In the Footsteps of the Ancients

Ronald G. Witt, Ph.D. (1965) in History, Harvard University, is Professor of History at Duke University and researches the discontinuities and continuities between medieval and early European thought, especially in France and Italy. His publications include The Earthly Republic of the Italian Humanists (1976), Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (1983), and Cultural Roots and Continuities, 5th ed. (1997).

This monograph demonstrates why humanism began in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century. It considers Petrarch a third generation humanist, who christianized a secular movement. The analysis traces the beginning of humanism in poetry and its gradual penetration of other Latin literary genres, and, through stylistic analyses of texts, the extent to which imitation of the ancients produced changes in cognition and visual perception. The volume traces the link between vernacular translations and the emergence of Florence as the leader of Latin humanism by 1400 and why, limited to an elite in the fourteenth century, humanism became a major educational movement in the first decades of the fifteenth. It revises our conception of the relationship of Italian humanism to French twelfth-century humanism and of the character of early Italian humanism itself. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Ch. 1 Introduction 1 Ch. 2 The Birth of the New Aesthetic 31 Ch. 3 Padua and the Origins of Humanism 81 Ch. 4 Albertino Mussato and the Second Generation 117 Ch. 5 Florence and Vernacular Learning 174 Ch. 6 Petrarch, Father of Humanism? 230 Ch. 7 Coluccio Salutati 292 Ch. 8 The Revival of Oratory 338 Ch. 9 Leonardo Bruni 392 Ch. 10 The First Ciceronianism 443 Ch. 11 Conclusion 495 Appendix 509 Bibliography 515 Index of Persons 549 Index of Places 556 Index of Subjects 558