di camillo sobre humanismo en esp 1

8/2/2019 Di Camillo Sobre Humanismo en Esp 1

1/15

Review: Interpretations of the Renaissance in Spanish Historical ThoughtAuthor(s): Ottavio Di Camillo

Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 352-365Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863069 .

Accessed: 22/09/2011 15:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The University of Chicago Press andRenaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access toRenaissance Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpresshttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2863069?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2863069?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress


2/15

Interpretationsf the Renaissance n SpanishHistoricalThoughtby OTTAVIO Di CAMILLO

T HERE ARE SEVERAL REASONS or presenting an overview of whatthe terms Renaissance and humanism have meant to Spanishhistorians and literary critics during the past one hundred fiftyyears. Despite the fact that these historiographical categories havenot received the same attention in Spain as they have in other partsof Europe, it is still useful to identify certainrecurring assumptionsregarding the nature of the Spanish Renaissance and to point outhow these underlying presuppositions are usually linked, directlyor indirectly, to the historicaldevelopment of the concept of the Re-naissance elaborated elsewhere in Europe. One hopes that this briefexposition will be of some benefit to those students of the SpanishRenaissance who are unawareof the ideological currents andmeth-odological trends that have motivated, and to a certain extent de-termined, the major interpretations of the period that have beenproposed. For scholars who are unfamiliar with the views andideasof Spanishhistorians andliterarycriticsof the Renaissance this out-line may serve as an introduction to their works and as an aid inassessing their contributions.The period under review is relatively short, spanning approxi-mately one hundred fifty years, that is, from the second half of thelast century, when the first interpretationsof the Renaissance wereformulated, to the present. But long before any theoretical treat-ment of the concept of the Renaissancein Spanishhistoricalthoughtwas undertaken, the idea of a rebirthof Spanishletters had alreadyenjoyed a long tradition. The earliest documented evidence of a re-vival of learning can be dated, in fact, to around the middle of thefifteenth century. Isolated occurrences of expressions relating to acultural renewal, such as "dispelling the darkness of ignorance,""illuminating Spainwith new light," or "driving out the barbariansfrom schools anduniversities," which arefirstrecordedin the writ-ings of this time, began to appear at an increasing rate in letters,books and treatises during the next two centuries, when both thenotion of a cultural reawakening and the role of the movement re-sponsible for bringing it about--what we call today humanism-

[352]


3/15

SPANISH INTERPRETATIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE 353were widely acknowledged.I The idea that a cultural rebirth hadtaken place within a well-defined period in Spanishcivilization be-came the most significant featurein the first histories of literature,poetry andeloquence composed in the second half of the eighteenthcentury mainly by Jesuit scholars who took refuge in Italy aftertheir expulsion from Spain.2 It was also at this time that the six-teenth century, a period of unprecedented achievements in litera-ture, arts and sciences, came to be known as the SiglodeOro or theGolden Age, as it is usually referred to in English. This designationrapidly gained wide acceptanceand eventually came to replacetheterm Renaissance. The question ofperiodization, anew andimpor-tant featureof the incipient national history, was resolved in favorof dividing the literary culture of Spain into three periods: a prim-itive stage that lasted to the end of the fifteenth century, the GoldenAge in the sixteenth century and a third period from the seven-teenth century on. Jose Luis Velasquez was the only historian whobelieved that the literature and culture of the fifteenth centuryshould constitute a separate period because of certain distinctivecharacteristics which set it apartfrom both the previous primitivestage and the Siglo de Oro of the following century.3Interest in the Renaissance as a cultural rebirthwaned during thefirstpartof the nineteenth century when the predominant romanticinterpretations of Spanish literature, generally written outside ofSpain, stressed the originality, purity and spontaneity of the na-tional creative genius as this manifested itself in the Middle Ages.All artistic expressions associated with the restoration of classical

'With the exception, perhaps, of Italy, nowhere in Europe was the use of the ne-ologism "humanist" as widespread as in sixteenth-century Spain. Used at first to in-dicate the teacher of the studia humanitatis, it soon acquired a variety of meanings. Itcame to designate the dangerous scholar with reformist ideas, the pedant, the poet, anystudent of the humanities, the rogue and, with this same meaning, it was even appliedto a feminine literary character. By the end of the sixteenth century, the need was feltto put an end to the trivialization of such a designation and the true role of the "hu-manist" became the subject of two extensive treatises: Juan Lorenzo Palmireno, Vo-cabalario del humanista (Valencia, 1569) and Baltasar de C6spedes, Discurso de las letrashumanas llamado el humanista, written in i600, which circulated in manuscript form.2See among others: Juan Francisco de Masdeu, Historiacr(ticadeEspana y de la culturaespanola, 20 vols. (Madrid, I783-I805);Juan Andr6s, Del origen,progresoy estadoactualde toda literatura(Madrid, I784).

