’In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni

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."In the Footsteps of the Ancients is the recipient of the Jacques Barzun Prize 2001 in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. The Birth of the New Aesthetic 3. Padua and the Origins of Humanism 4. Albertino Mussato and the Second Generation 5. Florence and Vernacular Learning 6. Petrarch, Father of Humanism? 7. Coluccio Salutati 8. The Revival of Oratory 9. Leonardo Bruni 10. The First Ciceronianism 11. Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Indexes Index of Persons Index of Places Index of Subjects