renaissance to enlightenment essay

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Chapter VI: Renaissance and Enlightenment: The Golden Age of Interdisciplinarity

In a poem from one of the great writers during the Enlightenment Era, Alexander Pope outlines the role of man and underlines the ethos of the enlightenment:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride.

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little, or too much:

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused, or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! 1

In this first stanza of the 1732 poem Of the Nature and, State of Man with Respect to Himself as an Individual or commonly called The Riddle of the World,  Pope outlines the comedic fragility of the human being in this new era of knowledge. As Macfarlane opines, mankind was entering into a new world of scientific and epistemological revolution; and Pope, perhaps unknowingly, offered the most grounded predicament of human beings, that we are flawed 2 . This is the most significant contrast with knowledge during this time, the fact that the knowledge of a human being is vast and comprehensive through science and arts (as showed in the poem); yet at the same time, we are governed by laws, science, and the society that forms around us, like death which we are cursed with knowing. The Renaissance which came after centuries of religious, economic, and political turmoil at the hands of the Medieval dark ages attempts a redux or a return to classical ways of logical knowledge. These were profound as being a catalyst to a new way of knowledge in modern eras that followed.

What the Renaissance and Enlightenment Era did was turn back the clock on epistemological sense making, more succinctly, a return to the epistemology of the Greek Antiquity and Ancient Rome. Thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s Printing Press (c. 1440-1452), the technical revolution of knowledge was now easily distributed to the masses 3 . In many ways the trivium and quadrivium went from the hallowed walls of the university, to the outside world where the academic dialogue spread across the land including the Latin language being used as a tool for epistemological expansion. Research by Reynolds and Wilson focus on work such as Plato’s Phaedrus , and Aristotle on making their way into the Western cannon starting in the Medieval period with other poetic works retained from Ancient Greece via the Byzantine Empire 4 . This presented a transformative concept towards knowledge and understanding, in a way, described as surfacing from the ocean for fresh air after the drowning suffocation of religious dogma in the Medieval Period.

One of the most important characteristics to Renaissance learning was the concept of humanism which influenced most aspects of Renaissance life, learning, and society. Humanism in the era as described by Reynolds and Wilson:

“[H]as been traced to the word umanista …to denote a teacher of the humanities, the stadia humanitatis , which by this time had crystalized as the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.” 5

Humanism is an embrace of the interdisciplinary forms of learning from Chapter 5 – with the trivium and quadrivium and the growth of the scholastic institution. I would suggest the true description of interdisciplinary here relies on educators using humanistic concepts in the seven liberal disciplines. This creates knowledge in a form of apprenticeship outside of the ambiguity of ecclesiastical philosophy, although some scholars would opine that the humanism is indeed a way of seeing the world in a theoretical lens, the Renaissance era took philosophy and grew the art form in a divergent way through an informed or enlightened use of interdisciplinary thinking; pushing outwardly the boundaries of knowledge.

Polymaths and Renaissance Interdisciplinarity

In Europe, after the Middle Ages many nation states went through reforms, none bigger than Italy who were on the forefront of the Renaissance Era. Art and literature were at the head of the Italian Renaissance using the forms of humanism to create some of the most influential pieces in human history. One of the most influential authors that ushered in the Italian Renaissance was Durante di Alighiero degli Aligheri, or as he is referred to in common parlance, Dante. His famous work the Divine Comedy (c. 1320), is considered one of the most famous works of poetry of the Middle Ages and influential to the Italian Renaissance movement influencing a generation of knowledge, literation and art forms 6 which led to the rise of the polymaths, most famously Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The polymath is key to understanding interdisciplinarity, as interdisciplinary thinking and interdisciplinary nature is the Renaissance definition for a universal or learned person in a variety of different subjects. It was architect Leon Battista Alberti (c. 1404-1472) that stated a polymath or a Renaissance Man “can do all things if he will” 7 .

The concept of the polymath in the Renaissance era has been regarded as giftedness, especially with the relevance of da Vinci and Michelangelo. However, one might look at the nature of interdisciplinarity and wonder if all humans, in a frame of humanistic thinking, are different gradations of polymaths? Robert A. Heinlein sees this as a need for humans to be polymathic in a contemporary framework through his writings on the competent man:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, coon a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” 8

Aside from the sense of classical masculinity, or what I would like to call ‘ubermasculinus’; there is a sense that if you are a human, man or woman, you may not know how to butcher a hog or cook dinner, but understand that eating is about surviving. Perhaps someone with a weak stomach does not have the ability to set a bone, but should have the knowledge to be able to transfer the injured to a hospital to get the help they need. Although Heinlein’s comedic outlook could be far from any one person, the theory behind it is true, and that competency comes from the knowledge to make connections from certain situations that are a part of life such as love, living, eating, labor, and education. The main thesis of Renaissance Interdisciplinarity is that the polymath is not an expert in every concept around, but is competent to do these things or at the very least, understand their meaning to learning, life, and society.

One of the greatest scientists of the modern era Erwin Schrödinger attempted to connect the concepts of affine connections and differential geometry with a Lagrangian method was regarded as a “heroic attempt to attain the great unity of physical laws by way of geometrizing classical fields” 9 . The attempt to be a polymath is the ability to expand knowledge outside of classical realms and try something different. Much like Schrödinger, the polymath is willing to obtain knowledge in their specific field and expand their knowledge into other fields, the interdisciplinarity comes from the polymath’s ability to use their expertise to transcend their field into another field. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment produced this transcendent concept of knowledge outside of the social and institutional boundaries to make society and institutions better for it.

From Renaissance to Enlightenment: The Golden Age of Interdisciplinarity

Remnants of the narrow and strict Medieval religious doctrines battled with one profession, perhaps more than any other: astronomers. There is a host of literature outlining the battle between priests and astronomers and no other astronomer felt this challenge than the Polish mathematician: Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). Copernicus is widely known for the heliocentric model, which places the sun at the center of the known universe, rather than the Earth which was previously understood. Although this came many years after a theory was introduced by Aristarchus of Samos 10 , Copernicus is regarded as expanding and perfecting the model leading to a new age of scientific revolution. In his work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium or On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (c. 1543) Copernicus outlines the now scientifically credible concept of the Sun in the middle of our solar system. However, at the time these were controversial ideals contradicting Ptolemy’s and the churches geocentric model of the universe. He outlines the spherical shape of the planets, the movement of the planets around the sun and the sphere of stars that make up the universe 11 . It was in this work he graphs and illustrates the solar system with the explanation:

“Therefore if the first law is still safe – for no one will bring forward a better one than that the magnitude of the orbital circles should be measured by the magnitude of time – then the order of the spheres will follow in this way – beginning with the highest: the first and highest of all sphere of the fixed stars, which comprehends itself to all things, and is accordingly immovable” 12

Although, as we now know more about the universe, that the stars are not immovable, actually they follow the same laws as our star (i.e. The Sun). Copernicus was way ahead of his time regarding knowledge about the solar system and the universe. Even with vicious challenges from the church such as Philipp Melanchthon and Julius Caesar Scaliger who suggested that “[Copernicus’] writings should be expunged or their authors whipped” 13 . This work was instrumental to ushering in the Enlightenment thinkers and the scientific revolution.

The Enlightenment Era is considered one of the most important eras in the history of epistemology and knowledge; given it was the catalyst that moved human history from the tumultuous era of 14th century into prosperous 20th century. The impact on the growth of society was key as the Enlightenment saw mass-reformation in epistemology, society, economy, philosophy, and science through an intellectual movement predominantly in Europe 14 . Some look deeper to what was at the center of this intellectual movement and certain factors that related to the advancement. Cohen outlines the work of Claude Bernhard with this understanding:

“In this context Bernhard seems to have envisaged two separate processes. One was the large-scale dramatic revolution, the introduction of the experimental method…The second was ‘science in evolution’, primarily an incremental process having two aspects: using knowledge acquired already…and attaining new knowledge” 15 .

Stephen Hicks, a Canadian-American philosopher, outlines three names from the Enlightenment Era that were key thinkers to the web of logic, reason, progress and the ultimate pursuit of happiness 16 . The names he mentions are Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and John Locke. I would go one step further and add David Hume and consider his work on empirical philosophies a cornerstone to Enlightenment thinking.

The interdisciplinarity of enlightenment comes from what enlightenment stands for, a new and bright view on the world. These are commonly referred to as the Enlightenment Values and consist of: Reason, Logic, Liberty, Progress, and Toleration. Reason and logic outline a rationalistic base for all learning, freedom to pursue any type of learning especially the removal from institutional roadblocks with science were also important values. Progress comes from the continual advancement of knowledge, and toleration from maintaining the forms of humanism and natural law. What these authors provide is a clear augmentation of these values in their work which create a logical and rational base for knowledge that we continue to use to this day, especially in sciences.

Francis Bacon, the First Viscount of St. Alban (1561-1626) is known as the father of empiricism, the scientific method, and one of the most influential members of Enlightenment Era scientific revolution. It was in 1605 where Bacon formulated his ideas for the Baconian Method for inductive reasoning in The Advancement of Learning , this where life can be learned, thus learning can be obtained and advanced through civil history, ecclesiastical history, mathematics, epistemology, rhetoric, and moral culture 17 . René Descartes (1596-1650) is known as a great interdisciplinarian through his contributions in the area of philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. The French national is regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Descartes is most famous for his position on logical philosophy with his famous quote “ I think, hence I am ” 18 , and provides the foundation for logic and reason tied to the human and only the human through interdisciplinary knowledge. John Locke (1632-1704) is the English philosopher and political scientist who is seen as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers. He is regarded as the father of classical liberalism which have cross-disciplinary facets including political science, ethics, and educational theory. Lastly, David Hume (1711-1776) is the Enlightenment influencer from the highlands of Scotland. Known for his work on empiricism, he is regarded as a philosopher, historian, and economist. Hicks has referred to Hume in a minor instance to attributing a move away from the concepts of Enlightenment to a doctrine of multiple truths 19 ; however, I would suggest that Humian concept of experience actually lent to advancement of empirical enlightenment than many philosophers have proposed in the past .

What these authors have in common is a shared understanding of epistemology and truth regarding knowledge. This itself, considering the time can be outlined as empirical given the shared beliefs on knowledge between many of the thinkers. There were criticisms from authors, notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fredrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte which came out as Post-Kantianism c Idealism or German Idealism 20 . This would eventually set the stage between Foundationalist and Anti-Foundationalist doctrines which are present to this day in epistemology. However, idealism considers the subjective notion of how things are seen to us and how things are perceived, and truth can only come from experience. What enlightenment thinkers attempt is to cut through the subjective murkiness regarding ethics to create a foundational knowledge that governs all the idealism that is found. Essentially, if truth comes from experience, what creates experience?

These authors attempted to find the foundational principles that govern experience within the universe. This was done through challenging the disciplinary field of ethics and connection of different knowledge realms using interdisciplinarity. Bacon starts through the interconnecting nature of thinking under his rule of natural epistemology and logic:

“I take it those things are to be held possible which may be done by some person, though not by every one; and which may be done by many, though not by any one; and which may be done in the succession of ages, though not within the hourglass of one man’s life; and which may be done by public designation, though not by private endeavour.” 21

Descartes in his Discourse on Methods (c. 1637) talks about his educational training and the critical views that come from his misguided teaching:

“But as soon as I finished the entire course of study, at the close of which is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I completely changed my opinion. For I found myself in so many doubts and errors, that I was convinced I had advanced no farther in all my attempts of learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance.” 22

Locke in The Two Treatise of Government (c. 1681) outlines the need for freedom and autonomy for humans against tyranny toward natural law; and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (c. 1693) outlines the need for reasoning with a child to expand their competency in learning:

“To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.” 23

“They understand it as early as they do language; and, if I misobserve not, they love to be treated as rational creatures, sooner than as imagin’d. ‘Tis a pride should be cherish’d in them, and, as much as can be, made the greatest instrument to turn them by. But when I talk of reasoning , I do not intend any other but such as is suited to the child’s capacity and apprehension. No body can think a boy of three or seven years old should be argu’d with as a grown man. Long discourses, and philosophical reasoning, at best, amaze and confound, but do not instruct children. When I say, therefore, that they must be treated as rational creatures, I mean that you should make them sensible, by the mildness of your carriage, and the composure even in your correction of them, that what you do is reasonable in you, and useful and necessary for them.” 24

Hume uses experience-relating-to-truth found in his work Of the Standard of Taste (c. 1757). The lesson of interdisciplinarity comes in the form of experience through experimentation leading to advancement in science. Inside this work, Hume references the literary work of Don Quixote  to describe the difference of taste, where two men drink a bottle of wine, one senses a taste of leather, the other senses a taste of metal, only to find that at the bottom of the wine glass is a key with a leather tie attached 25 . Two different tastes, but through experimentation they find that both theories were correct and can be regarded as empirical and rational. With interdisciplinarity the ability of using experimental design and empiricism together can develop answers to complex issues augmenting two theories to make one. Innate characteristics of interdisciplinarity follow a methodological approach from Bacon; a natural contrarian or critical view from Descartes; an autonomous, free, and rational objective as outlined in Locke; and an experimental justification for finding expanded truth in Hume.

What do these authors attempt with interdisciplinarity regarding foundational truth in relation to Enlightenment Values? Well first is that learning must be free, and freedom cannot be taught, rather is inherited through our understanding as humans. This goes beyond the idealism principle towards a cognitive notion of interdisciplinarity and our innate ability to pursue knowledge – allowing for the freedom to obtain knowledge. Studies from Peter Curruthers and Allen Repko suggest the ability for creative and technological innovation dating back 40,000 years ago from species over 100,000 years old 26 , leading to the concept of established communication and cognitive constructs creating a sense of cognitive interdisciplinarity 27 . This connects the concepts of cognitive and neuro-networks working in an interdisciplinary way to create knowledge for humans, essentially lending evidence to the natural epistemology model of accepting natural law and foundational governance. Natural epistemology and logic within the laws of nature that supersede any human, govern our ability to learn and to have idyllic experiences.

In Practice: Economics, Science, and Social Elevation

Enlightenment Values in practice created some of the greatest advancements at the tail end of the Enlightenment Era. Economics came in the form of capitalism which brought a collective enhancement succeeding mercantilism – boosting trade and economic growth for states. Science grew from Antoine Lavoisier and Edward Jenner from 1789 and 1796 respectively, as Lavoisier created the initial Periodic Table and Edward Jenner’s contribution was the creation of the smallpox vaccine 28 . Another notable figure was Sir Issac Newton and his amazing advancements in mathematics, physics, and astronomy through formulation of Newtonian Physics and mathematical descriptions on the foundational concept of gravity 29 . This all culminated in a social elevation unlike the world has ever seen. In comparison to the Medieval world, the adults and children far exceeded in social progress and happiness.

In the modern era, criticisms of capitalism are presented, some acceptable, but most move away from the original concepts of capitalism as a general theory. Capitalism itself has an interdisciplinary framework through Adam Smith who sought to challenge past systems such as agrarian capitalism and mercantilism to create a new economic foundation based on liberty for trade, commerce, taxation, wages, labor, education, and society 30 . Smith outlines the theory relating to the systems of a political economy:

“Political economy, considered as a branch of science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects; first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, of more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.” 31

Smith not only outlines the economic system of capitalism, but the political and social system of capitalism for the benefit of society, insofar connecting the ideas of a political economy focused on autonomous capital for the betterment of humans. Some opponents of capitalism might question any benefits, however, Smith does provide a concept of taxation to help society and the commonwealth which relates to a social contract in a relationship between citizen, state, and society. The interdisciplinarity framework from the Enlightenment of capitalism was to provide a sense of enrichment not only for an economy through systems of growing cities and the Industrial Revolution, but for a political and social life being a tool for systems that expand beyond the economic system.

It was in this economic system where science grew leaps and bounds in the goal of advancing learning, life, and society. This came about through the growth in social and economic systems for the people in society. It was the French that rounded the work on scientific advancement through new forms of economic salary for discovery and research 32 . This had led to a growth in the advancement of medicine in institutions through the growth in society. Institutions were able to provide funds and resources to professional workplaces such as hospitals and medical laboratories 33 and compliment more people for health and wellness. These concepts would be paramount as the world moved steadfast in the modern era.

Interdisciplinarity is the Catalyst

The importance that interdisciplinarity played during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment era creates the connection between humans and their ability to make knowledgeable connections to create complex systems for the overall good. In summation, the prevailing outcomes from the Renaissance and Enlightenment Era produced massive benefits for learning, life and society in many ways including politics, economics, medicine, personal freedom, wealth, health, and progression.

At this point, it may be prudent to look at the Renaissance and Enlightenment as a framework for human growth and understanding. Although, many issues arose after the Enlightenment and into the modern era, the re-growth of interdisciplinarity meant the re-growth and practical expansion of knowledge to challenge issues. In many ways, to return to interdisciplinarity is to return to a natural sense of epistemology for the greater good for ourselves and society. It is important to look at the Renaissance Era and the Enlightenment with an appreciation of the current world we live in, I personally tend to stay away from “what-aboutisms” but one might consider, what would happen if the Medieval concepts from 500-1400 would have continued into a modern day society, what would our world look like and what would we be as a human race? I think about this questions often; with no growth in science, heightened feudalism with tyrant kings and queens owning lands, and the common human used as chattel; questions and implications like this should be considered as we dive into a new age in future chapters, also to outline some critiques and criticisms to the proliferation of modern systems.

The Interdisciplinarity Reformation Copyright © 2020 by Carson Babich. All Rights Reserved.

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Enlightenment

The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “ philosophes ”(e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment exemplified by the project of the Encyclopedia (see below 1.5). However, there are noteworthy centers of Enlightenment outside of France as well. There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung , key figures of which include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered throughout Europe and America in the eighteenth century.

What makes for the unity of such tremendously diverse thinkers under the label of “Enlightenment”? For the purposes of this entry, the Enlightenment is conceived broadly. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence ”, because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences) would dramatically improve human life. Guided by D’Alembert’s characterization of his century, the Enlightenment is conceived here as having its primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but also the set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry in the earlier times. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. Taking as the core of the Enlightenment the aspiration for intellectual progress, and the belief in the power of such progress to improve human society and individual lives, this entry includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz, and Spinoza, thinkers whose contributions are indispensable to understanding the eighteenth century as “the century of philosophy par excellence ”.

The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social unrest comes to a head in the violent political upheaval which sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured ancien régime (the monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the political power of the Catholic Church). The French revolutionaries meant to establish in place of the ancien régime a new reason-based order instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Though the Enlightenment, as a diverse intellectual and social movement, has no definite end, the devolution of the French Revolution into the Terror in the 1790s, corresponding, as it roughly does, with the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of opposed movements, such as Romanticism, can serve as a convenient marker of the end of the Enlightenment, conceived as an historical period.

For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.

This entry describes the main tendencies of Enlightenment thought in the following main sections: (1) The True: Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics in the Enlightenment; (2) The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment; (3) The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment.

1.1 Rationalism and the Enlightenment

1.2 empiricism and the enlightenment, 1.3 skepticism in the enlightenment, 1.4 science of man and subjectivism in the enlightenment, 1.5 emerging sciences and the encyclopedia, 2.1 political theory, 2.2 ethical theory, 2.3 religion and the enlightenment, 3.1 french classicism and german rationalism, 3.2 empiricism and subjectivism, 3.3 late enlightenment aesthetics, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the true: science, epistemology and metaphysics in the enlightenment.

