Notes
Only Connect! An Introduction
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“What is humanism?”: David Nobbs, Second from Last in the Sack Race (1983), in The Complete Pratt (London: Arrow, 2007), 289–91.
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Their worldview has been summed up: Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1999), 9.
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They hope to cultivate humanitas: For a definition encompassing such meanings: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humanitas.
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The human-centered approach: Quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (London: W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), vol. 2, 463–65. A similar line is reported by Socrates in Plato, Theaetetus, 160c–d.
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Here is the novelist: E. M. Forster, from a letter to The Twentieth Century (1955), quoted in Humanist Anthology, ed. M. Knight (London: Rationalist Press Association/Barrie & Rockliff, 1961), 155–56. Forster served as vice president of the Ethical Union in the 1950s, and president of the Cambridge Humanists Society from 1959 until his death; he was also a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK) from 1963.
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A notorious case: Mashal Khan: https://humanists.international/2017/04/humanist-murdered-fellow-university-students-alleged-blasphemy/. As of 2021, thirteen countries in the world still had the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy.
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The organization Humanists UK: See a letter from Bob Churchill of IHEU (now Humanists International) pointing out the inappropriateness of Plato and Aristotle: http://iheu.org/uk-rejects-asylum-application-humanist-fails-name-ancient-greek-philosophers/ Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/26/you-dont-need-to-know-plato-and-aristotle-to-be-a-humanist and https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/26/philosophers-urge-rethink-of-pakistani-humanist-hamza-bin-walayat-asylum.
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More generally, they argued: On the case overall, personal communication with Hamza bin Walayat. Also: https://humanists.international/2018/01/uk-rejects-asylum-application-humanist-fails-name-ancient-greek-philosophers/. And: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/17/pakistani-humanist-denied-uk-asylum-after-failing-to-identify-plato.
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And, in the wake: The new Home Office training procedures: https://humanists.uk/2019/05/17/success-humanists-uk-begins-delivering-training-to-home-office-staff-on-asylum-claims/.
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The first discussion: Jeaneane Fowler, “The Materialists of Classical India,” in The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, ed. A. Copson and A. C. Grayling (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2015), 98–101, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka.
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The philosopher Ajita Kesakambalī: The Long Discourses of the Buddha, a translation of the Dīgha Nikāya by Maurice Walsh (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), 96 (division I, chap. 2). See Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri, Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 39.
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A key component: Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in The Art of Happiness, trans. George K. Strodach (London: Penguin, 2012), 159–60.
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Then there was Protagoras: From Protagoras’s lost work On the Gods, quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 465.
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The biographer Diogenes Laertius: “Protagoras,” in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 465. Plutarch also mentioned Protagoras’s being banished, and explained that it was because of the era’s intolerance toward anyone who attributed events to natural causes rather than divine powers: Plutarch, “Life of Nicias,” in Lives, trans. John Dryden, rev. A. H. Clough (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), vol. 2, 266.
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the American author Zora Neale Hurston: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, reprinted in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 764.
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The tradition lives on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_Sherine. Bishopsgate Institute Library, London, BHA papers. BHA 1/17/148, on the atheist bus campaign, including a BHA report, “Atheist Bus Campaign: Why Did It Work?” See https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/successful-campaigns/atheist-bus-campaign/.
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It was even formulated: Ingersoll’s happiness credo appears in various formats, including in An Oration on the Gods (January 29, 1872) (Cairo, IL: Daily Bulletin Steam Book & Job Print, 1873), 48. He also recited it on a phonograph record, on January 22, 1899. The cylinder is on display at the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, Dresden, New York, and can be heard online at https://youtu.be/rLLapwIoEVI.
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This principle of human interconnectivity: Terence, Heauton tomorumenos (The Self-Tormenter), act 1, scene 1, line 77. Betty Radice’s translation in Terence, Phormio and Other Plays (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967), 86, reads: “I’m human, so any human interest is my concern.”
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A similar thought: “Ubuntu (philosophy),” New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ubuntu_(philosophy). For a modern examination of it as a humanist philosophy, see Stanlake J. W. T. Samkange, Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy (Salisbury, UK: Graham, 1990).
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The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 1999), 35.
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Over the years after his death: “Ethical wisdom” is Karyn L. Lai’s translation in An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 24. See Jiyuan Yu, “Humanism: Chinese Conception of,” from the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2005), available at http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/humanism-chinese-conception.
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When disciples asked Kongzi: Confucius, The Analects, 12:2 (shu in relation to ren) and 15:24 (as guide to life). See the commentary on the latter by Annping Chin in her translation, The Analects (New York: Penguin, 2014), 259.
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The Jewish theologian: Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder.
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The Hindu Mahābhārata and Christian scriptures: “Men endued with intelligence and cleansed souls should always behave towards other creatures after the manner of that behaviour which they like others to observe towards themselves.” Mahābhārata XIII: 5571, ed. Pratāpa Chandra Rāy (Calcutta: Bhārata Press, 1893), vol. 9, 562. Book XIII is the Book of Instruction; the context concerns vegetarianism. “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Matthew 7:12. Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, in Man and Superman (Westminster, UK: Constable, 1903), 227.
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One of Kongzi’s later followers: Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2008), 46–47 (2A6: child), 149–50 (6A6: seed). Van Norden remarks that Mengzi does allow for rare cases of damage in childhood, such that the seeds are destroyed so early that they are not viable; see 150–52 (6A7–8).
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Being well educated: Confucius, The Analects, 2:20.
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In Greece, Protagoras was a believer: Plato, Protagoras, 328b. In Protagoras and Meno, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1956), 60.
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The myth of Prometheus’s theft: The myth is related by Plato in Protagoras, 320d–325d.
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The Roman statesman Cicero: Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum), with the argument for human excellence in book II.
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The genre reached its height: Giannozzo Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence (De dignitate et excellentia hominis), ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2018), 105–11 (book II).
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“Ours indeed are those inventions”: Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence, 139–41 (book III).
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Manetti celebrates the physical pleasures: Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence, 205 (book IV). Manetti’s work was an expansion of earlier, briefer works by Antonio da Barga and Bartolomeo Facio; see Brian Copenhaver’s introduction to this translation, vii–xvii. Also see Manetti’s book IV, translated by Bernard Murchland in Two Views of Man: Pope Innocent III, On the Misery of Man; Giannozzo Manetti, On the Dignity of Man (New York: Ungar, [1966]), 61–103.
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In Confucian thought: On Xunzi, see Bryan W. Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 163–84. On translating the word e as “detestable,” see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xunzi/.
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The fourth-century theologian Nemesius of Emesa: Nemesius, On the Nature of Man, trans. R. W. Sharples and P. J. Van der Eijk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 50.
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But a few years later: Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, book XIV, chap. 11.
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The most devastating attack: Innocent III, De miseria humanae conditionis, trans. Bernard Murchland in Two Views of Man: Pope Innocent III, On the Misery of Man; Giannozzo Manetti, On the Dignity of Man (New York: Ungar, [1966]), 4–10 (stages of life’s misery), 13 (book I, §13: vanity), 4 (book I, §1: worms), 9 (book I, §8: “vile ignobility”).
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“Do not look for satisfaction”: Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 182, in Pensées, and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi, ed. Anthony Levi (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 54.
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In lectures of 1901–1902: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1988), 454.
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They took away ordinary human freedoms: This is one reason Plato is an inappropriate choice as an example of a humanist philosopher, by the way. His Republic advocates a society in which all citizens must follow the role allotted to their caste. For some castes, all arts and literature are censored, so that they will not be exposed to ideas inconsistent with the larger state goals. In The Laws, he goes still further in his call for censorship and rigid social structures—and people are expected to subordinate themselves not only to the state but also to the principle of the divine. The philosopher Karl Popper, himself a committed humanist, argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that these two works prefigured his own century’s totalitarianism.
Chapter 1. The Land of the Living
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The older of the two: The stories from Petrarch’s early life come from his letters: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters / Rerum familiarum, libri I–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), vol. 3, 203 (Fam. XXI, 15: exile); vol. 1, 8 (Fam. I, 1: near drowning); vol. 2, 59 (Fam. X, 3: hairstyles). All subsequent references to Petrarch’s Letters on Familiar Matters in this chapter are to this edition.
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A setback occurred: This story is told in Petrarch, Letters of Old Age [Rerum senilium, books I–XVIII], trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), vol. 2, 601 (Sen. XVI, 1). All subsequent references to Petrarch’s Letters of Old Age in this chapter are to this edition.
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Many of these verses: Petrarch’s Virgil manuscript, augmented with his notes and a miniature painted by his friend Simone Martini, is now in Milan’s Ambrosian Library: S.P. 10/27 olim. Images may be found online at https://www.ambrosiana.it/en/opere/the-ambrosian-virgil-of-francesco-petrarca/. The notes are translated in Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: Phoenix/University of Chicago Press, 1961), 77.
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Later retreats included: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 3, 22–23 (Fam. XVII, 5).
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The custom had recently been revived: Ronald G. Witt, “In the Footsteps of the Ancients”: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 118–20.
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A later description by: Giannozzo Manetti, Biographical Writings, ed. and trans. Stefano U. Baldassari and Rolf Bagemihl (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2003), 75.
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At times, everything seemed: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 2, 28 (Sen. I, 6).
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Sending one such list: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 1, 160 (Fam. III, 18).
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“Who knows if”: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 2, 603 (Sen. XVI, 1).
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In a letter, he describes: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 3, 64 (Fam. XVIII, 12).
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At other times, Petrarch found comfort: “Tormented and sluggish” and the intervention story: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 2, 199–200 (Fam. XIII, 7).
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His most important production: The Livy manuscript is in the British Library, Harley 2493. Facsimile edition: G. Billanovich, La tradizione del testo di Livio e le origini dell’umanesimo, vol. 2: Il Livio del Petrarca e del Valla: British Library, Harleian 2493 (Padua: Antenore, 1981).
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A particularly energizing discovery: Cicero, Pro Archia (62 CE), para. 16, in Cicero, The Speeches, trans. N. H. Watts (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 25.
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Petrarch found the full text: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 2, 603–4 (Sen. XVI, 1). On this and other such stories, see also L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), 131–32.
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Another work by Cicero: He found Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus. Giuseppe F. Mazzotta, “Petrarch’s Epistolary Epic: Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarum libri),” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 309–20, this on 309.
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Some of the letters tell long stories: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 1, 172–80 (Fam. IV, 1, to Dionigi da Borgo, April 26 [1336]).
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The letters are literary constructions: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 3, 207 (Fam. XXI, 15: hospitality); vol. 1, 8 (Fam. I, 1: Metabus and Camilla. The story is from Virgil, Aeneid, book XI, lines 532–56).
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He actually does direct one: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 2, 672–79 (Sen. XVIII, 1, “To Posterity”).
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For Petrarch, books are sociable: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 1, 158 (Fam. III, 18: “They speak”); vol. 2, 256–57 (Fam. XV, 3: frosty air); vol. 3, 187 (Fam. XXI, 10: tripping and Cicero); vol. 3, 317 (Fam. XXIV, 3: “Why did you choose”).
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Born in 1313: Marco Santagata, Boccaccio: Fragilità di un genio (Milan: Mondadori, 2019), 13.
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When his father contemplated: Giovanni Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry (preface and books XIV and XV of Genealogia deorum gentilium), trans. Charles G. Osgood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1930), 131–32 (XV, 10).
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What he did excel at: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 131 (XV, 10).
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the first serious Dante scholar: The lecture series was begun late in Boccaccio’s life. He had earlier discussed Dante’s life and work in Trattatello in laude di Dante, and wrote short introductions to each canto of the Commedia in his own manuscript copies. Sandro Bertelli, introduction to Dantesque Images in the Laurentian Manuscripts of the Commedia (14th–16th Centuries), ed. Ida G. Rao (Florence: Mandragora, 2015), 15.
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He called Petrarch: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 115–16 (XV, 6).
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Yet when it came to assessing: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 132 (XV, 10).
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In one, an abbess is informed: Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, day 9, story 2.
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in one, a great lord summons: Boccaccio, The Decameron, day 1, story 3.
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While writing this: James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 193–94, referring to Laura Regnicoli’s research for the exhibition Boccaccio autore e copista, at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, 2013.
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Boccaccio was active: Mazzotta, “Petrarch’s Epistolary Epic: Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarum libri),” 309–20.
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Boccaccio looked up to Petrarch: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 3, 224–25 (Fam. XXII, 7).
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had made good discoveries: The works he found were Varro’s De lingua latina and Cicero’s Pro Cluentio: see Santagata, Boccaccio: Fragilità di un genio, 159.
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In one strange episode: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 22–25 (Sen. I, 5, to Boccaccio, May 28 [1362]). On this difficult period for Boccaccio, see Santagata, Boccaccio: Fragilità di un genio, 221–33. For Petrarch on the benefits of (cautiously) reading non-Christian classical literature, see “On His Own Ignorance and That of Others,” in Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2003), 333–35.
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Less selfishly, he gave Boccaccio: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 123 (XV, 9).
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In his Genealogy: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 135 (XV, 12).
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“a considerable measure to the enjoyment”: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 1, 291 (Fam. VI, 2).
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The passion for literature: Petrarch may have had some beginner’s lessons from Barlaam of Seminara. See his letter to Nicholas Sygeros, in Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 3, 44–46 (Fam. XVIII, 2). On Barlaam (who died in 1348), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_of_Seminara. My thanks to Peter Mack for alerting me to this.
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“It’s all Greek to me”: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act I, scene 2, line 295, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me.
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Writing to thank him: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 3, 44–46 (Fam. XVIII, 2). The Greek friend is Nicholas Sygeros.
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Again courting the authorities: On his hard work: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 120 (XV, 7).
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“for ever lost in thought”: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 114–15 (XV, 6).
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Boccaccio had a reason: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 114–15 (XV, 6).
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He let Leontius live with him: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 114–15 (XV, 6). On surviving dual-language copies of his translations, and on the whole story in general, see Agostino Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio (Venice and Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1964), especially 25. Petrarch’s copy of the two translations is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: Lat. 7880. I (Iliad) and Lat. 7880. II (Odyssey).
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Petrarch watched from afar: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 156 (Sen. V, 1).
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Petrarch gave him a copy: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 100 (Sen. III, 6).
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Once in Constantinople: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 100 (Sen. III, 6: “shaggier”), 176 (Sen. V, 3: “Where he haughtily”).
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In truth, Petrarch admitted: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 189 (Sen. VI, 1).
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Petrarch seems to have felt: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 189–90 (Sen. VI, 1).
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Back in 1347: Nicola Davis, “5,000-Year-Old Hunter-Gatherer Is Earliest Person to Die with the Plague,” Guardian, June 29, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/29/5000-year-old-hunter-gatherer-is-earliest-person-to-die-with-the-plague.
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A lawyer living in Piacenza: Rosemary Horrox, trans. and ed., The Black Death (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 24–25, quoting Gabriele de’ Mussi, Historia de morbo, a manuscript in the University of Wrocław Library (Ms. R 262, ff. 74–77v.).
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As it spread: Horrox, The Black Death, 22.
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People made efforts: Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1995), 7 (preface).
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Meanwhile, thoughts often turned: Horrox, The Black Death, 105–6.
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One of those who favored: Horrox, The Black Death, 41–45, quoting Louis Heyligen. See also Edwin Mullins, Avignon of the Popes (Oxford, UK: Signal, 2007), 124.
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In Florence the situation: G. H. McWilliam, “Translator’s Introduction” to his translation of Boccaccio, The Decameron, xliii.
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All these details: Boccaccio, The Decameron, 5 (preface). The preceding details of the effects of the plague on countryside and city alike are also from Boccaccio’s preface.
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Long before Boccaccio: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1952), 155 (book II, para. 53).
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Boccaccio’s story was similar: Boccaccio, The Decameron, 8 (preface).
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Boccaccio acknowledges this: McWilliam, “Translator’s Introduction,” xliii–xliv.
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disposing of corpses: In England, for example, records show that bodies were buried in cemeteries rather than in pits, and government business often went on in much the normal way—suggesting a surprising strength in social institutions. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 273.
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“In any public misfortune”: Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 596.
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having destroyed at least a third: Christopher S. Celenza, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (London: Reaktion, 2017), 100. Celenza cites sources giving figures between 30 and 60 percent.
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Petrarch was working in Parma: E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: Phoenix/University of Chicago Press, 1963), 74–76.
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After the news reached him: Mullins, Avignon of the Popes, 141.
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a despairing Latin verse: Petrarch, “Ad se ipsum,” quoted and trans. in Wilkins, Life of Petrarch, 80.
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A letter to his old friend: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 1, 415–20, these quotations on 415, 419 (Fam. VIII, 7).
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More losses would come: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 8 (Sen. I, 2, to Francesco [Nelli], June 8 [Padua, 1361–62]). The same letter mentions the death of “his Socrates.”
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Writing to Boccaccio: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1, 76 (Sen. III, 1: numbed), 92 (Sen. III, 2: “terrible fear”).
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He also resumed: Petrarch, My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2016), 117. The work was begun in 1347 and continued through 1349, with further revisions in 1353.
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writing to his Socrates: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 1, 415 (Fam. VIII, 7).
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“Unprovided with original learning”: Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1990), 82.
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“But when you have seen vicious mobs”: Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (London: Penguin, 2008), 91–92. My emphasis added on “then.”
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Cicero drew a distinction: Cicero, On the Orator [De oratore], 3:55, in Ancient Rhetoric from Aristotle to Philostratus, trans. and ed. Thomas Habinek (London: Penguin, 2017), 181. (“If we grant felicity in speaking to those who want nothing to do with virtue, rather than creating orators we give weapons to madmen.”)
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Another rhetorician: Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (London: W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), vol. 4, 355–57, 359 (XII.i.1: gift), (XII.i.7: arms). Neither this nor Cicero’s De oratore was available in a full version in Petrarch’s time.
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he writes to a friend: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 2, 380–91 (Sen. X, 4, to Donato Apenninigena [Albanzani], Padua, 1368).
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Petrarch’s book takes the form: Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), vol. 1, 17 (body), 177 (elephants) (both book I). Petrarch began this work in 1354 and finished it in 1360.
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In the other half of the book: Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, vol. 3, 153 (exile), 222 (plague) (both book II).
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Not all sources of misery: Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, vol. 3, 10–11 (seas), 227 (prosthetics), 228 (forehead aglow) (all book II).