30rfgenes de la poesia castellana(Madrid, I754). His work was to have a lasting in-fluence both in and outside of Spain. It became known in Europe in German translationby the famous philologist Johan Andre Diez in 1769.


4/15

RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

learning or with any form of erudition, from the fifteenth centuryon, were unconditionally brandedas foreign, imitative and servileart.4 Such an unmitigated characterization of the Renaissance,which made even the Spanishtranslatorsuneasy, proved to be onlya passing fad.In the years during which Michelet was preparing the seventhvolume of his monumental history of Francededicated entirely tothe Renaissance period, a Spanish historian, Jose Amador de losRios, was also working on a massive history of Spain.s AlthoughAmador de los Rios' work never reached the sixteenth century, thecentury that in Michelet's history bears the title of La Renaissance,the Spaniard'slast volume, the seventh in a series, dealing exclu-sively with the fifteenth century, is clearlywritten with a new con-ception of the Renaissancein mind. Consistent with his idea of totalhistory, based on the literary culture of the national tradition, henot only included under literature Latin and vernacularworks butalso other humanistic disciplines. His positive evaluation of the lit-erary production inspired by the classical revival, still reviled bymany romantic literary critics, made him the lone defender of thenew learning that accompanied the revival of antiquity in fifteenth-century Spain.His liberal concerns and his appropriationof German idealism,which are at the root of his search for strong personalities with amarked sense of freedom of thought and expression, led him to in-vestigate the life and works of the Marquis of Santillana. This earlyfifteenth-century poet, who, in addition to being a learned man,was also actively involved in the political life of the time, becameto Amador de los Rios a paradigmaticfigure in whose activities are

4There were several histories of literature in translation circulating in Spain duringthe first half of the nineteenth century, including Frederick Bouterweck, Historia de laliteraturaespafola, trans. J. G6mes de la Cortina and N. Hugalde de Mollinedo (Madrid,I829); andJ. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Historia de la literaturaespanola,trans. Lorenzode Figueroa andJos6 Amador de los Rios (Seville, 1841). In these and other translations,one can see how the Spanish translators went to great lengths to try to fill in what theforeign author had disregarded or to mitigate the excessively harsh judgment passedon Renaissance authors accused of pedantry because of their erudition.

sit is very likely that J. Michelet, Histoire de la France, 5 vols. (Paris, I833-I850),which covered French history up to the end of the fifteenth century, inspired Amadorde los Rios to undertake a similar enterprise. The publication of the seventh volumeof the Spaniard's Historia crfticade la literaturaespanola(Madrid, I861-65), in which hedeals with the fifteenth century, coincided with the appearance of Michelet's volume(1862) on the sixteenth century, entitled La renaissance.

354


5/15

SPANISH INTERPRETATIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE 355

revealed the workings of the national spirit at a crucial moment ofSpain'shistory. As a member of the highest nobility, Santillanaem-bodied the traditionalchivalric values and the social responsibilitiescommensurate with his rank. But what most likely attractedAma-dor de los Rios to Santillanawas the latter's intellectual endeavorsas well as his openness to the latest trends in learning and ideas. Itshould be noted that the library assembled by Santillana, whichAmador de los Rios tried to reconstruct, contained one of the bestcollections of classical texts in Europe and a significant number ofworks by contemporary Italian humanists in either their originalLatin or in Spanish and Italian translations.The attention he paid to Santillanaand to the century in whichhe lived is a clearindication that Amador de los Rios recognized inthis period the beginning of a new erathat was to culminate in thesixteenth century.6 In his reluctance, however, to refer to this pe-riod as the Renaissance, he was perhaps following Michelet, whoin those same years reserved the use of this term exclusively for thesixteenth century. His uncertainty about whether the fifteenth cen-tury representedthe beginning of the Renaissanceis best illustratedby his efforts to reevaluate the works of the humanists (he is stillunaware of the newly coined term "humanism") while at the sametime refusing to recognize their role as promoters of the new era.This apparentcontradictioncanbe explainedby his general concep-tion of history as a series of stages, somewhat static in nature,wherein the culture of each period is characterizedby a differentmanifestation of the national spirit. Within this scheme, the revivalof learning in the fifteenth century was simply the door, as it were,leading to the true Renaissance. This basic interpretation, withminor variations, has dominated Spanish Renaissance studies tothis day.His rehabilitation of fifteenth-century poets, historians, moral-ists and learnedmen who up to that time had been describedby ro-mantic literary critics as slaves to fashionable trends coming fromItaly, needed a plausible explanation that would justify their works