In this era dedicated to human progress, the advancement of the natural sciences is regarded as the main exemplification of, and fuel for, such progress. Isaac Newton’s epochal accomplishment in his Principia Mathematica (1687), which, very briefly described, consists in the comprehension of a diversity of physical phenomena – in particular the motions of heavenly bodies, together with the motions of sublunary bodies – in few relatively simple, universally applicable, mathematical laws, was a great stimulus to the intellectual activity of the eighteenth century and served as a model and inspiration for the researches of a number of Enlightenment thinkers. Newton’s system strongly encourages the Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of ourselves as capable of knowing those laws and of plumbing the secrets of nature through the exercise of our unaided faculties. – The conception of nature, and of how we know it, changes significantly with the rise of modern science. It belongs centrally to the agenda of Enlightenment philosophy to contribute to the new knowledge of nature, and to provide a metaphysical framework within which to place and interpret this new knowledge.

René Descartes’ rationalist system of philosophy is one of the pillars on which Enlightenment thought rests. Descartes (1596–1650) undertakes to establish the sciences upon a secure metaphysical foundation. The famous method of doubt Descartes employs for this purpose exemplifies (in part through exaggerating) an attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment. According to Descartes, the investigator in foundational philosophical research ought to doubt all propositions that can be doubted. The investigator determines whether a proposition is dubitable by attempting to construct a possible scenario under which it is false. In the domain of fundamental scientific (philosophical) research, no other authority but one’s own conviction is to be trusted, and not one’s own conviction either, until it is subjected to rigorous skeptical questioning. With his method, Descartes casts doubt upon the senses as authoritative source of knowledge. He finds that God and the immaterial soul are both better known, on the basis of innate ideas, than objects of the senses. Through his famous doctrine of the dualism of mind and body, that mind and body are two distinct substances, each with its own essence, the material world (allegedly) known through the senses becomes denominated as an “external” world, insofar as it is external to the ideas with which one immediately communes in one’s consciousness. Descartes’ investigation thus establishes one of the central epistemological problems, not only of the Enlightenment, but also of modernity: the problem of objectivity in our empirical knowledge. If our evidence for the truth of propositions about extra-mental material reality is always restricted to mental content, content before the mind, how can we ever be certain that the extra-mental reality is not other than we represent it as being? Descartes’ solution depends on our having secured prior and certain knowledge of God. In fact, Descartes argues that all human knowledge (not only knowledge of the material world through the senses) depends on metaphysical knowledge of God.

Despite Descartes’ grounding of all scientific knowledge in metaphysical knowledge of God, his system contributes significantly to the advance of natural science in the period. He attacks the long-standing assumptions of the scholastic-aristotelians whose intellectual dominance stood in the way of the development of the new science; he developed a conception of matter that enabled mechanical explanation of physical phenomena; and he developed some of the fundamental mathematical resources – in particular, a way to employ algebraic equations to solve geometrical problems – that enabled the physical domain to be explained with precise, simple mathematical formulae. Furthermore, his grounding of physics, and all knowledge, in a relatively simple and elegant rationalist metaphysics provides a model of a rigorous and complete secular system of knowledge. Though major Enlightenment thinkers (for example Voltaire in his Letters on the English Nation , 1734) embrace Newton’s physical system in preference to Descartes’, Newton’s system itself depends on Descartes’ earlier work, a dependence to which Newton himself attests.

Cartesian philosophy also ignites various controversies in the latter decades of the seventeenth century that provide the context of intellectual tumult out of which the Enlightenment springs. Among these controversies are the following: Are mind and body really two distinct sorts of substances, and if so, what is the nature of each, and how are they related to each other, both in the human being (which presumably “has” both a mind and a body) and in a unified world system? If matter is inert (as Descartes claims), what can be the source of motion and the nature of causality in the physical world? And of course the various epistemological problems: the problem of objectivity, the role of God in securing our knowledge, the doctrine of innate ideas, and others.

Baruch Spinoza’s systematic rationalist metaphysics, which he develops in his Ethics (1677) in part in response to problems in the Cartesian system, is also an important basis for Enlightenment thought. Spinoza develops, in contrast to Cartesian dualism, an ontological monism according to which there is only one substance, God or nature, with two attributes, corresponding to mind and body. Spinoza’s denial, on the basis of strict philosophical reasoning, of the existence of a transcendent supreme being, his identification of God with nature, gives strong impetus to the strands of atheism and naturalism that thread through Enlightenment philosophy. Spinoza’s rationalist principles also lead him to assert a strict determinism and to deny any role to final causes or teleology in explanation. (See Israel 2001.)

The rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz (1646–1716) is also foundational for the Enlightenment, particularly the German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung ), one prominent expression of which is the Leibnizian rationalist system of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Leibniz articulates, and places at the head of metaphysics, the great rationalist principle, the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. This principle exemplifies the characteristic conviction of the Enlightenment that the universe is thoroughly rationally intelligible. The question arises of how this principle itself can be known or grounded. Wolff attempts to derive it from the logical principle of non-contradiction (in his First Philosophy or Ontology , 1730). Criticism of this alleged derivation gives rise to the general question of how formal principles of logic can possibly serve to ground substantive knowledge of reality. Whereas Leibniz exerts his influence through scattered writings on various topics, some of which elaborate plans for a systematic metaphysics which are never executed by Leibniz himself, Wolff exerts his influence on the German Enlightenment through his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which he attempts to demonstrate all the propositions of science from first principles, known a priori.

Wolff’s rationalist metaphysics is characteristic of the Enlightenment by virtue of the pretensions of human reason within it, not by reason’s success in establishing its claims. Much the same could be said of the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century. Through their articulation of the ideal of scientia, of a complete science of reality, composed of propositions derived demonstratively from a priori first principles, these philosophers exert great influence on the Enlightenment. But they fail, rather spectacularly, to realize this ideal. To the contrary, what they bequeath to the eighteenth century is metaphysics, in the words of Kant, as “a battlefield of endless controversies.” However, the controversies themselves – regarding the nature of God, mind, matter, substance, cause, et cetera, and the relations of each of these to the others – provide tremendous fuel to Enlightenment thought.

Despite the confidence in and enthusiasm for human reason in the Enlightenment – it is sometimes called “the Age of Reason” – the rise of empiricism, both in the practice of science and in the theory of knowledge, is characteristic of the period. The enthusiasm for reason in the Enlightenment is primarily not for the faculty of reason as an independent source of knowledge, which is embattled in the period, but rather for the human cognitive faculties generally; the Age of Reason contrasts with an age of religious faith, not with an age of sense experience. Though the great seventeenth century rationalist metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz exert tremendous influence on philosophy in the Enlightenment; moreover, and though the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has a rationalist strain (perhaps best exemplified by the system of Christian Wolff), nevertheless, that the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert is dedicated to three empiricists (Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton), signals the ascendency of empiricism in the period.

If the founder of the rationalist strain of the Enlightenment is Descartes, then the founder of the empiricist strain is Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Though Bacon’s work belongs to the Renaissance, the revolution he undertook to effect in the sciences inspires and influences Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment, as the age in which experimental natural science matures and comes into its own, admires Bacon as “the father of experimental philosophy.” Bacon’s revolution (enacted in, among other works, The New Organon , 1620) involves conceiving the new science as (1) founded on empirical observation and experimentation; (2) arrived at through the method of induction; and (3) as ultimately aiming at, and as confirmed by, enhanced practical capacities (hence the Baconian motto, “knowledge is power”).

Of these elements of Bacon’s revolution, the point about method deserves special emphasis. Isaac Newton’s work, which stands as the great exemplar of the accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, is, like Bacon’s, based on the inductive method. Whereas rationalist of the seventeenth century tend to conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first principles, known a priori, Newton’s method begins with the observed phenomena of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be derived or explained. The evident success of Newton’s “bottom-up” procedure contrasts sharply with the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason, and this contrast naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.

The tendency of natural science toward progressive independence from metaphysics in the eighteenth century is correlated with this point about method. The rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeds through its separation from the presuppositions, doctrines and methodology of theology; natural science in the eighteenth century proceeds to separate itself from metaphysics as well. Newton proves the capacity of natural science to succeed independently of a priori, clear and certain first principles. The characteristic Enlightenment suspicion of all allegedly authoritative claims the validity of which is obscure, which is directed first of all against religious dogmas, extends to the claims of metaphysics as well. While there are significant Enlightenment thinkers who are metaphysicians – again, one thinks of Christian Wolff – the general thrust of Enlightenment thought is anti-metaphysical.

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is another foundational text of the Enlightenment. A main source of its influence is the epistemological rigor that it displays, which is at least implicitly anti-metaphysical. Locke undertakes in this work to examine the human understanding in order to determine the limits of human knowledge; he thereby institutes a prominent pattern of Enlightenment epistemology. Locke finds the source of all our ideas, the ideas out of which human knowledge is constructed, in the senses and argues influentially against the rationalists’ doctrine of innate ideas. Locke’s sensationalism exerts great influence in the French Enlightenment, primarily through being taken up and radicalized by the philosophe , Abbé de Condillac. In the Treatise on Sensations (1754), Condillac attempts to explain how all human knowledge arises out of sense experience. Locke’s epistemology, as developed by Condillac and others, contributes greatly to the emerging science of psychology in the period.

Locke and Descartes both pursue a method in epistemology that brings with it the epistemological problem of objectivity. Both examine our knowledge by way of examining the ideas we encounter directly in our consciousness. This method comes to be called “the way of ideas”. Though neither for Locke nor for Descartes do all of our ideas represent their objects by way of resembling them (e.g., our idea of God does not represent God by virtue of resembling God), our alleged knowledge of our environment through the senses does depend largely on ideas that allegedly resemble external material objects. The way of ideas implies the epistemological problem of how we can know that these ideas do in fact resemble their objects. How can we be sure that these objects do not appear one way before the mind and exist in another way (or not at all) in reality outside the mind? George Berkeley, an empiricist philosopher influenced by John Locke, avoids the problem by asserting the metaphysics of idealism: the (apparently material) objects of perception are nothing but ideas before the mind. However, Berkeley’s idealism is less influential in, and characteristic of, the Enlightenment, than the opposing positions of materialism and Cartesian dualism. Thomas Reid, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, attacks the way of ideas and argues that the immediate objects of our (sense) perception are the common (material) objects in our environment, not ideas in our mind. Reid mounts his defense of naïve realism as a defense of common sense over against the doctrines of the philosophers. The defense of common sense, and the related idea that the results of philosophy ought to be of use to common people, are characteristic ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly pronounced in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Skepticism enjoys a remarkably strong place in Enlightenment philosophy, given that confidence in our intellectual capacities to achieve systematic knowledge of nature is a leading characteristic of the age. This oddity is at least softened by the point that much skepticism in the Enlightenment is merely methodological, a tool meant to serve science, rather than a position embraced on its own account. The instrumental role for skepticism is exemplified prominently in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in which Descartes employs radical skeptical doubt to attack prejudices derived from learning and from sense experience and to search out principles known with certainty which may serve as a secure foundation for a new system of knowledge. Given the negative, critical, suspicious attitude of the Enlightenment towards doctrines traditionally regarded as well founded, it is not surprising that Enlightenment thinkers employ skeptical tropes (drawn from the ancient skeptical tradition) to attack traditional dogmas in science, metaphysics and religion.

However, skepticism is not merely a methodological tool in the hands of Enlightenment thinkers. The skeptical cast of mind is one prominent manifestation of the Enlightenment spirit. The influence of Pierre Bayle, another founding figure of the Enlightenment, testifies to this. Bayle was a French Protestant, who, like many European philosophers of his time, was forced to live and work in politically liberal and tolerant Holland in order to avoid censorship and prison. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), a strange and wonderful book, exerts great influence on the age. The form of the book is intimidating: a biographical dictionary, with long scholarly entries on obscure figures in the history of culture, interrupted by long scholarly footnotes, which are in turn interrupted by further footnotes. Rarely has a work with such intimidating scholarly pretentions exerted such radical and liberating influence in the culture. It exerts this influence through its skeptical questioning of religious, metaphysical, and scientific dogmas. Bayle’s eclecticism and his tendency to follow arguments without pre-arranging their conclusions make it difficult to categorize his thought. It is the attitude of inquiry that Bayle displays, rather than any doctrine he espouses, that mark his as distinctively Enlightenment thought. He is fearless and presumptuous in questioning all manner of dogma. His attitude of inquiry resembles both that of Descartes’ meditator and that of the person undergoing enlightenment as Kant defines it, the attitude of coming to think for oneself, of daring to know. This epistemological attitude, as manifest in distrust of authority and reliance on one’s own capacity to judge, expresses the Enlightenment values of individualism and self-determination.

This skeptical/critical attitude underlies a significant tension in the age. While it is common to conceive of the Enlightenment as supplanting the authority of tradition and religious dogma with the authority of reason, in fact the Enlightenment is characterized by a crisis of authority regarding any belief. This is perhaps best illustrated with reference to David Hume’s skepticism, as developed in Book One of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and in his later Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748). While one might take Hume’s skepticism to imply that he is an outlier with respect to the Enlightenment, it is more convincing to see Hume’s skepticism as a flowering of a crisis regarding authority in belief that is internal to the Enlightenment. Hume articulates a variety of skepticisms. His “skepticism with regard to the senses” is structured by the epistemological problem bound up with the way of ideas, described above. Hume also articulates skepticism with regard to reason in an argument that is anticipated by Bayle. Hume begins this argument by noting that, though rules or principles in demonstrative sciences are certain or infallible, given the fallibility of our faculties, our applications of such rules or principles in demonstrative inferences yield conclusions that cannot be regarded as certain or infallible. On reflection, our conviction in the conclusions of demonstrative reasoning must be qualified by an assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake in our reasoning. Thus, Hume writes, “all knowledge degenerates into probability” ( Treatise , I.iv.i). Hume argues further that, given this degeneration, for any judgment, our assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake, and the corresponding diminution of certainty in the conclusion, is another judgment about which we ought make a further assessment, which leads to a further diminution of certainty in our original conclusion, leading “at last [to] a total extinction of belief and evidence”. Hume also famously questions the justification of inductive reasoning and causal reasoning. According to Hume’s argument, since in causal reasoning we take our past observations to serve as evidence for judgments regarding what will happen in relevantly similar circumstances in the future, causal reasoning depends on the assumption that the future course of nature will resemble the past; and there is no non-circular justification of this essential assumption. Hume concludes that we have no rational justification for our causal or inductive judgments. Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding causal reasoning are more radical than his skeptical questioning of reason as such, insofar as they call into question even experience itself as a ground for knowledge and implicitly challenge the credentials of Newtonian science itself, the very pride of the Enlightenment. The question implicitly raised by Hume’s powerful skeptical arguments is whether any epistemological authority at all can withstand critical scrutiny. The Enlightenment begins by unleashing skepticism in attacking limited, circumscribed targets, but once the skeptical genie is out of the bottle, it becomes difficult to maintain conviction in any authority. Thus, the despairing attitude that Hume famously expresses in the conclusion to Book One of the Treatise , as the consequence of his epistemological inquiry, while it clashes with the self-confident and optimistic attitude we associate with the Enlightenment, in fact reflects an essential possibility in a distinctive Enlightenment problematic regarding authority in belief.

Though Hume finds himself struggling with skepticism in the conclusion of Book One of the Treatise , the project of the work as he outlines it is not to advance a skeptical viewpoint, but to establish a science of the mind. Hume is one of many Enlightenment thinkers who aspire to be the “Newton of the mind”; he aspires to establish the basic laws that govern the elements of the human mind in its operations. Alexander Pope’s famous couplet in An Essay on Man (1733) (“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man”) expresses well the intense interest humanity gains in itself within the context of the Enlightenment, as a partial substitute for its traditional interest in God and the transcendent domain. Just as the sun replaces the earth as the center of our cosmos in Copernicus’ cosmological system, so humanity itself replaces God at the center of humanity’s consciousness in the Enlightenment. Given the Enlightenment’s passion for science, the self-directed attention naturally takes the form of the rise of the scientific study of humanity in the period.

The enthusiasm for the scientific study of humanity in the period incorporates a tension or paradox concerning the place of humanity in the cosmos, as the cosmos is re-conceived in the context of Enlightenment philosophy and science. Newton’s success early in the Enlightenment of subsuming the phenomena of nature under universal laws of motion, expressed in simple mathematical formulae, encourages the conception of nature as a very complicated machine, whose parts are material and whose motions and properties are fully accounted for by deterministic causal laws. But if our conception of nature is of an exclusively material domain governed by deterministic, mechanical laws, and if we at the same time deny the place of the supernatural in the cosmos, then how does humanity itself fit into the cosmos? On the one hand, the achievements of the natural sciences in general are the great pride of the Enlightenment, manifesting the excellence of distinctively human capacities. The pride and self-assertiveness of humanity in the Enlightenment expresses itself, among other ways, in humanity’s making the study of itself its central concern. On the other hand, the study of humanity in the Enlightenment typically yields a portrait of us that is the opposite of flattering or elevating. Instead of being represented as occupying a privileged place in nature, as made in the image of God, humanity is represented typically in the Enlightenment as a fully natural creature, devoid of free will, of an immortal soul, and of a non-natural faculty of intelligence or reason. The very title of J.O. de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1748), for example, seems designed to deflate humanity’s self-conception, and in this respect it is characteristic of the Enlightenment “science of man”. It is true of a number of works of the Enlightenment, perhaps especially works in the more radical French Enlightenment – notable here are Helvétius’s Of the Spirit (1758) and Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770) – that they at once express the remarkable self-assertiveness of humanity characteristic of the Enlightenment in their scientific aspirations while at the same time painting a portrait of humanity that dramatically deflates its traditional self-image as occupying a privileged position in nature.

The methodology of epistemology in the period reflects a similar tension. Given the epistemological role of Descartes’ famous “ cogito, ergo sum ” in his system of knowledge, one might see Descartes’ epistemology as already marking the transition from an epistemology privileging knowledge of God to one that privileges self-knowledge instead. However, in Descartes’ epistemology, it remains true that knowledge of God serves as the necessary foundation for all human knowledge. Hume’s Treatise displays such a re-orientation less ambiguously. As noted, Hume means his work to comprise a science of the mind or of man. In the Introduction, Hume describes the science of man as effectively a foundation for all the sciences since all sciences “lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.” In other words, since all science is human knowledge, scientific knowledge of humanity is the foundation of the sciences. Hume’s placing the science of man at the foundation of all the sciences both exemplifies the privilege afforded to “mankind’s study of man” within the Enlightenment and provides an interpretation of it. But Hume’s methodological privileging of humanity in the system of sciences contrasts sharply with what he says in the body of his science about humanity. In Hume’s science of man, reason as a faculty of knowledge is skeptically attacked and marginalized; reason is attributed to other animals as well; belief is shown to be grounded in custom and habit; and free will is denied. So, even as knowledge of humanity supplants knowledge of God as the keystone of the system of knowledge, the scientific perspective on humanity starkly challenges humankind’s self-conception as occupying a privileged position in the order of nature.

