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Both the classical enthusiasms of Paduan lawyers and notaries and the literary works of Florentines like Brunetto Latini and Dante show that about 1300 the prosperous educated laymen in the Italian cities were groping their way towards a new culture distinct from both the chivalric culture of the medieval nobility and the scholastic culture of the clergy. This was a natural response to the conditions of their life. Since the nineteenth century, historians have labelled this new culture ‘humanism’, though that abstract term was coined by a German scholar in 1808 and appears nowhere in the writings of the Renaissance itself. The term that did exist then was ‘humanistic studies’ (studia humanitatis) , used to designate a cluster of academic subjects much favoured by humanists. By the first half of the fifteenth century, the term ‘humanist’ (in Latin, humanista) had come into use, originally as student slang used to designate masters who taught those particular academic subjects: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. ‘Humanism’, the bundle of subjects taught by ‘humanists’ in the Latin grammar schools and university faculties of liberal arts, made no claim to embrace the totality of human learning, nor even all of the traditional seven ‘liberal arts’ (embracing the trivium , or grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and the quadrivium , or arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) that in theory were studied by all who received the bachelor and master of arts degrees from a university. The studia humanitatis did not include the subjects taught in the three higher faculties of medieval universities: law, medicine, and theology. |
