestatem illam eloquii tam anxie desideratis in modernis, ut nisi vincant vel saltem redoleant vetustatem adeo mordaciter contemnetis?”

9. Novati, IV (1), 142: “Si nulla mutatio ab Ennianis temporibus facta fuisset … adhuc vetus illa ruditas permaneret.” On the Petrarch controversy see Jerrold Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, 1966), pp. 86-98, and Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966), pp. 254-56. Baron's contribution to the history of the quarrel of ancients and moderns is important. See his “The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” in Paul O. Kristeller and Phillip P. Wiener, ed. Renaissance Essays (New York, 1968), pp. 95-114. According to Baron, the first significant justification of the moderns was Bruni's in 1418, in the preface to his History of the Florentine People, where he revised his earlier pessimistic feeling about the inferiority of his age. His more sanguine attitude is explained by the nascent spirit of ‘civic humanism.’ Baron argues that a conviction of the equality of the volgare and ancient languages was essential to an historically relative and optimistic treatment of the quarrel. Baron believes that Bruni had this conviction and that “the next major step came with Lorenzo de' Medici” (p. 112) and his praise of the volgare. Baron then contrasts optimism about the moderns, civic humanism, praise of the volgare and “classicist discouragement.” My interpretation is different. The Latin-volgare debate was only one part of the humanists' comparative study of languages. Their philology, which was not particularly ‘civic’, and which was principally a discussion of ancient languages, as well as their efforts to make Latin a living language for their times, contributed to the development of historicism and to optimism about the moderns.

10. Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. L. Mehus (Florence, 1741), II, 107-8. Bruni, however, was not convinced that mihi was classical.

11. De aspiratione in Opera (Venice, 1518-1519), II, fol. 32^v. A different assessment of Pontano's ideas is Hans Baron's: “What has entirely disappeared in Pontano's review of the controversy is Bruni's historically-minded interpretation of the changing needs of usus and of the right of the moderns to do what the ancients had done.” From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago, 1968), pp. 222-23.

12. Mehus, II, 62-68. On the debate see Cecil Grayson, A Renaissance Controversy: Latin or Italian? (Oxford, 1966); R. Fubini, “La coscienza del latino negli umanisti,” in Studi medioevali, s. 3, 2 (1961); U. Holmes, “The Vulgar Latin Question and the Origin of the Romance Tongues,” in Studies in Philology, 25 (1928); M. Vitale, “Le origini del volgare nelle discussioni dei filologi del '400,” in Lingua Nostra, 15 (1953).

13. Filelfo's letter to Lorenzo de' Medici on the debate is in his Epistolae (Venice, 1502), fol. 259^v.

14. Epistolario, ed. Remigio Sabbadini (Venice, 1915-1919), II, 509.

15. Vita Platonis, Cod. Magl. XXXIV, 86, fol. 134: “Nam sicuti quae a maioribus nostris bene excogitata atque satis aperte elucubrata sunt sequi profuerit sic alienis tantum insistere vestigiis nec suum proferre pedem pigrae mentis argumentum esse contenderim. Quod futurum fuisset si in aedificandis domiciliis, navigationibus subeundis, picturis factitandis antiquorum arte contenti fuissemus? Nonne antris adhuc stabularemus, arboribusque cavatis? Nonne ratibus aut lintribus vellificatio teneretur? Nonne ridicule viserentur imagines?” On Guarino's Vita Platonis see Remigio Sabbadini, La scuola e gli studi di Guarino Guarini Veronese (Catania, 1896), p. 136; Eugenio Garin, “Guarino Veronese e la cultura a Ferrara,” Ritratti di umanisti (Florence, 1967), pp. 86-87; Ian Thomson, “Some Notes on the Contents of Guarino's Library,” Renaissance Quarterly, 29 (1976), 169-77.

16. Lorenzo Valla, Antidotum primum, ed. A. Wesseling (Assen, 1978), No. 174, p. 122: “Sed quid plura de stultitia tua, qui ais me nunc posse meipsum praeferre Varroni (quod verbum, sicut caetera abs te confictum est) quod Cicero et beatus Augustinus illum praeferant omnibus latinis sapientia et doctrina; quasi vero (O, incredibilem amentiam) hi duo sententiam tulerint de futuris hominibus et non de his solum qui fuerant aut erant. Quid enim si post illos existat aliquis Varrone doctior aut Vergilio praestantior, aut Sallustio Livioque melior historicus? Negabis tu eum esse doctiorem, praestantiorem, meliorem quod non ita veteres iudicarint?”