Immanuel Kant explicitly enacts a revolution in epistemology modeled on the Copernican in astronomy. As characteristic of Enlightenment epistemology, Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787) undertakes both to determine the limits of our knowledge, and at the same time to provide a foundation of scientific knowledge of nature, and he attempts to do this by examining our human faculties of knowledge critically. Even as he draws strict limits to rational knowledge, he attempts to defend reason as a faculty of knowledge, as playing a necessary role in natural science, in the face of skeptical challenges that reason faces in the period. According to Kant, scientific knowledge of nature is not merely knowledge of what in fact happens in nature, but knowledge of the causal laws of nature according to which what in fact happens must happen. But how is knowledge of necessary causal connection in nature possible? Hume’s investigation of the idea of cause had made clear that we cannot know causal necessity through experience; experience teaches us at most what in fact happens, not what must happen. In addition, Kant’s own earlier critique of principles of rationalism had convinced him that the principles of (“general”) logic also cannot justify knowledge of real necessary connections (in nature); the formal principle of non-contradiction can ground at best the deduction of one proposition from another, but not the claim that one property or event must follow from another in the course of nature. The generalized epistemological problem Kant addresses in the Critique of Pure Reason is: how is science possible (including natural science, mathematics, metaphysics), given that all such knowledge must be (or include) knowledge of real, substantive (not merely logical or formal) necessities. Put in the terms Kant defines, the problem is: how is synthetic, a priori knowledge possible?

According to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in epistemology addressed to this problem, objects must conform themselves to human knowledge rather than knowledge to objects. Certain cognitive forms lie ready in the human mind – prominent examples are the pure concepts of substance and cause and the forms of intuition, space and time; given sensible representations must conform themselves to these forms in order for human experience (as empirical knowledge of nature) to be possible at all. We can acquire scientific knowledge of nature because we constitute it a priori according to certain cognitive forms; for example, we can know nature as a causally ordered domain because we originally synthesize a priori the given manifold of sensibility according to the category of causality, which has its source in the human mind.

Kant saves rational knowledge of nature by limiting rational knowledge to nature. According to Kant’s argument, we can have rational knowledge only of the domain of possible experience, not of supersensible objects such as God and the soul. Moreover Kant’s solution brings with it a kind of idealism: given the mind’s role in constituting objects of experience, we know objects only as appearances , only as they appear according to our faculties, not as they are in themselves. This is the subjectivism of Kant’s epistemology. Kant’s epistemology exemplifies Enlightenment thought by replacing the theocentric conception of knowledge of the rationalist tradition with an anthropocentric conception.

However, Kant means his system to make room for humanity’s practical and religious aspirations toward the transcendent as well. According to Kant’s idealism, the realm of nature is limited to a realm of appearances, and we can intelligibly think supersensible objects such as God, freedom and the soul, though we cannot know them. Through the postulation of a realm of unknowable noumena (things in themselves) over against the realm of nature as a realm of appearances, Kant manages to make place for practical concepts that are central to our understanding of ourselves even while grounding our scientific knowledge of nature as a domain governed by deterministic causal laws. Though Kant’s idealism is highly controversial from its initial publication, a main point in its favor, according to Kant himself, is that it reconciles, in a single coherent tension, the main tension between the Enlightenment’s conception of nature, as ordered according to deterministic causal laws, and the Enlightenment’s conception of ourselves, as morally free, as having dignity, and as perfectible.

The commitment to careful observation and description of phenomena as the starting point of science, and then the success at explaining and accounting for observed phenomena through the method of induction, naturally leads to the development of new sciences for new domains in the Enlightenment. Many of the human and social sciences have their origins in the eighteenth century (e.g., history, anthropology, aesthetics, psychology, economics, even sociology), though most are only formally established as autonomous disciplines later. The emergence of new sciences is aided by the development of new scientific tools, such as models for probabilistic reasoning, a kind of reasoning that gains new respect and application in the period. Despite the multiplication of sciences in the period, the ideal remains to comprehend the diversity of our scientific knowledge as a unified system of science; however, this ideal of unity is generally taken as regulative, as an ideal to emerge in the ever-receding end-state of science, rather than as enforced from the beginning by regimenting science under a priori principles.

As exemplifying these and other tendencies of the Enlightenment, one work deserves special mention: the Encyclopedia , edited by Denis Diderot and Jean La Rond d’Alembert. The Encyclopedia (subtitled: “ systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts ”) was published in 28 volumes (17 of text, 11 of plates) over 21 years (1751–1772), and consists of over 70,000 articles, contributed by over 140 contributors, among them many of the luminaries of the French Enlightenment. The work aims to provide a compendium of existing human knowledge to be transmitted to subsequent generations, a transmission intended to contribute to the progress and dissemination of human knowledge and to a positive transformation of human society. The orientation of the Encyclopedia is decidedly secular and implicitly anti-authoritarian. Accordingly, the French state of the ancien régime censors the project, and it is completed only through the persistence of Diderot. The collaborative nature of the project, especially in the context of state opposition, contributes significantly to the formation of a shared sense of purpose among the wide variety of intellectuals who belong to the French Enlightenment. The knowledge contained in the Encyclopedia is self-consciously social both in its production – insofar as it is immediately the product of what the title page calls “a society of men of letters” – and in its address – insofar as it is primarily meant as an instrument for the education and improvement of society. It is a striking feature of the Encyclopedia , and one by virtue of which it exemplifies the Baconian conception of science characteristic of the period, that its entries cover the whole range and scope of knowledge, from the most abstract theoretical to the most practical, mechanical and technical.

2. The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is most identified with its political accomplishments. The era is marked by three political revolutions, which together lay the basis for modern, republican, constitutional democracies: The English Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789–99). The success at explaining and understanding the natural world encourages the Enlightenment project of re-making the social/political world, in accord with the models we allegedly find in our reason. Enlightenment philosophers find that the existing social and political orders do not withstand critical scrutiny. Existing political and social authority is shrouded in religious myth and mystery and founded on obscure traditions. The criticism of existing institutions is supplemented with the positive work of constructing in theory the model of institutions as they ought to be. We owe to this period the basic model of government founded upon the consent of the governed; the articulation of the political ideals of freedom and equality and the theory of their institutional realization; the articulation of a list of basic individual human rights to be respected and realized by any legitimate political system; the articulation and promotion of toleration of religious diversity as a virtue to be respected in a well ordered society; the conception of the basic political powers as organized in a system of checks and balances; and other now-familiar features of western democracies. However, for all the enduring accomplishments of Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear that human reason proves powerful enough to put a concrete, positive authoritative ideal in place of the objects of its criticism. As in the epistemological domain, reason shows its power more convincingly in criticizing authorities than in establishing them. Here too the question of the limits of reason is one of the main philosophical legacies of the period. These limits are arguably vividly illustrated by the course of the French Revolution. The explicit ideals of the French Revolution are the Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom and equality; but, as the revolutionaries attempt to devise rational, secular institutions to put in place of those they have violently overthrown, eventually they have recourse to violence and terror in order to control and govern the people. The devolution of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror is perceived by many as proving the emptiness and hypocrisy of Enlightenment reason, and is one of the main factors which account for the end of the Enlightenment as an historical period.

The political revolutions of the Enlightenment, especially the French and the American, were informed and guided to a significant extent by prior political philosophy in the period. Though Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651), defends the absolute power of the political sovereign, and is to that extent opposed to the revolutionaries and reformers in England, this work is a founding work of Enlightenment political theory. Hobbes’ work originates the modern social contract theory, which incorporates Enlightenment conceptions of the relation of the individual to the state. According to the general social contract model, political authority is grounded in an agreement (often understood as ideal, rather than real) among individuals, each of whom aims in this agreement to advance his rational self-interest by establishing a common political authority over all. Thus, according to the general contract model (though this is more clear in later contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau than in Hobbes himself), political authority is grounded not in conquest, natural or divinely instituted hierarchy, or in obscure myths and traditions, but rather in the rational consent of the governed. In initiating this model, Hobbes takes a naturalistic, scientific approach to the question of how political society ought to be organized (against the background of a clear-eyed, unsentimental conception of human nature), and thus decisively influences the Enlightenment process of secularization and rationalization in political and social philosophy.

Baruch Spinoza also greatly contributes to the development of Enlightenment political philosophy in its early years. The metaphysical doctrines of the Ethics (1677) lay the groundwork for his influence on the age. Spinoza’s arguments against Cartesian dualism and in favor of substance monism, the claim in particular that there can only be one substance, God or nature, was taken to have radical implications in the domains of politics, ethics and religion throughout the period. Spinoza’s employment of philosophical reason leads to the denial of the existence of a transcendent, creator, providential, law-giving God; this establishes the opposition between the teachings of philosophy, on the one hand, and the traditional orienting practical beliefs (moral, religious, political) of the people, on the other hand, an opposition that is one important aspect of the culture of the Enlightenment. In his main political work, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677), Spinoza, building on his rationalist naturalism, opposes superstition, argues for toleration and the subordination of religion to the state, and pronounces in favor of qualified democracy. Liberalism is perhaps the most characteristic political philosophy of the Enlightenment, and Spinoza, in this text primarily, is one of its originators.

However, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) is the classical source of modern liberal political theory. In his First Treatise of Government , Locke attacks Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), which epitomizes the sort of political theory the Enlightenment opposes. Filmer defends the right of kings to exercise absolute authority over their subjects on the basis of the claim that they inherit the authority God vested in Adam at creation. Though Locke’s assertion of the natural freedom and equality of human beings in the Second Treatise is starkly and explicitly opposed to Filmer’s view, it is striking that the cosmology underlying Locke’s assertions is closer to Filmer’s than to Spinoza’s. According to Locke, in order to understand the nature and source of legitimate political authority, we have to understand our relations in the state of nature. Drawing upon the natural law tradition, Locke argues that it is evident to our natural reason that we are all absolutely subject to our Lord and Creator, but that, in relation to each other, we exist naturally in a state of equality “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another” ( Second Treatise , §4). We also exist naturally in a condition of freedom, insofar as we may do with ourselves and our possessions as we please, within the constraints of the fundamental law of nature. The law of nature “teaches all mankind … that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (§6). That we are governed in our natural condition by such a substantive moral law, legislated by God and known to us through our natural reason, implies that the state of nature is not Hobbes’ war of all against all. However, since there is lacking any human authority over all to judge of disputes and enforce the law, it is a condition marred by “inconveniencies”, in which possession of natural freedom, equality and possessions is insecure. According to Locke, we rationally quit this natural condition by contracting together to set over ourselves a political authority, charged with promulgating and enforcing a single, clear set of laws, for the sake of guaranteeing our natural rights, liberties and possessions. The civil, political law, founded ultimately upon the consent of the governed, does not cancel the natural law, according to Locke, but merely serves to draw that law closer. “[T]he law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men” (§135). Consequently, when established political power violates that law, the people are justified in overthrowing it. Locke’s argument for the right to revolt against a government that opposes the purposes for which legitimate government is taken by some to justify the political revolution in the context of which he writes (the English revolution) and, almost a hundred years later, by others to justify the American revolution as well.

Though Locke’s liberalism has been tremendously influential, his political theory is founded on doctrines of natural law and religion that are not nearly as evident as Locke assumes. Locke’s reliance on the natural law tradition is typical of Enlightenment political and moral theory. According to the natural law tradition, as the Enlightenment makes use of it, we can know through the use of our unaided reason that we all – all human beings, universally – stand in particular moral relations to each other. The claim that we can apprehend through our unaided reason a universal moral order exactly because moral qualities and relations (in particular human freedom and equality) belong to the nature of things, is attractive in the Enlightenment for obvious reasons. However, as noted above, the scientific apprehension of nature in the period does not support, and in fact opposes, the claim that the alleged moral qualities and relations (or, indeed, that any moral qualities and relations) are natural . According to a common Enlightenment assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it. This view is expressed explicitly by the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795 and which, perhaps better than any other work, lays out the paradigmatically Enlightenment view of history of the human race as a continual progress to perfection). But, in fact, advance in knowledge of the laws of nature in the science of the period does not help with discernment of a natural political or moral order. This asserted relationship between natural scientific knowledge and the political and moral order is under great stress already in the Enlightenment. With respect to Lockean liberalism, though his assertion of the moral and political claims (natural freedom, equality, et cetera) continues to have considerable force for us, the grounding of these claims in a religious cosmology does not. The question of how to ground our claims to natural freedom and equality is one of the main philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment.

The rise and development of liberalism in Enlightenment political thought has many relations with the rise of the mercantile class (the bourgeoisie) and the development of what comes to be called “civil society”, the society characterized by work and trade in pursuit of private property. Locke’s Second Treatise contributes greatly to the project of articulating a political philosophy to serve the interests and values of this ascending class. Locke claims that the end or purpose of political society is the preservation and protection of property (though he defines property broadly to include not only external property but life and liberties as well). According to Locke’s famous account, persons acquire rightful ownership in external things that are originally given to us all by God as a common inheritance, independently of the state and prior to its involvement, insofar as we “mix our labor with them”. The civil freedom that Locke defines, as something protected by the force of political laws, comes increasingly to be interpreted as the freedom to trade, to exchange without the interference of governmental regulation. Within the context of the Enlightenment, economic freedom is a salient interpretation of the individual freedom highly valued in the period. Adam Smith, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, describes in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) some of the laws of civil society, as a sphere distinct from political society as such, and thus contributes significantly to the founding of political economy (later called merely “economics”). His is one of many voices in the Enlightenment advocating for free trade and for minimal government regulation of markets. The trading house floor, in which people of various nationalities, languages, cultures, religions come together and trade, each in pursuit of his own self-interest, but, through this pursuit, supplying the wants of their respective nations and increasing its wealth, represents for some Enlightenment thinkers the benign, peaceful, universal rational order that they wish to see replace the violent, confessional strife that characterized the then-recent past of Europe.

However, the liberal conception of the government as properly protecting economic freedom of citizens and private property comes into conflict in the Enlightenment with the value of democracy. James Madison confronts this tension in the context of arguing for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution (in his Federalist #10). Madison argues that popular government (pure democracy) is subject to the evil of factions; in a pure democracy, a majority bound together by a private interest, relative to the whole, has the capacity to impose its particular will on the whole. The example most on Madison’s mind is that those without property (the many) may seek to bring about governmental re-distribution of the property of the propertied class (the few), perhaps in the name of that other Enlightenment ideal, equality. If, as in Locke’s theory, the government’s protection of an individual’s freedom is encompassed within the general end of protecting a person’s property, then, as Madison argues, the proper form of the government cannot be pure democracy, and the will of the people must be officially determined in some other way than by directly polling the people.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political theory, as presented in his On the Social Contract (1762), presents a contrast to the Lockean liberal model. Though commitment to the political ideals of freedom and equality constitutes a common ground for Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear not only how these values have a home in nature as Enlightenment science re-conceives it, but also how concretely to interpret each of these ideals and how properly to balance them against each other. Contrary to Madison, Rousseau argues that direct (pure) democracy is the only form of government in which human freedom can be realized. Human freedom, according to Rousseau’s interpretation, is possible only through governance according to what he calls “the general will,” which is the will of the body politic, formed through the original contract, concretely determined in an assembly in which all citizens participate. Rousseau’s account intends to avert the evils of factions by structural elements of the original contract. The contract consists in the self-alienation by each associate of all rights and possessions to the body politic. Because each alienates all, each is an equal member of the body politic, and the terms and conditions are the same for all. The emergence of factions is avoided insofar as the good of each citizen is, and is understood to be, equally (because wholly) dependent on the general will. Legislation supports this identification with the general will by preserving the original equality established in the contract, prominently through maintaining a measure of economic equality. Rousseau’s account of the ideal relation of the individual citizen to the state differs from Locke’s; in Rousseau’s account, the individual must be actively engaged in political life in order to maintain the identification of his supremely authoritative will with the general will, whereas in Locke the emphasis is on the limits of governmental authority with respect to the expressions of the individual will. Though Locke’s liberal model is more representative of the Enlightenment in general, Rousseau’s political theory, which in some respects presents a revived classical model modified within the context of Enlightenment values, in effect poses many of the enduring questions regarding the meaning and interpretation of political freedom and equality within the modern state.

Both Madison and Rousseau, like most political thinkers of the period, are influenced by Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), which is one of the founding texts of modern political theory. Though Montesquieu’s treatise belongs to the tradition of liberalism in political theory, given his scientific approach to social, legal and political systems, his influence extends beyond this tradition. Montesquieu argues that the system of legislation for a people varies appropriately with the particular circumstances of the people. He provides specific analysis of how climate, fertility of the soil, population size, et cetera, affect legislation. He famously distinguishes three main forms of governments: republics (which can either be democratic or aristocratic), monarchies and despotisms. He describes leading characteristics of each. His argument that functional democracies require the population to possess civic virtue in high measure, a virtue that consists in valuing public good above private interest, influences later Enlightenment theorists, including both Rousseau and Madison. He describes the threat of factions to which Madison and Rousseau respond in different (indeed opposite) ways. He provides the basic structure and justification for the balance of political powers that Madison later incorporates into the U.S. Constitution.

It is striking how unenlightened many of the Enlightenment’s celebrated thinkers are concerning issues of race and of gender (regarding race, see Race and Enlightenment: A Reader , edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze). For all the public concern with the allegedly universal “rights of man” in the Enlightenment, the rights of women and of non-white people are generally overlooked in the period. (Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a noteworthy exception.) When Enlightenment thinkers do turn their attention to the social standing of women or of non-white people, they tend to spout unreasoned prejudice. Moreover, while the philosophies of the Enlightenment generally aspire or pretend to universal truth, unattached to particular time, place or culture, Enlightenment writings are rife with rank ethno- and Eurocentrism, often explicit.

In the face of such tensions within the Enlightenment, one response is to affirm the power of the Enlightenment to improve humanity and society long beyond the end of the eighteenth century, indeed, down to the present day and into the future. This response embraces the Enlightenment and interprets more recent emancipation movements and achievement of recognition of the rights and dignity of traditionally oppressed and marginalized groups as expressions of Enlightenment ideals and aspirations. Critics of the Enlightenment respond differently to such tensions. Critics see them as symptoms of disorder, ideology, perversity, futility or falsehood that afflict the very core of the Enlightenment itself. (See James Schmidt’s “What Enlightenment Project?” for discussion of critics of the Enlightenment.) Famously, Adorno and Horkheimer interpret Nazi death camps as the result of “the dialectic of the Enlightenment”, as what historically becomes of the supremacy of instrumental reason asserted in the Enlightenment. As another example, we may point to some post-modern feminists, who argue, in opposition to the liberal feminists who embrace broadly Enlightenment ideals and conceptions, that the essentialism and universalism associated with Enlightenment ideals are both false and intrinsically hostile to the aspirations to self-realization of women and of other traditionally oppressed groups. (See Strickland and the essays in Akkerman and Stuurman.) This entry is not the place to delineate strains of opposition to the Enlightenment, but it is worth noting that post-Enlightenment social and political struggles to achieve equality or recognition for traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups are sometimes self-consciously grounded in the Enlightenment and sometimes marked by explicit opposition to the Enlightenment’s conceptions or presuppositions.

