Poetics, Polymathy, and Critice. On Some Controversial Notions in Early Modern Intellectual History

Abstract

Abstract In this article, Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem and Johannes Wower’s De polymathia tractatio are analyzed and contrasted with each other, and a number of hitherto unnoticed similarities between the two works are brought to the fore. It is argued that these similarities are rooted in a shared understanding of the notions of grammatice and of critice, which, in turn, is traced back to a number of passages in Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus grammaticos. It is further argued that Sextus Empiricus was initially not read as a Pyrrhonian sceptic in the fifteenth century, but that at least some of his arguments were used in order to structure the encyclopedia of grammatical knowledge, understood in the widest possible meaning of this word. It is finally argued that Poliziano was the driving force behind this initial understanding; that poetics and polymathy were almost indistinguishable intellectual pursuits in the context of early modern erudition; and that their eventual drifting apart was mainly due to the key notion of critice being invested with different, irreconcilable meanings in the course the seventeenth century.