17. Salvatore I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972), pp. 180-92.

18. Lorenzo Valla, Apologus: Secundus Actus, ed. Camporeale, pp. 479-534, citation p. 530: “Neque nos tardiori quam illi fuerunt, ingenio facias (quoniam quibusdam in artibus nequaquam illis cedimus) quales, si non sumus, sed veteribus pares, unde fit, ut vulgus (Romanum atque ideo Italicum illiteratorum dico) non possit ullo pacto conservare imo consequi et imitari sonum literatarum vocum etiam millies auditarum et quotidies inculcatarum, cuiusmodi sunt eae quae a sacerdotibus subinde repetuntur?”

19. Pfeiffer, pp. 35-36.

20. Elegantiarum libri sex in Opera Omnia (Basel, 1540; repr. Turin, 1962), I, 22: “Non legem scribo, quasi nunquam aliter factum sit sed quod frequentissimum factitatum est.”

21. Dialecticarum Disputationum libri III in Opera Omnia, I, 688: “Ad actissimam veritatis legem ac Stoicam loquentes non utemur et (ut inquit Cicero) non ad aurificis stateram sed ad popularem quadam trutinam.” De Oratore, II, 38, 159.

22. See Hanna-Barbara Gerl, Rhetorik als Philosophie: Lorenzo Valla (Munich, 1974), pp. 191-229.

23. Elegantiae, p. 46: “Nolo equidem tam confidenter (ut facit Gellius) scripturam mendosam dicere et affirmare quod inexploratum habetur. Taceo quod damnat fortassis immeritos qui nec corrumperunt scripturam et melius sic dici putaverunt.”

24. Oratio super Fabio Quintiliano et Statii Sylvis in Opera (Lyons, 1535), p. 102: “Postremo ne illud quidem magnifecerim, quod horum scriptorum seculo corrupta iam fuisse eloquentia obiciatur; nam si rectius inspexerimus, non tam corruptam atque depravatam illam, quam dicendi mutatum genus intelligemus. Neque autem statim deterius dixerimus quod diversum sit.”

25. Mehus, II, 163. On Bruni's opinions of Hebrew see Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago, 1970), II, 580.

26. Dialecticae, p. 733: “Sed esto qualem vultis quo nullus sit perfectior. Num protinus hic imperfectus est et malus. An non nisi una via est recte loquendi? Cum non sit una scribendi nisi volumus nostra ipsorum tantummodo probare. Improbent Graeci, Latinique et Dalmatae et si qui alii sunt a sinistro scribentes in dextrum. Eos qui secus faciunt, Hebraeos, Penos, Aegyptios, Syros et quicunque sunt alii, aut illi invicem hos improbent.”

27. Lorenzo Valla, Apologus: Secundus Actus, p. 526: “Pog. Cum ab ipsa infantia barbarorum filii cum materno lacte vernaculum linguam discan, quamvis hiulcam, rudem, asperam, barbarum, absonam prolatu, quae nobis viris esset admodum scitu difficilis. Lau. O te praeter caeteros homines ridiculum Pogi! Cui non aliena lingua difficilis absona atque adeo barbara? Nunquid putas minus absurdum videri Germanis Italicam quam nobis videatur illorum? Aut non ita laborant Teuthones in percipienda nostra ut nos in ipsorum?”

28. See Francesco Adorno, “Di alcune orazioni e prefazioni di Lorenzo Valla,” Rinascimento, 5 (1954), 219, and Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971), pp. 118-20.

29. Dialecticae, p. 733: “At enim alter est consuetior. Vos eum fecistis consuetiorem non natura.”

30. See Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Lorenzo Valla (Florence, 1891), pp. 211-18. Facio's Invectives are edited by R. Valentini in Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei, 15 (1906). On the invention of words see Sabbadini, Storia, pp. 75-80; O. Besomi, “Dai ‘Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum’ del Valla al ‘De orthographia’ del Tortelli,” in Italia medioevale e umanistica, 9 (1966), 73-121.

31. Recriminationes in Facium in Opera Omnia, I, 482: “… praesertim memor me regi scribere qui nec ita teneret argutias linguae latinae et saepenumero scalam legisset.”

32. Recriminationes, p. 486: “Hoc verbum novum est, quod a navi scopulus, sic a disertis hominibus fugiendum est. … Si primogeniti dixisses usitato, vulgari tamen et non eleganti vocabulo usus esses.”

33. Recriminationes, p. 487: “Profecto non eo fastidio, quo vos putidi qui ob id solum existimatis inelegans, quia apud solos ecclesiasticos repetitur, quos vulgares appellatis … scribens de rebus ecclesiasticis ac loquens fortassis ab istorum usu non recederem.”