6Jos6Amador de los Rios, Vida del Marquesde Santillana, reprinted by Espasa Calpe(Madrid, 1947), 83-84: "Aquel inextinguible amor al estudio, aquella insaciable sed denuevas y mas luminosas ideas que le anim6 toda su vida estableciendo vivos y estrechoscomercios con los pueblos mas cultos de Europa," which "dotaron a Castilla de ina-preciables tesoros y contribuyeron poderosamente a preparar la venturosa era de Isabella Cat6lica, epoca de verdadero renacimiento."


6/15

RENAISSANCE QUARTERLYas legitimate expressions of the national spirit. Mindful of the po-lemic between Spanish and Italian historians that had taken placein the previous century, especially the one between Lampillas andTiraboschi,7over which country hadfostered atrue classicalrebirthor "Risorgimento," andbelieving aswell in the Latin national char-acter or genius of the Spanish people, he explained the rebirth ofantiquity in the fifteenth century as the normal manifestation of acultural trait which was not entirely new to Spanishculture. Ama-dor de los Rios was influenced by the views of Mme. de Staelwhohad divided European civilization into three racial groups, eachwith specific cultural characteristics, and who had placed Spainwith FranceandItalybecauseof their common Latinheritage. SinceSpain's national spirit was shaped by the language and civilizationof the Latin group to which it belonged, he argued that it was onlynatural that a classicalrevival would reappearfrom time to time inSpanish history, whenever the socio-political circumstances of aparticularperiod were favorable. The Latinculturalsubstratum, infact, had first revealeditself, however dimly, in the thirteenth cen-tury during the reign of Alphonse the Wise. It reappeared again ina much more assertive way at the court ofJohn II of Castile and Al-phonse V of Aragon in Naples; and it manifested itself in all its plen-titude during the following century. On the strength of this argu-ment, Amador de los Rios introduced the Latin and vernacularworks written at the court of Alphonse V in Naples as an integralpart of the Spanish cultural world.In spite of the vast amount of source material with which he doc-umented his history, Amador de los Rios did not propose any newscheme regarding the periodization of Spanish history. And be-cause he did not accept any continuity between the Middle Agesand the Renaissanceof the sixteenth century, he had to placethe cul-tureof the fifteenth centurywithin the medieval period. It is curiousto note how the culturalactivities at the Aragonese court at Naples

7Thepolemic startedwhen G. Tiraboschi attributed he decline of ItalianRenais-sance culture to the Spanishdomination of the country. SaverioLampillasansweredthese andmany othercharges n a work writtenin Italianwhich is, in effect, a literaryhistory of Spain:Saggio torico-apologeticoella etteraturapagnuolaontroepregiudicateopinioni di alcuni moderni crittori taliani, 4 vols. (Geneva, 1772-1782). A Spanish trans-lation of this work was published in Zaragoza in 1783. The exchange of letters regard-ing the controversy between these two scholars is reproduced in G. Tiraboschi, Storiadella letteratura taliana, I vols. (Modena, 1772-1782).