Many of the leading issues and positions of contemporary philosophical ethics take shape within the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment in the West, ethical reflection begins from and orients itself around religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife. The highest good of humanity, and, accordingly, the content and grounding of moral duties, are conceived in immediately religious terms. During the Enlightenment, this changes, certainly within philosophy, but to some significant degree, within the population of western society at large. As the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and dissemination of education advance in this period, happiness in this life, rather than union with God in the next, becomes the highest end for more and more people. Also, the violent religious wars that bloody Europe in the early modern period motivate the development of secular, this-worldly ethics, insofar as they indicate the failure of religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife to establish a stable foundation for ethics. In the Enlightenment, philosophical thinkers confront the problem of developing ethical systems on a secular, broadly naturalistic basis for the first time since the rise of Christianity eclipsed the great classical ethical systems. However, the changes in our understanding of nature and cosmology, effected by modern natural science, make recourse to the systems of Plato and Aristotle problematic. The Platonic identification of the good with the real and the Aristotelian teleological understanding of natural things are both difficult to square with the Enlightenment conception of nature. The general philosophical problem emerges in the Enlightenment of how to understand the source and grounding of ethical duties, and how to conceive the highest good for human beings, within a secular, broadly naturalistic context, and within the context of a transformed understanding of the natural world.

In ethical thought, as in political theory, Hobbes’ thought is an important provocation in the Enlightenment. Hobbes understands what is good, as the end of human action, to be “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire,” and evil to be “the object of his hate, and aversion,” “there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves” ( Leviathan , chapter 6). Hobbes’ conception of human beings as fundamentally motivated by their perception of what is in their own best interest implies the challenge, important for Enlightenment moral philosophy, to construct moral duties of justice and benevolence out of such limited materials. The basis of human action that Hobbes posits is immediately intelligible and even shared with other animals to some extent; a set of moral duties constructed on this basis would also be intelligible, de-mystified, and fit within the larger scheme of nature. Bernard Mandeville is sometimes grouped with Hobbes in the Enlightenment, especially by critics of them both, because he too, in his popular Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), sees people as fundamentally motivated by their perceived self-interest, and then undertakes to tell a story about how moral virtue, which involves conquering one’s own appetite and serving the interests of others, can be understood to arise on this basis.

Samuel Clarke, an influential rationalist British thinker early in the Enlightenment, undertakes to show in his Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), against Hobbes, that the absolute difference between moral good and moral evil lies in the immediately discernible nature of things, independently of any compacts or positive legislation by God or human beings. Clarke writes that “in men’s dealing … one with another, it is undeniably more fit, absolutely and in the nature of the thing itself, that all men should endeavor to promote the universal good and welfare of all; than that all men should be continually contriving the ruin and destruction of all”. Likewise for the rest of what morality enjoins upon us. According to Clarke, that some actions (those we call morally good or required) are “fit to be done” and others not fit is grounded upon the immediately evident relations in which things stand to each other in nature, just as “the proportions of lines or numbers” are evident to the rational perception of a reasonable being. Similarly, Christian Wolff’s rationalist practical philosophy also grounds moral duties in an objective rational order. However, the objective quality on which moral requirements are grounded for Wolff is not the “fitness” of things to be done but rather their perfection. Wolff counts as a founder of the Aufklärung in part because of his attempted derivation of ethical duties from an order of perfection in things, discernable through reason, independently of divine commands.

Rationalist ethics so conceived faces the following obstacles in the Enlightenment. First, as implied above, it becomes increasingly implausible that the objective, mind-independent order is really as rationalist ethicists claim it to be. Second, even if the objective realm were ordered as the rationalist claims, it remains unclear how this order gives rise (on its own, as it were) to obligations binding on our wills. David Hume famously exposes the fallacy of deriving a prescriptive statement (that one ought to perform some action) from a description of how things stand in relation to each other in nature. Prima facie, there is a gap between the rationalist’s objective order and a set of prescriptions binding on our wills; if a supreme legislator must be re-introduced in order to make the conformity of our actions to that objective order binding on our wills, then the alleged existence of the objective moral order does not do the work the account asks of it in the first place.

Alongside the rationalist strand of ethical philosophy in the Enlightenment, there is also a very significant empiricist strand. Empirical accounts of moral virtue in the period are distinguished, both by grounding moral virtue on an empirical study of human nature, and by grounding cognition of moral duties and moral motivation in human sensibility, rather than in reason. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the influential work Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), is a founding figure of the empiricist strand. Shaftesbury, like Clarke, is provoked by Hobbes’ egoism to provide a non-egoistic account of moral virtue. Shaftesbury conceives the core notion of the goodness of things teleologically: something is good if it contributes to the well-being or furtherance of the system of which it is a part. Individual animals are members of species, and therefore they are good as such insofar as they contribute to the well-being of the species of which they are a part. Thus, the good of things, including human beings, for Shaftesbury as for Clarke, is an objective quality that is knowable through reason. However, though we can know what is good through reason, Shaftesbury maintains that reason alone is not sufficient to motivate human action. Shaftesbury articulates the structure of a distinctively human moral sensibility. Moral sensibility depends on the faculty of reflection. When we reflect on first-order passions such as gratitude, kindness and pity, we find ourselves approving or liking them and disapproving or disliking their opposites. By virtue of our receptivity to such feelings, we are capable of virtue and have a sense of right and wrong. In this way, Shaftesbury defines the moral sense that plays a significant role in the theories of subsequent Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume.

In the rationalist tradition, the conflict within the breast of the person between the requirements of morality and self-interest is canonically a conflict between the person’s reason and her passions. Shaftesbury’s identification of a moral sentiment in the nature of humanity renders this a conflict within sensibility itself, a conflict between different sentiments, between a self-interested sentiment and an unegoistic sentiment. Though both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, no less than Clarke, oppose Hobbes’s egoism, it is nonetheless true that the doctrine of moral sensibility softens moral demands, so to speak. Doing what is morally right or morally good is intrinsically bound up with a distinctive kind of pleasure on their accounts. It is significant that both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the two founders of modern moral sense theory, articulate their ethical theory in conjunction with an aesthetic theory. Arguably the pleasure we feel in the apprehension of something beautiful is disinterested pleasure . Our susceptibility to aesthetic pleasure can be taken to reveal that we apprehend and respond to objective (or, anyway, universal) values, not only or necessarily on the basis of reason, but through our natural sensibility instead. Thus, aesthetics, as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson independently develop an account of it, gives encouragement to their doctrines of moral sensibility. But an account of moral virtue, unlike aesthetics, requires an account of moral motivation . As noted above, both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson want to do justice to the idea that proper moral motivation is not the pursuit of pleasure, even disinterested pleasure, but rather an immediate response to the perception of moral value. The problem of giving a satisfying account of moral motivation is a difficult one for empiricist moral philosophers in the Enlightenment.

While for Shaftesbury, at the beginning of the moral sense tradition, moral sense tracks a mind-independent order of value, David Hume, motivated in part by a more radical empiricism, is happy to let the objective order go. We have no access through reason to an independent order of value which moral sense would track. For Hume, morality is founded completely on our sentiments. Hume is often regarded as the main originator of so-called “ethical subjectivism”, according to which moral judgments or evaluations (regarding actions or character) do not make claims about independent facts but merely express the subject’s feelings or attitudes with respect to actions or character. Such subjectivism is relieved of the difficult task of explaining how the objective order of values belongs to the natural world as it is being reconceived by natural science in the period; however, it faces the challenge of explaining how error and disagreement in moral judgments and evaluations are possible. Hume’s account of the standards of moral judgment follows that of Hutcheson in relying centrally on the “natural” responses of an ideal observer or spectator.

Hume’s ethics is exemplary of philosophical ethics in the Enlightenment by virtue of its belonging to the attempt to provide a new, empirically grounded science of human nature, free of theological presuppositions. As noted above, the attempts by the members of the French Enlightenment to present a new understanding of human nature are strongly influenced by Locke’s “sensationalism”, which, radicalized by Condillac, amounts to the attempt to base all contents and faculties of the human mind on the senses. Typically, the French philosophes draw more radical or iconoclastic implications from the new “science of man” than English or Scottish Enlightenment figures. Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) is typical here. In De l’ésprit (1758), Helvétius follows the Lockean sensationalism of Condillac and pairs it with the claim that human beings are motivated in their actions only by the natural desire to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their pain. De l’ésprit , though widely read, gives rise to strong negative reactions in the time, both by political and religious authorities (the Sorbonne, the Pope and the Parlement of Paris all condemn the book) and by prominent fellow philosophes , in great part because Helvétius’s psychology seems to critics to render moral imperatives and values without basis, despite his best attempts to derive them. Helvétius attempts to ground the moral equality of all human beings by portraying all human beings, whatever their standing in the social hierarchy, whatever their special talents and gifts, as equally products of the nature we share plus the variable influences of education and social environment. But, to critics, Helvétius’s account portrays all human beings as equal only by virtue of portraying all as equally worthless (insofar as the claim to equality is grounded on all being equally determined by external factors). However, Helvétius’s ideas, in De l’ésprit as well as in its posthumously published sequel De l’homme (1772), exert a great deal of influence, especially his case for the role of pleasure and pain in human motivation and the role of education and social incentives in shaping individuals into contributors to the social good. Helvétius is sometimes regarded as the father of modern utilitarianism through his articulation of the greatest happiness principle and through his influence on Bentham.

Helvétius is typical in the respect that he is radical in the revisions he proposes, not in common moral judgments or customs of the time, but rather regarding the philosophical grounding of those judgments and customs. But there are some philosophers in the Enlightenment who are radical in the revisions they propose regarding the content of ethical judgments themselves. The Marquis de Sade is merely the most notorious example, among a set of Enlightenment figures (including also the Marquis de Argens and Diderot himself in some of his writings) who, within the context of the new naturalism and its emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure, celebrate the avid pursuit of sexual pleasure and explicitly challenge the sexual mores, as well as the wider morality, of their time. The more or less fictionalized, philosophically self-conscious “libertine” is one significant expression of Enlightenment ethical thought.

If the French Enlightenment tends to advance this-worldly happiness as the highest good for human beings more insistently than the Enlightenment elsewhere, then Rousseau’s voice is, in this as in other respects, a discordant voice in that context. Rousseau advances the cultivation and realization of human freedom as the highest end for human beings and thereby gives expression to another side of Enlightenment ethics. As Rousseau describes it, the capacity for individual self-determination puts us in a problematic relation to our natural desires and inclinations and to the realm of nature generally, insofar as that realm is constituted by mechanistic causation. Though Rousseau places a great deal of emphasis on human freedom, and makes significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves as free, he does not address very seriously the problem of the place of human freedom in the cosmos as it is conceived within the context of Enlightenment naturalism.

However, Rousseau’s writings help Kant to the articulation of a practical philosophy that addresses many of the tensions in the Enlightenment. Kant follows Rousseau, and disagrees with empiricism in ethics in the period, in emphasizing human freedom, rather than human happiness, as the central orienting concept of practical philosophy. Though Kant presents the moral principle as a principle of practical reason, his ethics also disagrees significantly with rationalist ethics in the period. According to Kant, rationalists such as Wolff, insofar as they take moral prescriptions to follow from an end given to the will (in Wolff’s case, the end of perfection), do not understand us as autonomous in our moral activity. Through interpreting the faculty of the will itself as practical reason, Kant understands the moral principle as internally legislated, thus as not only compatible with freedom, but as equivalent to the principle of a free will, as a principle of autonomy. As noted above, rationalists in ethics in the period are challenged to explain how the objective moral order which reason in us allegedly discerns gives rise to valid prescriptions binding on our wills (the gap between is and ought ). For Kant, the moral order is not independent of our will, but rather represents the formal constraints of willing as such. Kant’s account thus both avoids the is-ought gap and interprets moral willing as expressive of our freedom.

Moreover, by virtue of his interpretation of the moral principle as the principle of pure practical reason, Kant is able to redeem the ordinary sense of moral requirements as over-riding, as potentially opposed to the claims of one’s happiness, and thus as different in kind from the deliverances of prudential reasoning. This ordinary sense of moral requirements is not easily accommodated within the context of Enlightenment empiricism and naturalism. Kant’s stark dichotomy between a person’s practical reason and her sensible nature is strongly criticized, both by the subsequent Romantic generation and in the contemporary context; but this dichotomy is bound up with an important benefit of Kant’s view – much promoted by Kant himself – within the context of the Enlightenment. Elaborated in the context of Kant’s idealism as a contrast between the “realm of freedom” and the “realm of nature”, the dichotomy enables Kant’s proposed solution to the conflict between freedom and nature that besets Enlightenment thought. As noted above, Kant argues that the application of the causal principle is restricted to the realm of nature, thus making room for freedom, compatibly with the causal determination of natural events required by scientific knowledge. Additionally, Kant attempts to show that morality “leads ineluctably to” religious belief (in the supersensible objects of God and of the immortal soul) while being essentially not founded on religious belief, thus again vindicating the ordinary understanding of morality while still furthering Enlightenment values and commitments.

Though the Enlightenment is sometimes represented as the enemy of religion, it is more accurate to see it as critically directed against various (arguably contingent) features of religion, such as superstition, enthusiasm, fanaticism and supernaturalism. Indeed the effort to discern and advocate for a religion purified of such features – a “rational” or “natural” religion – is more typical of the Enlightenment than opposition to religion as such. Even Voltaire, who is perhaps the most persistent, powerful, vocal Enlightenment critic of religion, directs his polemic mostly against the Catholic Church in France – “ l’infâme ” in his famous sign-off in his letters, “ Écrasez l’infâme ” (“Crush the infamous”) refers to the Church, not to religion as such. However, controversy regarding the truth-value or reasonableness of religious belief in general, Christian belief in particular, and controversy regarding the proper place of religion in society, occupies a particularly central place in the Enlightenment. It’s as if the terrible, violent confessional strife in the early modern period in Europe, the bloody drawn-out wars between the Christian sects, was removed to the intellectual arena in the Enlightenment and became a set of more general philosophical controversies.

Alongside the rise of the new science, the rise of Protestantism in western Christianity also plays an important role in generating the Enlightenment. The original Protestants assert a sort of individual liberty with respect to questions of faith against the paternalistic authority of the Church. The “liberty of conscience”, so important to Enlightenment thinkers in general, and asserted against all manner of paternalistic authorities (including Protestant), descends from this Protestant assertion. The original Protestant assertion initiates a crisis of authority regarding religious belief, a crisis of authority that, expanded and generalized and even, to some extent, secularized, becomes a central characteristic of the Enlightenment spirit. The original Protestant assertion against the Catholic Church bases itself upon the authority of scripture. However, in the Enlightenment, the authority of scripture is strongly challenged, especially when taken literally. Developing natural science renders acceptance of a literal version of the Bible increasingly untenable. But authors such as Spinoza (in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ) present ways of interpreting scripture according to its spirit, rather than its letter, in order to preserve its authority and truth, thus contributing to the Enlightenment controversy of whether some rationally purified version of the religion handed down in the culture belongs to the true philosophical representation of the world or not; and, if so, what its content is.

It is convenient to discuss religion in the Enlightenment by presenting four characteristic forms of Enlightenment religion in turn: deism, religion of the heart, fideism and atheism.

Deism . Deism is the form of religion most associated with the Enlightenment. According to deism, we can know by the natural light of reason that the universe is created and governed by a supreme intelligence; however, although this supreme being has a plan for creation from the beginning, the being does not interfere with creation; the deist typically rejects miracles and reliance on special revelation as a source of religious doctrine and belief, in favor of the natural light of reason. Thus, a deist typically rejects the divinity of Christ, as repugnant to reason; the deist typically demotes the figure of Jesus from agent of miraculous redemption to extraordinary moral teacher. Deism is the form of religion fitted to the new discoveries in natural science, according to which the cosmos displays an intricate machine-like order; the deists suppose that the supposition of God is necessary as the source or author of this order. Though not a deist himself, Isaac Newton provides fuel for deism with his argument in his Opticks (1704) that we must infer from the order and beauty in the world to the existence of an intelligent supreme being as the cause of this order and beauty. Samuel Clarke, perhaps the most important proponent and popularizer of Newtonian philosophy in the early eighteenth century, supplies some of the more developed arguments for the position that the correct exercise of unaided human reason leads inevitably to the well-grounded belief in God. He argues that the Newtonian physical system implies the existence of a transcendent cause, the creator God. In his first set of Boyle lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), Clarke presents the metaphysical or “argument a priori ” for God’s existence. This argument concludes from the rationalist principle that whatever exists must have a sufficient reason or cause of its existence to the existence of a transcendent, necessary being who stands as the cause of the chain of natural causes and effects. Clarke also supports the empirical argument from design, the argument that concludes from the evidence of order in nature to the existence of an intelligent author of that order. In his second set of Boyle lectures, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), Clarke argues as well that the moral order revealed to us by our natural reason requires the existence of a divine legislator and an afterlife, in which the supreme being rewards virtue and punishes vice. In his Boyle lectures, Clarke argues directly against the deist philosophy and maintains that what he regards as the one true religion, Christianity, is known as such on the basis of miracles and special revelation; still, Clarke’s arguments on the topic of natural religion are some of the best and most widely-known arguments in the period for the general deist position that natural philosophy in a broad sense grounds central doctrines of a universal religion.

Enlightenment deism first arises in England. In On the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke aims to establish the compatibility of reason and the teachings of Christianity. Though Locke himself is (like Newton, like Clarke) not a deist, the major English deists who follow (John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious [1696]); Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Freethinking [1713]; Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation [1730]) are influenced by Locke’s work. Voltaire carries deism across the channel to France and advocates for it there over his long literary career. Toward the end-stage, the farcical stage, of the French Revolution, Robespierre institutes a form of deism, the so-called “Cult of the Supreme Being”, as the official religion of the French state. Deism plays a role in the founding of the American republic as well. Many of the founding fathers (Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Paine) author statements or tracts that are sympathetic to deism; and their deistic sympathies influence the place given (or not given) to religion in the new American state that they found.

Religion of the Heart . Opposition to deism derives sometimes from the perception of it as coldly rationalistic. The God of the deists, arrived at through a priori or empirical argument and referred to as the Prime Mover or Original Architect, is often perceived as distant and unconcerned with the daily struggles of human existence, and thus as not answering the human needs from which religion springs in the first place. Some important thinkers of the Enlightenment – notably Shaftesbury and Rousseau – present religion as founded on natural human sentiments, rather than on the operations of the intellect. Rousseau has his Savoyard Vicar declare, in his Profession of Faith in Emile (1762), that the idea of worshiping a beneficent deity arose in him initially as he reflected on his own situation in nature and his “heart began to glow with a sense of gratitude towards the author of our being”. The Savoyard Vicar continues: “I adore the supreme power, and melt into tenderness at his goodness. I have no need to be taught artificial forms of worship; the dictates of nature are sufficient. Is it not a natural consequence of self-love to honor those who protect us, and to love such as do us good?” This “natural” religion – opposed to the “artificial” religions enforced in the institutions – is often classed as a form of deism. But it deserves separate mention, because of its grounding in natural human sentiments, rather than in reason or in metaphysical or natural scientific problems of cosmology.

