The Bonds of Humanity: Cicero's Legacies in European Social and Political Thought, ca. 1100–ca. 1550 by Cary J. Nederman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bonds of Humanity: Cicero's Legacies in European Social and Political Thought, ca. 1100–ca. 1550 by Cary J. Nederman Nathanael Lambert Nederman, Cary J., The Bonds of Humanity: Cicero's Legacies in European Social and Political Thought, ca. 1100–ca. 1550, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020; cloth; pp. xvii, 240; R.R.P. US $79.95; ISBN 9780271085005. This survey of Cicero's legacy across the Middle Ages (c. 1100–c. 550) constitutes a considerable feat of primary source scholarship alone. The Bonds of Humanity plumbs the chief works of social and political thought that radiate out from the influence of Marcus Tullius Cicero's texts directly, or owe something to the spirit of Ciceronianism, or come 'via intermediary sources' like Saint Augustine (p. 87). 'Cicero's legacies of social and political thought' (such is the author's subtitle), drawn from eighteen medieval and early modern authors, form the subject matter; Cary Nederman's goal is nothing less than 'to illuminate how elements of […] thought were transformed, recombined, and otherwise adapted in order to suit a vast range of intellectual pursuits' (p. 11). [End Page 241] In this Herculean endeavour, akin to Charles B. Schmitt's earlier work (Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance, Martinus Nijhoff, 1972) to trace the reception of Aristotle through the same period, Nederman has certainly succeeded. It is an act of recovery, with his introduction decrying a scholarly neglect of Cicero's contribution amid medieval historians. As stated in Chapter 2, that neglect 'to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance "in the realms of social and political thought […] requires considerable reconsideration and revision"' (p. 41). While the debt to Cicero in the earlier Renaissance, or even in Italian 'civic' humanism, is commonly acknowledged, Nederman is recognizing Cicero and his twelfth-century adherents here in an unparalleled work in this field that will long remain standard to it. Unparalleled because Cicero's influence upon European thought over these centuries has not received the same attention as that of Aristotle. But the nature of Nederman's project and his chosen methodology (classical reception studies) leave him open to criticisms on points where 'Ciceronian' concepts conform more to the times of these authors, or the needs of their audiences, or cleave more closely to the work of other vaunted ancients, than to Cicero. Aware of a malleable potential to Cicero's thought, Nederman sets out the key background themes in his introduction—these themes, covering such topics as the origin of society, the uniting of wisdom with speech (eloquence), universal equality in humanity, natural reason leading to virtue, the divine (or natural) gift of 'right reason' (p. 20), and government building on natural association, course through the eight chapters like planetary bodies. The chronological ordering of the chapters means that Nederman pursues his quarry through a changing and ever more complicated world, so that the cloister of the twelfth century becomes the court of the fourteenth, enlarging into an age of conquest and imperial adventure abroad. Accordingly, the predictable effect is a diversity of fundamental political views. Chapters 2 and 3, for example, cover twelfth-century thinkers such as Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury, and works like the Moralium dogma philosophorum, although innovation on points among the thinkers is limited. Reflections upon the 'good of the many' (p. 54) or 'duties' (p. 55), as arising from ends that are 'natural' to human association and to justice, are prolific in these writings. John of Salisbury's key works are arguably more systematic, and thus Chapter 3 contains a discussion of the 'body politic' as analogous to 'the human organism' (pp. 68–71), an interesting return to the age-old usage. Where such writers share an 'organic naturalism' (p. 68) with Cicero's own, there is a complementary dovetailing of concepts on both sides. Nederman quotes as precursor A. J. Carlyle, who pares Cicero's philosophical thought on society down to 'three related conceptions of natural law, natural equality, and the natural society of men in the State' (p. 3). While organic growth between law, equality, and society at the level of society and government is...