De commodis litterarum atque incommodis

Abstract

One of the principal aims of the Modern Humanities Research Association is declared to be 'to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines, and to maintain the broader unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization'. If it had existed in the middle of the fifteenth century with these objectives, the Association could hardly have found a better candidate for the Presidency than the Italian Leon Battista Alberti, for he combined in a unique way a wide variety of disciplines in arts and sciences, including moral philosophy, law, social studies, literature, languages, optics, painting, sculpture, architecture, and mathematics. No studies were alien to him, whether practical or academic. He pursued knowledge not only for its intrinsic values but for its application to the benefit of the individual and society in general. He also pursued it with what we should term a strong research interest, constantly on the lookout for new ideas, new inventions, and new fields to explore, with a persistent confidence in human improvement towards self-fulfilment and happiness. His numerous works in Latin and Italian, both literary and technical, are obviously indebted to the classical tradition, but they also show a quite remarkable creativity and originality even during, and in spite of, those periods of pessimism which occurred frequently in his youth and continued sporadically into the changed circumstances of his later life. Whatever he subsequently became and wrote, he had many reasons not to be optimistic when he graduated from the University of Bologna in 1428 and soon afterwards wrote in Latin the work, whose title I have borrowed for this address, on the advantages and disadvantages of letters. His comments in their context are historically interesting, and they and their general themes are not irrelevant to our own. My object, therefore, is to explain and explore the content of Alberti's treatise for the light it throws on education and society in his times, and to invite reflection on its implications for our own studies. Alberti began life in I404 with two personal disadvantages, which were still there twenty-five years later, explicit or implicit, in his De commodis: illegitimacy and exile from Florence.1 The exile had just come to an end in I428. References in the work to Tuscan and Florentine attitudes, and to a Bologna recently left behind, suggest a probable date of composition of I429. We know that because of exile his education before university took place first in Venice, then in Padua in the school of Gasparino Barzizza, schoolmaster and university Professor of Rhetoric who was at that time introducing new material and methods into the teaching of the trivium, and in particular of grammar and rhetoric. These were the beginnings of humanistic teaching within the existing school curriculum and university system, pursuing,