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when a friend wrote to him: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, vol. 2, 641, 633n (Sen. XVI, 9, to Dom Jean Birel Limousin, prior of the charterhouse north of Milan, [1354–57]).
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It is never any use: Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, vol. 3, 37 (book II).
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Petrarch’s whole oeuvre: As two eminent historians of early modern humanism have recently commented, loss was a possibility that “always haunted the humanists,” and the humanism of the Italian Renaissance “was born from a profound sense of loss and longing.” See Anthony Grafton, Inky Fingers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 9; and James Hankins, Virtue Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 1.
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he looked back on past centuries: Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, 8–9 (Boccaccio’s preface).
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“My fate is to live”: Petrarch, Africa, IX, 451–57. Quoted in T. E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’ ” Speculum 17 (1942), 226–42, this on 240. Mommsen also quotes and translates other allusions by Petrarch to a dark age, notably a description of recent centuries as times of “darkness and dense gloom,” through which only a few keen-eyed geniuses could see. (Petrarch, Apologia contra cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias, quoted by Mommsen, 227.) On the “gap,” see Alexander Lee, Pit Péporté, and Harry Schnitker, eds., Renaissance Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c. 1300–c. 1550 (Leiden, Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2010).
Chapter 2. Raising Ships
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And in such cases: In the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy, for example, parchment was cleaned in one case by “gently washing off the ink of Cicero’s De republica,” to make room for a section of Augustine’s study of the biblical Psalms (Vat. Lat. 5757): https://spotlight.vatlib.it/palimpsests/about/vat-lat-5757-inf. On early Christian destruction in general, see Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age (London: Macmillan, 2017).
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Benedict, the sixth-century founder: Pope Gregory I, The Life of Saint Benedict, trans. Terrence Kardong (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), 49.
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Some conservation-minded people: The Letters of S. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, anonymous trans., rev. H. Walford (Oxford, UK: James Parker, 1881), 109–10 (letter XVIII, Ambrose to Emperor Valentinian II, 384 CE).
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When Vesuvius erupted: It was found in 2018. Valeria Piano, “A ‘Historic(al)’ Find from the Library of Herculaneum,” in Seneca the Elder and His Rediscovered Historiae ab initio bellorum civilium [P. Herc.1067] (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110688665-003/html.
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the fascinating al-Kindi: See Peter Adamson, Al-Kindi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Kindi.
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the emperor Charlemagne ordered monks: “From the General Letter of Charlemagne, before 800,” in Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, ed. P. E. Dutton, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 91.
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His contemporary biographer: Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 79 (Einhard, s. 25).
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Charlemagne founded boys’ schools: Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, 74 (Einhard, s. 19).
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He kept nagging: “A Letter of Charles on the Cultivation of Learning, 780–800,” 90.
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Monastic scriptoria could be: The Rule of Benedict, trans. Carolinne White (London: Penguin, 2008), 61 (rule 38: no questions), 21 (rule 6: no jokes), 63 (rule 40: no wine grumbling), 84 (rule 57: no pride in skills). On monks being issued a book a year, see Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 34.
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The grammarian Gunzo of Novara: Anna A. Grotans, Reading in Medieval St. Gall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 49.
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By the 1100s: Notably Haskins, in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
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made from cloth rags: This theory has been proposed by Marco Mostert of Utrecht University; see Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence (London: Chatto & Windus, 2020), 154, and Martin Wainwright, “How Discarded Pants Helped to Boost Literacy,” Guardian, July 12, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jul/12/martinwainwright.uknews4.
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The cathedrals provided a base: Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 67.
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Like Petrarch later: Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 53–64. On his letters, see John of Salisbury, Letters, ed. W. J. Millor and S. J. and H. E. Butler; vol. 1, rev. C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1979–86).
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had made an agreement: Petrarch, “Testament,” in Petrarch’s Testament, ed. and trans. Theodor Mommsen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 68–93, this on 83. For the background on his will and possessions, see Mommsen’s introduction, 45–50.
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His library went: Mommsen, introduction, Petrarch’s Testament, 44; Marco Santagata, Boccaccio: Fragilità di un genio (Milan: Mondadori, 2019), 289 (proviso about open use).
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The most energetic character: David Thompson and Alan F. Nagel, eds. and trans., The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 6, citing Coluccio’s letter to Roberto Guidi, count of Battifolle, August 16, 1374. On Coluccio, see also Berthold L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua: Antenore, 1963), and Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), especially 184–89 on his network of contacts and 183, 421 on his own library.
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Coluccio added twelve more: Giannozzo Manetti, Biographical Writings, ed. and trans. Stefano U. Baldassari and Rolf Bagemihl (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2003), 101.
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He did not marry: Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasiano Memoirs [Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV], trans. William George and Emily Waters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Renaissance Society of America, 1997), 401–2. Vespasiano also mentions Niccolò making his books available to anyone who wished to use them and inviting students to come in to read and discuss books.
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Giannozzo Manetti wrote: Manetti, Biographical Writings, 127.
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Poggio Bracciolini, whose lively personality: Vespasiano, The Vespasiano Memoirs, 353 (“strong invective”). The punch-up was with the Greek scholar George of Trebizond. See Henry Field, The Intellectual Struggle for Florence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 284.
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At Cluny Abbey: On Vitruvius, see Carol Herselle Krinsky, “Seventy-Eight Vitruvian Manuscripts,” Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 30 (1967), 36–70. On Quintilian and Cicero, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), 137–38. The Cicero speeches they found were Pro Roscio and Pro Murena.
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Then, probably in Fulda: Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, trans. Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1974), 88 (Poggio to Niccolò, April 14 [1425]). On Lucretius’s work, see also Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), especially 4, where she mentions the hoarding. See also Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2010).
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In 1423, while working: Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters, 84 (Poggio to Niccolò, Rome, November 6, 1423).
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a highly humanistic amusement: Barbara C. Bowen, ed., One Hundred Renaissance Jokes: An Anthology (Birmingham, UK: Summa, 1988), 5–9, this on 9.
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In their copying and writing: L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), 139; A. C. de la Mare, The Handwriting of the Italian Humanists, vol. 1, fascicule 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, for the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, 1973). The latter gives examples from the handwriting of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, Niccolò Niccoli, Poggio Bracciolini, and others.
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The humanists dismissed: Apparently it was Lorenzo Valla who first used this term to describe handwriting, in the preface to his Elegances of the Latin Language (Elegantiae linguae Latinae, libri sex). See E. P. Goldschmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance: Three Lectures on Type, Illustration, Ornament (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 2.
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Petrarch, during several visits: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters / Rerum familiarum, libri I–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), vol. 1, 292 (here and there), 294 (expertise) (Fam. VI, 2, to Giovanni Colonna). On Gregorius’s De mirabilibus urbis Romae, see Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 33–34.
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“Not such a hard discovery”: Matthew Kneale, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings (London: Atlantic, 2018), 189.
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Poggio wrote his own description: Poggio Bracciolini, “The Ruins of Rome,” trans. Mary Martin McLaughlin, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1977), 379–84; this is Poggio’s dialogue with Antonio Loschi on ruins, from the first book of his De varietate fortunae, or On the Inconstancy of Fortune, written 1431–1448. On other explorations, see, for example, his climb to read inscriptions at Porta Sanguinaria, Ferentino, in Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters, 129–30 (Poggio to Niccolò, September 15 [1428]).
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Two youths who lived: Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome (London: Vintage, 2008), 25.
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A few travelers: See Cyriac of Ancona, Life and Early Travels and Later Travels, ed. and trans. Charles Mitchell, Edward W. Bonar, and Clive Foss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 (Later), 2015 (Early).
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both mean the same thing: My thanks to Peter Mack for this point.
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Also interested in Roman origins: Leon Battista Alberti, Delineation of the City of Rome [Descriptio urbis Romae], ed. Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan, trans. Peter Hicks (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007). See also Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 167; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001), 241–43.
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Alberti devised a method: Flavio Biondo, Italy Illuminated, ed. and trans. Jeffrey A. White (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2005–16), this in vol. 1, 189–93, including “fish,” 191 (book II, §47–49). On the ships, see also Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001), 248–49.
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A mosaic was detached: Elisabetta Povoledo, “Long-Lost Mosaic from a ‘Floating Palace’ of Caligula Returns Home,” New York Times, March 14, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/world/europe/caligula-mosaic-ship-italy.html. See also https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/nov/22/priceless-roman-mosaic-coffee-table-new-york-apartment, with more information on how it came to New York.
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The full raising: For information on the Nemi ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi_ships.
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The museum is now alive: https://comunedinemi.rm.it/contenuti/11827/museo-navi.
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Flavio Biondo used it: Flavio Biondo, Italy Illuminated, this in vol. 1, 5. The link to the Nemi ships is pointed out by Anthony Grafton, “The Universal Language: Splendors and Sorrows of Latin in the Modern World,” in Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 138.
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Poggio described the Quintilian manuscript: Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters, 194–95 (Poggio to Guarino Guarini, December 15, 1416).
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The image is slightly spoiled: Vespasiano, The Vespasiano Memoirs, 352.
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Poggio’s friend Cinzio: Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters, 189 (Cinzio to Franciscus de Fiana, undated but apparently summer 1416).
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The bookseller and biographer Vespasiano: Vespasiano da Bisticci, “Proemio della vita dell’Alessandra de’ Bardi,” in Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV, ed. Paolo d’Ancona and Erhard Aeschlimann (Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1951), 543. The English translation abbreviates it, losing this point. In Italian: “In grande oscurità sono gli ignoranti in questa vita”; of writers he says, “Hanno gli scrittori alluminato il mondo, a cavatolo di tanta oscurità in quanta si trovava.” The remark about ignorance as a source of evil is also from this proem.
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Francesco Barbaro, a Venetian scholar: Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters, 196–203, these on 196, 198 (Franciscus Barbarus to Poggio, July 6, 1417).
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“I have a room”: Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book-Hunters, 118 (Poggio to Niccolò Niccoli, Rome, October 21 [1427]).
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No wonder Poggio chose: Poggio Bracciolini, On Avarice [De Avaritia, Basel 1538], trans. Benjamin G. Kohl and Elizabeth B. Welles, in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. B. G. Kohl, R. G. Witt, and E. B. Welles (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1978), 241–89, esp. 257 on avarice being beneficial.
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Far away to the north: Lorenzo Bonoldi, Isabella d’Este: A Renaissance Woman, trans. Clark Anthony Lawrence ([Rimini]: Guaraldi/Engramma, 2015), vol. 1, 11; Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 196–99. See also Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua 1474–1539 (London: John Murray, 1903).
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In 1984, the historian: Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” in Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 12–50, https://nguyenshs.weebly.com/uploads/9/3/7/3/93734528/kelly_did_women_have_a_renaissanace.pdf.
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Or they might flourish: Hrotswitha: in a classic humanistic discovery story, six of her plays were found in the Cloister of St. Emmeram in Regensburg by Conrad Celtis in 1493; he published them as Opera Hrosvite (Nuremberg, 1501), with illustrations by Albrecht Dürer. The manuscript is in the Bavarian State Library. See Lewis W. Spitz, Conrad Celtis: The German Arch-Humanist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 42; E. H. Zeydel, “The Reception of Hrotsvitha by the German Humanists after 1493,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44 (1945), 239–49; Leonard Forster, introduction to Selections from Conrad Celtis, ed. and trans. Leonard Forster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 11. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrotsvitha. More has been written about Hildegard; see, for example, Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen (London: Headline, 2001).
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An outstanding early example: On Christine de Pizan’s early life and work, see Sarah Lawson’s introduction to her translation of The Treasure of the City of Ladies, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2003), xv–xvii.
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In 1405, she wrote: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), 9 (part 1, s. 2).
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women such as Laura Cereta: Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr., eds., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy (Asheville: Pegasus/University of North Carolina at Asheville, 2000), 81–84.
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Another letter writer: Angelo Poliziano, Letters, ed. and trans. Shane Butler (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2006), vol. 1, 189–91.
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One of her letters: Translated in King and Rabil, Her Immaculate Hand, 77. The same source gives information on her later life (48–50).
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The poet Vittoria Colonna: Ramie Targoff, Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), 16.
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The humanistic education: See, for example, the discussion in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), 23–24. On humanistic education generally in this era, see also Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
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Humanistic tutors liked to contrast: This example is given by Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), 154 (book I, chap. 26).
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Princess Mary’s teacher: Juan Luis Vives, In Pseudodialecticos, trans. and ed. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1979), 84 (“moral philosophy”), 88 (“the true disciplines”).
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Guarino wrote in praise: Both the Guarini letter and the dialogue (by Angelo Decembrio, De politia litteraria, 1462) are quoted in Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 46 (letter), 30 (dialogue).
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The duke there, Federico da Montefeltro: Julia Cartwright, Baldassare Castiglione: His Life and Letters (London: John Murray, 1908), vol. 1, 60–61 (treasure), 62 (copyists).
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The atmosphere of a slightly later generation: Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 47 (also 63, tennis and tightrope-walking).
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should behave with sprezzatura: On sprezzatura and its translation, see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995), 69–72.
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Castiglione claims that he wrote: Castiglione, “Dedication,” Book of the Courtier, 31. For the real story, see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, 22–23.
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One admired scholar: Ezio Raimondi, Codro e l’umanesimo a Bologna (Bologna: C. Zuffi, 1987), 11–14; Carlo Malagola, Della vita e delle opere di Antonio Urceo detto Codro: Studi e ricerche (Bologna: Fava e Garagnani, 1878), 164.
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Printing, both with and without: Endymion Wilkinson, “Woodblock Printing,” in Chinese History: A New Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2012), 910.
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Up to ten thousand: Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence (London: Chatto & Windus, 2020), 142. For the numbers, he refers to Janet Ing, “The Mainz Indulgences of 1454/5: A Review of Recent Scholarship,” British Library Journal 1 (Spring 1983), 19. The indulgences were for those who donated money for defending Cyprus against the Turks.
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Like most inventions: Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes [De laude scriptorium], trans. Roland Behrendt, ed. Klaus Arnold (Lawrence, KS: Coronado, 1974), especially 53–63 (spiritual exercise) and 35 (parchment more durable). The introduction mentions his reason for printing his book (15).
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As Edward Gibbon wrote: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 2000), 727 (chap. 68)
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The best use of such designs: Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1979), 119.
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At one extreme: Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62.
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As the book historian: E. P. Goldschmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 51.
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It comes with woodcuts: Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1979), 122.
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Small books were not new: Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 43 (i, ii).
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One of the new authors: Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry; Etna, ed. and trans. Mary P. Chatfield (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2005), 194–249, this on 243. On his ascent and on Aldus’s printing of the book, see Williams, Pietro Bembo on Etna.
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But the letters are clean and clear: Gareth D. Williams, Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 202n. For more on the semicolon: Cecelia Watson, Semicolon (London: Fourth Estate, 2020). A similar symbol had been used in manuscript times, but only for representing abbreviations of common Latin words.
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It amounts to a demonstration: Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 315.
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Among the many who joined: Erasmus’s Apologia adversus rapsodias calumniosarum querimoniarum Alberti Pii (1531), translated by Margaret Mann Phillips in her The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study with Translations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 68. Also on Erasmus’s stay with Aldus, see Erasmus, “Penny-Pinching” [Opulentia sordida] (1531), in The Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 488–99.
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Aldus had friends: Aldus Manutius, The Greek Classics, ed. and trans. N. G. Wilson (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2016), 289–91.
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Erasmus said of Aldus: Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus, 181.
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Beyond the real planet: Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 95.
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Aldus rightly congratulated himself: Aldus Manutius, The Greek Classics, ed. and trans. N. G. Wilson, 205–7 (“Nun o, nunc, iuvenes, ubique in urbe / flores spargite: vere nanque primo / Aldus venit en, Aldus ecce venit!”).
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In one of Aldus’s prefaces: Aldus Manutius, The Greek Classics, 99.
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Erasmus compared editorial work: R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990–93), vol. 2, 158, citing a letter from Erasmus to Thomas Ruthall, March 7, 1515.
Chapter 3. Provocateurs and Pagans
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When the emperor Constantine the Great: For the text of the Donation, see Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2007), 162–83. On its historical context and how it was used, see Johannes Fried, “Donation of Constantine” and “Constitutum Constantini”: The Misinterpretation of a Fiction and Its Original Meaning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
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The Donation document: Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), 55. Doubt was cast especially by Nicholas of Cusa in 1432–1433.
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The poet Maffeo Vegio: Maffeo Vegio to Lorenzo Valla, Pavia, August 26 [1434]: Lorenzo Valla, Correspondence, ed. and trans. Brendan Cook (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2013), 35–37. The work he was referring to was the Repastinatio.
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Bartolomeo Facio, summed him up: Facio’s first Invective, quoted in Maristella Lorch, introduction to Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure: De Voluptate, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris, 1977), 8. Valla’s other great enemy in Naples scholarly life was Antonio Beccadelli, known as Panormita.
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Valla acknowledged his own bumptious character: Lorenzo Valla to Cardinal Trevisan (1443), translated in Salvatore I. Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla’s Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and Innovation in Early Renaissance Humanism,” in “Lorenzo Valla: A Symposium,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996), 9–26, this on 9.
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His attack begins: Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, 67.
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First he uses the methods: Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, 11–15 (is it plausible?), 43 (documentation?).
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Following these blows: Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, 67 (satraps), 97 (felt socks etc.).
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Valla knew he was on firm ground: N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 69–72. These works were commissioned by Pope Nicholas V in Rome, at a time when Valla was back in favor with the papacy.
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“How brilliant Valla is!”: Rudolph Langen of Munster, writing to Antony Vrye (or Liber) of Soest, February 27, 1469, quoted in P. S. Allen, The Age of Erasmus (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1914), 23.
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An alternative image: Lorenzo Valla, Dialectical Disputations, ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver and Lodi Nauta (Cambridge, MA: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2012). Unfortunately, a sixteenth-century editor replaced the earlier title with the dull Dialecticae disputationes, or Dialectical Disputations, which stuck; see the editors’ introduction, x–xi.
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Valla also redug the texts: Livy: BL Harley 2493. Facsimile: Giuseppe Billanovich, La tradizione dal testo di Livio e le origini dell’umanesimo, vol. 2: Il Livio del Petrarca e del Valla: British Library, Harleian 2493 (Padua: Antenore, 1981). Valla’s amendments: Emendationes sex librorum Titi Livi, written in 1446–1447.
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In his Annotations to the New Testament: Lorenzo Valla, In Latinam Novi Testamenti interpretationem ex collatione Graecorum exemplarium adnotationes, written and revised through the 1440s. See Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy, 73, and L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), 144. On Valla’s New Testament textual criticism, see also Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 32–69.
