New set of links: Latin humanist texts

If you scroll right down to the bottom of the screen, you will see on the right-hand side a short set of links. I am building up a list of humanist (mainly quattrocento) texts available on-line and this is the first step.

There are some useful sites which act as gateways or collect together relevant texts. I have found especially useful the Society for Neo-Latin Studies webpages, and the neo-Latin section of The Latin Library. The texts I have cited come partly thanks to their assistance and partly through wider trawling. They are hosted on a range of websites and appear in a range of formats: some are html texts, others are as images of printed books (either early modern or later), one is a transcription with a link to images of a relevant manuscript. They differ in elegance – the text of Carbone’s funeral oration on Guarino is a sad specimen: it is taken from Garin’s indispensable Prosatori latini, and appears with ragged ends of each line, reflecting the line-ends in the printed text. The quality of the edition also varies.

What particularly strikes me, however, is the paucity of texts available on-line, and the curious nature of what does appear. It might be said that the web of the new millennium need not have any space for a dead language but the democracy of the on-line universe is a Babel of idioms, including the lingua franca of Old Europe (I particularly like the Finnish Latin news station). The Latin of the quattrocento humanists, of course, could be accused of being neither one thing nor the other: not given to the freedom of medieval Latin, at the same time, it does not meet the standards expected of neo-Latin. That said, neo-Latinists are a tolerant bunch and do mention fifeenth-century texts in the on-line resources they are compiling. Whatever the reasons for the relatively low number of texts – at a time when the I Tatti Library series is making many works accessible in hard-copy – what is most striking is the curious nature of what is available.

Often, the texts which can be viewed are not the major works by that author. The best example of this is Leonardo Bruni, the pre-eminent Florentine humanist of the early quattrocento. His De Studiis, as you can see, is available — a relatively minor work but one in which there is modern scholarly interest. Apart from that, Biblioteca Italiana provides a copy of his short tract on whether all Romans spoke Latin which though it may be of interest could hardly be called a work through which he made his reputation. If we wanted to read a work which was  seminal to his intellectual formation, we would want to see his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum or his Laudatio Florentinae Urbis. Neither is available, and with the latter of these there is a particular irony. The Laudatio, his praise of Florence which has become a foundation text of civic humanism, was a best-seller in his own lifetime and one of the works for which he was best known — but, after his death, in the age of new-fangled print, it was somehow forgotten and not edited until the twentieth century, by Hans Baron. So, as one medium gave way to another, this small but significant work lost its leading status. Is this happening again? Is the dictum that history repeats itself being proven true?

Which was the first Latin Life of Henry V?

I am about to upset the ghosts again. I have done so before when I described Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, as a book-lover but not a book-worm (a judgement I stand by, though I would express it with more subtlety now), or when I pointed out that Paul II, sometimes considered a humanist pope, in part because of his book-collecting, actually owed much of his library to the activities of one previous collector. On this occasion, the spirit who will be shaking his gory locks is far less distinguished than a royal or papal prince; it is the humanist, Tito Livio Frulovisi.

I have just seen the final set of proofs for an article coming out in the next issue of English Historical Review on Frulovisi’s most famous work, his Vita Henrici Quinti. Frulovisi – despite his resonant forenames — was hardly a great success in his own lifetime, but his Vita is remembered as the first posthumous biography of Henry V and, at a couple of removes, a source for Shakespeare’s play. The Vita was also, it is said, the source for another biography, called the Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, which was once thought to have been by Thomas of Elmham, and is now sometimes known as Ps-Elmham. Though this latter work was, like Frulovisi’s biography, edited and published by Thomas Hearne in the eighteenth century, it has not found much favour with historians: much longer than Frulovisi’s, it is considered simply more prolix, with little extra information, and in an overblown style which compares poorly to Frulovisi’s humanist Latin. Frulovisi, as secretary of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, is thought to have been, in effect, ghost-writing the war memoirs of Henry V’s youngest brother, which the Ps-Elmham did little more than copy.

What I argue – what I hope I demonstrate – in my article is that the Vita et Gesta is actually the earlier of the two works, and provides Frulovisi’s main source. There are several reasons to reverse the usual chronology — to return, indeed, to the chronology which many pre-twentieth-century scholars considered to be the case — and they include matters of both structure and style. I do not intend to repeat the arguments in detail here, but the stylistic argument is that Frulovisi was converting the florid Latin into humanist diction, but not always being successful. I give in the article two extracts to show how this worked; examples could be drawn from most pages of the works. I will give you another brief example which I do not mention in English Historical Review. It comes from early on in the biographies, and relates to the revolt of Owen Glendower:

Ps-Elmham, Vita et Gesta, p. 10	Frulovisi, Vita, p. 4
quousque totam Wallie rebellionem sua virtute penitus exstirpavit et ipsam patriam, cum universis incolis suis, eidem patri suo subjectam restituit	cum reliqua Wallia in deditionem patris reducta
excepto ipso Owanno, capitali rebelli, pre timore in loca deserta et latebrosas caveas, absque pugnancium fortitudine fugiente ibidemque vitam inhonorifice finiente	preter Owanum quendam Wallicorum caput, qui propter metum et conscientiam facinoris in deserta loca et antra sine comitibus fugatus vitam inhoneste finivit
eius filius et heres isti principi Henrico post in regem coronato serviens ei familiaris extitit domestico famulatu.	eius Owani Henrico postea regi famulatus est filius.
De hiis Wallie guerris, per multa annorum continuatis curricula, de obsidionibus, conflictibus, frequenti strage, discriminosis incomodis, fortuna et infortuniis, aliisque infinitis in eisdem contingentibus, idem expavescens calamus pauca ponit, quia ad veram et certam singulorum noticiam non pervenit.	Et hoc de Wallicis bellis satis, quorum ad certam quoque singulorum notitiam non devenerunt.

