Last updated 09/07/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Let me pursue for a moment the question that Professor Nauert raised at the end of his paper: how successful were the new classical schools of the Renaissance in achieving the highest goal of the humanist educational program, that of inspiring their students to seek wisdom and virtue?
This is a difficult question for us to answer for two reasons. First, as a result of the deterioration of the tradition of moral philosophy in the west after the Enlightenment, the kind of deterioration that Alasdair Maclntyre describes in his well-known book After Virtue, our society is deeply confused about the meaning, purpose and possibility of moral education.
* One of the challenges in explaining the origins and diffusion of Renaissance humanism is to find an explanation broad enough to include Petrarch. It is interesting in this regard that the two most influential accounts of the origins of humanism do not explain Petrarch. Paul O. Kristeller observed years ago that "a very small number of outstanding humanists like Petrarch, Boccaccio and Erasmus" are exceptions to his theory that Renaissance humanists "were the professional heirs and successors of the medieval rhetoricians, the so-called dictatores. . ."(Kristeller, 1979, 93). And Hans Baron, whose writings have advanced the thesis of "civic humanism," once replied to Wallace K. Ferguson's criticism that he made Petrarch too medieval by saying that he, Baron, considered Petrarch "neither 'medieval' nor 'Renaissance,' but (if I may use the figure) rather a Moses, first to see a new land, but not granted to enter it" (Baron, 28).