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Its main problem was not: William J. Connell, introduction to “Lorenzo Valla: A Symposium,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996), 1–7, this on 2. See Valla’s On Free Will, trans. Charles Edward Trinkaus Jr., in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 155–82, translator’s introduction, 147–54. See also Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 216–27.
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Valla had written the work: Valla, On Pleasure: De Voluptate, 69 (Stoic: animals), 101, 109, 131 (Epicurean: pleasures), 285–87 (Christian: heavenly ones better), 91 (Lorenzo: “My soul inclines”).
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“What in Heaven’s name”: Lorenzo Valla to Eugenius IV, November 27 [1434], in Valla, Correspondence, 43. See also Lorch, introduction to Valla, On Pleasure: De Voluptate, 27.
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That was one of the main reasons: Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla’s Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and Innovation in Early Renaissance Humanism,” 9–26, this on 9.
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This allowed him to live: Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 143; G. W. Bowersock, introduction to his translation of Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, ix.
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When he died in 1457: Jill Kraye, “Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions of Renaissance Humanism,” Comparative Criticism 23 (2001), 37–55, this 37–38 (with image of the tomb). Niebuhr told students of finding the paving slab, in a lecture on the history of Rome at the University of Bonn in 1828–1829. The historian Francesco Cancellieri rescued it soon after that.
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His commentary on the New Testament: R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990–93), vol. 2, 44–45.
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Like Valla, he preferred: Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla’s Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine,” 9–26, this on 25.
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They would follow him: A notable example is Isaac Casaubon, who in De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI of 1614 showed that the “hermetic” texts beloved of Renaissance Neoplatonists were not ancient Egyptian as they had thought, but written by later Christians, which explained why the ideas in them seemed so uncannily to prefigure Christianity. See Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983), 78–93.
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As he concluded this letter: “To restore the others to their senses” and preceding quotations are from Lorenzo Valla to Joan Serra, Gaeta, August 13 [1440], in Valla, Correspondence, 75–97.
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Valla seemed to fancy himself: Poggio Bracciolini to Bartolomeo Ghiselardi, 1454, translated in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), 80. The Latin in fuller form is: “Itaque opus esset non verbis, sed fustibus, et clava Herculis ad hoc monstrum perdomandum, et discipulos suos.” See Salvatore I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1972), 137. Valla was teaching in Rome during this period. See also an earlier letter from Francesco Filelfo to both Poggio and Valla, March 7, 1453, begging them to get over their quarrel, in Valla, Correspondence, 273.
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One reason Poggio had: On all this, see Ciceronian Controversies, ed. JoAnn DellaNeva, trans. Brian Duvick (Cambridge, MA: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2007), including Angelo Poliziano to Paolo Cortesi, vowing to avoid non-Ciceronian terms, 3–5.
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Petrarch, who was less uncritical: Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters / Rerum familiarum, libri I–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–85), vol. 3, 314–16 (Fam. XXIV, 2, to Pulice da Vicenza, a poet, who had also been present on the occasion).
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While living in a hermit’s retreat: “Ciceronianus es, non Christianus.” The story is told in Jerome’s letter to the lady Eustochium, the daughter of his disciple Paula, 384 CE. Here as translated in Eugene F. Rice Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 3. Also in Saint Jerome, Selected Letters, trans. F. A. Wright (London: W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933), 53–158, with the dream on 127–29.
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Commenting on this: Valla, in the preface to book IV of his Elegances: Lorenzo Valla, “In quartum librum elegantiarum praefatio: Prefazione al quarto libro delle Eleganze,” in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Turin: Einaudi, 1976–77), vol. 5, 612–23, this on 614–15. See also Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance, 86.
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Longolius’s problem was pointed out: Erasmus, “The Ciceronian,” trans. Betty I. Knott, ed. A. H. T. Levi, in Collected Works, vol. 28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 430–35.
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The very stones of Rome: On the background to Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, for which the artist consulted his personal humanist adviser Angelo Poliziano: Frank Zöllner, Sandro Botticelli (Munich: Prestel, 2009), 135, 140–41.
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Petrarch reassured himself: Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Others,” in Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2003), 333.
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His Fourth Eclogue mentions: Virgil, Eclogues, IV.
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the poet Faltonia Betitia Proba: In Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi. See E. Clark and D. Hatch, The Golden Bough, the Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cento_Vergilianus_de_laudibus_Christi. Twelfth-century scholars, especially in the school of Chartres, used the word integumentum, or “outer covering,” to describe this type of classical text, meaning that the surface was a mere shawl or cloak hiding a deeper meaning: Peter Adamson, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 96–97.
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This is why Dante: Dante, Inferno, canto 4, line 39 (Virgil); canto 10, lines 13–15 (Epicurus).
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As Erasmus had one: Erasmus, “The Ciceronian,” 388 (Diana), 396 (museums), 383 (flamens and vestals).
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During the 1460s, several men: Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13; Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 95–97 (with samples of their poetry); Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 89–90 (plays).
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A report sent home: Translated in D’Elia, A Sudden Terror, 88.
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This was plausible: Ronald G. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 341–43.
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“Before boys have reached”: D’Elia, A Sudden Terror, 82. D’Elia is the source for most of the rest of this account of the Roman Academy and its persecution, except where otherwise noted.
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Disliking the humanists: J. F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 93.
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Pomponio wrote, thanking him: Translated in D’Elia, A Sudden Terror, 181. Also, for Rodrigo’s surprise at their eloquence: 170.
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He published a recipe book: B. Platina, De honesta voluptate et valetudine, written in the mid-1460s but published only later. John Verriano, “At Supper with Leonardo,” Gastronomica 8, no. 1 (2008), 75–79.
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Platina also wrote: Platina, Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum aa. 1–1474 (Venice: J. Manthen and J. de Colonia, 1479).
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All the same, its members: Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance, 16; D’Elia, A Sudden Terror, 184. A student’s notes survive of a tour through the Roman ruins, conducted for a foreign visitor sometime after 1484: Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988), 76–77.
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In his Praise of the City of Florence: Leonardo Bruni, Laudatio florentinae urbis, trans. Hans Baron, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, trans. and ed. G. Griffiths, J. Hankins, and D. Thompson (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 116–17 (nothing out of tune), 121 (industrious and urbane).
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And, as he wrote elsewhere: Leonardo Bruni, “Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi” (1428), trans. Gordon Griffiths, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, trans. and ed. G. Griffiths, J. Hankins, and D. Thompson (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 121–27, this on 126. Nanni Strozzi had died fighting for the city in 1427.
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According to Thucydides: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, book 2, §35–46.
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Yet in both cases the humanistic ideal: Historians have disagreed about whether the Florentine ideas of this period are best described as “civic humanism” or not. The term is associated particularly with the historian Hans Baron, who highlighted their concern with political and civic commitments more than with literary or philosophical matters for their own sake: Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). On this, see also James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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They were particularly encouraged: J. Thiem, introduction to his edition of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. J. Thiem et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 5–6.
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A central figure in the group: Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, book 3, chap. 3, trans. J. L. Burroughs, Journal of the History of Ideas 5, no. 2 (April 1944), 227–42, this on 235.
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Recent Pico scholars have tried: Brian P. Copenhaver details why the “dignity of man” title does not properly belong to it, in Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and his Oration in Modern Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 28–29. On the general reception of Pico and his work, see Brian P. Copenhaver and William G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “Symbol of His Age”: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Droz, 1981).
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In the beginning, goes Pico’s version: Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 121, para. 29 (“shaper of yourself”), 123, paras. 31–32 (chameleon).
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Those were in fact: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990), especially 102–4 on Leonardo and Alberti.
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Leon Battista Alberti seems: Leon Battista Alberti, The Life, in R. Watkins, “L. B. Alberti in the Mirror: An Interpretation of the Vita with a New Translation,” Italian Quarterly 30, no. 117 (Summer 1989), 5–30. The account was written in 1437 or 1438; Riccardo Fubini established in 1972 that the author was Alberti himself. See Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001), 17–18.
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Besides designing buildings: Leon Battista Alberti: Della pittura [De pictura], written in Tuscan in 1435–1436 and Latin in 1439–1441; De re aedificatoria, written between 1443 and 1452; De statua, begun circa 1450 and published in 1460.
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He was an expert surveyor: Leon Battista Alberti, Delineation of the City of Rome [Descriptio urbis Romae], ed. Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan, trans. Peter Hicks (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007). See also Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 241–43. My thanks to Stefano Guidarini for our conversation on Alberti and Roman buildings.
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Each of his fields: Leon Battista Alberti, Ludi matematici [Ludi rerum mathematicarum] (written 1450–1452), ed. R. Rinaldi (Milan: Guanda, 1980). See Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 167.
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Applying the same principle: All these quotations are from Alberti, The Life, 7–15.
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Vitruvian Man was: Vitruvius, De architectura [On Architecture], with woodcut illustrations by Cesare Cesariano (Como: G. da Ponte, 1521), book 3, §1.
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Even designers of printing fonts: See the font designed for Jean Grolier by Geoffroy Tory in 1529: Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury, trans. George B. Ives (New York: Grolier Club, 1927).
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Michelangelo Buonarroti followed: The sketch and wooden model are still kept in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence; see William E. Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21, 31.
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Even the international symbol: On the design of the Happy Human symbol, with Denis Barrington’s original drawing of 1963 and a note by Andrew Copson, circa 2001, see British Humanist Association papers in the Bishopsgate Institute Library, London: BHA 1/8/11.
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Interestingly, Humanists UK has now: https://humanists.uk. Thanks to Andrew Copson for explaining the meaning of the new symbol.
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But without adjustment: Vitruvius, De architectura.
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Immanuel Kant was surely closer: Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, trans. Allen W. Wood, in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107–20, this on 113.
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But then he heard: His mention of tearing up his Plato writings was made in a sermon of 1495; quoted in Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 8. On Savonarola generally, see also Lauro Martines, Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Florence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).
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While in this world: Girolamo Savonarola, All Souls’ Day sermon of November 2, 1496, in Selected Writings: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498, trans. and ed. Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 46.
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To explain his reasons: Weinstein, Savonarola, 12–13. The tract was later given the title On Contempt for the World [De contemptu mundi] by biographers, summing up its message.
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Having taken his monastic vows: Weinstein, Savonarola, 22–23.
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Lorenzo at that time: Lorenzo’s death is described vividly by Poliziano in a letter of May 18, 1492: Angelo Poliziano, Letters, ed. and trans. Shane Butler (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2006), vol. 1, 239. Lorenzo’s approach to Savonarola may have been Pico’s idea.
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Yet many of the other: Weinstein, Savonarola, 119 and (on Marsilio Ficino’s losing enthusiasm around this time) 144. Pico remained loyal, but it did him no good: after he died in 1494, Savonarola announced from the pulpit that, according to reliable sources, Pico had not made it to heaven but only to purgatory: Savonarola’s sermon of Sunday, November 23, 1494, quoted in Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 167, 184.
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As a witness wrote: Letter from the orator Paolo Somenzi to Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, describing Carnival of February 16, 1496, translated in Savonarola, Selected Writings, 219.
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In following years, the processions: Descriptions of 1497 bonfires in Savonarola, Selected Writings, 244–58.
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There they went: In A Life of Savonarola (anonymous, although previously attributed to Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi), in Savonarola, Selected Writings, 257.
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Fra Bernardino da Siena: Quoted in Weinstein, Savonarola, 72.
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And if the books were: Savonarola, Selected Writings, 346.
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He would also have liked: Savonarola’s statements come mainly from a sermon of December 14, 1494, translated in Weinstein, Savonarola, 155–56.
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The Florentine authorities did not: Weinstein, Savonarola, 295–96 (citing an account by Luca Landucci of the execution), 298 (the bell). The bell was supposed to be exiled for fifty years, but in fact it was brought back in 1509; it is now in the Museum of San Marco, Florence. For an account of the bell’s trial, punishment, and restoration, see Daniel M. Zolli and Christopher Brown, “Bell on Trial,” Renaissance Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Spring 2019), 54–96.
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The other, Niccolò Machiavelli: Machiavelli wrote about Savonarola in several places, including The Prince, chap. 6, where he presents this argument. The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), 52.
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As for his overall philosophy: Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (London: Watts, 1938), 23.
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The worst shock for Rome: André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. This is also the source, on 124, for other details of losses (including Giovio’s), and 92–93, for the “Luther” graffiti (under Raphael’s Disputation of the Holy Sacrament in the Stanze della Segnatura).
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Among others who lost: K. Gouwens, introduction to his translation of Paolo Giovio. Notable Men and Women of Our Time (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2013), ix.
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Later, Giovio left the city: T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 86–88.
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The latter had even written: Pliny the Younger to Voconius Romanus, epistle 9.7, in Letters, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 237.
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He also published a book: Paolo Giovio, Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita (Venice: M. Tramezinus, 1546).
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Sitting near him was: Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, introduction to their translation of Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), vii–viii. See also Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 214.
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Vasari’s work included: Giorgio Vasari’s Six Tuscan Poets (1544), in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The other three poets are Cino da Pistoia, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Guido Cavalcanti—a friend of Dante, and an interesting figure rumored (by Boccaccio) to have been an atheist.
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In the Lives, Vasari: Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 48–49 (rebirth), 47 (historians).
Chapter 4. Marvelous Network
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This was the starting point: Girolamo Fracastoro, Latin Poetry, trans. James Gardner (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2013), 29 (book 1, lines 437–51).
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“Shun tender chitterlings”: Girolamo Fracastoro, Fracastoro’s Syphilis, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Eatough (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 69 (book 2, lines 133–37). Chitterlings are made from the large intestine of a hog; a chine is meat with part of the backbone. In Latin: “Tu teneros lactes, tu pandae abdomina porcae, / Porcae heu terga fuge, et lumbis ne vescere aprinis, / Venatu quamvis toties confeceris apros. / Quin neque te crudus cucumis, non tubera captent, / Neve famem cinara, bulbisve salacibus expe.”
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“Hail great tree”: Fracastoro, Fracastoro’s Syphilis, 107 (book 2, lines 405–12). In Latin: “Salve magna Deum minibus sata semine sacro, / Pulchra comis, spectata novis virtutibus arbos: / Spes hominum, externi decus, et nova Gloria mundi: Fortunata nimis . . . / Ipsa tamen, si qua nostro te carmine Musae / Ferre per ora virum poterunt, hac tu quotue parte / Nosceris, coeloque etiam cantabere nostro.”
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Besides giving rein to: This point is made by the more recent translator James Gardner, in the introduction to his Fracastoro, Latin Poetry, xiii. He drew on works such as Ulrich von Hutten’s De morbo gallico [The French Disease] (1519).
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Sadly, guaiacum, which induces sweating: P. Eppenberger, F. Galassi, and F. Rühli, “A Brief Pictorial and Historical Introduction to Guaiacum—from a Putative Cure for Syphilis to an Actual Screening Method for Colorectal Cancer,” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 83, no. 9 (September 2017), 2118–19, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5555855/.
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This is why, in his 1979 book: Edmund D. Pellegrino, Humanism and the Physician (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 33.
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And the nineteenth-century scientist: T. H. Huxley, “Universities: Actual and Ideal” (University of Aberdeen, 1874), in Science and Education, vol. 3 of Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1910), 189–234, this on 220.
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He reserved special scorn: Petrarch, Letters of Old Age [Rerum senilium, books I–XVIII], trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), vol. 2, 438–49, this on 444 (Sen. XII, 1: vegetables); vol. 1, 167–76, this on 172 (Sen. V, 3: “all are learned”).
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Some thirty years after these remarks: Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, “General Prologue,” lines 443–44.
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They promoted their work: Johann Winter von Andernach (J. Guintherius), preface to his Aliquot libelli (Basel, 1529), sig. A2r-v, translated in Richard J. Durling, “A Chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, nos. 3–4 (1961), 230–305, this on 239.
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Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: Petrarch’s Pliny is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: MS Lat. 6802. The Oxford copy is in the Bodleian Library, MS Auct. T.I.27. See Charles G. Nauert Jr., “Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author,” American Historical Review 84 (1979), 72–85, this on 75n. The German humanist Rodolphus Agricola also carried his Pliny with him everywhere while traveling in Italy: Gerard Geldenhouwer, “Vita,” in Rudolf Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus’s Testimonies, ed and trans. Fokke Akkerman, English trans. Rudy Bremer and Corrie Ooms Beck (Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2012), 91–107, this on 99.
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For humanists, Pliny’s appetite: In particular, the earlier humanist Ermolao Barbaro claimed in Castigationes plinianae (1493) that he had corrected more than five thousand errors, but he added that it was the copyists’ fault. Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 122–25.
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Leoniceno, however, squarely blamed: Niccolò Leoniceno, De Plinii et plurium aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus . . . (Ferrara: I. Maciochius, 1509), f. 21v. On blaming Pliny, see also Angelo Poliziano, Letters, ed. and trans. Shane Butler (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2006), vol. 1, 103–5. On the whole affair, see Nauert, “Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny”; Arturo Castiglioni, “The School of Ferrara and the Controversy on Pliny,” in Science Medicine and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege/Oxford University Press, 1953), vol. 1, 269–79; Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 127–29.
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Like Lorenzo Valla before him: Vivian Nutton, “The Rise of Medical Humanism: Ferrara, 1464–1555,” Renaissance Studies 11 (1997), 2–19, this on 4.
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“Why did nature grant us”: Translated in Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 129, with reference to Leoniceno, De Plinii et aliorum medicorum erroribus liber . . . (Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1529), 65–66.
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Leoniceno dedicated his little treatise: Dipsas were then identified as small venomous snakes mentioned by Lucan and Cato; the New World snakes now bearing the same name are not poisonous at all. Nutton, “The Rise of Medical Humanism: Ferrara, 1464–1555,” 2–19, with reference to Niccolò Leoniceno, De dipsade et pluribus aliis serpentibus (Bologna, 1518; written much earlier than the publication date) on 5.
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In Ferrara, the court physician: On Brasavola: Nutton, “The Rise of Medical Humanism: Ferrara, 1464–1555,” 12–14. On botanical gardens and collections: Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
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Galen had to use: Susan P. Mattern, The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 151.
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Later, a long shadow: Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, book 23, chap. 24.
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As the nineteenth-century pro-anatomy campaigner: [T. Southwood Smith], Use of the Dead to the Living: From the Westminster Review (Albany, UK: Websters and Skinners, 1827), 37.
