Against the Vernacular: Ciceronian Formalism and the Problem of the Individual

Abstract

My goal is to show the significance of a family quarrel within Renaissance humanism for the humanism, much more broadly conceived, of current debate. Renaissance humanism, at its narrowest and most orthodox, required the imitation of approved classical authors and especially the cultivation of Golden Latin prose style. Golden Latin meant Cicero preeminently, but also included Livy (the focus of my argument later on), who had applied Ciceronian rhetoric to the writing of history, the one major prose form Cicero himself did not attempt. Even a northern, Protestant, and relatively late practitioner of humanist pedagogy could limit his Latin curriculum to these two authors alone, as Roger Ascham reports having done with his foremost student, the princess Elizabeth. 1 Initiated by Petrarch as an enthusiasm for the writings and character of Cicero the man, Ciceronianism developed over the course of a century into a dogma of style, an insistence that Cicero was the only acceptable model for Latin prose. 2 Inevitably, such dogma met with resistance. Often cited in this regard is a letter, written around 1490, from the Italian humanist Angelo Poliziano to his friend Paolo Cortesi. Cortesi had sent Poliziano some essays in strict imitation of Cicero, but Poliziano responded by firmly rejecting this inflexible approach to style, both because it unduly restricted the range of possible literary models and because it discouraged the expression of what was truly one's own: "For I am not Cicero. Nonetheless, as I see it, I express myself." 3 Thus, before the close of the fifteenth century, Ciceronianism had already been set in opposition to the value of individual self-expression.