The Italian Renaissance | Florence and Civic Humanism (Lecture 8)

Lecture 8: The newly enriched and politically dominant mercantile classes of Florence did not identify with the values and principles of the Middle Ages. Those were clerical, feudal, and rural, whereas their lives were secular, mercantile, and urban. Urban merchants required secular education to practice their professions; they required clearly formulated laws; they required knowledge of vernacular languages; they required tuition in arithmetic and accounting; and they required a value system that validated what they did rather than consigned the pursuit of profit and interest to the vices of the damned.

These new men, the product of social mobility and secular education, found a set of ideals consonant with their own in the recovery of ancient Rome. Romans of the time of Cicero were, after all, like them: urban, cosmopolitan, secular, mercantile citizens of a republic. Therefore, the application of ancient principles and models already visible in the career of Petrarch had a special appeal to 14th- and 15th-century Florentines. Moreover, Petrarch had solved the old disjunction between classical pagan and later Christian values by proving that although ancient Romans might have lived before the Christian dispensation, that did not detract from their essential virtue or goodness as human beings. They enjoyed ethical principles that were not incompatible with sincere Catholic belief. This adaptation of classical learning to the demands of Italian life was called Humanism, and when applied to the Florentine Republic, it developed into Civic Humanism, in which the responsibility of the good citizen to the community took on a powerful ethical force and prepared one for service in this world rather than the next.

Primary Source Texts:
Kenneth R. Bartlett, “Humanism,” pp. 72–83, 95–108, in The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance.
Leonardo Bruni, The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts.
Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century.

Supplementary Reading:
Hans Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance.

Lecture 9: https://rumble.com/v4xeuth-the-italian-renaissance-florentine-culture-and-society-lecture-9.html