A Humanist's Image of Humanism: The Inaugural Orations of Bartolommeo della Fonte

Abstract

Professor Kristeller in his ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’ as well as in his lecture on ‘The Humanist Movement’ in The Classics and Renaissance Thought emphasizes the professional nature of humanism, assigning to it the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy at the universities of Italy under the designation of the studia humanitatis. While he would not, I am sure, deny the wide cultural significance of the writings and activities of the humanists within the Renaissance, he does take a more restricted view of them than those philosophers and commentators who look upon the Italian humanists as simply one phase of a broadly humanitarian philosophical and religious outlook stretching from the ancient world to modern times, be it Jacques Maritain or Corliss Lamont.