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The Parisian professor Jacobus Sylvius: Charles D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 9 (vital spirits), 106 (Sylvius); Bernard Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 25. The name Jacobus Sylvius was the Latinized form of Jacques Dubois.
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The real reason is simply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_mirabile.
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Some commentators began suggesting: Berengario da Carpi, translated in Marco Catani and Stefano Sandrone, Brain Renaissance: From Vesalius to Modern Neuroscience (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 154.
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The final blow came: O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 64.
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While still at Louvain: Vesalius in Louvain: O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 64 (body), 69–71 (the commentary, i.e., Vesalius, Paraphrasis, 1537).
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He went on to study: O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 77 (precocity), 318–20 (cutting), 81–82 (lectures). The lecture notes were made by the eighteen-year-old student Vitus Tritonius Athesinus and are in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Vesalius describes his preferences and techniques in the Fabrica.
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It did still include: Vesalius, Tabulae anatomicae (1538), which still showed Galen’s rete mirabile in the third table: see the image online at https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/L0002233.jpg/full/760%2C/0/default.jpg. The rete mirabile is at B. Vesalius confessed to his mistake in the Fabrica; see below.
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Vesalius became annoyed: O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 98–100.
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At last, in 1543: Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel: J. Oporinus, 1543). See also Vesalius, The Fabric of the Human Body, ed. and trans. Daniel H. Garrison and Malcolm H. Hast (Basel: Karger, 2014), an annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions of De humani corporis fabrica libri septem. See the digitized version at http://www.vesaliusfabrica.com/en/original-fabrica.html. On the term fabrica, see O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 139. It could also mean “form of construction,” as if describing a building. See also Daniel H. Garrison, “Why Did Vesalius Title His Anatomical Atlas ‘The Fabric of the Human Body’?,” http://www.vesalius-fabrica.com/en/original-fabrica/inside-the-fabrica/the-name-fabrica.html.
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He blamed both himself: Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, as translated in Catani and Sandrone, Brain Renaissance: From Vesalius to Modern Neuroscience, 152–53.
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This was a good warning: Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, book 5, chap. 15. See Garrison and Hast’s annotation in their translation The Fabric of the Human Body, vol. 2, 1069n40: Vesalius confused it with a part of the labia minora, the nympha.
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It took another Padua anatomist: Realdo Colombo, De re anatomica (Venice: N. Bevilacqua, 1559), 243 (s. 11, lines 6–20). In Latin: “tam pulchram rem, tanta arte effectam, tantae utilitatis gratia.” Colombo’s book was written earlier, in the early 1540s, but not published until 1559. See Mark Stringer and Ines Becker, “Colombo and the Clitoris,” European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 151 (2010), 130–33, and Robert J. Moes and C. D. O’Malley, “Realdo Colombo: ‘On Those Things Rarely Found in Anatomy . . . ,’ ” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 34, no. 6 (1960), 508–28. The clitoris was also described by Gabriele Falloppio, who made notes about it in 1550 and published a description in Observationes anatomicae of 1561. Vesalius never did see the light; in a later book, he asserted that “this new and useless part” existed only in hermaphrodites, not in healthy women. Vesalius, Anatomicarum Gabrielis Falloppii observationum examen (1564), translated in Stringer and Becker, “Colombo and the Clitoris,” 132.
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With a few such exceptions: O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 130–37.
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It is poignant to see: On the influence of such considerations, see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Penguin, 1989).
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He was friends with Realdo Colombo: Stringer and Becker, “Colombo and the Clitoris,” 131.
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Leonardo wrote: “I dissected him”: Martin Clayton and Ron Philo, Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist (London: Royal Collection, 2011), 17.
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He was also rather better educated: Paula Findlen et al., Leonardo’s Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader (Stanford, CA: Stanford Libraries, 2019), catalog of an exhibition held at the Stanford Libraries in 2019 that sought to reconstruct Leonardo’s possible collection based on his lists and other mentions of books.
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Leonardo intended to write: Translated in Clayton and Philo, Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist, 9, with reference to his notebook RL 19037v.
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As Lucretius had said: Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89 (book 3, line 712).
Chapter 5. Human Stuff
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He tried to bestow: Lewis W. Spitz, Conrad Celtis: The German Arch-Humanist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 23.
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“Find out the nature”: Leonard Forster, introduction to Selections from Conrad Celtis, 1459–1508 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 31–33.
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Writing to a fellow teacher: Rudolf Agricola to Jacob Barbireau, June 7, 1484, later published as De formando studio. In Rudolf Agricola, Letters, ed. and trans. Adrie Van der Laan and Fokke Akkerman (Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum; Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 203–19, this on 205–9. “Things themselves” (res ipsas) I took, however, from the French translation of this section: R. Agricola, Écrits sur la dialectique et l’humanisme, ed. Marc van der Poel (Paris: H. Champion, 1997), 264–65 (“tu dois étudier les faits mêmes [res ipsas]”).
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The voracious eagerness of such: Rabelais, Pantagruel, chap. 8, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2006), 47–49.
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In fact, Rabelais had mastered: Johann von Plieningen, “Vita,” in Rudolf Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus’s Testimonies, ed. and trans. Fokke Akkerman, English trans. Rudy Bremer and Corrie Ooms Beck (Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2012), 53–75, this on 71–73. The other details in this paragraph are from the same source, except, on his good accent, Goswinus van Halen, “Vita,” in Rudolf Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus’s Testimonies, 77–89, this on 89. On Agricola’s general effect on people: Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 20–21. Johann von Plieningen was one of two brothers from Agricola’s homeland whom he befriended in Ferrara; he called them “the Plinys” because of their names (and because he loved Pliny).
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his influence on others was greater: He was best known for a work on dialectical invention: De inventione dialectica libri tres (Amsterdam: Alardus, 1539).
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he made an impression: R. J. Schoeck, “Agricola and Erasmus: Erasmus’s Inheritance of Northern Humanism,” in Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius, 1444–1485 (Proceedings of the International Conference at the University of Groningen, October 28–30, 1985), ed. F. Akkerman and A. J. Vanderjagt (Leiden, Netherlands; New York: Brill, 1988), 181–88, this on 181–82.
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along the lines of his advice: Rudolf Agricola to Jacob Barbireau, June 7, 1484, later published as De formando studio, in Agricola, Letters, 203–19, this on 205–9.
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Erasmus and Agricola could have: Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1993), 128.
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Desiderius Erasmus is remembered: On his friendships and correspondence, see Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985–87), which includes some two thousand names of people he knew or mentioned.
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“This incident destroyed all love”: Erasmus, “On Education for Children,” in Collected Works, vol. 26: Literary and Educational Writings, 4: De pueris instituendis / De recta pronuntiatione, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 291–346, this on 326.
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The Deventer monks were probably: Erasmus to Lambertus Grunnius, 1516, quoted in R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990–93), vol. 1, 49.
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“The worst trick it ever played”: E. M. Forster, “Breaking Up” (Spectator, July 28, 1933), in The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Penguin, 1999), 273.
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On the basis of his experiences: Works emerging from his English period include On the Method of Study (De ratione studii, 1511, expanded in 1512 and 1514) and On the Abundant Style (De copia, 1512, with later expansions).
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De civilitate morum puerilium: Erasmus, “On Good Manners for Boys,” trans. Brian McGregor, in Collected Works, vol. 25: Literary and Educational Writings, 3: De conscribendis epistolis formula / De civilitate, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 269–89, especially 276 (Spanish teeth-brushing), 277–78 (gas), 274 (cheerful brow).
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“Manners maketh man”: For the history of this motto, which seems to go back to William of Wykeham in the fourteenth century but was recorded by William Horman in 1519, see Mark Griffith, “The Language and Meaning of the College Motto” (2012), https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/1NCN1%20%282012%29%20Griffith-Manners.pdf.
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Erasmus also taught the habits: Erasmus, On The Method of Study, in Collected Works, vol. 24: Literary and Educational Writings, 2: De copia / De ratione studii, ed. Craig R. Thompson, 661–91, this on 671.
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He gave ample materials: On the concept of copiousness, see especially Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1979).
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This treatise lists ways of varying: Erasmus, Copia, in Collected Works, vol. 24: Literary and Educational Writings, 2: De copia / De ratione studii, 279–660, including 302 (Quintilian), 572–81 (causes, consequences, examples), 411 (customary), 429 (doubt), 431–32 (wheedling), 560–62 (ways of describing dying). For those unfamiliar with the comedy troupe Monty Python, this is a reference to their 1969 parrot sketch, in which John Cleese returns a dead parrot to the pet shop and repeatedly tries to convince the assistant that it really is dead. He varies his terms Erasmianly: “This parrot has ceased to be,” “This is an ex-parrot,” etc.
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His expanding, burgeoning method: The first version, Erasmus, Adagiorum collectanea (1500), is now quite rare: copies are at Harvard, Sélestat, The Hague, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The edition with 4,251 adages was that of 1533. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 1, 237–38, 241n1.
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“My home is wherever”: Quoted in Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 2, 134.
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“They all know Latin”: Erasmus, epistle 391A to Johannes Sapidus, 1516, translated in Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 2, 159.
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“It was delightful to see him”: Translated in P. S. Allen, The Age of Erasmus (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1914), 153.
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New scholarship, he thought: Erasmus, “Letter to Dorp” (epistle 337), in The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 169–94, this on 192.
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In his youth: On this work, see Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 1, 141.
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The Annotations were more controversial: He found this work in the Abbaye du Parc. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 2, 44–45.
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Now he picked up on Valla’s: Many other such projects were under way, among them a full, multilingual “Complutensian Polyglot Bible,” produced by a team of scholars at the University of Alcalá in Spain. Finished in 1517 and published in 1522, it included parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Latin. See Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 70–111. The year 1522 also saw Martin Luther’s German translation of the New Testament, to be followed in 1534 by his complete Bible.
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He vented his annoyance: Erasmus, “Letter to Dorp,” 169–94, this on 192.
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“Whatever is not pleasing”: Erasmus to Albert of Brandenburg, October 19, 1519, trans. John C. Olin, in his edition of Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, with the Life of Erasmus by Beatus Rhenanus, rev. ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1975), 134–45, this on 144–45.
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Erasmus was not of that type: Erasmus to Jodocus Jonas, May 10, 1521, in Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation, 150–63, this on 153.
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He and Luther had: Erasmus attacked Luther on this point in De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (Basel: Froben, 1524); Luther responded with De servo arbitrio (Wittemberg: J. Lufft, 1525).
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Erasmus’s increasing aversion: Valentina Sebastiani, Johann Froben, Printer of Basel (Leiden, Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2018), 66–67.
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He made no secret: Erasmus to Richard Pace, July 5, 1521, in Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 2, 231.
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What he hated above all: Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 181.
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In his 1515 Adages: Erasmus, “Dulce bellum inexpertis,” in Margaret Mann Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 308–53, this on 309. The title phrase is from Vegetius, Art of War, vol. 3, xiii (Phillips corrects Erasmus, who cites Vegetius as chap. 14). See also Erasmus, “A Complaint of Peace” [Querela pacis], (December 1517), trans. Betty Radice, in Collected Works, vol. 27: Literary and Educational Writings, 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 289–322.
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Like Protagoras and Pico: All from Erasmus, “Dulce bellum inexpertis,” 308–53, this on 317 (crest and beasts), 310–12 (“friendly eyes” etc.), 322 (friendship among many), 313 (damages of war), 309–10 (lawyers and theologians).
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Later commentators observed: A good example is Stefan Zweig’s biographical essay Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam, published in Vienna in 1934 while comparable forces were being unleashed on his own world. Erasmus [and] The Right to Heresy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Hallam/Cassell, 1951).
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Officially, the name: It is now called Erasmus+. https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/. On the numbers who have used it: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_130. On Sofia Corradi, known as “Mamma Erasmus”: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Corradi.
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The result of these early years: Michel de Montaigne: Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), 913 (book 3, chap. 9). Montaigne’s choice of French also reflects a general flowering of French writing in this time. He describes his father’s experiment in book 1, chap. 26 (156–57).
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His copy of Lucretius’s: See M. A. Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript, Notes and Pen-Marks (Geneva: Droz, 1998).
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Montaigne, like Erasmus before him: Montaigne, Essays, 181 (book 1, chap. 30).
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“putting a very high price”: Montaigne, Essays, 961 (book 3, chap. 11).
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Having been born a Catholic: Montaigne, Essays, 278 (book 1, chap. 56: happy to believe), 521 (book 2, chap. 12: safe during wars).
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“I love life and cultivate”: Montaigne, Essays, 1041–42 (book 3, chap. 13).
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“There is nothing so beautiful”: Montaigne, Essays, 1039 (book 3, chap. 13).
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“Is it possible to imagine”: Montaigne, Essays, 399 (book 2, chap. 12: “Is it possible”), 508 (book 2, chap. 12: Protagoras).
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Yet Montaigne trashes: Montaigne, Essays, 365 (book 2, chap. 10: Cicero), 362 (book 2, chap. 10: Virgil), 269 (book 1, chap. 51: rhetoric), 155 (book 1, chap. 26: “not as fine”).
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Biographies and histories are good: Montaigne, Essays, 367 (book 2, chap. 10: “more alive”), 362 (book 2, chap. 10: Terence).
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Those angles often derive: Montaigne, Essays, 205 (book 1, chap. 37).
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He asked them, through: Montaigne, Essays, 193 (book 1, chap. 31).
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So great was his love: Montaigne, Essays, 725 (book 2, chap. 37).
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Montaigne writes that each: Montaigne, Essays, 740 (book 3, chap. 2: “entire form” and “You can tie up”).
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Writing a book of this sort: Montaigne, Essays, 284 (book 1, chap. 56).
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“the Montaignesque element in literature”: Walter Pater, “Charles Lamb,” in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1890), 105–23, this on 117.
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Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 52.
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“fuller of human stuff”: William James to Catherine Elizabeth Havens, March 23, 1874, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 152.
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George Eliot believed: George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 263.
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In recent times, some research: Recent studies have come up with divergent conclusions about whether reading fiction helps us to behave more ethically. A key study found that people who have just read a passage of literary fiction make more ethical choices in a test than those who have not: David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342, no. 6156 (October 18, 2013), 377–80, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract?sid=f192d0cc-1443-4bf1-a043-61410da39519. Others wonder whether basing moral decisions on empathy is even a good idea: Paul Bloom argues that it leads us to bond too much with our in-group at the expense of out-groups and strangers, and that a reasoned kindness might be a better guide: Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (London: Bodley Head, 2017).
Chapter 6. Perpetual Miracles
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In Lisbon, at about half past nine: Edward Paice, Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (London: Quercus, 2008), 69, with reference to Thomas Chase’s letter to his mother, Centre for Kentish Studies, Gordon Ward Collection U442; and BL Add. 38510 ff.7–14: “Narrative of His Escape from the Earthquake at Lisbon.” Other details of the event come from Paice, 168–72 (numbers of casualties), and from T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (London: Methuen, 1956).
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The event would later merge: J. W. von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, vols. 1–3, trans. Robert R. Heitner, in Goethe, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 35.
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The Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida: Russell R. Dynes, “The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: The First Modern Disaster,” in The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions, ed. Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner (Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2005), 34–49, this on 42.
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It showed his disapproval: This occurred between 1708 and 1711. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 95–100.
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Augustine had urged his readers: Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), 475 (book 12, chap. 4).
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A similar idea was concisely: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle 1, line 294.
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Chaucer had told the story: Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, “The Franklin’s Tale,” lines 885–93.
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He tried to imagine what: Voltaire to Jean-Robert Tronchin, November 24, 1755, in Voltaire, The Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Richard A. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, 1973), 181.
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Being a poet: Voltaire, “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” (1756). See Theodore Besterman, Voltaire, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1976), 367–71.
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The problem arose again later: Voltaire, “Good, all is” (“Bien [tout est]”), in Philosophical Dictionary, ed. and trans. Theodore Besterman (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979), 72–73.
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Voltaire’s most eloquent response: Voltaire, Candide, in Candide and Other Stories, trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–88, this on 48.
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It is more like: Voltaire to Elie Bertrand, February 18, 1756, in Voltaire, The Selected Letters, 183.
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Voltaire ended Candide: Voltaire, Candide, 1–88, this on 88.
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E. M. Forster distinguished: E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 101.
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Their philosophy of pragmatic: Its first recorded use was in an 1858 volume of essays by the Scottish doctor John Brown. He only partly approved of the principle, but did name it. John Brown, Horae Subsecivae [Leisure Hours] (Edinburgh: T. Constable; London: Hamilton, Adams, 1858–82), vol. 1, xix. This is the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is mentioned by Gordon S. Haight in his editor’s note to the letter from Eliot—a letter in which she cautiously accepts credit for the term while noting that inventions are often made simultaneously by several people. She probably did not know of Brown’s usage. Eliot to James Sully, January 19, 1877, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. S. Haight (London: Oxford University Press; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), vol. 4, 333–34. Sully had written a book about pessimism; he went ahead and attributed the term to her when he published it later that same year. See also James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (London: S. King, 1877), 399.
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Discussing Eliot’s meliorism: Rosemary Ashton, “Coming to Conclusions: How George Eliot Pursued the Right Answer,” Times Literary Supplement, November 15, 2019), 12–14, this on 14; Besterman, Voltaire, 397. I have been influenced in my reading of Enlightenment values by the recent work of Ritchie Robertson, who highlighted the Enlighteners’ meliorist and humanist motives more than their idealizing of reason: Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 (London: Allen Lane, 2020).
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These beliefs lay behind: P. N. Furbank, Diderot: A Critical Biography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1992), 128–29.
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Diderot also took a philosophical view: Furbank, Diderot, 130.
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Nicolas de Condorcet was: Nicolas de Condorcet, “The Sketch” [Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind], trans. June Barraclough, in Condorcet, Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–147, this on 130. On his range of applications and his ideal of progress, see Lukes and Urbinati’s introduction, xviii–xix.
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He wrote in his 1770 work: Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature, vol. 1, adapted from original translation by H. D. Robinson, 1868 (Manchester, UK: Clinamen, 1999), 5 (mists of darkness), 189 (far from holding forth, etc.). The story of Holbach’s wife is told by Michael Bush in his introduction to this edition, ix.
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The philosopher and historian Pierre Bayle: Richard S. Popkin, introduction to his edition (with Craig Brush) of Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections (Indianapolis and Cambridge, UK: Hackett, 1991), xviii. The source of this story is Claude Gros de Boze, in “Eloge de M. Le Cardinal de Polignac,” prefacing Polignac’s L’anti-Lucrèce (Paris, 1749).