356


7/15


as well as the figure of Alphonse V were interpreted differently byAmador de los Rios and Burckhardt, who was writing at approx-imately the same time. If Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Re-naissancen Italy (I860), views Alphonse V as the prototype of theRenaissanceprince intent on creating "the state as a work of art,"Amador de los Rios relegates this patron of famous humanists tothe Middle Ages, even while acknowledging his contribution to therevival of antiquity.Due to the work of Amador de los Rios, humanists, but not yet"humanism," had finally appearedin the literary history of Spain.They were reintegrated into the literary mainstream and, for thefirst time, considered an important factor in the unfolding of thenational culture. Convinced that there were two Renaissances, aLatin and a vernacularone, each vying for hegemony, Amador delos Rios paidas much attentionto Latinasto vernacularworks, thusopening two lines of further investigation.8 For our purpose, thesignificance of his work lies in his having established the chrono-logical limits for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Spanishhistory, a model that has been acceptedby later historians. His un-finished history, which extends only to the end of the fifteenthcentury, was taken up years later by a young scholar, MarcelinoMenendez y Pelayo, who broadened considerably the scope of hisown research by exploring different areas of the Renaissance andby focusing on the underlying connections among literature, aes-thetics, philosophy, religious ideas, ethics, history andthe sciences.One of Menendez y Pelayo's earliest studies, indicative perhapsof the scholarly orientation he was to take, was an essay onsixteenth-century humanists written in 1878. His main objectivewas to show that a knowledge of the Spanish literaturewritten inLatinduring the I50os is essential for the understandingof the ver-nacular literature of the time. In this study the term "humanism"was utilized, to my knowledge, for the first time in SpanishRenais-sance studies.9 Menendez y Pelayo used the word exclusively todescribe the intellectual movement that promoted the classical re-vival and produced a body of Latin writings in Spain. As he later

8Historia, VI, 9-Io.9MarcelinoMen6ndezy Pelayo, "Humanistas spafiolesdelsigloXVI," reproducedinEstudios discursosecrfticaistoricaliteraria,d. E. SanchezReyes (Santander,1949),11.3.


8/15


explained, the term should not apply solely to the sixteenth centurybut to the fifteenth century aswell, since the use of this classical lan-guage for literary and historical compositions had also becomeprevalentat the court ofAlphonse V in Naples and, sometime later,at the court of the Catholic Kings. In connection with his definitionof humanism he also gave his interpretationof the Renaissance asthe rebirth of forms and ideas of the classical world. IBut this revival of classical antiquity, he cautioned, cannot andshould not be takenliterally, for such a culturalphenomenon wouldhave been historically impossible. There were, in his view, a num-ber of historical factors that affected in a decisive way the outcomeof the classical revival. Christianity andthe barbarian nvasions, forexample, were two major conditioning forces that prevented clas-sical culture from being reborn in its pristine form. Equally crucialin shaping the development of the classical rebirth were the differ-ent cultural traditions and institutions that emerged with the for-mation of European nations during the Middle Ages.To Menendez y Pelayo, who saw the Renaissance as an histor-ically identifiablephenomenon, the term itself was amisnomer, be-cause classicalcivilization had never completely disappeared, espe-cially in countries like SpainandItaly. Intwelfth-century Spain, forexample, even when Frenchinfluences seemed to dominate Spanishletters, the Latin substratum still survived as a cultural undercur-rent. And when this latent current reemerged in the fifteenth cen-tury, its driving force was characterizedby the desire to recover"the ancient form in all its totality, even in its smallest componentsof language and rhythm."I But unlike Amador de los Rios, whosaw a clearly defined trend toward the restoration of classical an-tiquity from the very beginning of the century, Menendez y Pelayotended to dismiss these earlyefforts, attractedashe was by the fullerdisplay of the classical revival in the last quarterof the century, dur-ing the reign of the Catholic Kings. Borrowing anexpression froman eighteenth-century scholar, Mayans y Siscar,on whom Menen-dez y Pelayo relied a great deal in many of his works, he charac-terized the Renaissance period as the time when Spaniards finally

IIbid.:"Por renacimiento entiende todo el mundo la resurrecci6n de las ideas y delas formas de la antiguedad clasica.""Ibid., 11.5: "la forma antigua en toda su amplitud, hasta en sus ultimas concre-ciones de lengua y de ritmo."

358


9/15


regained their "critical awareness and stylistic art."12 It should benoted that by "critical awareness" Mayans y Siscar was referringto the humanist attack on scholastic learning, a feature that heturnedinto the criterion for marking the end of one era (the MiddleAges) and the beginning of the other (the Golden Age). This point,which Menendez y Pelayo also stressed, but to a lesser degree, hasnever been fully clarified since later historians have either mini-mized the scope of this issue or dismissed it outright.Regarding the classical revival of fifteenth-century Spain, Me-nendez y Pelayo was far more critical than Amador de los Rioswhen it came to associating it with the Renaissance.Though he sawnumerous indications of a revival of classical learning and of thebreakdown of the chivalric spirit-part of a general pattern in thedissolution of the Middle Ages -he still maintainedthat the overallculture of the period was essentially medieval. He explained thatany manifestations of new intellectual trends were partof that ges-tation period when all the elements of the national life came to-gether in order to form the "proper and more grandiose" Renais-sance of the sixteenth century.I3 According to a principle ofhistorical continuation, he believed that any period of great intel-lectual and artistic expression was necessarily preceded by one oflesser cultural excellence. For these reasons he defined the fifteenthcentury as "unaespecie de p6rtico de nuestro renacimiento" (akindof portal to our Renaissance),14 a metaphor in which the impres-siveness of the entrance is overshadowed by the monumental in-teriorto which it leads. Though Menendez y Pelayo's metaphoricalmeaning has been lost on later historians and the portal has beentaken for a mere door, the transitional characterit conveyed hasbecome emblematic of this century.Menendez y Pelayo's study of sixteenth-century humanistsmarked a turning point in Spanish historical thought and literarycriticism. Charting a new course amidst past and present historicalinterpretations and literary theories, this youthful essay, strongly

