Humanism and Secularization from Petrarch to Valla (review)

Abstract

Humanism and secularization from Petrarch Valla. By Rlccardo Fubini. Translated by Martha King. [Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 18.] (Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 306. $64.95.) In this book, Riccardo Fubini deals with one of the most significant questions regarding Italian Renaissance and its ramifications: how, and what extent, did the intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance contribute the secularization of western culture? This is an important, densely argued, and deeply learned book. Fubini's approach represents the best in postwar Italian historicist tradition, overtly diachronic in approach, in which the historian is compelled make judgments about the past. Throughout the book, in fact, Fubini engages in subtle polemic, likely escape readers not familiar with the field. he writes that he does not wish reduce humanist polemics against scholastic forms of thought and discourse to mere difference of opinion among disciplines and methods of teaching (p. 5) and elsewhere that he is not proposing a paradigm of (p. 7). In setting out this method, Fubini is in effect eschewing another very dominant mode of thinking about Renaissance intellectual history, associated with Paul Oskar Kristeller, synchronie in style, where the historian attempts draw an overall cultural map of period and resists making overt value judgments, in an effort be as all-inclusive as possible and make clear the multifaceted manifestations of Renaissance intellectual life. If it is simplistically objected Fubini's method that his version of humanism does not account for all those intellectuals in the early modern world who were interested in some vague way in the five studia humanitatis, one might reply that this was not his intention. Instead, Fubini is making very specific, precise argument: that certain humanists in the first half of the fifteenth century, associated with or highly influenced by the cultural politics of the city of Florence and marked by closeness the papal court, evolved style of thought that was essentially secular, if not always overtly so; he is thinking primarily of Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Lorenzo Valla, though others come into play. In their thought, one can discern kind of cultural relativism tied new sense of history, skepticism regarding institutionally entrenched intellectual traditions, and moral philosophy that takes lived human experience as its ultimate criterion for judgment, rather than abstract theological pronouncements. …