2 - Language and history: Renaissance humanism and the philologic tradition

Summary

If one central concern can be singled out in that eclectic period which comprises the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it is language. Humanism was not so much interested in linguistics in an abstract sense but with the power of the word in action. Nancy Struever has shown that humanist linguistic thought is greatly indebted to the sophist rhetorical tradition as interpreted in Latin by the great Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintillian. “Renaissance language theorists,” and here she cites Petrarch and the nominalist, William of Occam, especially, “repeat some of the basic moments of sophistic thought in their attempt to reassess the relation of language to being, their emphasis on the mediating power of language, and their sense of role as derived from language skill.” Humanism conceived of discourse as leading to decision, of language as a motivator of human choice and action.

The attack mounted by Renaissance humanism against scholasticism was founded not so much on a rejection of the basic tenets of medieval speculative philosophy as on a total repudiation of the purely formal character of terministic logic and its ossified discourse. The scholastic dialectician's insistence on the priority of thought over speech and the subsequent subordination of the sciences of discourse to dialectics was countered by the humanists with a declaration of the primacy of linguistic eloquence in all intellectual activity. As Trapezuntius put it, “For indeed, reason itself lies hidden in the obscure processes of the intellect before it has been drawn forth by speech; it has just so much light or brilliance as the fire hidden in the flint, before one strikes it: indeed, while it is hidden no one would think to call it fire.”