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He campaigned against the damage: Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, trans. Brian Masters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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“A miracle, in the full meaning”: Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 311.
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“In all ages man has prayed”: Robert G. Ingersoll, “The Gods,” in Orations (London: Freethought, 1881), 33.
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Spinoza had already been excommunicated: The text of the herem is given in Steven Nadler, Spinoza, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 139–41.
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It is what Condorcet called: Condorcet, “The Sketch,” 140.
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Earlier humanists had written: Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), 379 (book 2, chap.11).
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He could not bear to watch: Montaigne, Essays, 379 (chicken), 385 (“a certain respect”), 380–81 (weeping and tortures) (all book 2, chap. 11).
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Yet this was apparently: Tertullian, Of Public Shows (De spectaculis), §30.
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But in the twelfth century: Bernard of Cluny, Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s De contemptu mundi, trans Ronald E. Pepin (East Lansing, MI: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1991), 17–19.
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Charles Darwin said that he: Charles Darwin, “Religious Belief” (written 1879, “copied out” 1881), in Autobiographies, ed. Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2002), 49–55, this on 49–50.
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“I will call no being”: John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865), 103.
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The basics of an ethical system: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 231–338. See also Shaftesbury’s earlier An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (London: A. Bell, 1699).
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Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning: Furbank, Diderot, 26.
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Thus, the English philosopher: John Locke, A Letter on Toleration, ed. J. W. Gough and R. Klibansky (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1968), 135.
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The rebels thought, however: Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. and ed. Robert C. Bartlett (New York: SUNY Press, 2000), 165–240 (letters 8 and 9).
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Bayle knew that he: Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 334–35.
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But the French authorities: Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, trans. Denys Potts (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 31.
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The whole experience gave him: Ian Davidson, Voltaire (New York: Pegasus, 2012), 108–11 (Letters), 356–57 (Dictionary).
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Diderot also served time: Furbank, Diderot, 48–50.
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Neither stopped writing, but they: Furbank, Diderot, 291.
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In the Netherlands, too: Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 286–91.
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The Baron d’Holbach published: Bush, introduction to Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature, vol. 1, vii.
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Voltaire also covered his writings: Voltaire to Gabriel and Philibert Cramer, February 25, 1759, in Voltaire, The Selected Letters, 198.
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“These days, no book”: Voltaire to Madame du Deffand, January 6, 1764, translated in Davidson, Voltaire, 328.
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one of the key figures in charge: Jean des Cars, Malesherbes: Gentilhomme des lumières (Paris: Fallois, 1994), 45.
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When called on to censor: Des Cars, Malesherbes, 92 (grounds for banning), 93 (hiding manuscripts), 85 (Madame de Pompadour).
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As to the other manuscripts: Furbank, Diderot, 254, 461, 472.
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He had another distressing experience: Furbank, Diderot, 273.
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Malesherbes had retired: Des Cars, Malesherbes, 387–91.
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Other Enlightenment thinkers had also: Quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, “French Feminists and the Rights of ‘Man’: Olympe de Gouges’s Declarations,” History Workshop Journal 28 (1989), 1–21, this on 17. Her declaration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Woman_and_of_the_Female_Citizen.
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Another victim, though he was: Nicolas de Condorcet, “On the Emancipation of Women. On Giving Women the Right to Citizenship,” trans. Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt, in Condorcet, Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 156–62.
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He wrote his main work: Condorcet, “The Sketch,” quotations on 147. The story of Condorcet’s adventures and death is told by Lukes and Urbinati in their introduction to his Political Writings, xx–xxi.
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One final author: Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine (London: Profile, 2007), 258–60; Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 41.
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How astonishing it is: Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (London: Watts, 1938), 38 (that anything should exist), 27–28 (better suited; open air), 2 (human inventions).
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“I believe in the equality”: Paine, The Age of Reason, 1.
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The Age of Reason, with its message: Jacoby, Freethinkers, 61.
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When Paine did die: Paul Collins, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
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The great champion of Paine: Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood, 1983), 46–47; G. D. H. Cole, Richard Carlile, 1790–1843 (London: Victor Gollancz and Fabian Society, 1943), 10–11.
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One of his productions: Richard Carlile, An Address to Men of Science (London: R. Carlile, 1821), 7. On this and the imprisonment, see Cole, Richard Carlile, 11, 16.
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But this situation also forced: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2nd ed. (1714), ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34. “Esoteric” writing was originally described, as well as practiced, by John Toland in “Clidophorus; or Of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy . . . ,” in Tetradymus (London: J. Brotherton and W. Meadows [etc.]), 1720), 66. Clidophorus means “keybearer.”
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Having to pretend that one: Paine, The Age of Reason, 2.
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The twentieth-century philosopher: Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (London: Phoenix, 1998), 128.
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He suggests applying: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Writings, ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 101.
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The later science communicator: Carl Sagan, “Encyclopaedia Galactica,” episode 12 of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, PBS, originally broadcast December 14, 1980. Sagan was talking about evidence for alien visits to Earth, but the phrase has been applied in more general contexts.
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Imagine, continues Hume: Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1980), 101.
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At first he intended: Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Writings, 96–116 (section 10: “Of Miracles”). See also Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 286.
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He wrote The Natural History of Religion: “Note on the Text,” in David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver, and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. John Valdimir Price (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1976), 7. See Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 320.
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One speaker says: “Philo” speaking, in Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Martin Bell (London: Penguin, 1990), 131.
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Despite Hume’s precautions: Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 162, 251–54.
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It could have been worse: Aikenhead was executed in 1697. Michael Hunter, “ ‘Aikenhead the Atheist’: The Context and Consequences of Articulate Irreligion in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992), 221–54, this on 225.
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And yet, contrary to his alarming: Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 587 (Boswell), 245 (Adam). The dinner story was told by Hume’s friend Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk: A. Carlyle, Autobiography, ed. J. Hill Burton (London and Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1910), 285–86.
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David Hume was living: Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Bell, 132.
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Having cudgeled his brains: Hume’s letter was written (but not sent) to an unnamed doctor, identified by Mossner as Dr. John Arbuthnot. On the letter, see Ernest Campbell Mossner, “Hume’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734: The Biographical Significance,” Huntingdon Library Quarterly 7, no. 2 (February 1944), 135–52, 137 (“most sturdy”).
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Hume resembled Montaigne: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., rev. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1978), 269 (book 1, part 4, §8).
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Restored, he does return: Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 576 (book 3, part 3, §1: shared feeling), 470 (book 3, part 1, §2: producing morality), 577–78 (book 3, part 3, §1: producing a full moral system), 364 (book 2, part 2, §5: mirrors). Hume took his argument about morality further in Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751): Hume, Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1951), 167–323. Hume’s friend Adam Smith argued similarly about morals and sympathy in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar; Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759).
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He wrote to a friend once: David Hume to Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, 1766, quoted in Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 286.
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From the outset, when he: David Hume to Henry Home, December 1737, quoted in Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 112.
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Later, in 1757, he published: David Hume, Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757). See J. C. A. Gaskin, “Hume’s Suppressed Dissertations: An Authentic Text,” Hermathena 106 (Spring 1968), 54–59, this on 55.
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Boswell was struck: James Boswell, diary entry, December 28, 1764, in James Boswell, ed. F. A. Pottle, Boswell on the Grand Tour (London: Heinemann, 1953), vol. 1, 286.
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It would be only “humane”: Quoted in Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 587.
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Hume had just been diagnosed: David Hume to William Strahan, June 12, 1776, Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1888), 337.
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Calling on the philosopher: James Boswell, “An account of my last interview with David Hume, esq. (Partly recorded in my Journal, partly enlarged from my memory, March 3, 1777),” in his diary, Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, ed. C. McC. Weis and F. A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1971), 11–15.
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In fact, when Boswell told: Boswell’s comment and Johnson’s remark: both in Boswell’s diary entry for Tuesday, September 16, 1777, Boswell in Extremes 1776–1778, 155.
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Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Hume’s friend: “Letter from Adam Smith to William Strahan,” November 9, 1776, describing Hume’s last illness, included with the 1777 publication of Hume’s “My Own Life” (April 18, 1776), in The Life of David Hume, Esq; Written by Himself (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 37–62, 43–44 (dying fast), 49–50 (Good Charon).
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Among the works he brushed up: Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 592.
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Strahan never did produce: Gaskin, “Hume’s Suppressed Dissertations,” 54–59, this on 55–57.
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So come, said Charon: “Letter from Adam Smith to William Strahan,” 37–62, this on 49–50 (“please step”), 58 (“happy composure”).
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A crowd gathered outside: Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 605 (Boswell), 603 (atheist/honest man).
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Smith agreed, and concluded: “Letter from Adam Smith to William Strahan,” 37–62, this on 62.
Chapter 7. Sphere for All Human Beings
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Hume was among them: David Hume, “Of National Characters” (1748; rev. 1754), quoted in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997), 33. Hume’s revisions were made in 1776, and published in the posthumous edition of 1777. For Beattie’s criticism, see James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell; London: E. and C. Dilly, 1771), 508–11, this on 511.
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In general terms, he strongly: Nicolas de Condorcet, “The Sketch” [Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind], trans. June Barraclough, in Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–147, this on 126–29.
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In his pedagogical treatise Émile: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1991), 358–63, 386–87.
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Still, when she died: Voltaire to Frederick the Great, October 15, 1749, in Voltaire and Frederick the Great, Letters, ed. and trans. Richard Aldington (London: George Routledge, 1927), 203 (letter 99).
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In ancient Greece, for example: Plato, Timaeus, 42a–b, 90e (men reborn as women), 92b (shellfish).
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Aristotle wrote Europe’s: Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, rev. R. F. Stalley (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16–17 (I, 5).
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The philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda: At a debate on this topic, held at Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–1551. See Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
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In a speech of 1844: Selections from Josiah C. Nott, “Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races” (1844), in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 206–38, this on 238. Nott later went on to cowrite Types of Mankind (1854), which presented a similar argument for complete racial difference.
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Augustine had influentially stated: Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, book 16, chap. 8.
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This theology was confirmed: Hanke, All Mankind Is One, 21.
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In 1900, the classical scholar: Jane Ellen Harrison, “Homo Sum,” in Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), 80–115.
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The Dante translator and novelist: Dorothy L. Sayers, “Are Women Human?,” in Unpopular Opinions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 108–9 (trousers and Aristotle).
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But her argument was not: Sayers, “Are Women Human?,” 114.
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“We deny the right”: Harriet Taylor Mill, “Enfranchisement of Women,” in The Complete Works, ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 51–73, this on 57.
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Pericles telling Athenian free men: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, book 2, §46.
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Those negativities are: Joan Wallach Scott, “French Feminists and the Rights of ‘Man’: Olympe de Gouges’s Declarations,”History Workshop Journal 28 (1989), 1–21, this on 17.
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The virtue question was tackled: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men / A Vindication of the Rights of Woman / An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72 (“I shall first consider”), 119 (“human duties”), 122 (human virtues), 125 (“Confined”), 265 (“I wish to see”). On the virtue question: her argument has to contend with the fact that even the word virtue in its Latin origin casts maleness as the norm, because it derives from vir, “man”—evoking manliness or, as twenty-first-century slang sometimes has it, “manning up.”
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The key ingredient in achieving: John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women” (1869), in Collected Works, vol. 21: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson (London: Routledge, 1984), 259–340, this on 337. Mill wrote it after Harriet’s death, between 1859 and 1861; it was published in 1869.
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Dan Goodley has argued this: Dan Goodley, Disability and Other Human Questions (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2021), chap. 5 (unpaginated).
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This was investigated in the early nineteenth century: Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in J. S. Mill and J. Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Penguin, 1987), 65–111, this on 80–81.
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Instead, Bentham proposes: Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London: Athlone; Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1970), 283n.
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In a treatise: Jeremy Bentham, “Of Sexual Irregularities” (1814), in Of Sexual Irregularities and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, ed. P. Schofield, C. Pease-Watkin, and M. Quinn (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2014).
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In his will, he left: On the fascinating topic of Bentham’s auto-icon: Jeremy Bentham, “Auto-Icon, or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living: A Fragment. From the MSS. of Jeremy Bentham,” unpublished manuscript [London?, 1832?]; [T. Southwood Smith], Use of the Dead to the Living: From the Westminster Review (Albany, UK: Websters and Skinners, 1827); T. Southwood Smith, A Lecture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham Esq., in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine, on the 9th of June, 1832 (London: Effingham Wilson, 1832); C. F. A. Marmoy, “The ‘Auto-Icon’ of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London,” Medical History 2, no. 2 (April 1958), 77–86.
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Oscar Wilde was imprisoned: Thomas Wright, Oscar’s Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 1–2.
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Later he was moved: Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), 465–66 (first station incident), 492 (“Oh beautiful world!”).
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But as he had written: Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, in The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, ed. I. Murray (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 98.
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Compiling lists of notable female figures: Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2001).
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Paolo Giovio’s 1527 dialogue: Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. and trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 367–69.
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Montaigne, in his better moments: Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), 831 (book 3, chap. 5).
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Christine de Pizan, the pioneering humanist: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), 57 (part 1, §27).
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Virginia Woolf imagined: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2004), 54–61. First published 1945, based on a paper given in 1928.
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“One is not born”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 293.
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we simply cannot know: John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women” (1869), in Collected Works, vol. 21: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson (London: Routledge, 1984), 259–340, this on 276–77.
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Mill praised his own mentor: John Stuart Mill, “Bentham” (1838), in Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), 41 (questioner), 42 (subversive).
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He made connections: Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” 269.
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That failure of insight: Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” 277.
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The great abolitionist and autobiographer: Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), 207. This was Douglass’s Fourth of July oration to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, in 1852. The cultural historian Johan Huizinga similarly asked, in an address of 1935 skewering the pseudo-scientific ideas of race then in ascendancy in Europe: “Has a race-theorist ever made the startling and shaming discovery that the race to which he deemed himself to belong is inferior?” J. Huizinga, In the Shadow of To-morrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Distemper of Our Time, trans. J. H. Huizinga (London and Toronto: W. Heinemann, 1936), 68–69.
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Born in Maryland: Frederick Douglass, “Narrative,” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), 15–21.
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Among Douglass’s other works: Frederick Douglass, “To My Old Master,” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), 413–20, this on 418–19. This was first published in Douglass’s newspaper The North Star, September 8, 1848.
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As Douglass puts it elsewhere: Frederick Douglass, “From My Bondage and My Freedom” (1855), in The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), 547.
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“It is a terrible, an inexorable, law”: James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” (1960), in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 179.
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“a man’s character greatly takes”: Douglass, “From My Bondage and My Freedom,” 547.
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Douglass had a compelling voice: John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr., introduction to The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), xxi.
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That new art interested him: John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: The Most Photographed American in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2015), ix. The authors have identified 160 distinct photographs/poses.
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Sure enough, it did: Douglass, “Narrative,” 37.
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His soul was roused: Douglass, “Narrative,” 42.
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He favored Ciceronian constructions: Douglass, “Narrative,” 59 (“You have seen”), 58 (“You are loosed”).
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He does not hold back: Douglass, “Narrative,” 95.
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The phrase features: E. M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 300 (“You shall see”), 188 (all other quotations).
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In his own campaigning, Douglass: This proposal was made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848. See Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2017), 386.
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He wrote to a friend in 1915: E. M. Forster to Forrest Reid, March 13, 1915, quoted in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Cardinal/Sphere, 1988), vol. 2, 14.
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In Love’s Coming-of-Age: Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming-of-Age, 5th ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein; Manchester, UK: Clarke, 1906), 3 (integrating sexuality), 11–12 (“thinning out,” “human element”).
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Carpenter and Merrill welcomed visitors: Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), 163.
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the idea for Maurice had popped: E. M. Forster, “Terminal Note,” in Maurice (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 217.
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Meanwhile, Maurice also moves past: Forster, Maurice, 146.
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He explored it: Forster, Howards End, 58.
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he was happy to support political rights: See a note to this effect in E. M. Forster’s commonplace book, quoted in Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 1, 180.
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He also wearied of always having: Furbank quotes Forster: “Weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.” Furbank, E. M. Forster, vol. 1, 199.
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“She too is enamoured”: E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 60–61.
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“It is race-bound and it’s class-bound”: E. M. Forster, “Liberty in England” (a talk to the Congrès International des Écrivains, Paris, June 21, 1935), in Abinger Harvest (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967), 75–82, this on 76.
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So limited was it: Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 18.
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“The Master’s way consists”: Kongzi, quoted by Master Zeng Can: Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin, 2014), 51 (Analects, 4:15). “Humanity” is used twice here, but translates zhong in the first clause, and shu in the second.
Chapter 8. Unfolding Humanity
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Erasmus cited an old legend: Erasmus, “On Education for Children,” in Collected Works, vol. 26, Literary and Educational Writings, 4: De pueris instituendis / De recta pronuntiatione, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 291–346, this on 304–6. The bear legend is in Pliny, Natural History, 8:126.
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The Prussian philosopher: Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy (1803), trans. Robert B. Louden, in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 434–85, this on 440. I’ve substituted the word “seeds” for “germs” in the translation, since “germs” in modern English usage has distracting connotations. As there are several key terms in this sentence, here is the original in full: “Es liegen viele Keime in der Menschheit, und nun ist es unsere Sache, die Naturanlagen proportionirlich zu entwickeln, und die Menschheit aus ihren Keimen zu entfalten, und zu machen, daß der Mensch seine Bestimmung erreiche.” Kant, Über Pädagogik, ed. Friedrich Theodor Rink (Königsberg: F. Nicolovius, 1803), 13.
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One is Bildung: In early notes on the subject of Bildung, Humboldt described it as both an inward reflection and a way of grasping the outside world. It is also something that can be passed on through the generations; an individual’s culture does not disappear. Humboldt, “Theory of Bildung” (written circa 1793–1794), trans. Gillian Horton-Krüger, in Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition, ed. I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, and K. Riquarts (Mahwah, NJ, and London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), 57–61, this on 58–59.
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The other word was Humanismus: Christopher Celenza, “Humanism,” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 462. The reference is to F. I. Niethammer, Der Streit des Philanthropismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichtsunserer Zeit (Jena, 1808). See also A. Campana, “The Origin of the Word ‘Humanist,’ ”Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946), 60–73.
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By the mid-nineteenth century: Excerpts from Georg Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, trans. Denys Hay, in The Renaissance Debate, ed. Denys Hay (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 29–34, this on 30.