Fideism . Deism or natural religion of various sorts tends to rely on the claim that reason or human experience supports the hypothesis that there is a supreme being who created or authored the world. In one of the most important philosophical texts on natural religion to appear during the Enlightenment, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), this supposition is criticized relentlessly, incisively and in detail. Naturally, the critical, questioning attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment in general is directed against the arguments on which natural religion is based. In Part Nine of the Dialogues, Samuel Clarke’s “argument a priori” (as defended by the character Demea) is dispatched fairly quickly, but with a battery of arguments. But Hume is mainly concerned in the Dialogues with the other major pillar of natural religion in the Enlightenment, the “empirical” argument, the teleological argument or the argument from design. Cleanthes, the character who advances the design argument in the dialogue, proceeds from the rule for empirical reasoning that like effects prove like causes. He reasons that, given the resemblance between nature, which displays in many respects a “curious adaptation of means to ends”, and a man-made machine, we must infer the cause of nature to be an intelligence like ours, though greater in proportion as nature surpasses in perfection the products of human intelligence. Philo, the skeptical voice in the Dialogues , presses Cleanthes’ argument on many fronts. He points out that the argument is only as strong as the similarity between nature or parts of nature and man-made machines, and further, that a close scrutiny reveals that analogy to be weak. Moreover, according to the principle of the argument, the stronger the evidence for an author (or authors) of nature, the more like us that author (or authors) should be taken to be. Consequently, according to Philo, the argument does not support the conclusion that God exists, taking God to be unitary, infinite, perfect, et cetera. Also, although the existence of evil and disorder in nature may serve actually to strengthen the case for the argument, given the disorder in human creations as well, the notion that God authors evil and disorder is disturbing. If one denies that there is disorder and evil in nature, however implausibly, the effect is to emphasize again the dissimilarity between nature and human products and thus weaken the central basis of the argument. With these and other considerations, Philo puts the proponent of the empirical argument in a difficult dialectical position. But Cleanthes is not moved. He holds the inference from the phenomenon of the curious adaptation of means to ends in nature to the existence of an intelligent and beneficent author to be so natural as to be impervious to the philosophical cavils raised by Philo. And, in the ambiguous conclusion of the work, Philo seems to agree. Though Hume himself seems to have been an atheist, one natural way to take the upshot of his Dialogues is that religious belief is so “natural” to us that rational criticism cannot unseat it. The ambiguous upshot of the work can be taken to be the impotence of rational criticism in the face of religious belief, rather than the illegitimacy of religious belief in the face of rational criticism. This tends toward fideism, the view according to which religious faith maintains its truth over against philosophical reasoning, which opposes but cannot defeat it. Fideism is most often associated with thinkers whose beliefs run contrary to the trends of the Enlightenment (Blaise Pascal, Johann-Georg Hamann, Søren Kierkegaard), but the skeptical strain in the Enlightenment, from Pierre Bayle through David Hume, expresses itself not only in atheism, but also in fideism.

Atheism . Atheism is more present in the French Enlightenment than elsewhere. In the writings of Denis Diderot, atheism is partly supported by an expansive, dynamic conception of nature. According to the viewpoint developed by Diderot, we ought to search for the principles of natural order within natural processes themselves, not in a supernatural being. Even if we don’t yet know the internal principles for the ordering and development of natural forms, the appeal to a transcendent author of such things is reminiscent, to Diderot’s ear, of the appeal to Aristotelian “substantial forms” that was expressly rejected at the beginning of modern science as explaining nothing. The appeal to a transcendent author does not extend our understanding, but merely marks and fixes the limits of it. Atheism (combined with materialism) in the French Enlightenment is perhaps most identified with the Baron d’Holbach, whose System of Nature (1770) generated a great deal of controversy at the time for urging the case for atheism explicitly and emphatically. D’Holbach’s system of nature is strongly influenced by Diderot’s writings, though it displays less subtlety and dialectical sophistication. Though most Enlightenment thinkers hold that morality requires religion, in the sense that morality requires belief in a transcendent law-giver and in an after-life, d’Holbach (influenced in this respect by Spinoza, among others) makes the case for an ethical naturalism, an ethics that is free of any reference to a supernatural grounding or aspiration. Like Helvétius before him, d’Holbach presents an ethics in which virtue consists in enlightened self-interest. The metaphysical background of the ethics he presents is deterministic materialism. The Prussian enlightened despot, Frederick the Great, famously criticizes d’Holbach’s book for exemplifying the incoherence that troubles the Enlightenment generally: while d’Holbach provides passionate moral critiques of existing religious and social and political institutions and practices, his own materialist, determinist conception of nature allows no place for moral “oughts” and prescriptions and values.

3. The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment

Modern systematic philosophical aesthetics not only first emerges in the context of the Enlightenment, but also flowers brilliantly there. As Ernst Cassirer notes, the eighteenth century not only thinks of itself as the “century of philosophy”, but also as “the age of criticism,” where criticism is centrally (though not only) art and literary criticism (Cassirer 1932, 255). Philosophical aesthetics flourishes in the period because of its strong affinities with the tendencies of the age. Alexander Baumgarten, the German philosopher in the school of Christian Wolff, founds systematic aesthetics in the period, in part through giving it its name. “Aesthetics” is derived from the Greek word for “senses”, because for Baumgarten a science of the beautiful would be a science of the sensible, a science of sensible cognition. The Enlightenment in general re-discovers the value of the senses, not only in cognition, but in human lives in general, and so, given the intimate connection between beauty and human sensibility, the Enlightenment is naturally particularly interested in aesthetics. Also, the Enlightenment includes a general recovery and affirmation of the value of pleasure in human lives, against the tradition of Christian asceticism, and the flourishing of the arts, of the criticism of the arts and of the philosophical theorizing about beauty, promotes and is promoted by this recovery and affirmation. The Enlightenment also enthusiastically embraces the discovery and disclosure of rational order in nature, as manifest most clearly in the development of the new science. It seems to many theorists in the Enlightenment that the faculty of taste, the faculty by which we discern beauty, reveals to us some part of this order, a distinctive harmony, unities amidst variety. Thus, in the phenomenon of aesthetic pleasure, human sensibility discloses to us rational order, thus binding together two enthusiasms of the Enlightenment.

In the early Enlightenment, especially in France, the emphasis is upon the discernment of an objective rational order, rather than upon the subject’s sensual aesthetic pleasure. Though Descartes’ philosophical system does not include a theory of taste or of beauty, his mathematical model of the physical universe inspires the aesthetics of French classicism. French classicism begins from the classical maxim that the beautiful is the true. Nicolas Boileau writes in his influential didactic poem, The Art of Poetry (1674), in which he lays down rules for good versification within different genres, that “Nothing is beautiful but the true, the true alone is lovable.” In the period the true is conceived of as an objective rational order. According to the classical conception of art that dominates in the period, art imitates nature, though not nature as given in disordered experience, but the ideal nature, the ideal in which we can discern and enjoy “unity in multiplicity.” In French classicism, aesthetics is very much under the influence of, and indeed modeled on, systematic, rigorous theoretical science of nature. Just as in Descartes’ model of science, where knowledge of all particulars depends on prior knowledge of the principle from which the particulars are deduced, so also in the aesthetics of French classicism, the demand is for systematization under a single, universal principle. The subjection of artistic phenomena to universal rules and principles is expressed, for example, in the title of Charles Batteaux’s main work, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), as well as in Boileau’s rules for good versification.

In Germany in the eighteenth century, Christian Wolff’s systematic rationalist metaphysics forms the basis for much of the reflection on aesthetics, though sometimes as a set of doctrines to be argued against. Wolff affirms the classical dictum that beauty is truth; beauty is truth perceived through the feeling of pleasure. Wolff understands beauty to consist in the perfection in things, which he understands in turn to consist in a harmony or order of a manifold. We judge something beautiful through a feeling of pleasure when we sense in it this harmony or perfection. Beauty is, for Wolff, the sensitive cognition of perfection. Thus, for Wolff, beauty corresponds to objective features of the world, but judgments of beauty are relative to us also, insofar as they are based on the human faculty of sensibility.

Though philosophical rationalism forms the basis of aesthetics in the early Enlightenment in France and Germany, thinkers in the empiricist tradition in England and Scotland introduce many of the salient themes of Enlightenment aesthetics. In particular, with the rise of empiricism and subjectivism in this domain, attention shifts to the ground and nature of the subject’s experience of beauty, the subject’s aesthetic response. Lord Shaftesbury, though not himself an empiricist or subjectivist in aesthetics, makes significant contributions to this development. Shaftesbury re-iterates the classical equation, “all beauty is truth,” but the truth that beauty is for Shaftesbury is not an objective rational order that could also be known conceptually. Though beauty is, for Shaftesbury, a kind of harmony that is independent of the human mind, under the influence of Plotinus, he understands the human being’s immediate intuition of the beautiful as a kind of participation in the original harmony. Shaftesbury focuses attention on the nature of the subject’s response to beauty, as elevating the person, also morally. He maintains that aesthetic response consists in a disinterested unegoistic pleasure; the discovery of this capacity for disinterested pleasure in harmony shows the way for the development of his ethics that has a similar grounding. And, in fact, in seeing aesthetic response as elevating oneself above self-interested pursuits, through cultivating one’s receptivity to disinterested pleasure, Shaftesbury ties tightly together aesthetics and ethics, morality and beauty, and in that respect also contributes to a trend of the period. Also, in placing the emphasis on the subject’s response to beauty, rather than on the objective characteristics of the beautiful, Shaftesbury makes aesthetics belong to the general Enlightenment interest in human nature. Thinkers of the period find in our receptivity to beauty a key both to understanding both distinctively human nature and its perfection.

Francis Hutcheson follows Shaftesbury in his emphasis on the subject’s aesthetic response, on the distinctive sort of pleasure that the beautiful elicits in us. Partly because the Neo-Platonic influence, so pronounced in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, is washed out of Hutcheson’s, to be replaced by a more thorough-going empiricism, Hutcheson understands this distinctive aesthetic pleasure as more akin to a secondary quality. Thus, Hutcheson’s aesthetic work raises the prominent question whether “beauty” refers to something objective at all or whether beauty is “nothing more” than a human idea or experience. As in the domain of Enlightenment ethics, so with Enlightenment aesthetics too, the step from Shaftesbury to Hutcheson marks a step toward subjectivism. Hutcheson writes in one of his Two Treatises , his Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1725) that “the word ‘beauty’ is taken for the idea raised in us , and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea ” (Section I, Article IX). However, though Hutcheson understands beauty to be an idea in us, he takes this idea to be “excited” or “occasioned” in us by distinctive objective qualities, in particular by objects that display “ uniformity amidst variety ” (ibid., Section II, Article III). In the very title of Hutcheson’s work above, we see the importance of the classical ideas of (rational) order and harmony in Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory, even as he sets the tenor for much Enlightenment discussion of aesthetics through placing the emphasis on the subjective idea and aesthetic response.

David Hume’s famous essay on “the standard of taste” raises and addresses the epistemological problem raised by subjectivism in aesthetics. If beauty is an idea in us, rather than a feature of objects independent of us, then how do we understand the possibility of correctness and incorrectness – how do we understand the possibility of standards of judgment – in this domain? The problem is posed more clearly for Hume because he intensifies Hutcheson’s subjectivism. He writes in the Treatise that “pleasure and pain….are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence” ( Treatise , Book II, part I, section viii). But if a judgment of taste is based on, or expresses, subjective sentiments, how can it be incorrect? In his response to this question, Hume accounts for the expectation of agreement in judgments of taste by appealing to the fact that we share a common human nature, and he accounts for ‘objectivity’ or expertise in judgments of taste, within the context of his subjectivism, by appealing to the normative responses of well-placed observers. Both of these points (the commonality of human nature and the securing of ‘objectivity’ in judgments based on sentiments by appeal to the normative responses of appropriately placed observers) are typical of the period more generally, and especially of the strong empiricist strain in the Enlightenment. Hume develops the empiricist line in aesthetics to the point where little remains of the classical emphasis on the order or harmony or truth that is, according to the French classicists, apprehended and appreciated in our aesthetic responses to the beautiful, and thus, according to the classicists, the ground of aesthetic responses.

Immanuel Kant faces squarely the problem of the normativity of judgments of taste. Influenced by Hutcheson and the British empiricist tradition in general, Kant understands judgments of taste to be founded on a distinctive sort of feeling, a disinterested pleasure. In taking judgments of taste to be subjective (they are founded on the subject’s feeling of pleasure) and non-cognitive (such judgments do not subsume representations under concepts and thus do not ascribe properties to objects), Kant breaks with the German rationalist school. However Kant continues to maintain that judgments of beauty are like cognitive judgments in making a legitimate claim to universal agreement – in contrast to judgments of the agreeable. The question is how to vindicate the legitimacy of this demand. Kant argues that the distinctive pleasure underlying judgments of taste is the experience of the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding, a harmony that arises through their “free play” in the process of cognizing objects on the basis of given sensible intuition. The harmony is “free” in an experience of beauty in the sense that it is not forced by rules of the understanding, as is the agreement among the faculties in acts of cognition. The order and harmony that we experience in the face of the beautiful is subjective, according to Kant; but it is at the same time universal and normative, by virtue of its relation to the conditions of human cognition.

The emphasis Kant places on the role of the activity of the imagination in aesthetic pleasure and discernment typifies a trend in Enlightenment thought. Whereas early in the Enlightenment, in French classicism, and to some extent in Christian Wolff and other figures of German rationalism, the emphasis is on the more-or-less static rational order and proportion and on rigid universal rules or laws of reason, the trend during the development of Enlightenment aesthetics is toward emphasis on the play of the imagination and its fecundity in generating associations.

Denis Diderot is an important and influential author on aesthetics. He wrote the entry “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful” for the Encyclopedia (1752). Like Lessing in Germany, Diderot not only philosophized about art and beauty, but also wrote plays and influential art criticism. Diderot is strongly influenced in his writings on aesthetics by the empiricism in England and Scotland, but his writing is not limited to that standpoint. Diderot repeats the classical dictum that art should imitate nature, but, whereas, for French classicists, the nature that art should imitate is ideal nature – a static, universal rational order – for Diderot, nature is dynamic and productive. For Diderot, the nature the artist ought to imitate is the real nature we experience, warts and all (as it were). The particularism and realism of Diderot’s aesthetics is based on a critique of the standpoint of French classicism (see Cassirer 1935, p. 295f.). This critique exposes the artistic rules represented by French classicists as universal rules of reason as nothing more than conventions marking what is considered proper within a certain tradition. In other words, the prescriptions within the French classical tradition are artificial , not natural , and constitute fetters to artistic genius. Diderot takes liberation from such fetters to come from turning to the task of observing and imitating actual nature . Diderot’s emphasis on the primeval productive power and abundance of nature in his aesthetic writings contributes to the trend toward focus on artistic creation and expression (as opposed to artistic appreciation and discernment) that is a characteristic of the late Enlightenment and the transition to Romanticism.

Lessing’s aesthetic writings play an important role in elevating the aesthetic category of expressiveness. In his famous Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing argues, by comparing the famous Greek statue with the representation of Laocoön’s suffering in Virgil’s poetry, that the aims of poetry and of the visual arts are not identical; he argues that the aim of poetry is not beauty, but expression. In elevating the aesthetic category of expressiveness, Lessing challenges the notion that all art is imitation of nature. His argument also challenges the notion that all the various arts can be deduced from a single principle. Lessing’s argument in Laocoön supports the contrary thesis that the distinct arts have distinct aims and methods, and that each should be understood on its own terms, not in terms of an abstract general principle from which all arts are to be deduced. For some, especially for critics of the Enlightenment, in this point Lessing is already beyond the Enlightenment. Certainly it is true that the emphasis on the individual or particular, over against the universal, which one finds in other late Enlightenment thinkers, is in tension with Enlightenment tenets. Herder (following Hamann to some extent) argues that each individual art object has to be understood in its own terms, as a totality complete unto itself. With Herder’s stark emphasis on individuality in aesthetics, over against universality, the supplanting of the Enlightenment with Romanticism and Historicism is well advanced. But, according to the point of view taken in this entry, the conception of the Enlightenment according to which it is distinguished by its prioritization of the order of abstract, universal laws and principles, over against concrete particulars and the differences amongst them, is too narrow; it fails to account for much of the characteristic richness in the thought of the period. Indeed aesthetics itself, as a discipline, which, as noted, is founded in the Enlightenment by the German rationalist, Alexander Baumgarten, owes its existence to the tendency in the Enlightenment to search for and discover distinct laws for distinct kinds of phenomena (as opposed to insisting that all phenomena be made intelligible through the same set of general laws and principles). Baumgarten founds aesthetics as a ‘science’ through the attempt to establish the sensible domain as cognizable in a way different from that which prevails in metaphysics. Aesthetics in Germany in the eighteenth century, from Wolff to Herder, both typifies many of the trends of the Enlightenment and marks the field where the Enlightenment yields to competing worldviews.

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aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | aesthetics: German, in the 18th century | Bacon, Francis | Bayle, Pierre | Burke, Edmund | Clarke, Samuel | Collins, Anthony | Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de | Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de: in the history of feminism | cosmopolitanism | Descartes, René | emotion: 17th and 18th century theories of | ethics: natural law tradition | German Philosophy: in the 18th century, prior to Kant | Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) d’ | Hume, David | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Locke, John | Mendelssohn, Moses | Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de | Newton, Isaac | Reid, Thomas | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of] | toleration | Vico, Giambattista | Voltaire | Wolff, Christian

Acknowledgments

Mark Alznauer, Margaret Atherton, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Alan Nelson, Julius Sensat and Rachel Zuckert provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, which lead to substantial revisions.

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What is the Difference Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment?

The Renaissance and the Enlightenment name two distinctly different periods of European history. They both heralded major changes in culture, art, philosophy , science, and mathematics. The Renaissance is associated with advances in literature, architecture, humanism, and a world economy, while the Enlightenment is associated with the scientific method , industrialization, rationality, astronomy , and calculus.

The Renaissance occurred during the 14th-16th centuries, following the Middle Ages. In French, the name translates as "rebirth," meaning that this was a Golden Age of artistic, cultural, and intellectual thought and production. During this era, great contributions were made to music, astronomy, painting, architecture, poetry, drama, and philosophy. Some famous people of this period include Galileo , Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Niccolo Machiavelli .

Financial, political, and technological innovations contributed to this explosion in civilization. The Black Plague killed many people but ended up redistributing wealth, remapping cities, and establishing a literate middle class. The Gutenberg press allowed people to translate and widely distribute written material. Advents in ship building and ocean navigation enabled closer economic ties between all of Europe and the East, not to mention the New World. Knowledge was accessible when Greek and Roman texts were translated from Latin into Italian, French, and English, so scholars could expand upon Ancient wisdom.

From about 1650-1800, Europe and the New World experienced an Enlightenment that introduced new paradigms of morality. This, too, was a period of discovery, but is generally limited to the realm of science, mathematics, and technology. Logic and reason reigned as thinkers became convinced that society and the natural world were like a giant, united machine that, while it may be complicated, could eventually be dismantled, studied, and mastered. The scientific method, which relied on the notion of objective observation leading to verifiable conclusions, spurred developments in astronomy, philosophy, medicine and physiology, transportation, chemistry, and ethics.

Empirical data suddenly displaced people's superstitious notions of how the world functioned by explaining mystical phenomena such as lightning, eclipses, disease, or hallucinations. The new authority in this part of the world was research and science, rather than the Church and God. Charles Darwin , Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Gottfried Liebnitz are associated with the new fields of science such as calculus, cosmology, and physics . Society valued truth and the acquisition of knowledge as worthwhile pursuits that informed philosophy. Ethical behavior to treat everyone fairly was described in treatises by Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza.

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Discussion Comments

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• By: Brad Pict Michelangelo's David is considered an example of renaissance art.
• By: trekandshoot The Age of Enlightenment, which pertained to science and math, had an influence on many of America's founding fathers.
• By: Jakub Krechowicz Leonardo Da Vinci was a central renaissance figure.
• By: Stefano Costantini St. Peter's Basilica was built during the Renaissance.
• By: Georgios Kollidas The Enlightenment gave rise to scientists like Isaac Newton.
• By: Marco Desscouleurs Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel during the Renaissance.
• By: nickolae Charles Darwin was part of the Enlightenment.
• By: nickolae Galileo lived during the Renaissance, contributing greatly to the field of astronomy.