'"Ibid., 11.6: "espfritu critico y arte del estilo." Mayans y Siscar may have learnedabout the humanist attack on scholastic learning from Luis Vives, In Pseudodialecticos.It should be noted that the only edition of Vives' complete works that has ever beenpublished in Spain is the one prepared by Mayans y Siscar in 1782.'3Ibid., II. 8: "todos los elementos se determinaron con su propio y grandiosocaracter."

'4Marcelino Men6ndez y Pelayo, Poetas de la cortede Don Juan II (Madrid), I.


10/15


resembling a manifesto, contained in a germinal state most of hisideas on the Renaissance.Much of his laterworks, in fact, are meantto clarify and support with documentary evidence, his original un-derstandingof the Renaissance. Forexample, his multi-volume his-tory of aestheticideasin Spainis primarilyconcerned with showingthat Spanishliterature,especiallyin the Renaissance,is indeed basedon certain philosophical considerations regarding the nature ofbeauty in artistic and literary works. But it was also meant to op-pose certain neoromantic historians who attributed to the unso-phisticated utterances of primitive bards the true expression of thenation's literary genius, while accusing Renaissanceauthors of hav-ing buried their artistic creations in dead and worn-out forms andof having hindered the normal development of literature. Simi-larly, his extensive investigations into the history of religious het-erodoxy in Spain served as a rebuttal to northern European histo-rians who equated the true Renaissancewith the Reformation and,closer to home, as a defense againstthe attacks of Neothomists andultra-conservative intellectuals who viewed Renaissance humanistsas having at best antagonized the Church and at worst as havingpracticedall sorts of heresy. His statedpurpose, in fact, was to dem-onstratethat in the sixteenth century, the period of most intense re-ligious upheaval, the Latinspirit of the nation, strengthened by theRenaissance ("vivificado por el renacimiento") was able to immu-nize Spanishsociety from the contagious disorder of Protestantismand thus prevent the intrusion of the Reformation, that "offspringof Teutonic individualism."I5This exceedingly partisan nterpretationof the Renaissance,con-ditioned in many ways by the post-Burckhardtian versions of na-tional Renaissances being elaboratedin other partsof Europe, wasnever seriously questioned and mutatismutandi et the stage for anew approach to the study of this period. As we know, the orig-inality of Burckhardt's interpretation of the Italian Renaissancecaught the attention of many scholars, some of whom in turnsought to provide a comparable assessment of that period in theirrespective countries. Unable to arrive at a synthesis similar toBurckhardt's achievement, they had to rely on the kind of revival

I5M.Men6ndezy Pelayo,Historia e osheterodoxsespanoles, vols. (Madrid,I965),1.45:"elespiritu atino, vivificadoporel Renacimiento,protest6contra a Reformauees hija legitima del individualismoteut6nico."