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It also comes up: Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860), translated as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
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While Wilhelm was a quieter: See letters from Wilhelm to Caroline, October 1804 and November 1817, both in Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, trans. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 386, 407–8.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Oxenford, ed. J. K. Moorhead (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930), 136.
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He was studious: Gabriele von Bülow, Gabriele von Bülow, Daughter of Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Memoir, trans. Clara Nordlinger (London: Smith, Elder, 1897), 229–30.
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This led Wilhelm to write: Paul R. Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978–80), vol. 1, 60–61.
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Two years after that first: Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government [Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staatszubestimmen], trans. Joseph Coulthard Jr. (London: John Chapman, 1854), 73 (fears of chaos), 90 (“sweetly and naturally”), 94 (denying right to be fully human).
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Human character develops best: Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, 86 (“unfolded”).
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He did try to get: Schiller’s attempts to publish parts were in Thalia and Berlin Monthly Review: see Coulthard, preface to his translation of Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, iii.
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For the earlier age groups: Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 2, 44.
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University education, Humboldt said: Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 2, 67.
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“There is only one summit”: Wilhelm to Caroline, November 30, 1808, translated in W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 25.
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In the secret tract: Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, 33 (marriage).
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What fascinated him: His journal, July 18–23, 1789: Humanist without Portfolio, 378–79.
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“The more in life one”: Wilhelm to Caroline, October 1804, translated in Humanist without Portfolio, 388.
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“It is only through the study”: Wilhelm to Caroline, October 13, 1809, translated in Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 2, 46.
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One benefit of his jobs: Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 1, 277 (various languages); vol. 2, 108 (Native American languages).
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Wilhelm, by contrast, liked to claim: Von Bülow, Gabriele von Bülow, 230.
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He hoped to write: Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, ed. Michael Losonsky, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 2, 460–70.
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“There must be something to follow”: Von Bülow, Gabriele von Bülow, 229–30 (spirits, languages), 247–48 (“There must be something” and “Good-bye”).
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Harriet’s arguments for women’s right: Harriet Taylor Mill, “Enfranchisement of Women,” in The Complete Works, ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 51–73, this on 57.
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“The grand, leading principle”: Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, 65. Quoted by John Stuart Mill as an epigraph to On Liberty (London: Watts, 1929).
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For Mill, too, the right approach: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 68.
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Humboldt, too, had written: “Variety of situations” in Humboldt is Mannigfaltigkeit der Situationen, a phrase reminiscent of “many-sidedness,” or Vielseitigkeit. Mannigfaltigkeit is translated as “diversity” in the line featured by Mill at the opening of On Liberty. For the original German in both cases, see Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staatszubestimmen (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, [1852]), 25 (variety of situations), 71 (diversity).
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as Montaigne had said: Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), 141 (book 1, chap. 26). Cf. Mill, On Liberty, 24.
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Thus, Mill recommends: “Absolute freedom” and “foolish” are both from Mill, On Liberty, 14–15.
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Such control could not legally: John Stuart Mill, “Statement on Marriage,” in Collected Works, vol. 21: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson (London: Routledge, 1984), 99, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-xxi-essays-on-equality-law-and-education/simple#lf0223-21_head_034.
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The other delicate matter: After Mill’s death, three unpublished essays on religion, written between 1830 and 1858, were published; the last of these, “Theism” (written circa 1868–1870), raises the possibility of such a being. But in “Utility of Religion,” he notes that the promise of an afterlife is a valuable consolation to people who suffer on earth; if people were happier and more fulfilled in their earthly lives, the appeal of religion would decline. Both essays are in John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion: Nature, The Utility of Religion, and Theism (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874).
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Immersion in utilitarian theory: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 25–28 (childhood and religion), 81 (loss of pleasure).
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Mill’s path out of this: Jeremy Bentham to Henry Richard Vassall, Third Baron Holland, November 13, 1808, in Bentham, Correspondence, vol. 7, ed. John Dinwiddy (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988), 570. (“Prose is where all the lines but the last go on to the margin:—Poetry is where some of them fall short of it.”) See also A. Julius, “More Bentham, Less Mill,” in Bentham and the Arts, ed. Anthony Julius, Malcolm Quinn, and Philip Schofield (London: UCL Press, 2020), 178. Bentham could not have been entirely oblivious to poetry: he installed a stone tablet in his garden, inscribed as “sacred to Milton, prince of poets”: see M. M. St. J. Packe, Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954), 21. On Mill’s view of poetry, see Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill (London: Atlantic, 2008), 20.
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Now, rebelliously, John fell: Mill, Autobiography, 84–86.
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Reading Wordsworth made Mill reflect: John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Penguin, 1987), 272–338, this on 285; 279–81 (different qualities of pleasure).
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“What pleasure comes from our faculties”: Giannozzo Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence (De dignitate et excellentia hominis), ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver (Cambridge, MA, and London: I Tatti/Harvard University Press, 2018), 205 (book IV).
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One such form is: John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women” (1869), in Collected Works, vol. 21: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson (London: Routledge, 1984), 259–340, this on 337.
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Mill always said that Harriet: F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 260–63. On tuberculosis, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/harriet-mill/.
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Mill continued his work: Mill, Autobiography, ed. Mark Philp, 169.
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Also inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt: Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9. He also describes Humboldt himself as a harmoniously developed being, “one of the most perfect souls that have ever existed” (94).
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Also Humboldtian is that he: Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 36.
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Matthew Arnold had grown up: Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Sceptre, 1997), 241.
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One is the statement: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5.
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The other is also a definition: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 9.
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But Arnold is emphatic: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 80.
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For him, real culture: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 33.
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It means curiosity: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5.
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You can be cultured even: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 6 (newspapers), 107 (reading them with a fresh mind).
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What must be done with: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 54–55.
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The other phrase: Jonathan Swift, “Battle of the Books,” in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 104–25, this on 112.
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He also describes himself: Liberal: Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 32.
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It also had an impact: For explorations of working-class reading habits in general, see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020).
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One early series, Bohn’s: Hall and Stead, A People’s History of Classics, 58.
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Then came such outstanding: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics_(Bookshelf). See Adam Kirsch, “The ‘Five-Foot Shelf’ Reconsidered,” Harvard Magazine 103, no. 2 (November–December 2001).
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Unfortunately, Dent’s own habit: Frank Swinnerton, The Bookman’s London (London: Allan Wingate, 1951), 47.
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Those employees were: Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 133.
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He gave the series: See the account by David Campbell on the Everyman website. http://www.everymanslibrary.co.uk/history.aspx. For a list of early editions: http://scribblemonger.com/elcollect/elCatalog.pl.
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To help readers find: “The Best Hundred Books, by the Best Judges,” Pall Mall Gazette “Extra,” no. 24 (1886), 23.
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John Ruskin said he wanted: “The Best Hundred Books, by the Best Judges,” 9.
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Henry Morton Stanley, the adventurer: “The Best Hundred Books, by the Best Judges,” 21.
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Some feared that: Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 267; Ethel Carnie and Lavena Saltonstall, letters to Cotton Factory Times, March 20 and April 3, 10, 17, 1914. On Carnie, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Carnie_Holdsworth.
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Norris, a post office worker: Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 277. The quotation is from George W. Norris, “The Testament of a Trade Unionist,” Highway 39 (May 1938), 158–59.
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Humboldt was the most blissed-out: Humboldt to F. G. Welcker, October 26, 1825, translated in Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 2, 422–23.
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That name for it came: Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 12. “New Humanism” was a term applied to these views by others; it should not be confused with various other movements also called “New Humanism” at various times.
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Such outreach projects, for Babbitt: Babbitt, Literature and the American College, 8–9.
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When the novelist Sinclair Lewis: Sinclair Lewis, Nobel Lecture, 1930, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1930/lewis/lecture/. Other responses were collected in a symposium: C. Hartley Grattan, ed., The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium (New York: Brewer and Warren, 1930). This was in part a reply to a collection promoting the New Humanism: Norman Foerster, ed., Humanism and America (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930).
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Much later, Edward Said would observe: Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 21–22.
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“How much more fittingly”: Montaigne, Essays, 149 (book 1, chap. 26).
Chapter 9. Some Dream-Country
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Then it was the turn: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Penguin, 1968), 459.
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It is a vision of majesty: Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 459.
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It could have been even: Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 349. The publisher referred to here was John Murray.
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The Origin found a wide readership: Browne, Charles Darwin, 88–90 (Mudie’s), 186 (Mill), 189–90 (Eliot). G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies were published in periodical form and as a book in 1858; see also Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: A Life (London: Pimlico, 2000), 169.
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A different kind of reader: Karl Marx, Collected Works, vol. 41: Letters (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), 234 (“crude English fashion”). Browne, Charles Darwin, 403 (Das Kapital sent to Darwin).
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Huxley’s friendship with Darwin: Adrian Desmond, T. H. Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (London: Penguin, 1998), 188 (sea squirts), 224–25 (no idea).
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First, he reviewed the book: T. H. Huxley, “The Origin of Species,” in Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1892–95), vol. 2, 22–79, this on 52. Originally published in Westminster Review 17 (1860), 541–70, and reproduced at https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/OrS.html.
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Then he gave lectures: Browne, Charles Darwin, 105.
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Next came the 1860 meeting: Browne, Charles Darwin, 94, 118 (Darwin’s excuse for not attending).
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A similar remark was made: George W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (London: Thomas Nelson, [1904?]), 161–62.
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that was Huxley’s account of it: Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (London: Heinemann, 1968), 59, citing a letter from Huxley to Frederick Dyster.
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much-told tales, versions differed: Desmond, T. H. Huxley, 280.
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Darwin was grateful to Huxley: Browne, Charles Darwin, 136.
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In one talk to the South London: T. H. Huxley, “A Liberal Education and Where to Find It” (1868), in Science and Education, vol. 3 of Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1910), 76–110, this on 87–88 (current studies criticized), 97–98 (traces of past). Charles Dickens’s remarks are in Bleak House, chap. 12.
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And elsewhere he cited Terence: T. H. Huxley, “On Science and Art in Relation to Education” (1882), in Science and Education, vol. 3 of Collected Essays (1910), 160–88, this on 164.
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It was just that he: Huxley, “A Liberal Education and Where to Find It,” this on 96.
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Huxley, in another lecture: T. H. Huxley, “Universities: Actual and Ideal” (1874, University of Aberdeen), in Science and Education, vol. 3 of Collected Essays (1910), 189–234, this on 212. Huxley quoted Mill’s similar rectorial address at the University of St. Andrews on February 1, 1867, but changed every mention of classical studies to “science.”
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After an 1880 talk: Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Science,” in The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. Lionel Trilling (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980), 405–29, this on 413–20.
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But he also realized: Darwin noted this in The Descent of Man, writing that “the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through natural selection.” Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Gibson Square, 2003), 618.
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It provided no direct basis: Darwin, The Descent of Man, 612 (“habit, example” and “an all-seeing Deity”). His theory of the evolution of morality through social feeling is given mainly in part 1, chap. 4, 97–127.
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He had lost his Christian belief: Charles Darwin, “Religious Belief” (written 1879, “copied out” 1881), in Autobiographies, ed. Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2002), 49–55, this on 49–50 (Hell); 54 (helping others, and “agnostic”).
-
The person who did the most: T. H. Huxley, “Agnosticism,” in Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1892–95), vol. 5, 209–62, this on 237–38.
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His contemporary Richard Bithell: Richard Bithell, The Creed of a Modern Agnostic (London: Routledge, 1883), 10–14.
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More recently, another agnostic: Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 26.
-
Another noted agnostic: Leslie Stephen, “An Agnostic’s Apology,” in An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (London: Smith, Elder, 1893), 1.
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But agnostics could carry: Frederick James Gould, The Life-Story of a Humanist (London: Watts, 1923), 75.
-
Sir Leslie Stephen was known: Leslie Stephen, “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps,” in Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking, rev. ed. (London: Smith, Elder; Duckworth, 1907), 177–225, this on 184–85 (“At last!”), 193 (“ghastly mess”), 203 (Athanasian Creed), 221 (“something like a blessing”), 222–23 (“duty”). The piece was originally published in Fraser’s Magazine 86 (1872), 545–61. On the question of the story’s veracity: F. W. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), 97–98, which quotes Sir George Trevelyan as saying that the story was at least partly inspired by an incident in which Trevelyan and another inexperienced climber got into difficulties after Stephen led them on a tough side-path.
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George Eliot held it in high regard: George Eliot said this while walking with W. H. Myers in the Fellows’ Garden at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1873. Quoted in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1968), 464.
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Darwin also wrote of: Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 97.
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Leslie Stephen himself seems: A note made in 1856. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 144–45.
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His account may also have inspired: Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 201. On evidence for the idea that Hardy was influenced by the Stephen piece, see John Halperin, “Stephen, Hardy, and ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ ” in Studies in Fiction and History from Austen to Le Carré (New York: Springer, 1988).
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“In brotherhood bonded close”: Thomas Hardy, “A Plaint to Man” (1909–10), in A Selection of Poems, ed. W. E. Williams (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 95–96.
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In his poem “Dover Beach”: Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. Lionel Trilling (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980), 165–67.
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Apparently, he was inspired by: Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Sceptre, 1997), 116.
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Elsewhere, Arnold took a more pragmatic: Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–12.
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This calls to mind: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120 (part 3, §125).
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The novelist and biographer J. A. Froude: J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834–81 (London: Longman, Green, 1884), 248.
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He had been through: Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1961), vol. 1, 134–38.
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In 1860, six clergymen contributed: The two who were convicted were James Rowland Williams and Henry Bristow Wilson. See Josef L. Altholz, Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over Essays and Reviews 1860–1864 (Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1994), 1.
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When the young Robert Louis Stevenson: Robert Louis Stevenson to his friend Charles Baxter, quoted in Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Harper, 2006), 79–80.
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Another writer, Edmund Gosse: Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983), 90 (“I had no humanity”), 248, 251 (regrets).
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Indeed, the elder Gosse: P. H. Gosse, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: John Van Voorst, 1857). His son describes him as being hurt: Gosse, Father and Son, 105, 112.
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As Huxley’s biographer Adrian Desmond: Desmond, T. H. Huxley, 434.
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Some of them were swept: Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot (London: Virago, 1983), 3, 6–7.
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The nineteenth century was the great era: For a survey of the genre, see Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (London: John Murray, 1977).
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On seeing just that: Duncan Grant, “Virginia Woolf,” in The Golden Horizon, ed. Cyril Connolly (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 394.
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Robert Elsmere—the most durable: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 169 (“dirt and drains”), 179 (“live someone else’s life”), 261 (troubled by Christianity), 314 (“purely human”).
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Thus, performing a “catechism of himself”: Ward, Robert Elsmere, 475 (“catechism” and “the good”), 332 (“Every human soul”).
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“I see life always as a threadlike path”: Ward, Robert Elsmere, 164–66.
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The same concern was felt: Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Pimlico, 1996), 396–97.
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Robert Elsmere is not short: William Ewart Gladstone, “Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief,” Contemporary Review, May 1888, http://www.victorianweb.org/history/pms/robertelsmere.html. James is quoted by Rosemary Ashton in the introduction to her edition of Ward’s Robert Elsmere, vii. On the novel’s reception, see William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1976).
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Robert Elsmere became a word-of-mouth success: Rosemary Ashton, introduction to Ward, Robert Elsmere, vii.
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In 1819, he literally cut up: Amphibologisms: Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813, quoted in Peter Manseau’s edition of The Jefferson Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 38. Jefferson’s assembled cut-up, plus the remains of the two copies used for sources, remained in separate private collections until they were found by Cyrus Adler, who acquired them for the Smithsonian Institution. The story is told by Manseau, 80–93.
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One such person was Matthew Arnold: Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (London: Smith, Elder, 1873), xiii–xv, 383. Arnold followed that up with God and the Bible (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), responding to critics of the earlier book. Similar arguments for the Bible as literature were given by the Oxford don Benjamin Jowett, a contributor to the controversial Essays and Reviews collection: Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker, 1860), 330–433.
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It was reading Strauss’s book: H. W. Wardman, Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography (London: University of London/Athlone, 1964), 27–29.
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He did remain a biblical scholar: Ernest Renan, Memoirs, trans. J. Lewis May (London: G. Bles, 1935), 237.
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The book caused a furor: Renan, Memoirs, 226 (toned down), 202–3 (“reading too hard”).
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Secretly, Renan seems to have: The witness was Jules Lemaître. Translated in Wardman, Ernest Renan, 183.
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The American freethinker: Robert G. Ingersoll, “Ernest Renan” (1892), in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: Dresden; C. P. Farrell, 1902), vol. 11, 283–301, this on 300–301.
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Ingersoll himself was of a different school: The Best of Robert Ingersoll, ed. Roger E. Greeley (New York: Prometheus, 1993), 14 (no interest in understanding). Robert Ingersoll to Albert H. Walker, November 3, 1882, in Robert G. Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, ed. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, preface by Royston Pike (London: Watts, 1952), 98 (no interest in improving).
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E. M. Forster would feel: E. M. Forster, “How I Lost My Faith,” in The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Penguin, 1999), 318.
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In France, just after the Revolution: Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 267. See also Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 100–101, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason.
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Then there had to be saints: Condorcet had done something similar, writing an unpublished “Anti-Superstitious Almanack,” which allocated former saints’ days to people who had opposed church abuses or tortures: Nicolas de Condorcet, Almanach anti-superstitieux, ed. Anne-Marie Chouillet, Pierre Crépel, and Henri Duranton (Saint-Étienne, France: CNRS Éditions/Publications de Université de Saint-Étienne, 1992). See Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati, introduction to their edition of Condorcet, Political Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xvii.
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It had a lasting success: On the church: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/world/americas/nearly-in-ruins-the-church-where-sages-dreamed-of-a-modern-brazil.html. On Positivism in Brazil generally, see http://positivists.org/blog/brazil.
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Other Positivist churches are still: https://hibridos.cc/en/rituals/templo-positivista-de-porto-alegre/.
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A small congregation listened: “A Positivist Creed,” manuscript, Bod. M. C347, f. 176. Reproduced in T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 85.
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Congreve even spoke: This from Moncure Daniel Conway’s description of one such meeting on New Year’s Day 1881: Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences (London: Cassell, 1904), vol. 2, 347.
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One popular choice was: Josephine Troup and Edith Swepstone each composed versions, and Henry Holmes composed a large-scale cantata. Martha S. Vogeler, “The Choir Invisible: The Poetics of Humanist Piety,” in George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (London: Macmillan, 1982), 64–81, this on 78.
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“O may I join”: George Eliot, “The Choir Invisible,” in Complete Shorter Poetry, ed. Antonie Gerard van den Broek (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), vol. 2, 85–86, this on 86 (lines 1–5).
