Five Italian Occurrences of Umanista, 1540-1574

Abstract

Despite the repeated use of the term ‘humanist’ by modern scholars, few references to the term have been located in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Campana has found nine Itahan uses of the term in manuscript and printed sources from 1512 to 1588. In addition he has noted two sixteenth-century French uses, one English reference, and four appearances in the Latin text of the Epistolae ohscurorum virorum. Paul O. Kristeller has located the word in a letter of 1490 by the rector of the University of Pisa, in sixteenth-century university documents of Bologna and Ferrara, in John Florio's Italian-English dictionary of 1598, and in a Spanish document of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Eugenio Garin adds an example from a document of the Studio di Pisa of 1525. This short article will contribute five additional vernacular uses oiumanista in Italy between 1540 and 1574.