The Age of Enlightenment, an introduction

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery , c. 1766, oil on canvas, 147.2 x 203.2 cm ( Derby Museums and Art Gallery, England )

In A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery by Joseph Wright of Derby we see an orrery— a mechanical model of the solar system. In the center is a gas light which represents the sun (though the child who stands in the foreground with his back to us block this from our view); the arcs represent the orbits of the planets. Wright concentrates on the faces of the figures to create a compelling narrative.

With paintings like these, Wright invented a new subject: scenes of experiments and new machinery. This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (think cities, railroads, steam power, gas and then electric light, factories, and machines). Wright’s fascination with light, strange shadows, and darkness, reveals the influence of Baroque art .

Jean-Antoine Houdon, Voltaire , 1778, marble, 36.5 x 21.3 x 21.3 cm ( National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. )

Enlightenment

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century a shift in thinking occurred. This shift is known as the Enlightenment. You have probably already heard of some important Enlightenment figures, like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire. It is helpful I think to think about the word “enlighten” here—the idea of shedding light on something, illuminating it, making it clear.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, influenced by the scientific revolutions of the previous century, believed in shedding the light of science and reason on the world in order to question traditional ideas and ways of doing things. The scientific revolution (based on empirical observation, and not on metaphysics or spirituality) gave the impression that the universe behaved according to universal and unchanging laws (think of Newton here). This provided a model for looking rationally on human institutions as well as nature.

Reason and equality

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social ou Principes du droit politique (or The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right ), 1762, France (photo: R.A. Leigh )

Rousseau, for example, began to question the idea of the divine right of Kings. In The Social Contract , he wrote that the King does not, in fact, receive his power from God, but rather from the general will of the people. This, of course, implies that “the people” can also take away that power.

The Enlightenment thinkers also discussed other ideas that are the founding principles of any democracy—the idea of the importance of the individual who can reason for himself, the idea of equality under the law, and the idea of natural rights. The Enlightenment was a period of profound optimism, a sense that with science and reason—and the consequent shedding of old superstitions—human beings and human society would improve.

You can probably tell already that the Enlightenment was anti-clerical; it was, for the most part, opposed to traditional Catholicism. Instead, the Enlightenment thinkers developed a way of understanding the universe called Deism—the idea, more or less, is that there is a God, but that this God is not the figure of the Old and New Testaments, actively involved in human affairs. He is more like a watchmaker who, once he makes the watch and winds it, has nothing more to do with it.

The Enlightenment, the monarchy, and the French Revolution

The Enlightenment encouraged criticism of the corruption of the monarchy (at this point King Louis XVI), and the aristocracy. Enlightenment thinkers condemned Rococo art for being immoral and indecent, and called for a new kind of art that would be moral instead of immoral, and teach people right and wrong.

Louis-Michel van Loo, Diderot , 1767, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm ( Musée du Louvre, Paris )

Denis Diderot, Enlightenment philosopher, writer and art critic, wrote that the aim of art was “to make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridicule forceful; that is the aim of every honest man who takes up the pen, the brush or the chisel.” [1]

These new ways of thinking, combined with a financial crisis (the country was bankrupt) and poor harvests left many ordinary French people both angry and hungry. In 1789, the French Revolution began. In its initial stage, the revolutionaries asked only for a constitution that would limit the power of the king.

Ultimately the idea of a constitution failed, and the revolution entered a more radical stage. In 1792, King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were deposed and ultimately beheaded along with thousands of other aristocrats believed to be loyal to the monarchy.

[1] Denis Diderot, Essai sur la peinture , 1765

Additional resources

Read more about the enlightenment and the end of empires in Europe in a  Reframing Art History chapter.

The Enlightenment from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Enlightenment from Professor Paul Brian at Washington State University.

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What’s the Difference Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment?

This question  originally appeared on Quora , the best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter , Facebook , and Google Plus .

Answer by Kaiser Kuo , dabbler in history:

The Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement that peaked during the 15 th and 16 th centuries, though most historians would agree that it really began in the 14 th , with antecedents reaching back into the 12 th , and really didn’t end until the 17 th . Its chief feature was a heightened interest, to near obsession, with classical (that is, Greco-Roman) learning and culture, much of which had gone into eclipse, at least in Western Europe, during the early Middle Ages.

The Renaissance, which flowered first in Italy and spread to much of Western Europe east of the Pyrenees, saw a continuation of interest in the classical philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences that late medieval scholars had begun to revive in the 12 th century. The Renaissance added to this an interest in the aesthetics of the classical world, including architecture and letters. The revival of interest in all things classical, beginning in the 12 th -century focus on philosophy and natural philosophy, owed much to the transmission of Greek and Roman culture through Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) and through Islamic culture, and to the preservation of especially Greek philosophy (to include natural philosophy) in the Middle East and especially Central Asia. The reconquest of Sicily from Arab control in the early 11 th century, and contact (both peaceful and bellicose) with the Umayyad caliphate in Spain, which had been captured by Islam in the 8 th century and was eventually reconquered in 1492, were crucial to this.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Renaissance is associated with great figures like the father of the Latin revival Petrarch, the humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola, the great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, the poet Dante Alighieri, the artist Michelangelo, the political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli and many other names doubtless familiar to most educated Europeans.

Humanism and the keen interest in reason common to many of those smitten with Aristotelean philosophy during these centuries brought about profound challenges to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church during this time. The church itself was beset by many internal problems: Long-standing tensions between ecclesiastical and secular authority—supporters of the Holy Roman emperor versus partisans of the pope—broke out into open warfare during the early Renaissance. The Western Schism took place, in which there were actually three rival claimants to the papacy. And practices like the sale of indulgences (which would, for the right amount of money, supposedly reduce the time a sinner spent in purgatory before ascending to heaven), as well as concubinage, simony (sale of religious offices), and many other abuses of power would eventually create violent demand for reform. This would culminate in the Protestant Reformation.

The Enlightenment came much later, but it wouldn’t really have been possible without the Renaissance and the Reformation. Most historians will slip a mainly 17 th- century “Age of Reason” into outline chronologies of intellectual history, and this makes a great deal of sense; the great thinkers of the 17 th century didn’t have quite the fervor for empiricism and hadn’t quite embraced the political liberalism that would characterize the European Enlightenment. But they had pretty much abandoned the project of Scholasticism—that is, trying to prove God and revealed truth through pure reason, a very late medieval and Renaissance kind of obsession—and they instead “changed the subject,” as the historian Mark Lilla so aptly put it. This was the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ great contribution in Leviathan: He really begun the divorce of political thought from theology by simply no longer speaking of God in matters of statecraft.

The Enlightenment began, most historians would probably concur, in mid-17 th century, and peaked in the 18 th century, when its real center of gravity France, not (as in the Renaissance) Italy. It was only really conscious of itself as an epochal movement from the early to mid-18 th century on, though, and the word  Enlightenment didn’t really come into vogue until much later in that century. It was very much a reaction to the Catholic counter-revolution and really flowered after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, when the great powers of Europe fought along (roughly) confessional lines—France of course was an exception, and fought mainly on the side of the Protestant powers despite being Catholic.

The Enlightenment was the age of the triumph of science (Newton, Leibniz, Bacon) and of philosophy (Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu). Unlike the Renaissance philosophers, they no longer sought validation in the texts of the Greco-Roman philosophers, but were predicated more solidly on rationalism and empiricism. There were atheists among them, and devout Christians, but if there was a common belief about the divine among Enlightenment philosophers, it was probably deism.

The political philosophy of the Enlightenment is the unambiguous antecedent of modern Western liberalism: secular, pluralistic, rule-of-law-based, with an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms. Note that none of this was really present in the Renaissance, when it was still widely assumed that kings were essentially ordained by God, that monarchy was the natural order of things and that monarchs were not subject to the laws of ordinary men, and that the ruled were not citizens but subjects.

It was the Enlightenment, and thinkers who embodied its ideas, like Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin (I think it was Eugen Weber once described the sage of Philadelphia as the epitome of the Enlightenment thinker), who were the intellectual force behind the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and who really inspired the ideas behind the great political documents of the age like the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

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• The Renaissance : Why doesn’t the Catholic church still use the music of the great composers for masses?
• European Enlightenment : Which books and texts should I read to understand The Age of Enlightenment?
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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Humanism

Introduction, general overviews, reference resources, bibliographies, classicizing latin style, humanistic studies, philosophy and the civic life, assessments of the baron thesis, florentine humanism, roman humanism, venetian humanism, humanism in the italian states, german humanism, french and spanish humanism, english humanist texts, humanism and religion, biblical humanism, humanism as rhetoric, cicero and imitation, humanist historiography, consolatory literature, the transmission of greek and latin learning, pedagogical humanism and humanists, lorenzo valla, giovanni pico della mirandola, marsilio ficino and renaissance platonism, filelfo, perotti, and sadoleto, battles and influence, humanism and the protestant reformation, related articles expand or collapse the "related articles" section about, about related articles close popup.

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Humanism by Paul Grendler LAST REVIEWED: 06 May 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 27 June 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0002

Humanism was the major intellectual movement of the Renaissance. In the opinion of the majority of scholars, it began in late-14th-century Italy, came to maturity in the 15th century, and spread to the rest of Europe after the middle of that century. Humanism then became the dominant intellectual movement in Europe in the 16th century. Proponents of humanism believed that a body of learning, humanistic studies ( studia humanitatis ), consisting of the study and imitation of the classical culture of ancient Rome and Greece, would produce a cultural rebirth after what they saw as the decadent and “barbarous” learning of the Middle Ages. It was a self-fulfilling faith. Under the influence and inspiration of the classics, humanists developed a new rhetoric and new learning. Some scholars also argue that humanism articulated new moral and civic perspectives and values offering guidance in life. Humanism transcended the differences between the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, as leaders of both religious movements studied and used the ancient Latin and Greek classics. Because of the vast importance and broad scope of humanism, it is not surprising that scholars have studied it intensively and view it in different ways. This article provides a sampling of some of the best and most influential scholarship on the subject and demonstrates the broad impact of humanism in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Because humanism is a vast topic, overviews are few. Nauert 2006 is brief but has the advantage of presenting a single viewpoint, while Rabil 1988 is large and has many authors.

Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe . 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Excellent and concise one-volume survey of humanism across Europe. A good starting point both for students and scholars.

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Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy . 3 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

Forty-one essays by recognized authorities, each with bibliography, about humanism across Europe and specific themes. Vol. 1 deals with the foundations of humanism and humanism in Italy; Vol. 2, with the rest of Europe; and Vol. 3, with humanism and the disciplines, the professions, arts, and science. A good starting point for advanced students and scholars lacking knowledge in particular fields of study.

Several comprehensive scholarly aids and sources useful for students and advanced scholars of Renaissance humanism are available. Students and scholars seeking basic information may start with the articles on humanism in Grendler 1999 , all of which offer reliable information and basic bibliographies. Weiss 1996 is a good introduction to northern European humanism. Bietenholz and Deutscher 1985–1987 provides numerous short biographies. The advanced researcher doing manuscript research will find Kristeller 1963–1997 indispensable, while Hankins 2001 provides reliable Latin texts and English translations of works by Italian humanists. Ford, et al. 2014 offers much useful information on humanistic topics and individuals.

Bietenholz, Peter G., and Thomas B. Deutscher. Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation . 3 vols. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1985–1987.

DOI: 10.3138/9781442673328 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Short biographies of over 1,900 Renaissance and Reformation figures mentioned in the works of Erasmus; particularly useful for northern Europe. Paperback reprint published in 2003.

Ford, Philip, Jan Bloemendal, and Charles Fantazzi, eds. Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World . 2 vols. Renaissance Society of America 3. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2014.

Although neo-Latin (new Latin) means the Latin language from the time of Petrarch to the present, this work concentrates on neo-Latin in the Renaissance. While there is no article on humanism per se, the majority of the 211 articles are relevant for major themes and individuals in humanism. Vol. 1, Macropaedia ; Vol. 2, Micropaedia .

Grendler, Paul F., ed. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance . 6 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1999.

Offers nearly 1,200 articles, all with bibliographies and written by experts, plus hundreds of illustrations, maps, genealogical charts, and tables, on every aspect of the Renaissance. Vol. 3, pp. 209–233, presents survey articles on humanism in different countries by various specialists.

Hankins, James, ed. The I Tatti Renaissance Library . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Provides reliable facing Latin texts and English translations of important works of Italian humanists. Very valuable source. A list of the volumes in the series is available online .

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries . 7 vols. London: Warburg Institute, 1963–1997.

Lists thousands of manuscripts by Italian humanists found in libraries throughout the world. An indispensable tool for the researcher. Also available online . CD-ROM version available under the direction of Lucinda Floridi (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995).

Weiss, James Michael. “Humanism.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation . Vol. 2. Edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand, 264–272. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Surveys the development of humanism, with particular reference to humanism in northern Europe. Mentions the connections of humanism with the Protestant Reformation.

Kohl 1985 is a good English-only bibliography, while Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance is a comprehensive electronic bibliography that is particularly strong in recent works.

Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance .

Online bibliography listing articles, essays, books, dissertation abstracts, encyclopedia entries, and reviews for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, from 400 to 1700, based at the University of Toronto. As of January 2017 it listed more than 1,400,000 entries, with new entries added daily. Includes links to other online Renaissance sources and is particularly useful for recent scholarship. Available online through libraries or by individual subscription.

Kohl, Benjamin G. Renaissance Humanism, 1300–1550: A Bibliography of Materials in English . New York: Garland, 1985.

Comprehensive and useful bibliography, although limited to English-language secondary sources and translations.

Renaissance Quarterly is the leading journal in the field. It began as Renaissance News in 1948 and assumed its current title in 1967. Back issues are available online through several subscription services. Humanistica Lovaniensia has detailed studies on northern humanism in particular, while Italia Medioevale e Umanistica concentrates on the connections between late medieval and early Renaissance scholarly developments in Italy.

Humanistica Lovaniensia .

An annual volume that began as a series of monographs on the history of humanism at Leuven, Belgium. It now covers humanism more broadly but focuses on humanism in northern Europe, especially the Netherlands. Publishes in several languages.

Italia Medioevale e Umanistica .

An annual volume that focuses on early Italian humanism and late medieval scholarship. All articles are in Italian.

Renaissance Quarterly .

The leading journal in the field, with articles and reviews in all disciplines involving the Renaissance. Because it covers all fields, only a small number deal with humanism. Published by the Renaissance Society of America.

Origins of Humanism

The term “humanism” did not originate in the Renaissance (although studia humanitatis [humanistic studies] and humanista [Italian for “humanist”] did) but was coined in early-19th-century Germany as Humanismus (humanism). The pioneering historian of humanism was Georg Voigt (b. 1827–d. 1891), who in 1859 published a large monograph on Italian Renaissance humanism that described the origins of humanism and defined the terms of research for nearly a century. Voigt 1960 is the most recent printing, while Grendler 2006 describes Voigt’s scholarly approach and explains his importance.

Grendler, Paul F. “Georg Voigt: Historian of Humanism.” In Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt . Edited by Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens, 295–325. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2006.

Presents a brief biography of Voigt in the context of 19th-century German scholarship and then assesses the interpretation and influence of Voigt 1960 .

Voigt, Georg. Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums: Oder, das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960.

Argues that Petrarch was the father of humanism and then surveys the themes and works of all major Italian humanists and themes of the 15th century, followed by brief discussions of the influence of Italian humanism on Germany, France, and England. First published in one volume in 1859, Voigt’s book has never been translated into English, except for a few well-chosen pages from the 1893 edition excerpted in The Renaissance Debate (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), edited by Denys Hay; reprinted in 1976 (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger), pp. 29–34.

The newest interpretation of the origins of humanism is found in Witt 2000 , a large study whose interpretation is based on analysis of the Latin style of many Italian scholars between about 1260 and the 1420s.

Witt, Ronald G. “In the Footsteps of the Ancients”: Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni . Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2000.

Argues that humanism began in the 1260s, when a small number of Italian scholars sought to develop a classicizing Latin style based on imitation of the ancients. They first used it to write poetry, and the new style gradually spread to other genres over several generations, culminating in Leonardo Bruni and other figures of the early 15th century.

Probably the most widely accepted definition of humanism is that it was the broad educational, literary, and cultural movement involving the studia humanitatis —grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, based on the standard ancient authors in Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. Humanistic studies generated a greater emphasis on man, a tendency toward concrete self expression, a fundamental classicism, and efforts to revive or restate the philosophical and other views of ancient writers by those who studied the humanities. Hence, a humanist was a scholar, teacher, or student of the humanities based on the classics. This is the definition proposed by Paul Oskar Kristeller (b. 1905–d. 1999), first articulated in 1945 and repeated and developed in many books and articles since. Kristeller 1965 and Kristeller 1979 offer synoptic treatments of his understanding of humanism, while Kristeller 1956–1996 provides many concrete examples of his scholarship on particular topics. Monfasani 2006 and Celenza 2004 assess Kristeller’s overall contribution to Renaissance studies.

Celenza, Christopher S. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Chapter 2, pp. 16–57 and 167–178, contrasts Kristeller’s synchronic approach to humanism with Eugenio Garin’s diachronic approach. See also comments on Hans Baron’s civic humanism thesis, pp. 36–39.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters . 4 vols. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956–1996.

Collection of many of Kristeller’s articles on humanism, rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, and other topics. Some articles are conceptually broad; others present detailed research based on manuscript sources. All demonstrate Kristeller’s wide knowledge.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts . New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Has articles on humanism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and the influence of humanism on vernacular literature, music, and painting.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought and Its Sources . Edited by Michael Mooney. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Collects some of Kristeller’s most important articles defining humanism, its connections with the Middle Ages and Byzantine learning, and humanistic concepts of the dignity of man.

Monfasani, John, ed. Kristeller Reconsidered: Essays on His Life and Scholarship . New York: Italica, 2006.

Assessments by sixteen scholars of Kristeller’s contributions to Renaissance studies.

In contrast with Paul Oskar Kristeller (see Humanistic Studies ), Eugenio Garin (b. 1909–d. 2004), professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Florence and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, argued that humanism was a broad philosophy of life. Humanism included a positive evaluation of civic and worldly values, the primacy of the will, the dignity of man, Platonism, a sense of historical anachronism, and a new investigation of nature. In Garin’s view, humanism profoundly influenced all aspects of Renaissance thought and action, and he strongly emphasized the differences between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Garin’s scholarship on humanism has had enormous influence on Italian and European scholars, but less on North American scholars. Garin 1965 provides his only comprehensive treatment of humanism, while Garin 1969 , Garin 1972 , and Garin 1990 translate some of Garin’s elegant essays on various topics and individuals.

Garin, Eugenio. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance . Translated by Peter Munz. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965.

English translation of the 1958 revised edition of L’umanesimo italiano: Filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento . This book was first published in German in Switzerland in 1947 and then in Italian in 1952. Garin fits all the major Italian intellectual figures from Petrarch through Galileo Galilei into his interpretation.

Garin, Eugenio. Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance . Translated by Peter Munz. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1969.

English translation of Scienza e vita civile nel Rinascimento italiano (1965) plus two other essays from 1966. Essays on the interpretation of the Renaissance, the ideal city, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei and the scientific culture of the Renaissance, and magic and astrology.