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George Eliot herself took: T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 87.
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John Stuart Mill wrote an exposé: John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London: N. Trübner, 1865), 54–56.
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T. H. Huxley took one look: T. H. Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life” (1868), Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1892–95), vol. 1, 156, https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/PhysB.html.
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The split occurred: Wright, The Religion of Humanity, 4.
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He preferred a slightly less: Wright, The Religion of Humanity, 99 (“mumbling”), 96 (“Hail to Thee”; the collection was called The Service of Man [1890]), 101 (Trollope).
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Harrison’s son Austin left: Austin Harrison, Frederic Harrison: Thoughts and Memories (London: William Heinemann, 1926), 90 (Shakespeare), 83 (Gissing).
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Mill expressed this objection: Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 50 (systematizing), 60 (evolution and dogma).
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The memoir by Frederic’s son: Harrison, Frederic Harrison, 67.
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When the philosopher Bertrand Russell: Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (London: Unwin, 1975), 43–69, this on 63.
Chapter 10. Doctor Hopeful
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As a boy, Zamenhof noticed: L. L. Zamenhof to N. Borovko, circa 1895, in L. L. Zamenhof, Du Famaj Leteroj [Letters to Nikolaj Borovko and Alfred Michaux], ed. and trans. André Cherpillod (Courgenard, France: Eldono La Blanchetière, 2013), 10–11. In Esperanto with French translation and notes.
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While still a teenager: L. L. Zamenhof to A. Michaux, February 21, 1905, in Zamenhof, Du Famaj Leteroj, 39.
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The Old Testament story of Babel: Genesis 11:1–9, this in 6.
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It played it so well: Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1996), 3, 23 (“formulated”) (book 1, §1 and §9).
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Zamenhof did consider Latin: Marjorie Boulton, Zamenhof: Creator of Esperanto (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 11.
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“Malamikete de las nacjes”: Boulton’s translation in prose is amended here to produce verse lines: Boulton, Zamenhof, 15. See also Zamenhof to N. Borovko, circa 1895, in Zamenhof, Du Famaj Leteroj, 17.
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A distressing setback: Boulton, Zamenhof, 17–21.
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Generally known by the title: The text of Zamenhof’s Unua Libro in an English translation by Richard H. Geoghegan (1889), revised by Gene Keyes (2006), is online: see L. L. Zamenhof, Doctor Esperanto’s International Language, part 1, http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html. On Dr. Hopeful, see Boulton, Zamenhof, 33.
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Immanuel Kant had observed: Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace” (1795), in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis and Cambridge, UK: Hackett, 1983), 125.
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Just as with the language problem: Zamenhof’s The Dogmas of Hillelism was published in the Russian Esperantist publication Ruslanda Esperantisto in 1906. Boulton, Zamenhof, 97–101.
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Zamenhof named the religion: Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016), 78.
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Not everyone in the Esperantist movement: Boulton, Zamenhof, 104–5. There is some similarity between the idea of Zamenhof’s shared religion and the Bahá’í faith, which also sees all religion as a unity.
-
Zamenhof himself had been: Zamenhof to A. Michaux, February 21, 1905, in Zamenhof, Du Famaj Leteroj, 33–35.
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First Book had opened: Zamenhof, Unua Libro, trans. Geoghegan, rev. Keyes. The earlier translation, by Julius Steinhaus, is quoted in Boulton, Zamenhof, 39.
-
In 1908, an Esperantist physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet.
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Much later, in 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Rose_Island.
-
“Happiness is the only good”: Ingersoll’s happiness credo appears in various formats, including in An Oration on the Gods (January 29, 1872) (Cairo, IL: Daily Bulletin Steam Book & Job Print, 1873), 48. The recording can be heard online at https://youtu.be/rLLapwIoEVI.
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Ingersoll was an agnostic: Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 34.
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When Robert was born: Robert G. Ingersoll, The Life and Letters. ed. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, preface by Royston Pike (London: Watts, 1952), 1.
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From his upbringing, he had: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 13.
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Next, he trained as a lawyer: Civil war: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 23–32. Hatred of war: Edward Garstin Smith, The Life and Reminiscences of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: National Weekly Pub. Co.; London: Shurmer Sibthorp, 1904), 116.
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During his legal studies: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 15–16.
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It horrified him to learn: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 36–37.
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Among those who quickly gave: Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 381. For some of Ingersoll’s addresses to juries, see Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. 10.
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Ingersoll did have plenty: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 55.
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He used humor: Smith, The Life and Reminiscences of Robert G. Ingersoll, part 2, Reminiscences, 32.
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At other moments, he could: Ingersoll, “The Ghosts,” in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. 1, 272 (“spared no pains”), 326 (“Let them cover”).
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Quintilian himself had recommended: Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (London: W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), vol. 4, 411 (XII.v.5).
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He loved to eat: Smith, The Life and Reminiscences of Robert G. Ingersoll, part 2, Reminiscences, 208.
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So well did he eat: C. H. Cramer, Royal Bob: The Life of Robert G. Ingersoll (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), 102.
-
For Ingersoll, there was nothing: Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from His Writings and Speeches, ed. Roger E. Greeley (New York: Prometheus, 1993), 79–80. Admiring Shakespeare: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 162–69.
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“Is life worth living”: Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, 55.
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Such mentions of his wife: Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, 12. Photograph: Jacoby, The Great Agnostic, 40.
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“I do believe in the nobility”: Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, 83.
-
His opponents called him: Jacoby, The Great Agnostic, 2 (“Injuresoul”). Margaret Sanger remembered his being pelted when he spoke in their town of Corning, New York; her father had invited Ingersoll, but there was so much trouble they had to move the talk to a quiet spot outdoors in the woods. Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), 2.
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He even turned fruit: Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, 56.
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Of his responses to these: Ingersoll, The Life and Letters, 291.
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And as Bertrand Russell wrote: Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), 203.
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he began to look around himself: She wrote this in a letter to her own mother. Cited in Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 12.
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His mother, Katharine Russell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Russell,_Viscountess_Amberley.
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Katharine’s husband, John Russell: Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (London: Penguin, 1988), 4.
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Russell said that reading: Russell, Autobiography, 36.
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“educated at a time when easy-chairs”: Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864–1865) (London: Penguin, 1972), 48.
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Yet Russell also learned: Russell, Autobiography, 17. The text is Exodus 23:2.
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Russell considered it “undesirable”: Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 1.
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“If I were to suggest”: The Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot quotes Russell, and discusses arguments made against the teapot analogy. The source is Russell’s “Is There a God?,” written for Illustrated magazine in 1952 but not published. A similar idea was proposed by Carl Sagan: “If I say that I have a dragon in my garage, but it is invisible, weighs nothing, cannot be felt to the touch, and breathes a heatless, undetectable fire, then what is the difference between this and my having no dragon in my garage at all?” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (London: Headline, 1997), 160–61.
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as Thomas Paine once wrote of Voltaire: Thomas Paine, “Rights of Man,” in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 145.
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Mathematics came into his life: Russell, Autobiography, 30.
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He stood for election: Russell, Autobiography, 156–57.
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During one episode: Russell, Autobiography, 38.
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Intense emotions swept through him: “Good hater”: Beatrice Webb in her diary in 1901, quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell (London: Vintage, 1997–2001), vol. 1, 139. Russell in turn accused her and her husband of being cold: Russell, Autobiography, 76.
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“the loneliness of the human soul”: Russell, Autobiography, 149.
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The fact that Russell was: For the intensity of Russell’s love of mathematics and logic, see his letters to and from Gilbert Murray, quoted in Russell, Autobiography, 160–62. Quotation from The Little Review in Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1978), 534.
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Like the long-ago Epicureans: Russell, “What I Believe,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (London: Unwin, 1975), 43–69, this on 47.
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“We ought to stand up”: Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (London: Unwin, 1975), 13–26, this on 26.
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Writing to his lover: Russell to Ottoline Morrell, quoted in Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell, 303.
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Even some of his own: Another letter from Russell to Ottoline Morrell, quoted in Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell, 305.
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The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin, 2011), 25–26.
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In Hungary, when the young artist: Béla Zombory-Moldován, The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, trans. Peter Zombory-Moldovan (New York: New York Review Books, 2014), 6.
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In 1916, he was fined: Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, 61–62.
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In 1918, police came: Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell, 420–22. Russell’s article was “The German Peace Offer.”
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Recalling his prison experience: Bertrand Russell, “Experiences of a Pacifist in the First World War,” in Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 30–34, this on 33–34.
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Once inside, Russell: Russell, Autobiography, 256 (“though they”), 257 (Strachey).
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While he was still incarcerated: Russell, Autobiography, 326.
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For all his jests: Russell, Autobiography, 263.
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He did not abandon: Bertrand Russell, “From Logic to Politics,” in Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 35–39, this on 35–36.
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On the contrary, he felt: Russell, Autobiography, 261.
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In a series of wartime: Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, 18.
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Tagore believed in giving: Rabindranath Tagore, “The Modification of Education” (1892), in Education as Freedom: Tagore’s Paradigm, trans. Subhransu Maitra (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014), 27–40, this on 31.
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Scientific literacy helped protect: Bertrand Russell, Education and the Good Life (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926), 29–30 (“what the world might be”), 142–46 (changeable ideas).
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Starting with some twenty pupils: Russell, Education and the Good Life, 78.
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It was a risky experiment: Russell, Autobiography, 389–90.
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Russell also believed: Russell, Education and the Good Life, 213.
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He did point out: Russell, “What I Believe,” 57.
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One story had it that a journalist: Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), 71. Russell’s biographer Ronald Clark tells a version of the story in which it was the local vicar who came to call, but he cites a letter from the vicar’s son, who remembered his parents being relaxed about the Russells’ naked children, letting them play in their garden or come into their kitchen, where the vicar’s wife took advantage of the opportunity to tell them Bible stories. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell, 530.
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Juicy tales of this kind: Russell, Autobiography, 460.
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The matter came to court: Horace M. Kallen, “Behind the Bertrand Russell Case,” in The Bertrand Russell Case, ed. H. M. Kallen and John Dewey (New York: Viking, 1941), 20.
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Russell’s family ran around naked: Paul Edwards, “How Bertrand Russell Was Prevented from Teaching at City College, New York,” in Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (London: Unwin, 1975), 165–99, this 173.
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But Russell’s lucky stars worked: Russell, Autobiography, 465. For the Barnes Foundation today, see https://www.barnesfoundation.org/.
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Whereas the First World War: Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, 67.
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Hitler’s ideology represented: Russell, Education and the Good Life, 267.
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First, the language: Schor, Bridge of Words, 180.
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If it hoped to placate: Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language: Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95, 115 (views of Hitler and others), 116–17 (ban).
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In 1935 all teaching of Esperanto: Boulton, Zamenhof, 208–9.
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Ludwik Zamenhof’s youngest daughter: For example, Lidia Zamenhof, “Nia Misio,” Esperanto Revuo, no. 12 (December 1934). See Schor, Bridge of Words, 186. Lidia Zamenhof also became a devotee of the Bahá’í faith, which like Homaranismo espouses the idea of a universal religion that all can share.
-
She tried to get a visa: Schor, Bridge of Words, 193–95.
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Adam’s widow and son: Boulton, Zamenhof, 213–14.
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And as Robert Ingersoll said: Ingersoll’s text, “Hope,” is found on the phonograph record at the Ingersoll Museum, Dresden, New York, available online at https://youtu.be/rLLapwIoEVI.
Chapter 11. The Human Face
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Gentile, who was the author: Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile’s “La dottrina del fascismo” (“The Doctrine of Fascism”) was published in 1932 in vol. 14 of the Enciclopedia italiana: part 1, “Fundamental Ideas,” by Gentile (though signed by Mussolini); part 2, “Social and Political Doctrines,” by Mussolini. All the lines quoted here are from Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, Project Gutenberg e-book, ed. Alan Swallow, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14058/14058-h/14058-h.htm. It includes both Mussolini and Gentile, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” and Gentile, “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism.”
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As Gentile wrote, Fascism offered: Gentile, “The Doctrine of Fascism.”
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Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary: Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (London: Redwords, 1991), 282–83.
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In Italy, Gentile therefore organized: Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 52. On Gentile, see also A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001).
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A similar educational program: Erika Mann, School for Barbarians (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), 47 (incapable of imagining), 99–100 (images of war).
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The philosopher Hannah Arendt: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017), 614.
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It was education as transformed: Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. T. M. Greene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1938), 89–118, this on 93.
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His move away from traditional: Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 13.
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The disaster left Croce: Cecil Sprigge, Benedetto Croce: Man and Thinker (Cambridge, UK: Bowes & Bowes, 1952), 12–17.
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His friendship with Gentile: Benedetto Croce to Giovanni Gentile, October 24, 1924, translated in Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 75.
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As he put it in a letter: Benedetto Croce to Alessandro Casati, October 1924, translated in Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 76.
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Croce responded with what became: B. Croce, “A Reply by Italian Authors, Professors, and Journalists to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist Intellectuals,” in From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800–1950, ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 713–16, this on 714–15; Gentile’s “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals,” 706–12.
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After his protest, Croce retired: Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 114–20.
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The important thing, he wrote: Benedetto Croce, “History as the History of Liberty” (1937), in Philosophy—Poetry—History: An Anthology of Essays, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 546–88, this on 585–86.
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As Stefan Zweig wrote: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin, 2011), 389.
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In that same year, 1934: Stefan Zweig, Erasmus [and] The Right to Heresy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Hallam/Cassell, 1951), 5. See also chap. 6, “Greatness and Limitations of Humanism,” 67–88.
-
He continued writing: Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, trans. Will Stone (London: Pushkin, 2015).
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But Zweig did despair: The suicide letter is included in “Publisher’s Postscript,” in Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, ed. Harry Zohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 437–40.
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In a radio tribute: E. M. Forster, “Some Books” (talk given on the BBC’s We Speak to India, March 4, 1942), in The BBC Talks, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 172.
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As it happens, Forster himself: Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit (London: Vintage, 2012), 171.
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“There is something truly poignant”: Roger-Pol Droit, Humanity in the Making: Overview of the Intellectual History of UNESCO, 1945–2005 (Paris: UNESCO, 2005), 40.
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Making notes on Zweig’s book: Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918–1939, ed. Hermann Kesten, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: André Deutsch, 1983), 222 (entry for Sunday, August 5, 1934).
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But humanists’ failure: Thomas Mann, “Europe Beware,” trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, in Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 69–82, this on 82.
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His most direct treatment: Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 113–57.
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The young, Naphta says: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 400 (obey), 522 (future of learning).
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One day, lost in a mountain blizzard: Mann, The Magic Mountain, 497.
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writers had a moral duty: Heinrich Mann presented this view influentially in “Zola,” published in the journal Die weissen Blätter in 1915 and reprinted in his collection of essays on French writers Geist und Tat: Franzosen 1780–1930 (Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1931). See Karin Verena Gunnemann, Heinrich Mann’s Novels and Essays: The Artist as Political Educator (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 79.
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At one speech in 1930: Thomas Mann, “An Appeal to Reason” (talk given in Berlin, October 1930), trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, in Order of the Day, 46–68, this on 54–56 (heckling); Tobias Boes, Thomas Mann’s War (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2019), 85–86.
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Mann saved the blackened leaves: Thomas Mann to Hermann Hesse, December 22, 1932, The Hesse-Mann Letters, ed. Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Arena, 1986), 16.
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One thing bothered him: Erika Mann and Klaus Mann, Escape to Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 6–7.
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Thus reunited with at least some: Thomas Mann, “Achtung, Europa!” (April 1935), in Achtung, Europa! Aufsätze zur Zeit (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1938), 73–93.
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He continued writing novels: Boes, Thomas Mann’s War, 148–54. For MacLeish’s opinions, see “Of the Librarian’s Profession,” Atlantic Monthly (June 1940), reprinted in Champion of a Cause, ed. Eva M. Goldschmidt (Chicago: ALA, 1971), 43–53.
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As well as her study: Erika Mann, The Lights Go Down, trans. Maurice Samuel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1940), 239–81. A note states that a speech on art by Hitler, quoted in the Frankfurter Zeitung, July 17, 1939, did indeed contain thirty-three grammatical errors.
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One of the greatest experts: On Kristeller’s story, see Paul Oskar Kristeller and Margaret L. King, “Iter Kristellerianum: The European Journey (1904–1939),” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994), 907–29, this on 917–25.
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Then there was the art historian: Jeffrey Chipps Smith, introduction to Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), xxix–xxxi.
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Therefore, at the age of thirteen: Max Warburg, memorial address of December 5, 1929, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1986), 22.
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Toward the end of his life: Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt (Stuttgart and Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020). Two online exhibitions featuring the panels were held in 2020, at London’s Warburg Institute and Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/collections/warburg-institute-archive/bilderatlas-mnemosyne/mnemosyne-atlas-october-1929 and https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2020/aby_warburg/bilderatlas_mnemosyne_start.php.
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In 1920, after a tour: Fritz Saxl, “Ernst Cassirer,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1949), 47–48.
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In a feat of organization: On the move: Fritz Saxl, “The History of Warburg’s Library,” in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1986), 325–38, this on 336–37. The idea owed much to the suggestion of Dr. Raymond Klibansky of Heidelberg University; it was organized by the two chief curators, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing.
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The two institutes jointly launched: Prospectus of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, London, 1937 (“study of Humanism”), and “Memo Regarding the Warburg Institute: How to Get It Known in England,” May 30, 1934, both cited in Elizabeth McGrath, “Disseminating Warburgianism: The Role of the ‘Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,’ ” in The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, ed. U. Fleckner and P. Mack (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 39–50, this on 43–44. The Prospectus is reproduced in illustration 2.
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the ceramicist and sculptor: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/about/news/warburg-institute-receive-major-gift-edmund-de-waal.
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When the Nazis started burning books: Nikola van Merveldt, “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (Winter 2007), 523–35, https://milholmbc.weebly.com/uploads/3/8/0/7/38071703/bookscannotbekilledbyfire.pdf.
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Elsewhere, microfilm photographers: Kathy Peiss, Information Hunters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43.
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The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Marcel Reich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself: The Life, trans. Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), 68–70.
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More was to come: Thomas Mann, Listen, Germany! Twenty-five Radio Messages to the German People over BBC (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), v–vi. See also Boes, Thomas Mann’s War, 168–69.
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Sometimes, in these recordings: Mann, Listen, Germany!, 69 (January 1942), 98 (June 1942).
