From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance Mark Vessey N. G. Wilson . From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 200. $49.95 The subtitle of Nigel Wilson's new book could be thought misleading, did he not immediately qualify the work as a sequel to his Scholars of Byzantium (London: Duckworth, 1983), which "described the preservation of the classical heritage and the use made of it by the intellectuals of Byzantium" (ix). For Wilson, "Greek studies" means primarily "classical scholarship" applied to Greek texts. As the earlier book excluded early Christian writings unless they happened to bear on the literary curriculum or attract the attention of a classicizing writer like Michael Psellos, so this one treats only obiter of Greek patristic studies in the Italian Renaissance. As we should expect, Wilson draws special attention to Leonardo Bruni's pioneering translation (c.1403) of Basil's protreptic Ad iuvenes, emphasizing both the continuing power of that text as a sanction for the predominantly pagan literary curriculum of Christian Byzantium and its new-found utility in the West "as a weapon in controversy with opponents brought up in a less liberal tradition" (14). There is brief mention of the important patristic translations of the Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), already the subject of a major study by Charles L. Stinger, and some discussion of the activity of Cardinal Bessarion as a textual critic in the tradition of Jerome. Valla is remembered for his version of Basil's Nineteenth Homily as well as his work on the Greek New Testament. Evidence that Pope Nicholas V (1397-1455) was concerned with the question of the authenticity of the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite serves to remind us that "for all his humanistic interests [sic!] both he and his successors up to and including Sixtus IV (1471-84) attached importance to [the patristic] part of the Greek heritage" (80). The suggestion that humanist and Christian ideals were somehow at odds with each other, consistent with the older view of Italian [End Page 509] humanism as a basically secular phenomenon, surfaces again in Wilson's commentary on Aldus Manutius' record as a publisher of Greek texts. Noting that a 1501 volume contained poems of Prudentius with the hymns of John Damascene "and some lesser authors," he protests that "[w]hen so much remained to be done for the central areas of Greek literature the choice of such texts can only be characterised as eccentric" (142, emphasis added). Since Aldus presumably knew his market, the charge of eccentricity must recoil on the historian who knows better than he did where to place the center of Greek literature. Another problem is raised by the statement that Marcus Musurus' edition (also for the Aldine Press) of selected orations of Gregory of Nazianzus revived a Byzantine pattern of study, those texts having "made little impact" in Italy, where "other patristic literature had greater claims on scholars' attention" (155). So it may be. But the point is hard to grant when neither the claims of patristic literature nor the scholarly attention accorded it have been any part of the foregoing account. Wilson draws his book to a close in 1515. That was the year in which Raffaele Maffei of Volterra (1451-1522), formerly the translator of Homer, Xenophon and Procopius, published his Latin version of the works of Basil the Great, the basis of all subsequent Latin editions of the Opera omnia (see now Iréna Backus, Lectures humanistes de Basile de Césarée: Traductions latines (1439-1618) [Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1990], 15-27). Maffei's role in the adaptation of humanist ideals to the Roman ecclesiastical and theological milieu has been skilfully documented by the late John F. D'Amico (Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], Ch. 9). His name does not appear in From Byzantium to Italy. Readers interested in the textual tradition of the Church Fathers will once again be grateful to Nigel Wilson for supplying, conveniently and elegantly, so much of the philological, curricular and bibliographical context of their subject. They should beware...