Frulovisi’s phrasing is, as ever, more succinct but it retains many of the terms used in the Vita et Gesta, even when they are of dubious usage (see the repetition of famulatus, which the Vita et Gesta uses as a noun in the non-classical sense of ‘household’ while Frulovisi attempts to make it more classical by turning it into a past participle, but the verb from which it comes is of rare occurence in classical Latin). At other times, though, he strains to be different from that in the Vita et Gesta. Notice, for instance, that Ps-Elmham talks of Glendower hiding in gloomy caves — caveas — but Frulovisi, wanting to be different, uses antra, a term which is only to be found in poetry, not prose. My point is not that Frulovisi was a poor Latinist — humanist phrasing was in the making and mistakes were unavoidable — but that the verbal resonances are one sign that Frulovisi copied from the Vita et Gesta, rather than vice versa. The Vita et Gesta pays scant attention to the rules of classical phrasing — using guerra rather than bellum, say — and if it was following Frulovisi, it would have achieved the remarkable feat of stripping out all the humanist usages, and keeping those which were non-humanist. It makes more sense, I would contend, to see Frulovisi trying, and sometimes failing, to render the Vita et Gesta into ‘better’ Latin.

The best way to demonstrate the range of reasons why we should take Frulovisi’s work to be derivative of the much-derided Ps-Elmham would be to have a modern edition made of the work (there has not been one since the efforts of the redoutable Thomas Hearne in the early eighteenth century). If my article spurs renewed interest in the Vita et Gesta, that would be an achievement. But, you might ask, does it matter? Does the relative dating have any significance? The answer is yes, because, as I point out briefly in my article, it changes our view of the connexions between the different chronicles of the fifteenth century, and can also give us pause to reflect on the nature of political culture in the 1430s, when both these texts were written. It also raises a question mark over the usual perception of Humfrey as an engaged patron, supposedly directing ‘his’ scholars — an attitude which belittles those scholars’ own efforts, however unoriginal their works might have been. That is an issue which I will certainly be discussing again.

UPDATE: the article is now published and if you go to the page listing my publications, there is a free link to it on the Oxford University Press website.

The Italian Renaissance and the British Isles

I have a busy few months ahead of me. I’m hardly going on a world-tour but I have been invited to give lectures in a variety of locations, and I have listed them on a new page.

The first of these is at an event in the elegant surroundings of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, home to the Istituto Nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento. I anticipate a stimulating event, with several speakers who are always worth hearing, including Jonathan Woolfson (he of Padua and the Tudors fame, which I reviewed in Renaissance Studies), Alessandra Petrina (who shares with me an interest in Humfrey, duke of Gloucester; I reviewd her book for English Historical Review) and Michael Wyatt (author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England, which I wish I’d had chance to review).

As these scholars and their publications suggests, the conference’s theme is the Italian Renaissance and the British Isles — a subject that appears to becoming newly fashionable. There has, of course, been a tradition of English interest in our forefathers’ engagement with Renaissance Italy, exemplified early in the twentieth century by Paget Toynbee and Mandell Creighton, and carried further in the second half of the century by scholars like Denys Hay, Sydney Anglo, Joe Trapp and David Chambers. I cite them in particular because their work is concerned directly with the interaction between Italian culture and Englishmen, rather than providing studies of northern humanism or the so-called English Renaissance — with, that is, the transmission of ideas as much as with the reception of ideas.

What has been less strong in the past, perhaps, has been Italian interest in the cultural dialogue. I exclude Roberto Weiss who wrote the seminal work on my specific area of interest, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, since he was a cosmopolitan character: an Italian count whose career was in England, and who lived in Henley-on-Thames. I remember Nicolai Rubinstein saying that Weiss always signed himself ‘Roberto’ when in England and ‘Robert’ when in Italy — he wanted always to be an exotic outsider. He was also a capable cartoonist, but this is to take us away from the point. If Weiss can not stand as an example of Italian interest in the interaction between England and Italy, I am hard-pressed to think of enough names to demonstrate a tradition of interest in Italy in the topic — until, that is, recent years. Alessandra Petrina, whom I have mentioned, stands as one talented example, as does the young scholar Diego Pirillo, who is involved in organising the conference in at the Istituto. Perhaps it is significant that these are scholars in English faculties. The present flourishing is not confined to those departments — I find especially interesting the work on the English market for Italian art by Cinzia Maria Sicca — but there may well be a link between the post-War development of English as an international language, and the renaissance of Italian interest in the encounters of their countrymen with England in the quattrocento and cinquecento.

The result includes a series of volumes recently announced by Ashgate in Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies, edited by Michele Marrapodi of Palermo University. That is only one of several ventures that could be mentioned. It appears to be a good time to working in this field.

Gentlemen and Latin

With thanks to the Financial Times for reminding us of this deathless quotation:

A gentleman need not know Latin but he should at least have forgotten it.

The words of James Brander Matthews (1852 – 1929), a professor at Columbia whose studies spanned both English and French literature, as well as the history of the English language. His short tract on The Englishing of French Words was published in 1921 by the Society for Pure English.