STARKEY'S LIFE AS A HUMANIST

The nature of English humanism has recently become a topic of debate after decades of general agreement about it. This book in part answers Alistair Fox's call for many case studies to remedy the three major defects he identifies in previous scholarship: reliance on extrinsic rather than intrinsic evidence; excessive generalization; and insufficient clarity about the relations between humanism and religion. The second problem, of course, is easy to avoid in a biography, while the other two ought almost automatically to set the agenda for any successful portrait of an individual. Fox rightly discards most previous definitions of English humanists, offering instead the suggestion that only those who embraced a rather nebulous ‘classicism’ should qualify. Maria Dowling proposes a very similar standard, but both are vulnerable to George Logan's insistence that humanism must have content as well as formal characteristics, and to the charge of treating England too much in isolation from the continent and continental scholarship. In other words, for all the utility of a restrictive, formal definition instead of the easy acceptance of labels like ‘Erasmian’ for the whole of English humanism, Fox and Dowling go too far in the direction of ignoring the existential dimension of humanism, what it meant to be a humanist. Starkey's life can help to answer that question, especially if one focuses on his ‘civicism’ (Margaret King's word), his ‘classicism’ in both history and rhetoric and the religious tension these helped to induce in him.