Garin, Eugenio. Portraits from the Quattrocento . Translated by Victor A. Velen and Elizabeth Velen. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

English translation of several essays published in Italian in the 1960s. Studies of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Marsilio Ficino, Politian, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Savonarola, plus Garin’s important essay on how the humanist chancellors of the Florentine Republic used the classics to promote republican civic values and oppose tyranny, a key part of his civic-life thesis.

Garin, Eugenio. Astrology in the Renaissance: Zodiac of Life . Translated by Carolyn Jackson, June Allen, and Clare Robertson. London and New York: Arkana, 1990.

English translation of Lo zodiaco della vita (1976). Essays that emphasize the influence of astrology, magic, Neoplatonism, and hermeticism on astronomy and other scientific disciplines in the Italian Renaissance.

Hans Baron (b. 1900–d. 1988) articulated a new interpretation of Renaissance humanism that he called “civic humanism.” According to Baron, humanism developed in two stages: in the 14th century it was scholarly and literary, and in the early 15th century it became civic. Petrarch (b. 1304–d. 1374) and his first followers knew and loved the classics but were literary men devoted to study and the contemplative life. Humanism became civic during the political crisis of 1402 as the Florentine Republic struggled for its existence against Milan, ruled by a duke. At this time, Florentine intellectuals, especially Leonardo Bruni (b. 1370–d. 1444), the chancellor of Florence, joined their classical scholarship to a defense of liberty. Civic humanism included a new understanding of history, an affirmation of the ethical value of the conditions of the civic life, and a new understanding of Cicero, the classical writer most admired by humanists. Civic humanism created the intellectual foundations for a transformation of Italian culture in the Renaissance and, ultimately, the modern world, in Baron’s view. Baron 1955a and Baron 1955b articulate the basic argument, while Baron 1968 and Baron 1988 add important elements.

Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny . 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955a.

Argues by means of close analysis and dating of numerous humanistic texts that Bruni and other Florentines created civic humanism during the political crisis of the war against Milan at the beginning of the 15th century. Most readers will prefer the one-volume 1966 revised edition, available in paperback, because it streamlines and sharpens the argument.

Baron, Hans. Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocentro: Studies in Criticism and Chronology . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955b.

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Supplements Baron 1955a with detailed, somewhat technical chapters concerning the genesis and dating of humanist texts in the early 15th century.

Baron, Hans. From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Important additional articles that round out the interpretation. Has articles on Bruni, edits Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae Urbis , and includes an important article on the composition of Petrarch’s Secretum .

Baron, Hans. In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought . 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

In the 1930s Baron published important articles on 14th- and 15th-century humanism that stand independently of Baron 1955a . These articles (many revised, plus some new ones) are collected here. Vol. 2 includes a revised version of Baron’s important essay on the evolution of Niccolò Machiavelli’s ideas from the Prince to the Discourses .

Hans Baron’s conception of civic humanism and its origins has stimulated strong criticism and thoughtful assessment. Seigel 1968 and Hankins 2000 are critical; Witt, et al. 1996 and Molho 2008 are interested in how he arrived at his conclusions and are more appreciative.

Hankins, James, ed. Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Articles by ten scholars, most of them critical of Baron’s conception of civic humanism, often on the grounds that medieval scholars voiced ideas of republican liberty earlier, and that 1402 was not as decisive a turning point as Baron posited.

Molho, Anthony. “Hans Baron’s Crisis.” In Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy; Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy . Edited by David S. Peterson and Daniel E. Bornstein, 61–90. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008.

Argues that Baron’s own personal crisis (namely, his forced move from Germany to America) transformed his understanding of the connections between politics and ideas and enabled him to see how civic humanism was formed in the crucible of the desperate Florentine political and military struggle against Milan in 1402. Fascinating combination of biography and historiography.

Seigel, Jerrold E. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.

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Argues for a strong rhetorical element in humanist thought, and that humanists were not necessarily personally committed to civic values.

Witt, Ronald, John N. Najemy, Craig Kallendorf, and Werner Gundersheimer. “Special Section: AHR Forum: Hans Baron’s Renaissance Humanism.” American Historical Review 101.1 (1996): 101–144.

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Four distinguished historians assess Baron’s view of Petrarch, humanism, and Machiavelli. While noting some criticisms, they accept his view about the importance of Florentine civic humanism and its links to republicanism.

Francesco Petrarca (known as Petrarch in English) has been identified as the first humanist, since Georg Voigt called Petrarch “the father of Humanism” in 1859 (see Voigt 1960 in Origins of Humanism ). Petrarch strongly criticized medieval approaches and values, proposed ancient texts as sources of wisdom and models of style, and anticipated humanist pronouncements about the dignity of man. Bishop 1963 is a readable biography, while Foster 1984 is a good introduction to Petrarch’s thought, and Trinkaus 1979 emphasizes Petrarch’s humanistic side. Baron 1968 analyzes one of Petrarch’s most important and characteristic works. By contrast, Witt 2000 evicts Petrarch from his position of “father of humanism.”

Baron, Hans. “Petrarch’s Secretum : Was It Revised—and Why?” In From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature . By Hans Baron, 51–101. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Important study of Petrarch’s Secretum (Secret Book), his self-examination in the middle of his life, which continues to fascinate today.

Bishop, Morris. Petrarch and His World . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

An attractive and well-written biography that brings Petrarch alive. It is more interested in Petrarch’s life than in scholarly debates about his role in humanism. Includes elegant translations of some of Petrarch’s poetry.

Foster, Kenelm. Petrarch: Poet and Humanist . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984.

Short introduction to Petrarch and his works; emphasizes his life and poetry more than his philosophy.

Trinkaus, Charles. The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.

Emphasizes Petrarch as a humanist and a philosopher, as well as his role in shaping Renaissance views on man.

On pp. 230–291, Witt sees Petrarch as the most important of the third generation of humanists, the one who gave humanism a more Christian direction.

After Hans Baron (see Civic Humanism ), most scholars, especially in the English-speaking world, have accepted that there was a connection between humanism and politics. While humanism everywhere had as its base a knowledge and respect for classical texts as inspiration and models of deportment and learning, it took on different coloration and attitudes in different political and social settings. In Florence, major humanists filled the chancellorship, a high civil-service position; chancellors were both intellectual leaders and politically involved. Witt 1983 , Black 1985 , Brown 1979 , and Godman 1998 study successive Florentine humanist chancellors, while Martines 1963 and Field 1988 connect Florentine humanists and humanism to the city’s political and social context. Bruni 1987 presents the basic works of the most important Florentine chancellor, thus enabling the reader to judge the extent and nature of Leonardo Bruni’s conception of civic humanism.

Black, Robert. Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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Study of Accolti (b. 1415–d. 1464), a Florentine chancellor and humanist. Emphasizes Accolti’s role as a humanist historian of the Italian Middle Ages, as well as his reforms as chancellor.

Brown, Alison. Bartolomeo Scala, 1430–1497, Chancellor of Florence: The Humanist as Bureaucrat . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Study of another Florentine chancellor and humanist. Sees Scala, who was chancellor from 1465 to 1497, as combining his humanism with a focus on the centralization of political authority in Florence.

Bruni, Leonardo. The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts . Translated and introduced by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987.

This work provides a summary of his life and translates selections from his most important writings.

Field, Arthur. The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Study of the Platonic Academy, a group of Florentine humanists and philosophers who studied the writings of Plato and other ancient texts in the 1450s and 1460s. The Platonic Academy was a major means by which Plato’s ideas entered the mainstream of Renaissance thought.

Godman, Peter. From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Deals with Florentine humanism from 1494 to 1512, paying particular attention to Angelo Poliziano (Politian), Marcello Adriani, and Niccolò Machiavelli. Emphasizes that Florentine humanism was secular, and sees tensions between the thought of the humanists and Machiavelli.

Martines, Lauro. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.

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Studies the social, political, and economic situations of forty-five Florentines strongly committed to humanism. Demonstrates that they came from the elite ranks of Florentine society, and notes the congruence between their social positions and some of the values of civic humanism.

Witt, Ronald G. Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983.

Fundamental study of Salutati (b. 1331–d. 1406), a Florentine chancellor, transitional figure, and the intellectual leader of his generation of Florentine humanists. While Salutati was the most important early leader of Florentine humanists, Witt also emphasizes medieval and religious tendencies in his thought.

Humanism in Rome differed from Florentine humanism. The pope was an elected monarch who, with the aid of the Roman Curia, governed both an international church and the Papal States in central Italy. The humanists were clergymen rather than heads of families and civic office holders. Hence, Roman humanism did not celebrate republicanism or duties to family. Rather, Roman humanists, most of whom were born elsewhere and moved to Rome, emphasized the links between imperial Rome and the papacy, between the ancient city and Renaissance Rome. Historical research since the late 20th century demonstrates that Roman humanism was just as intellectually rich as that of Florence, but distinct. D’Amico 1983 is fundamental, while O’Malley 1979 and McGinness 1995 deal with preaching at the papal court. Stinger 1985 and Rowland 1998 offer more-general surveys, while Celenza 1999 translates an interesting text.

Celenza, Christopher S. Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger’s De curiae commodis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Introduction, Latin text, and English translation of a humanist treatise on the papal Curia, written in 1438. It praises the institution and criticizes its members.

D’Amico, John F. Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Emphasizes the Roman humanist themes, including Ciceronian Latin style and humanistic theology, from the 1480s to 1527. Explains the operation of the Curia.

McGinness, Frederick J. Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Continues the study of sacred oratory in Rome in the late 16th century, as preachers blended spirituality, humanistic rhetorical style, and the symbolic value of Rome.

O’Malley, John W. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521 . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979.

Emphasizes the humanistic revival of classical rhetoric in preaching at the papal court.

Rowland, Ingrid D. The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Emphasizes the enthusiasm for the classical period in papal Rome among scholars, artists, and bankers, and the connections among them between 1480 and 1520.

Stinger, Charles L. The Renaissance in Rome . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

A cultural survey of Rome from 1443 to 1527, with material on humanism. It emphasizes the importance of the example of ancient Rome.

Venice, the longest-lasting republic in Renaissance Italy, had a strong humanist culture. Its humanists were almost always Venetian patricians and citizens who emphasized unanimity, civic responsibility, and allegiance to Aristotelian philosophy, as King 1986 and King 2005 point out. Bouwsma 1968 deals with late Venetian humanism and cultural values in conflict with the papacy.

Bouwsma, William J. Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Although it probably overstates the Renaissance-versus-papacy theme, the book demonstrates the continued importance of humanistic and civic themes in the late Renaissance in Venice. Large and wide-ranging study.

King, Margaret L. Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Major survey of the themes of Venetian humanism in the 15th century, with extensive bio-bibliographical information about ninety-two leading Venetian humanists. The starting point for study of Venetian humanism.

King, Margaret L. Humanism, Venice, and Women: Essays on the Italian Renaissance . Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.

Has twelve studies of Venetian and female humanists of the 15th century. Offers detailed investigations of the humanist Giovanni Caldiera and several female humanists.

Studies of humanism in the Italian cities outside Rome ( Roman Humanism ), Florence ( Florentine Humanism ), and Venice ( Venetian Humanism ) demonstrate the similarity and diversity of Italian humanism. In Naples, humanists developed notions of magnanimity and other social virtues within a princely context, as Bentley 1987 demonstrates, while Milanese humanists glorified their rulers; see Ianziti 1988 . Bolognese humanism developed in the intersecting circles of the university and the Bentivoglio family and made contributions in philology, as Raimondi 1987 and Beroaldo 1995 show.

Bentley, Jerry H. Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Examines the roles and views of Neapolitan humanists, especially Giovanni Pontano (b. 1426–d. 1503) in the Kingdom of Naples. Neapolitan humanism revolved around the court and articulated princely values to some extent.

Beroaldo, Filippo, the Elder. Annotationes centum . Edited with introduction and commentary by Lucia A. Ciapponi. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995.

Reprints brief Latin philological studies of classical texts in which Beroaldo (b. 1453–d. 1505) used new humanistic techniques. Excellent introduction explains his method.

Ianziti, Gary. Humanistic Historiography under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan . Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Studies the writing of humanistic historiography that praised the Sforza dukes of Milan.

Raimondi, Ezio. Codro e l’umanesimo a Bologna . Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1987.

Still the best study of Bolognese humanists, especially Filippo Beroaldo the Elder and Codro (Antonio Urceo, b. 1446–d.  c . 1500) and their scholarship. Originally published in 1950.

Bernstein 1983 offers an excellent introduction to German humanism as a whole. Spitz 1957 studies the first important German humanist, and Spitz 1963 extends the analysis to others; Spitz 1996 surveys broader issues. Akkerman and Vanderjagt 1988 studies Rudolph Agricola, Rummel 2002 surveys a humanist-Scholastic clash, and Rummel 1995 looks at the broader reasons for the quarrels between humanists and Scholastics. Watts 1982 studies Nicholas of Cusa, an original and provocative thinker.

Akkerman, Fokke, and A. J. Vanderjagt, eds. Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius, 1444–1485: Proceedings of the International Conference at the University of Groningen, 28–30 October 1985 . Leiden, The Netherlands, and New York: Brill, 1988.

Excellent collection of studies, the majority in English, about the life and writings of Agricola, who studied in Italy and wrote an enormously influential humanist rhetoric manual first published in 1515, as well as other works.

Bernstein, Eckhard. German Humanism . Boston: Twayne, 1983.

Excellent survey of German humanism from 1450 to 1530. Discusses origins, themes, and major figures and provides excellent bibliography. Does not take strong interpretive stances.

Rummel, Erika. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Surveys the sharp debates between humanists and Scholastic theologians, beginning in Italy and passing to Germany between roughly 1450 and 1550.

Rummel, Erika. The Case against Johann Reuchlin: Religious and Social Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany . Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

An attempt to destroy Hebrew books, which humanists defended as important for the correct interpretation of the Bible, became a struggle between humanists and Scholastics between 1509 and 1520. Includes a historical introduction and translation of key texts. Available in paperback.

Spitz, Lewis W. Conrad Celtis, the German Arch-Humanist . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.

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Study of Celtis (b. 1459–d. 1508), the most important early German humanist, known for his poetry and for founding humanist societies.

Spitz, Lewis W. The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

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Studies three generations of German humanists, from Rudolf Agricola through Erasmus and Luther. Notes Italian influences, religious themes, and reformist tendencies. Helps explain why many German humanists supported Luther.

Spitz, Lewis W. Luther and German Humanism . Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Variorum, 1996.

A collection of articles arguing for strong Italian influence on German humanism, delineating the characteristics of German humanism, and assessing the importance of humanism in the German Reformation.

Watts, Pauline Moffitt. Nicolaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth Century Vision of Man . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1982.

Nicholas of Cusa (b. 1401–d. 1464), churchman, speculative philosopher, and theologian, does not fit into any category but had highly original thoughts about man and God.

Several key works have shaped current scholarship on French and Spanish humanism; all have extensive bibliographies. Stone 1969 provides an introduction to French humanism, while Kelley 1970 , McNeil 1975 , Lefèvre d’Étaples 1972 , and Gundersheimer 1969 offer studies of major figures and themes. Bataillon 1991 , originally published in 1937, is a monumental study of Spanish humanism that is still valuable.

Bataillon, Marcel. Érasme et l’Espagne: Texte établi per Daniel Devoto, édité per les soins de Charles Amiel . 3 vols. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 1991.

Fundamental study first published as a single volume in 1937 and subsequently expanded. Emphasizes the influence of Erasmus in Spain and the subsequent suppression of Erasmian humanism by the Inquisition.

Gundersheimer, Werner L., ed. French Humanism, 1470–1600 . London: Macmillan, 1969.

Collection of studies by well-known scholars on French humanism and humanists.

Kelley, Donald R. Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance . New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Broad study of the influence of humanism on French historiography and law. Traces the steps by which French humanists used historical techniques derived from humanism to understand French history and, in the process, developed a modern historical consciousness.

Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques. The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Related Texts . Edited by Eugene F. Rice Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

Historical introduction and prefatory letters in Latin and French to works by Lefèvre d’Étaples (b.  c . 1455–d. 1536), an influential French biblical humanist.

McNeil, David O. Guillaume Budé and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I . Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1975.

Study of Budé (b.  c . 1467–d. 1540), a French humanist known for his studies of ancient law, coins, and Christianity.

Stone, Donald, Jr. France in the Sixteenth Century: A Medieval Society Transformed . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Good introductory survey. After an introduction about the Renaissance and humanism, it provides succinct summaries of key figures and themes, organized around the reigns of French kings.

English Humanism

Humanism became a significant intellectual force in England during the reign of Henry VIII (b. 1509–d. 1547). Hence, the history of English humanism is bound up with the Tudor monarchy and Henry’s religious policies. Hay 1952 studies a pioneering humanist. McConica 1965 and Mayer 1989 describe the growing influence of humanists at the court and the roles that they played in Henry VIII’s religious policies, while Gleason 1989 describes a nonhumanist who founded a humanist school, and Surtz 1967 studies a humanist churchman who opposed Henry VIII and was beheaded. Thomas More (b. 1478–d. 1535) was the most accomplished and famous English humanist, and Utopia (1516) was his most famous work. Marius 1984 offers a comprehensive biography of More, while Hexter 1952 and Surtz 1957 analyze Utopia .

Gleason, John B. John Colet . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Study of Colet (b. 1467–d. 1519), a churchman and preacher who founded an important humanist school, although Colet himself was only partly influenced by humanism.

Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters . Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.

Study of Polydore Vergil (b. 1470–d. 1555), an Italian humanist who moved to England in 1502 and wrote the first humanist history of England and other works.

Hexter, J. H. More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952.

Perceptive dissection of the book, indicating when and how it was written, the influence of Christian humanism, contemporaneous political and social conditions, and More’s prescriptions for improving society

Marius, Richard. Thomas More: A Biography . London: Dent, 1984.

A comprehensive but not particularly sympathetic biography of More that notes his harsh attitude toward heretics.

Mayer, Thomas F. Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII . Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Starkey (b.  c . 1495–d. 1538), a humanist and political thinker, was educated in Italy and contributed to the Anglican “middle way” between Catholicism and Protestantism.

McConica, James K. English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI . Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.

Important study detailing the growth of humanist influence at the English court and the links between humanism and the English Reformation.

Surtz, Edward. The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy, Education, and Communism in More’s Utopia . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.

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A detailed study of the combination of humanism and communism in the Utopia . Helpful in indicating the classical and Christian sources used, how More used them, and his sense of irony.

Surtz, Edward. The Works and Days of John Fisher: An Introduction to the Position of St. John Fisher (1469–1535), Bishop of Rochester, in the English Renaissance and the Reformation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.

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Comprehensive study of a major English churchman and humanist who was executed for refusing to accept Henry VIII’s assertion of supremacy over the Church of England.

A few works played large roles in spreading humanist ideas in England and winning public approval for humanism. Ascham 1967 offers a precise humanist educational guide, including which classical texts to read, while Elyot 1992 combines a humanistic educational program with advice to rulers. The works of Thomas More (b. 1478–d. 1535) ranged from history and poetry to the Utopia and are indispensable for understanding English humanism. See More 1963–1997 .

Ascham, Roger. The Schoolmaster (1570) . Edited by Lawrence V. Ryan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Ascham (b. 1515/16–d. 1568) was a humanist scholar and tutor to Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth. The Schoolmaster , published in 1570, described an education based on humanist principles, and was widely reprinted.

