The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose: The Case of Apuleianism

Abstract

The Renaissance humanists’ quest for the perfect Latin style formed the central element in their views of literature and history and contributed fundamentally to the genesis of their cultural values. In order to establish the ideal Latin, the humanists searched the treasures of Antiquity and formed the critical standards necessary to judge and use ancient writers. As a consequence Renaissance Latin prose was dynamic, although within definite limits. It changed according to the increased knowledge and sophistication of both its practitioners and their audience. This essay will describe the changes that Latin prose (Latin poetry will be discussed only in passing) experienced in Italy in the last decades of the Quattrocento and first years of the Cinquecento. It will review the major schools of Latin prose composition—the eclectic, the strict imitative, and the “archaizing“— and concentrate on the last of these in an attempt to explain why some Italian humanists followed certain ancient but uncommon Latin models in their writing and, thereby, rejected, at least implicitly, a number of basic elements in the view of the Latin language and its history that was accepted during the Quattrocento.