360


11/15


of learning, often associated with religious issues, that manifesteditself in their particularnational tradition. Within this larger con-text, the religious component that Menendez y Pelayo injectedintothe discussion of the SpanishRenaissance is not unique. It was alsofound, to varying degrees, among historians of northern Europewhose interpretation of the Renaissancegave ample considerationto the religious concerns of their most distinguished humanists.Given the outrageous bias of some cultural theories circulating atthe turn of the century, it is understandablethat the controversy be-tween Catholic and Protestantscholars, begun precisely at the timeof the Renaissanceandkept alive throughout the centuries more byinertiathan by fervor, would againflareup with unusualvirulence,fueled at this time by nationalistic and ethnic rivalries.At issue was the meaning each national culture wanted to assignto this crucial period of European history, an epoch that was be-coming increasingly identified with the beginning of the modernage. Emphasis on the religious aspect of the Renaissance in someEuropean countries carried with it certain moral and political im-plications that determined in part the way in which they viewedtheir own culturalrevival, a revival that was fundamentally differ-ent from the Italianmodel proposed by Burckhardt. For this rea-son, even the classical rebirth first promoted by Italianhumanistscame to be considered a foreign import, mainly pagan in nature,whose influence played only a secondary role in the Renaissance ofthe national culture. In Germany, for example, the Renaissancewasseen as the prelude to a more important period and its durationwasreduced considerably to the years from the middle of the fifteenthcentury to the beginning of the Reformation. Since in their viewSpain, unlike Italy, did not produce a pagan revival of antiquity,but used instead its imperial power to retain and impose the me-dieval form of Catholicism (the Counter Reformation) on Europe,it was presumed that its culture remained essentially medieval. Onthe basis of this argument, some Germanhistorians, as late as 1927,would argue that Spain had never experienced a Renaissance.I6As a reaction to the theories advanced by Protestant historianswho identified the true Renaissance with the Reformation andeven rejected the ItalianRenaissancefor its paganism, Menendez y

I6Indicative of this position is V. Klemperer, "Gibt es eine spanische Renaissance,"Logos, XVI, 1927.


12/15


Pelayo claimed that it was only in sixteenth-century Spain that thetrueRenaissancetook place. The explanationhe gave andreiteratedin many of his writings was that only Spanishhumanists had beenable to "christianize" the Italian revival of arts and letters, whilenorthern humanists, in rejecting the achievements of Italian hu-manism, had only replaced it with heresy and thus "barbarism."In denying the existence of anorthernEuropeanRenaissanceon thebasis that Protestant thinkers, because of their race and cultural tra-ditions could not understand Italian humanism and the lessons ithad to offer, Menendez y Pelayo was even critical of Erasmus andof "Erasmism," a word he coined to describe a certain spiritualmovement, heterodox in nature, that spreadamong Erasmus' fol-lowers in early sixteenth-century Spain.Despite his biasedinterpretationof the northernRenaissance andderogatory assessment of Erasmus' works, Menendez y Pelayoshould at least be credited with analyzing the development of spir-ituality as only one aspectof Renaissance humanism in Spain, a dis-tinction which later Spanish critics and historians at times blurred,confusing humanism with religious feelings and practices of wor-ship. By the turn of the century, as the idea of a Christianhuman-ism, whether Catholic or Protestant, gained acceptanceamong Eu-ropeanhistoriansandErasmuscame to be seen as its most articulaterepresentative, Spanish intellectuals began to search for historicalcausesthatwould explain the presentpolitical andintellectualcrisis.They identified the origin of their immediate problems, amongother factors, in the attempts at religious renovation and in the re-pressive measures which frustrated Erasmianhumanism in the six-teenth century. The growing interest in Erasmus and, by exten-sion, in the Christian humanism of northern Europe promptedAdolfo Bonilla y San Martin to write a history of Erasmus' influ-ence in Spain. 7The study, published in 1907, canbe consideredtheforerunner of the more exhaustive investigation that a generationlater was undertakenby Marcel Bataillon. With Bonilla y San Mar-tin, who called the presence of Erasmus in Spain another "anotherchapter in the history of the Renaissance," the Christian aspect ofthe intellectual activities of this period became the object of re-newed attention. But it was only in 1937, with Marcel Bataillon's

I7Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, "Erasmo en Espafia (Episodio de la historia delRenacimiento)," Revue Hispanique 17 (1907): 379-548.