34. Recriminationes, p. 491: “… consectans quaedam veterum verba tanquam ubique apta, felix faustum, quia apud Livium legis de Romanis loquentem non ideo tamen ad omnes gentes transferenda, quae ne a Romanis quidem usurpata sunt semper. Lege Helium Spartianum, Lampridium, Tremelium, Pollionem, aliosque temporum scriptores et intelleges in declarandis Romanis principibus magis nostris verbis actum quam tuis.”

35. Recriminationes, p. 499.

36. Recriminationes, p. 504: “Nimis longum sit si enumerem nova a posterioribus excogita nomina, novis rebus accommodata, ne caeteras scientias artesque enumerem in ipsa re militari, quale est apud Vegetium matiomarbuli [martiomarbulus, Veg., Mil. I, 17] et obiae telorum genera, veteribus inaudita, aspectu incognita. Et certe nihil iniquius est quam ad generalia semper et impropria confugere et hanc verborum inopiam pati malle quam suum (ut quaeque res nascitur, sicut in hominibus sit) attribuere nomen et ingeniosum inventum propriae appellationis honore fraudere.”

37. Recriminationes, p. 513: “Ego contra veritatem historiae faciam eum dixisse ariolari?”

38. Recriminationes, p. 521: “Tu diversabatur regina apud virgines divo Dominico dicatas. Ego intro certros parietes reginam facio habitantem. Tu velut Dianae quae in solitudinibus ac speluncis habitabant videris innuere.”

39. Recriminationes, p. 531: “Non nominabo in historia mea prophetas sed aruspices potius atque augures caeterosque divinos, ariolos, coniectores, quasi non meo sed Numae Pompilii seculo scribam.”

40. On the Decades, see Denis Hay, “The Decades of Flavio Biondo,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 45 (1959).

41. Decades in Opera (Basel, 1559), p. 393: “Erunt vero multa in quibus nos circumloquutio adiuvabit, sed rerum singularum, quas omnino ut sunt intelligi oportet, vocabulorum mutatio talis est facta ut si vetusta illis exponendis attulero, mea ipse relegens scripta non intelligam.”

42. Decades, p. 393: “His namque posterioribus historiarum nostrarum annis maxima est facta provinciarum et Italiae urbium publice administrandarum ac privatim vivendi, sed maxime gerendi belli rationis mutatio. Ideoque qui priscis scriptoribus in promptu et tanquam ex quotidiano loquendi usa facillimi erant, modus dicendi a nobis magna ex parte servari non expediat.”

43. Decades, p. 394: “In oppugnationibus autem etsi non minor est quam maioribus fuerit nostri seculi hominibus industria, quia tamen nobis quae inventa sunt instrumentis, nova, ut par fuit, indita sunt nomina, eorum insolentia ideo multos fastidit, quod nisi arietem, fallaricam, scorpionem, fundasque ilico legentes offenderint, nullam aut ineptissimam fuisse oppugnationem existimant. Quos tamen si attente praesentis temporis scripta legent, ipso ingenii nostrorum et industriae vis maiorum peritiae et fortitudini comparata, poterit delectare.”

44. Decades, p. 393: “Si autem nostratia haec scribo et omnem pervertant compositionem et nauseam bilemque commoveant.”

45. Bartholomaei Facii de viris illustribus liber, ed. L. Mehus (Florence, 1745), p. 7. (On this edition, see Baxandall, p. 99 n. 109). Accolti, Dialogus de praestantia virorum sui aevi (Parma, 1692), pp. 86-89.

46. Accolti, p. 68: “Inter oratores ipsos dicendi agendique varietas vix potest enarrari, vix inter pictores, architectos etiam et aliarum artium magistros. … Illud quoque natura ipsa duce et rerum experientia cogimur agnoscere quod scilicet non eadem lex aut mos idem omnibus in locis convenit, nec in omni tempore neque inter omnes. Et quibus si pervivaces esse nolumus, satis liquere arbitror non propterea huius temporis militiam improbandam esse, quod a nonnullis ab antiquis discrepet institis, modo sit rationi, loco, temporibusque accommodata.”

47. Accolti, p. 89: “… nec multifacio qua quisque lingua materna scilicet an latina proloquatur modo graviter ornate copioseque pronuntiet.”

48. Baron, Crisis, p. 347.

49. See above, n. 9.

50. Accolti, p. 90.

51. Elegantiae, p. 4, trans. Baxandall, p. 117: “Verum enimvero quo magis superiora tempora infelicia fuere, quibus homo nemo inventus est eruditus, eo plus his nostris gratulandum est in quibus si paulo amplius adnitamur, confio propediem linguam romanam vere plus quam urbem et cum ea disciplinas omnes iri restitutum.”