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“Mankind cannot accept the ultimate triumph”: Mann, Listen, Germany!, 33 (May 1941).
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As the American art historian: Frederick Hartt, Florentine Art under Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), 45.
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Karl Marx had begun: For the alienation theory, see Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 108. First published in 1932, the book was edited together from various manuscripts written during Marx’s twenties in Paris.
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In China, home of ren: Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 89–91.
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Confucianism itself was suppressed: This happened in November 1966. See Sang Ye and Geremie R. Barmé, “Commemorating Confucius in 1966–67,” China Heritage Quarterly, no. 20 (December 2009), http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/scholarship.php?searchterm=020_confucius.inc&issue=020.
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Instead, a terrible puritanism: Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 94.
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And there were deaths: This is a widely accepted figure given by Yang Jisheng in The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012).
-
The popular, mostly humorous novelist: Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, UK: East Asian Research Center, 1974), 163–65, especially 164, quoting the interview with Lao She in 1966 by a visiting couple, Roma and Stuart Gelder. They included it in their book Memories for a Chinese Grand-Daughter (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), 182–95.
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Another regime of extreme nihilism: For the various estimates, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide.
-
As the writer and filmmaker Rithy Panh: Rithy Panh and Christophe Bataille, The Elimination, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2012), 142.
-
Rithy Panh’s 2013 film: Rithy Panh and Christophe Bataille, The Missing Picture [L’image manquante], Catherine Dussart Productions, 2013.
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The novelist William Golding said: William Golding, “Fable,” in The Hot Gates (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), 87 (“anyone who moved”), 94 (spirit of the times).
-
It is shocking to read: The twenty-six-year-old law student Heinz Küchler, in a letter of September 6, 1941, quoted and translated in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 116. The line was also quoted in David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 141.
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And, as Thomas Mann asked: Thomas Mann to Walter von Molo, September 7, 1945, in Thomas Mann, Letters, 1889–1955, ed. and trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970), vol. 2, 482.
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This was why the philosopher: Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1951), in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 17–34, this on 34.
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The idea behind this oft-quoted remark: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1997). See, for example, 24, for their critique of the Enlightenment as being “as totalitarian as any system.” The work was written in 1944 and expanded in 1947.
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In fact, some religious humanists: Jacques Maritain, True Humanism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 19. The book is based on lectures delivered at the University of Santander, Spain, in August 1934.
-
In 1950, Partisan Review ran: Partisan Review, February–May/June 1950; this from February 1950, 103.
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non-religious activists arranged: “Assault of the Humanists,” Elseviers Weekblad (1952), trans. in Hans van Deukeren et al., “From History to Practice—A History of IHEU, 1952–2002,” in International Humanist and Ethical Union, 1952–2002, ed. Bert Gasenbeek and Babu Gogineni (Utrecht: De Tijdstroom, 2002), 16–104, this on 26.
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He set out his postwar anti-humanist position: Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” in Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239–76, this on 247, 260 (call of Being), 252 (not God). “Being” is not always rendered with a capital B in English translation, because in German all nouns are spelled with an initial capital letter anyway, but there is an important distinction between Sein (“Being”) and Seiende (“beings”) that could be lost in English without the capital to flag it.
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Sartre’s own position: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 2007), 38. The French published title was slightly different: L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946, based on Sartre’s lecture of 1945). Although radically free, we are also supposed to make moral and political commitments to others.
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In 1966, Michel Foucault: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 422 (“erased”), 420 (Enlightenment).
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The postcolonial thinker: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 251.
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Yet Fanon, too, approached: All quotations in this paragraph are from Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 252–54.
-
Assessing these currents of thought: Longxi Zhang, “Humanism Yet Once More: A View from the Other Side,” in Humanism in Intercultural Perspective: Experiences and Expectations, ed. Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2009), 225–31, this on 228.
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“I undertook this project”: Panh and Bataille, The Elimination, 268.
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Benedetto Croce had also stressed: Benedetto Croce, “Progress as a State of Mind and Progress as Philosophic Concept,” in Philosophy—Poetry—History: An Anthology of Essays, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 589–94, this on 589–92.
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In pursuit of this goal: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, “The Basic Principle of the Curriculum,” in The Norwood Report: Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1943), 55, http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/norwood/norwood1943.html.
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In the United States: Harvard Committee, General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 168–69, https://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp/page/n5.
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The largest of all: H. J. Blackham, The Human Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 50.
-
Its Erasmian founding text stated: Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, signed at London, on 16 November 1945: Preamble, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%204/volume-4-I-52-English.pdf.
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Its conception was strongly humanistic: Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (London: Heinemann, 1968), 310–12; Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy [L’Unesco: Ses buts et sa philosophie] (London: Preparatory Commission, 1946; [facsimile edition] London: Euston Grove, 2010).
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As he wrote in his memoirs: Julian Huxley, Memories (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972, 1978), vol. 2, 30–31.
-
Unfortunately, the effect could not: Huxley, Memories, vol. 2, 22.
-
Then there was the matter of wording: United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 1, https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. On the process, see M. A. Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), especially 68, 90, for these particular discussions. See also Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007).
-
The first draft originally spoke: Sumner Twiss, “Confucian Ethics, Concept-Clusters, and Human Rights,” in Polishing the Chinese Mirror: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosemont, Jr., ed. M. Chandler and R. Littlejohn (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2007), 50–67, this on 60.
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The result of all these negotiations: Geraldine Van Bueren, “I Am Because You Are,” Times Literary Supplement, Human Rights Special Feature, December 21–28, 2018, 5–6.
-
Those words, said Mann: Mann, Listen, Germany!, 71 (January 1942).
-
Often, he followed in the steps: Damiano Fedele, “Cesare Fasola, il partigiano che salvò la Primavera di Botticelli,” Il Fiesolano, April 25, 2020, https://www.ilfiesolano.it/persone/cesare-fasola-il-partigiano-che-salvo-la-primavera-di-botticelli/. See also Eric Linklater, The Art of Adventure (London: Macmillan, 1947), 260–63.
-
He and Hartt were among the first: Hartt, Florentine Art under Fire, 18–19. The Montegufoni works are described and listed in Osbert Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room (London: Macmillan, 1949), 350–64.
-
One of the Allied visitors: Linklater, The Art of Adventure, 266–67.
-
This at least was the case: David Hapgood and David Richardson, Monte Cassino (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984), 13.
-
A member of the crew for this second bombing: Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959; London: Orbit, 2019), 26. See William H. Roberson and Robert L. Battenfeld, Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 1–2.
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Similar destruction almost happened: http://www.friendsofchartres.org/aboutchartres/colonelwelborngriffith/ and https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/6100%7Ctitle=Militarytimes. See also https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-american-hero-who-saved-chartres-cathedral.
-
As Jean-Paul Sartre put it: Jean-Paul Sartre, “The End of the War,” in The Aftermath of War (Situations 3), trans. C. Turner (London: Seagull, 2008), 65–75, this on 65.
-
“There lies before us”: Bertrand Russell, “Man’s Peril” (December 23, 1954), in Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 215–20, this on 220.
-
He repeated it in another: The Pugwash manifesto is online at https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/.
-
After one such occasion: Russell, Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 609.
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Russell worked for many other causes: Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual (The Reith Lectures, 1948–49) (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949), 93.
-
Around the same time, Julian Huxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_for_Conservation_of_Nature.
-
One part of nature almost: Russell, Autobiography, 511–12; 537. On the crash, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukken_Bruse_disaster.
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In an autobiographical talk: Bertrand Russell, “Hopes: Realized and Disappointed,” in Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 45–49, this on 47.
-
“I may have thought”: Russell, Autobiography, 728.
Chapter 12. The Place to Be Happy
-
During the crisis of the 1930s: Edwin H. Wilson, The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto, ed. Teresa Maciocha (Amherst, NY: Humanist Press [American Humanist Association], 1995), 23 (Raymond B. Bragg, letter of February 17, 1970, “humanist blast”), 63 (Buschman), 83 (Schiller).
-
Although the manifesto called: The 1933 manifesto is online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_Manifesto_I.
-
The Bristol Press in Connecticut: Wilson, The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto, 108–9.
-
In the postwar years: A good overview of international humanist societies and their origins, in the UK and internationally, can be found in Jim Herrick, Humanism: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Rationalist Press Association, 2009), 123–58. For a history of humanist organizations in the UK, see Callum Brown, David Nash, and Charlie Lynch, The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: A History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
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The most flamboyant: J. B. H. Wadia, M. N. Roy the Man: An Incomplete Royana (London: Sangam, 1983), 10.
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But he became disillusioned: M. N. Roy, New Humanism: A Manifesto (Delhi: Ajanta, 1981), 41.
-
As Bertrand Russell remarked: Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (May 10, 1933), in Mortals and Others (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 203.
-
Roy’s manifesto prominently featured: Roy, New Humanism, 43.
-
According to an entertaining account: Hans van Deukeren et al., “From History to Practice—A History of IHEU, 1952–2002,” in International Humanist and Ethical Union, 1952–2002, ed. Bert Gasenbeek and Babu Gogineni (Utrecht: De Tijdstroom, 2002), 16–104, this on 21.
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The latest version, issued by Humanists International in 2022: The “Declaration of Modern Humanism,” ratified at the Humanists International General Assembly, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2022, is in the Appendix of this book, and online: https://humanists.international/policy/declaration-of-modern-humanism/. The 1952 “Amsterdam Declaration,” ratified at the World Humanist Congress of 1952, is online: https://humanists.international/policy/amsterdam-declaration-1952/. Between these two, there were revised Amsterdam Declarations in 1975 and 2002.
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“We aim for our fullest”: American Humanist Association, “Humanist Manifesto III, a Successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933,” 2003, https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto3/. For AHA’s history: https://americanhumanist.org/about/our-history.
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The Black American humanist: Debbie Goddard, quoted in “Celebrating the Diverse Spirituality and Religion of African-Americans,” Huffington Post, February 17, 2004, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/diverse-african-american-religion_n_4762315.
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Goddard decided to work toward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Goddard, citing Brandon Withrow, “What It’s Like to Be Black and Atheist,” Daily Beast, November 19, 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-its-like-to-be-black-and-atheist. On the complexities of atheism and/or humanism in Black communities, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_the_African_diaspora.
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In return, as a 2001 declaration: AAH, “An African-American Humanist Declaration,” in Anthony B. Pinn, ed., By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 319–26, this on 326.
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humanists of color: U.S.: https://www.blackhumanists.org/about-the-bha. UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Black_Humanists.
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The poem was certainly shocking: James Kirkup’s “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name” can be found at https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2008/01/10/the-gay-poem-that-broke-blasphemy-laws/.
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The previous one had been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Gott.
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After the case, he would: https://www.channel4.com/news/archbishop-admits-church-failed-terribly-over-abuse-revelations.
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The poet himself avoided: Tania Branigan, “I Am Being Used, Claims Blasphemy Trial Poet,” Guardian, July 11, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/11/books.booksnews.
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But no literary testimony was heard: “Blasphemy at the Old Bailey,” Everyman, BBC, 1977.
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He would later recall: Quoted in John Mortimer, Murderers and Other Friends (London: Penguin, 1995), 87.
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The implication, as John Mortimer wrote: Mortimer, Murderers and Other Friends, 88.
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Meanwhile, with all the publicity: “Blasphemy at the Old Bailey.”
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Therefore, gay humanists decided: http://www.lgbthumanists.org.uk/history/.
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In honor of its origin: My thanks to Andrew Copson for telling me this.
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In the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_the_United_States.
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An international “End Blasphemy Laws Now” campaign: End Blasphemy Laws Now: https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/. Secular Rescue: David Robson, “The ‘Underground Railroad’ to Save Atheists,” Atlantic, January 18, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/the-underground-railroad-to-save-atheists/550229/. Secular Rescue’s website is here: www.secular-rescue.org; see also https://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/center_for_inquiry_launches_secular_rescue_to_save_lives_of_threatened_acti/.
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All this lies at the most dramatic end: For example, for the campaigns of Humanists UK, see their list at https://humanists.uk/campaigns/.
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In Britain, Humanists UK has some: https://humanists.uk/campaigns/secularism/constitutional-reform/bishops-in-the-lords/.
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Both there and in the House of Commons: On the problem of reserving a seat: https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2020/01/calls-for-parliamentary-prayers-review-after-mp-compelled-to-attend. For the form of prayers: https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/business/prayers/.
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The option to choose: G. W. Foote, Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh (London: Progressive, 1891), 35. On Bradlaugh, see also Charles Bradlaugh, The True Story of My Parliamentary Struggle (London: Freethought, 1882); Bryan Niblett, Dare to Stand Alone: The Story of Charles Bradlaugh (Oxford, UK: Kramedart, 2010); David Tribe, President Charles Bradlaugh, M.P. (London: Elek, 1971); John Robertson, Charles Bradlaugh (London: Watts, 1920).
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Thomas Jefferson, for example: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) (Baltimore: W. Pechin, 1800), 160.
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Some of the most conspicuous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance.
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“In God We Trust”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_We_Trust.
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A quietly determined activist: Vashti Cromwell McCollum, One Woman’s Fight (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951; rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961; Madison, WI: Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1993), 86 (cabbage), 85 (“ATHIST”), 101 (“May your rotten soul”), 104 (“Well, it’s a cinch”). See also Jay Rosenstein’s documentary, in which McCollum and her sons are interviewed: God Is Not on Trial Here Today (McCollum v. Board of Education), Jay Rosenstein Productions, 2010: http://jayrosenstein.com/pages/lord.html. It can be found online at https://youtu.be/EeSHLnrgaqY. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vashti_McCollum and her obituary, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/26/obituaries/26mccullum.html.
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In the UK, a similar outcry: Margaret Knight, Morals without Religion, and Other Essays (London: Dennis Dobson, 1955), 22–23 (“She looks”), 16–17 (Russell, and speaking openly). On opposition within the BBC, see Callum G. Brown, The Battle for Christian Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 139–40.
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This was why both British and American: Bishopsgate Institute Library, London: BHA papers. BHA 1/17/148, on the bus campaign, including a BHA report, “Atheist Bus Campaign: Why Did It Work?” BHA 1/17/149, correspondence and messages concerning the campaign, 2008–2009. See also https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/successful-campaigns/atheist-bus-campaign/.
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“I would not, by word”: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, reprinted in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 764.
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Julian Huxley wrote: Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), 358.
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“If a man knows the theory”: Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, May 15, 1889, translated in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, trans. Michael Henry Heim, ed. Simon Karlinsky (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 145. The song is by Mikhail Glinka, a setting to music of words by Pushkin. You can hear Galina Vishnevskaya singing it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymfoXrdWVQM&ab_channel=GalinaVishnevskaya-Topic.
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In 1968, the doyen: H. J. Blackham, Humanism (Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican, 1968), 159.
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Geoffrey Scott, author of the influential: Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism (London: Constable, 1914), 211–15 (bodily sense), 235 (“for physical conditions”).
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These goals drove: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961, 1989), 50, 55, 83.
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The work of Jacobs influenced: Annie Matan and Peter Newman, People Cities: The Life and Legacy of Jan Gehl (Washington, DC, and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 2016), 14–15 (including reproduction of a picture of him in an Ascoli Piceno newspaper, captioned “Sembra ma non è un ‘beatnik’ ”), 18 (“act of vandalism”; this project was in 1969). See also Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010), which includes pictures of people dwarfed or squeezed aside by cars and roads.
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“He said—and no one”: Leonid Sergeyevich Madyarov speaking, in Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (London: Vintage, 2006), 267.
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As another character: From the testament of Ikonnikov-Morzh, in Grossman, Life and Fate, 393.
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When he began Life and Fate: On the story of its rescue: Robert Chandler, introduction to Grossman, Life and Fate, xvii–xix; Robert Chandler, introduction to “Late Stories,” in Vasily Grossman, The Road, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova (London: Maclehose/Quercus, 2011), 197. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Fate.
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It was immediately hailed: The comparison with Chekhov’s stories is made by Robert Chandler in the introduction to his translation of Grossman’s Life and Fate, xii–xiii.
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Every time a person dies: Grossman, Life and Fate, 539 (“the stars”), 201 (machine, Fascism).
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Jaron Lanier, himself a pioneer: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2010), 32.
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To see this demeaning thought: George Eliot, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1879), 299–309, this on 307.
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These days some think that: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/31/domestic-chicken-anthropocene-humanity-influenced-epoch. See also Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). On the idea that the concept gives us too much importance, see Peter Brannen, “The Anthropocene Is a Joke,” Atlantic, August 13, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/.
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Contemplating this, some human beings: http://www.vhemt.org/. See also https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/10/i-campaign-for-the-extinction-of-the-human-race-les-knight. Posthumanism: The term was first defined in 1977 by the literary theorist Ihab Hassan, who said, “We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism.” Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer: toward a Posthumanist Culture? A University Masque in Five Scenes,” Georgia Review 31, no. 4 (Winter 1977), 830–50, this on 843. See also David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).
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Posthumanism has a benign air: For similar remarks, see James Lovelock and Bryan Appleyard, Novacene (London: Penguin, 2020), 56.
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It is not all that remote: David C. Barker and David H. Bearce, “End-Times Theology, the Shadow of the Future, and Public Resistance to Addressing Global Climate Change,” Political Research Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 2013), 267–79.
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In a 2016 survey: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/global-warming-god-end-times/.
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In the stage after that: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Duckworth, 2005), 15. On transhumanism, see also https://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/ and Max More and Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader (Oxford, UK: Wiley, 2013).
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The story begins: Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (London: Pan, 1956), 122.
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A few people resist: Clarke, Childhood’s End, 159.
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Such an ending for humanity: Clarke, Childhood’s End, 178.
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He goes where Dante went: “Transumanar significar per verba / non si poria.” Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 2007), 6–7 (canto 1, lines 70–71). On these lines, see Prue Shaw, Reading Dante (New York and London: Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2015), 245–46.
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“One is responsible to life”: James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 339 (part of The Fire Next Time, 1963; originally published in The New Yorker, November 17, 1962).
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“Humanism is a frail craft”: Tzvetan Todorov, Duties and Delights: The Life of a Go-Between. Interviews with Catherine Portevin, trans. Gila Walker (London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008), 264.
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“Happiness is the only good”: Robert Ingersoll’s happiness credo, from An Oration on the Gods (January 29, 1872) (Cairo, IL: Daily Bulletin Steam Book & Job Print, 1873), 48. Also in the 1899 recorded version, found online at https://youtu.be/rLLapwIoEVI.