362


13/15

SPANISH INTERPRETATIONS OF THE RENAISSANCE

publication of his extensive investigations on the reception and dif-fusion of Erasmus' works in Spain during the sixteenth century,that Erasmus took center stage in Spanish Renaissance studies,to the point that today there is hardly any writer, thinker or manof letters "worth his salt" who has not been called at one time oranother an "Erasmist."I8The influence of northernEuropeanhistorians in Spainat the be-ginning of this century was much more pervasive than one wouldsuspect. Even in terms of periodization we find, for example, thatBonilla y San Martin tried to reconcile the short-lived Renaissanceof the German historians with the chronological interpretationsof the Spanish Golden Age tradition. In his study of Fernando deC6rdoba, afifteenth-century schoolman whose works areastrangemixture of scholastic and Renaissance elements, Bonilla y SanMartin accepted the beginning of the Renaissance as the middle ofthe fifteenth century, but extended its duration from 1517 (the be-ginning of the Reformation) to an arbitrary I550.19 His eclectic andoften contradictory views reflected a vast arrayof sources rangingfrom Voltaire and Vico to late nineteenth-century German andFrenchhistorians, including aswell Menendez y Pelayo and avaguenotion of the "revolt of the medievalists" againstthe Burckhardtiantradition.For over half a century no new interpretationsof the Renaissancewere advanced, even though therewas a slight increasein the num-ber of studies on particular humanists and Renaissance authors.What is remarkable is that during the years in which the conceptof the Renaissance was undergoing a radicalrevision by historiansof the Middle Ages, none of the extreme interpretationsthat werethen being proposed had any significant influence on medieval orRenaissance studies in Spain. This was due primarilyto two deeplyrooted assumptions which had remained constant in Spanish his-toriography: a consensus that strains of medieval culture survivedthrough the Renaissance and a firm belief in the idea of a GoldenAge mitigating any revisionist claim that would undermine theoriginal characterof the period. The only trace left by the medieval-ists' revolt that can even vaguely be relatedto a new understanding

'8Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (Madrid, I937).I9Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, Fernandode Cordoba(1423?-1486?) y los origenesdelRenacimientofilos6fico en Espafa. Episodio de la historia de la logica (Madrid, I9II), i6.

363


14/15


of Renaissance humanism in Spain is the brief attention that waspaid to the topic of "arms and letters." The social and political re-ality underlying this recurrent motif in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writings was laterturned into an embryonic interpretationof humanism. The theme of "arms and letters" was first discussedby Americo Castro as one of the elements of the Spanish Renais-sance utilized by Cervantes.20 It was meant to show that the issuedramatizedby Cervantes originated in the social world of fifteenth-century men of letters who first became aware of the value of ed-ucation as a means to social mobility. Though Castro, to myknowledge, never returned to this topic in his later writings, the"civic" humanistic dimension of the issue was furtherexplored byJose Antonio Maravall, a young scholar who was to become oneof the major historians of post-war Spain.Though Maravall's book on the "humanismo de las armas" inCervantes' Quijote, published in 1948,21 appeared in the guise of aliterary analysis, it was really an essay on the intellectual life of theSpanish Golden Age. His aim was to demonstrate how, throughthis popular work, one could perceive the major currents ofthought operating within the society of the time. The term human-ism, used in the title in a generic sense, was in fact a synthesis ofthe main interpretationscirculatingin Spain during the first partofthis century. Maravall understood humanism in its broadest sense,as a movement that combined the spiritual, moral, social, politicaland even economic preoccupations of sixteenth-century thinkers.Their spiritualitywas not learnedsolely from the pages of Erasmus,for it derived also from the spiritualcurrents of the SpanishMiddleAges. Their humanism was revealed in a yearning for personal re-form that would extend to society and, ultimately, to the state.Forced to live in an empire with aspirationsaliento their own, theylonged for a Golden Age, a kind of political utopia which lookedboth to the past and to the future.Maravall'sconcept of humanism is not strictly related to the re-vival of classical antiquity, for such a revival, though important,was incidental to the real concerns of the people of the sixteenth

20Am6rico Castro, El pensamientode Cervantes(Barcelona-Madrid, new ed., 1972),215-I9.

"1JoseAntonio Maravall, El humanismode las armasen Don Quijote. Prologue by R.Menendez Pidal (Madrid, 1948).

364


15/15


century. Regarding his concept of the Renaissance, he was con-vinced that the period had been misunderstood by those who be-lieved that it representeda breakwith the Middle Ages. A revival,in Maravall's mind, is a way of looking at something from a newand different point of view. Hence his belief in an undeniable con-tinuity that linked the culture of the so-called Renaissance to theMiddle Ages.Many of Maravall's early views developed along different linesas hejoined the ongoing discussion on the question of Renaissanceand humanism, a subject to which he returned many times andexplored at great length. His views were often controversial butalways stimulating. Those works in which he deals with the prob-lem of the Renaissance deserve a more detailed examination.In recent decades other studies have appearedthathave made sig-nificant contributions to the field of Renaissance humanism. At alater date, I hope to review these works, together with those ofMaravall that I have not touched on here.GRADUATE CENTERCITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

di camillo sobre humanismo en esp 1

Documents