Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430-1530

Abstract

Was humanism without Latin a dead letter? The early quattrocento scholars who brandished the term studia humanitatis as their new slogan would have said so; their commitment to the language of Cicero was at the expense of the volgare. We might wish it were not so, and strain to link humanism with vernaculars far removed from the Italian peninsula. There is a lazy way of achieving this, by taking ‘humanism’ to be a Weltanschauung which spread across Europe and could be adopted in many tongues. Or there is a more forensic—and less tried—course which involves isolating what is particular in humanist practice and detecting moments when those habits or gestures were transferred to literatures in other traditions. Dr Wakelin follows this second route and with painstaking skill and shrewd insight compiles a new tale very much worth telling. Wakelin takes his story from the circle around Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, in the 1430s to Elyot and Lupset writing a century later. What he detects is that, alongside English interest in humanist writings in their original Latin, there developed a tradition of vernacular engagement with the studia humanitatis, expressed through the practice of translation and the adoption of humanist gestures. Like English humanist interest itself, this tradition of engagement did not have to wait for Henry VII and his successors to begin. It developed within manuscript culture; but, at the end of the fifteenth century, it became ‘institutionalised’—and, one might say, downgraded to a classroom skill, as Wakelin suggests in his discussion of John Anwykyll's remedial grammatical textbooks. The writers who walk across the pages of this book include John Lydgate, William Caxton and Thomas More but, for the most part, they are either lesser names such as Osbern Bokenham and Henry Medwall, or authors and readers who lurk in anonymity.