Quintilian in Northern Europe during the Renaissance, 1479–1620

This chapter discusses the impact of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria in northern Europe between 1479 and 1620. It discusses the printing history of the text, which began in Italy but was largely northern European after 1520 and which peaked in the years 1520–1550, and the commentaries which were published alongside the text. It analyses the use made of Quintilian by prominent northern humanist writers of textbooks on rhetoric and letter-writing, such as Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, Juan Luis Vives, Peter Ramus, Cyprien Soarez, Gerardus Vossius, and Nicolas Caussin. It considers the use made of Quintilian’s ideas in theories of education by Sir Thomas Elyot and Erasmus and in Montaigne’s Essais.

Beasts at School: Luther, Language and Education for the Advancement of Germanness

The article aims at answering three complementary questions – why the implementation of the Lutheran idea of Christian renewal was possible by means of the German tongue alone; how the language can get beyond its merely communicative and descriptive purposes; and finally when can the performative analogy between speaking and being become essential for the language itself? Consequently, it discusses Luther’s concept of language as the primary vehicle for cultural change in terms of religion and confession, the socio-political agenda and national aspirations. Such a concept involved a great deal of theoretical considerations regarding pragmatic and most of all performative effectiveness of language, that altogether enabled Luther to provide his fellow-countrymen with a language which was culturally self-assertive, founded upon usage rather that abstract rules, and therefore understandable to common men, measurably affecting their way of being. For that reason Luther’s educational aims and his reform of divine worship, being the direct beneficiaries of that discovery, were taken into consideration, together with their social impact on the new cultural modes of comprehending the qualities that distinguish one community from another. Accordingly, the article discusses the language discovered by Luther (Hochdeutsch) as a cultural understructure having an effect on every feature that defines Lutheranism (and the Lutheran collective identity in particular) in respect of politics, religion, values and knowledge. For such a language, more than anything else, was able to take all the German peculiarities into account, and to make Germans finally capable of overcoming the spiritual and corporeal supremacy of the Roman Latin (lingua Romana). A closer insight given here into a pre-Lutheran period of that Roman-German cultural encounter leaves no doubt that Luther himself was often following the footsteps of fifteenth-century German humanists like Jakob Wimpfeling, Rudolph Agricola and Conrad Celtis. Although Germans “are and must remain beasts and stupid brutes,” as Luther declared, nonetheless language, by means of education, and divine worship could finally liberate those beasts from Roman-Latin standards, that is from a foreign way of speaking and being.

Agricola, Rudolph (1444–85)

Rudolph Agricola was one of the leading humanists of northern Europe in the late fifteenth century. His polished Latin style, his Greek learning and his knowledge of classical literature made him a hero to Erasmus, More, Vives, Melanchthon and Ramus. His major work, De inventione dialectica (On Dialectical Invention) (1479), provides an original account of practical argumentation by combining elements from the established teachings of rhetoric and dialectic with analysis of passages from classical literature. It includes a new version of the topics of invention, based on Cicero’s method of devising arguments, outlined in his Topics. Agricola’s letter De formando studio (On Shaping Studies) (1484), which circulated widely in the sixteenth century, outlines a plan of knowledge and discusses methods of study. Although his approach was strongly humanist and the Roman rhetorician Quintilian was his favourite author, his logic remained firmly Aristotelian, unlike that of his predecessor Lorenzo Valla. He remained aware of the achievements of scholasticism, expressing admiration for Duns Scotus and adopting an extreme realist position in metaphysics.

Equitable Poetics and the State of Conflict in Edmund Spenser's Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser's legal poem, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, considers how civil conflicts implicitly generate a basis for their own evaluation and resolution. To illustrate this idea, Spenser draws from a tradition of rhetorical argumentation stretching from Aristotle and Cicero to Rudolph Agricola and Philip Sidney. This tradition emphasizes how fictions establish the shared questions that can create a deliberative context for equitable judgment when general law and particular case come into conflict. Dramatizing this rational process through an allegorical legal trial, Spenser illuminates how divergent judgments and actions become ethically legible to one another as parts of the same deliberative whole.

From Universals to Topics: The Realism of Rudolph Agricola, with an Edition of his Reply to a Critic

Rudolph Agricola’s De inventione dialectica has rightly been regarded as the most original and influential textbook on argumentation, reading, writing, and communication in the Renaissance. At the heart of his treatment are the topics (loci), such as definition, genus, species, place, whole, parts, similars, and so on. While their function in Agricola’s system is argumentative and rhetorical, the roots of the topics are metaphysical, as Agricola himself explicitly acknowledges. It has led scholars to characterize Agricola as a realist or even an extreme realist. This article studies two little treatises on universals by Agricola that throw further light on his realism. It is suggested that they could be viewed as an early step in his long-term project of revising and re-organizing the systems of topics as he encountered them in Aristotle, Cicero, and Boethius. The article offers a close analysis of the treatises, suggesting that Agricola’s realism owes a (general) debt to the school of the Scotists. In both earlier and later work Agricola emphasizes the common aspects of things that enable us to categorize and talk about things without denying their fundamental unicity and individuality. An edition of Agricola’s second treatise on universals—a reply to a critic—is added.