“Wisdom Speaking Copiously”: Renaissance Humanism Revisited

Abstract

You cannot travel very far in Renaissance studies without running into Paul Oskar Kristeller. He has catalogued and commented on countless manuscripts and texts. Prefaces almost invariably acknowledge his generous assistance with projects ranging from bibliography and anthology to radical reinterpretation. And Kristeller is largely responsible for the theory of that displaced Jacob Burckhardt's and charted courses for so much subsequent work. Fifty years ago, when Kristeller joined the conversations about the Renaissance's modernity and medievalism, despotism and libertarianism, piety and religious skepticism, Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) still towered over the field. Others questioned Burckhardt's idealization of Renaissance consciousness; Kristeller, however, argued decisively that Renaissance humanism was less philosophical system than cultural and educational program in which the place of rhetoric expanded and developed ... and came to pervade all areas of civilization (1979:242; 1988:130-37). As the program developed in each discipline, it coupled humanist classicism with a core of