Elyot, Thomas. A Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour. Edited by Donald W. Rude. New York: Garland, 1992.

Elyot (b.  c . 1490–d. 1546) was an English humanist who in this book (published in 1531) described the appropriate humanist education for members of the governing class and the virtues that they needed to display. Like Ascham 1967 , the book was often reprinted.

More, Thomas. The Complete Works of Thomas More . 15 vols. Edited by Richard S. Sylvester, Craig R. Thompson, Edward Surtz, et al. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963–1997.

Excellent critical edition with English translations from Latin when necessary, prepared by a distinguished team of scholars. All volumes have extensive historical introductions that provide much information about England and English humanism. Vol. 4 ( Utopia ) is particularly good.

Previous scholarship held that humanism was a secular philosophy that excluded religion. The scholarship of Charles Trinkaus (b. 1911–d. 1999) establishes beyond doubt that the humanists were intensely concerned with God and man, but that they saw the relationship differently than medieval Scholastics. Trinkaus 1970 is a massive study of the religious writings of Italian humanists, while some of the studies in Trinkaus 1983 and Trinkaus 1999 extend the analysis to Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Thomas More.

Trinkaus, Charles. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought . 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

In nearly a thousand pages, and analyzing a vast array of manuscript and printed primary sources, Trinkaus studies the religious writings of Italian humanists from Petrarch through Giovanni Pico. The work is particularly strong in its analysis of lesser-known humanists. Also available in paperback from the University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.

Trinkaus, Charles. The Scope of Renaissance Humanism . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

A collection of studies dealing with free will, the dignity of man, and other topics. Includes essays on Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and More.

Trinkaus, Charles. Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought . Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999.

A group of studies, including four on Lorenzo Valla, that continue Trinkaus’s emphasis on how humanists approached intellectual, moral, and theological issues by transforming medieval thought. Argues for the influence of Augustine, Quintilian, Plato, and Plotinus, while seeing the humanists as turning away from Aristotle to some extent.

Biblical criticism was one of the most important and far-reaching effects of humanism both in Protestant and Catholic Europe. Biblical humanists used their philological skills to study the texts of the Bible in the original languages. They then corrected the standard Latin translation (known as the Vulgate) and strongly criticized traditional biblical scholarship. This led to more-reliable editions of the Bible and better Latin translations, but also to sharp conflicts with conservative theologians who clung to medieval Scholastic methodology. Bentley 1983 looks at three key developments, while the articles in Rummel 2008 chronicle some of the bitter fights between humanists and Scholastics. Jenkins and Preston 2007 mentions other figures.

Bentley, Jerry H. Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Focuses on Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, and the Completensian polyglot Bible prepared in Spain. Argues that humanist biblical scholars produced a thorough reorientation of Western scholarship on the New Testament by insisting that it be based on the original Greek text.

Jenkins, Allan K., and Patrick Preston. Biblical Scholarship and the Church: A Sixteenth-Century Crisis of Authority . Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.

Studies the biblical humanism of Erasmus, Thomas More, William Tyndale, and Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, and conservative reactions to them.

Rummel, Erika, ed. Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus . Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2008.

Thirteen articles by experts on biblical humanism across Europe. Up-to-date information on the major quarrels between humanists and Scholastics over biblical scholarship in Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

Humanists put great store in a classicizing rhetoric in order to spread their messages on a variety of topics. Hence, scholars have studied humanistic primary rhetoric (speech or oratory) and secondary rhetoric (written words, especially letters and other prose treatises) extensively. McManamon 1982 describes the beginning of Renaissance classicizing rhetoric, while McManamon 1989 and D’Elia 2004 study how Italian humanists used rhetoric to promote secular values by using different rhetorical genres. The articles in Murphy 1983 sample the rich field of scholarship on humanistic rhetoric across Europe.

D’Elia, Anthony F. The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Demonstrates how humanists used orations at marriage ceremonies as an opportunity to exalt the value of marriage as a secular value.

McManamon, John M. “Innovation in Early Humanist Rhetoric: The Oratory of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder.” Rinascimento 22 (1982): 3–32.

Emphasizes that Vergerio (b.  c . 1369–d. 1444) was a pioneer in applying classical techniques to Latin oratory in the Renaissance.

McManamon, John M. Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Uncovers hundreds of humanist funeral orations and shows how they followed classical norms and promoted secular and religious ethical values.

Murphy, James J., ed. Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Twenty-three essays on Renaissance rhetoric in France, Italy, Germany, England, Spain, and the Netherlands, with much additional bibliography.

Humanists who desired to write good classical Latin had to decide which ancient writer, if any, they should take as a model. The European-wide debate focused on Cicero, the most esteemed and prolific ancient Latin author: Should humanists model their prose on that of Cicero, or should they strive for a more eclectic style? The debates were important because classical Latinity influenced content. Scott 1991 and Della Neva 2007 explain the controversy and provide translated texts. D’Amico 1983 points out that Roman humanists were strong Ciceronians, while Erasmus subjected Roman and Italian Ciceronians to satirical criticism and preferred an eclectic Latin style; see Erasmus 1986 . McLaughlin 1995 surveys imitation both in Latin and Italian writing. D’Amico 1984 studies various forms of Latinity in Italy.

Chapter 5, pp. 115–143 and 283–291, describes how Roman humanists embraced Ciceronianism. Roman humanists emphasized the links and continuity between ancient Rome and papal Rome. This was a way of integrating contemporaneous religion and classical culture.

D’Amico, John F. “The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose: The Case of Apuleianism.” Renaissance Quarterly 37.3 (1984): 351–392.

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Charts the schools of eclectic, Ciceronian, and archaistic Latinity in the Italian Renaissance. Reprinted in D’Amico’s Roman and German Humanism, 1450–1550 (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Variorum, 1993), edited by Paul F. Grendler.

Della Neva, JoAnn, ed. Ciceronian Controversies . Translated by Brian Duvick. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Provides Latin text and English translation of texts by Angelo Poliziano, Paolo Cortesi, Gianfrancesco Pico, Pietro Bembo, Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Celio Calcagnini, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, and Antonio Possevino on the Ciceronian controversy.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Collected Works of Erasmus . Vol. 28, The Ciceronian: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style . Translated and annotated by Betty I. Knott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.

An excellent translation, with extensive notes, of Erasmus’s devastating and hilarious attack on Italian, and especially Roman, Ciceronians. Along the way Erasmus provides a great deal of information about humanism and humanists.

McLaughlin, Martin L. Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo . Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.

Follows the debates on imitation from Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio in the 14th century to Pietro Bembo in the early 16th century.

Scott, Izora. Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero in the Renaissance: With Translations of Letters between Pietro Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico on Imitation; And a Translation of Desiderius Erasmus . The Ciceronian (Ciceronianus). Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1991.

Despite its age, it is still useful, not least because of the 124-page essay by Scott on the controversy in Italy and northern Europe. Originally published in 1910.

Humanism changed the writing of history. Humanist historians had a better understanding of the use of sources than their medieval predecessors, and they followed classical models. Above all, they saw history as the story of the actions of men in their political contexts. Wilcox 1969 studies Florentine humanistic history writing in the 15th century, while Zimmermann 1995 and McCuaig 1989 study two important 16th-century historians. Ianziti 2012 offers a detailed study of the most important historian of the early Renaissance.

Ianziti, Gary. Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past . I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

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Comprehensive study of all the historical works of the most influential humanist historian of the 15th century. It pays particular attention to the influence of Thucydides and Polybius on Leonardo Bruni and his position in Florentine politics.

McCuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

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Study of Sigonio (b. 1523–d. 1584), who used modern historical methods to study ancient Roman history and the Italian Middle Ages.

Wilcox, Donald J. The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

Demonstrates how the Florentine humanists brought a new humanistic perspective to the writing of history. Analyzes the historical works of Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Bartolomeo Scala.

Zimmermann, T. C. Price. Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Study of the humanist historian Giovio (b. 1486–d. 1552), who wrote a very influential history of his own era, as well as other works.

Another humanistic genre was the literature of consolation. McClure 1991 and King 1994 show how the humanists used classical rhetorical devices and models to develop a more secular literature of consolation than that of their medieval predecessors.

King, Margaret L. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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When an eight-year-old boy, the son of a prominent Venetian patrician, died in 1460, humanists responded with an outpouring of consoling letters, orations, treatises, and poems. This work analyzes expressions of personal emotions at the death of a child and the humanistic literature of consolation in the Venetian political context.

McClure, George W. Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Broad study analyzing how Italian humanists used ancient philosophical sources to develop a more secular literature of consolation, with psychological insights, rather than that of Scholastic Christian theology.

If the humanists were to re-create and imitate ancient Greek and Latin learning, they had to find and transcribe the works of ancient authors. Hence, beginning with Petrarch in the 14th century, Italians—and, later, northern Europeans—searched for manuscripts of ancient works. Many of them were not “lost”; they could be found in monastic libraries if one knew where to look. Then the manuscripts needed to be copied, edited, and diffused, tasks that became easier after the invention of printing. The great Italian scholar Remigio Sabbadini (b. 1850–d. 1934) did pioneering work on the recovery of manuscripts of ancient works that is still valuable; see Sabbadini 1967 . The Catalogus Translationum ( Kristeller, et al. 1960–2011 ) is a learned extension of his research. Reynolds and Wilson 2013 is a good starting survey for students and beginning researchers, while Bracciolini 1974 illustrates the excitement of the search for manuscripts. Pade 2007 is a superb study of the diffusion and influence of a major ancient work, while Kallendorf 1989 studies how humanists used Virgil. Italians had to learn ancient Greek but lacked teachers until a number of Greek scholars came to Italy in the 15th century. Wilson 1992 provides an overview of this migration, and Monfasani 1976 studies an important Greek emigré scholar.

Bracciolini, Poggius. Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis . Translated and annotated by Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

Poggio Bracciolini (b.  c . 1380–d. 1459) was an inveterate searcher for manuscripts of ancient texts who left no stone unturned in his quest to find them. He wrote numerous letters to his friend Niccolò Niccoli (b.  c . 1364–d. 1437) chronicling his successes and failures.

Kallendorf, Craig. In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance . Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989.

Study of how five 15th-century Italian humanists understood and used Virgil’s Aeneid .

Kristeller, Paul Oskar, F. Edward Kranz, Virginia Brown, James Hankins, and Robert A. Kaster, eds. Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries; Annotated Lists and Guides . 10 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960–2011.

Lists and describes the manuscripts and printed works of Latin editions of ancient Latin and Greek authors up to the year 1600. Each volume contains articles on individual Greek and Latin writers, with a brief history of the author and his works, plus a comprehensive listing of manuscripts and printed editions, along with information on the editors and translators, as well as excerpts from prefaces, usually in Latin.

Monfasani, John. George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1976.

Study of George of Trebizond (b. 1395–d. 1472/3), the most important of the Greek scholars who came to Italy and wrote a widely used rhetoric textbook.

Pade, Marianne. The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy . 2 vols. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007.

Exemplary study of the influence, editions, translations, and uses of Plutarch’s Lives , which was much used and loved by humanists.

Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature . 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 2013.

Excellent guide that briefly charts the survival of ancient literature in the Middle Ages, plus the rediscovery of some major texts in the Renaissance and beyond.

Sabbadini, Remigio. Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV . 2 vols. Edited by Eugenio Garin. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1967.

Pioneering and still-useful work on the recovery of manuscripts of ancient works. Includes Sabbadini’s additions and corrections to his original work, and an analysis of Sabbadini’s scholarly contributions by Garin. First published 1905–1914.

Wilson, N. G. From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Surveys the rediscovery and growing influence of classical Greek learning in Italy from the 14th century to the beginning of the 16th century.

Humanist pedagogues tirelessly promoted a curriculum based on the classics and taught it in their schools. Grendler 1989 describes the development of the humanistic curriculum, while McManamon 1996 studies the career and works of a major humanist pedagogical theorist. For readers with knowledge of Latin, an excellent way to follow the origins and development of humanistic schooling is through the correspondence in Vergerio 1969 and Guarini 1967 .

Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Part 2 (pp. 111–271) describes the origins of humanist pedagogy through its most important figures and then analyzes the curriculum, authors, and methodology of the humanistic curriculum in practice through the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy, and Greek.

Guarini (Guarino da Verona). Epistolario di Guarino Veronese . 3 vols. Edited by Remigio Sabbadini, Turin, Italy: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1967.

Guarino da Verona (b. 1374–d. 1460) was a major humanist teacher and scholar with wide influence. This edition of his letters, which he always wrote in Latin, shows how Guarini viewed humanism, his pedagogical principles, and his relations with princes, parents, and former students. Originally published 1915–1919.

McManamon, John M. Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder: The Humanist as Orator . Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996.

Monograph on Vergerio (b.  c . 1369–d. 1444), emphasizing his originality as a reforming pedagogical humanist who wanted moral philosophy, history, and rhetoric based on the classics to be taught.

Vergerio, Pier Paolo. Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio . Edited by Leonardo Smith. Turin, Italy: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1969.

Letters of Vergerio, who wrote a widely read treatise on humanistic education. Originally published in 1934.

Italian Humanists

The humanist movement embraced the insights of many individual humanists, especially Italians, whose criticism of medieval culture and scholarship and bold pronouncements concerning man, classical studies, philosophy, history, and religion created Renaissance humanism. Italian humanists played the primary roles, which is reflected in the concentration on Italy in this article. Humanists elsewhere in Europe followed their lead and added their own insights, especially after the invention of printing accelerated the diffusion of ideas. Scholars have long recognized the contributions that individual humanists made, and some humanists have drawn a great deal of attention. The works in this section offer a sampling of studies on individual Italian humanists.

Valla (b. 1406/7–d. 1457) was an immensely important mid-15th-century humanist known for his iconoclastic views about medieval learning, rhetoric, dialectic, history, papal political claims, and his pioneering scholarship on the text of the New Testament. Although there is no comprehensive study of Valla in English, a special section in an issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas , Connell, et al. 1996 , provides an introduction, and Trinkaus 1970 has good relevant chapters. Gaeta 1955 , Di Napoli 1971 , and Camporeale 1972 are good studies in Italian. Valla 1977 , Valla 1985 , and Valla 2007 provide English translations of some of his most important and controversial works. The ultimate iconoclast, Valla attacked traditional ideas in scholarship, history, and religion. Hence, modern scholars have paid considerable attention to his works and his influence.

Camporeale, Salvatore I. Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia . Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1972.

Sees Valla as an advocate of Pauline theology—that is, emphasizing the themes found in the Epistles of St. Paul, including free will, faith, and salvation in God, in contrast to late medieval Scholastic theology.

Connell, William J., Salvatore I. Camporeale, Charles Trinkaus, Ronald K. Delph, and Riccardo Fubini. “Special Section: Lorenzo Valla: A Symposium.” Journal of the History of Ideas 57.1 (1996): 1–86.

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Articles by Connell, Camporeale, Trinkaus, Delph, and Fubini on Valla’s works on the Donation of Constantine, the Trinity, and other topics.

Di Napoli, Giovanni. Lorenzo Valla: Filosofia e religione nell’umanesimo italiano . Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1971.

Good survey of Valla’s thought, with particular reference to philosophy and theology. It offers balanced assessments without emphasizing one particular interpretive theme.

Gaeta, Franco. Lorenzo Valla: Filologia e storia nell’umanesimo italiano . Naples, Italy: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1955.

Early attempt to assess Valla’s contribution to humanism; emphasizes his philology and historical sensibilities.

See chapters 3, 12, 13, and 14 for Valla’s thought about ethics, the Bible, the status of the religious, and the Eucharist.

Valla, Lorenzo. On Pleasure: De voluptate . Translated by A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch. New York: Abaris, 1977.

Latin text and English translation of Valla’s important defense of earthly and heavenly joy, derived in part from Epicurus, but more so from St. Augustine.

Valla, Lorenzo. The Profession of the Religious and the Principal Arguments from the Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine . Translated and edited by Olga Zorzi Pugliese. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1985.

Inexpensive paperback edition of English translations of Valla’s attack on the religious life and key parts of his attack on the Donation of Constantine.

Valla, Lorenzo. On the Donation of Constantine . Translated by G. W. Bowerstock. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Valla demonstrated his brilliant rhetorical and philological expertise in proving that the Donation of Constantine, which awarded political authority over the Western Empire (and by extension, Europe) to the pope, was a medieval forgery rather than an authentic work of Emperor Constantine the Great (ruled 306–337). Latin text and English translation.

Giovanni Pico (b. 1463–d. 1498) is famous for his Oration on the Dignity of Man , in which he celebrated man’s potential. Pico also attempted to find agreement on some propositions among a very wide range of Christian, pagan, ancient, medieval, and Renaissance sources. Garin 1937 and Kristeller 1964 are good starting points, while Di Napoli 1965 and Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento 1965 introduce the reader to the many facets of Pico’s thought. Pico della Mirandola 1965 provides English translations of three of Pico’s works.

Di Napoli, Giovanni. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo . Rome: Desclée, 1965.

Comprehensive study that surveys all of Pico’s works in a balanced way.

Garin, Eugenio. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Vita e dottrina . Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1937.

Garin sees Pico as the quintessential Renaissance philosopher for his emphasis on man. Despite its age, this is still a standard work on Pico.

Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’umanesimo: Convegno internazionale (Mirandola: 15–18 Settembre 1963) . 2 vols. Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1965.

Thirty-two articles, the majority in Italian, on Pico and his influence, by Garin, Kristeller, and others. Many articles discuss Pico’s intellectual sources and his influence on other Renaissance figures.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964.

Chapter 4, pp. 54–71, is an excellent and balanced introduction to Pico that emphasizes his syncretism, universality, and conception of man’s freedom.

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. On the Dignity of Man , On Being and the One , and Heptaplus . Translated by Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J. W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

Translation of three major works by Pico.

Scholars disagree on whether Marsilio Ficino (b. 1433–d. 1499) was a humanist or a philosopher, but most agree that he was the most important Platonist of the Renaissance. His translation of works by Plato into Latin and his Platonic Theology (published in 1482) and other works influenced many. He believed that Platonism and Christianity were compatible and was also interested in theology, magic, medicine, and astrology. Kristeller 1964 remains a comprehensive account of Ficino’s Platonic philosophy, while Allen 1984 and Allen 1998 present important aspects of Ficino’s thought. Hankins 1990 offers a synoptic account of Renaissance Platonism in 15th-century Italy. Ficino 2001–2008 is a Latin and English text of his most important work, while Ficino 1975–2003 translates his letters.

Allen, Michael J. B. The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of his Phaedrus Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

An introduction to Ficino’s Platonism by means of his Phaedrus commentary, in which Ficino advances the myth of the winged charioteer as a way of explaining man’s soul.

Allen, Michael J. B. Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation . Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998.

Ficino’s views on ancient theology, Socrates, Platonic dialectic, and other topics.

Ficino, Marsilio. The Letters of Marsilio Ficino . 7 vols. Translated by members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London. London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975–2003.

Ficino’s wide correspondence reveals many aspects of his scholarship, influence, and contacts with other scholars and humanists.

Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology . 6 vols. Edited by James Hankins and William Bowen. Translated by Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–2008.

Latin text with English translation of Ficino’s most important work, in which he sets forth his view of Platonic philosophy and sees it as compatible with Christianity. Love is a major theme.

Hankins, James. Plato in the Italian Renaissance . 2 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1990.

A comprehensive study of how 15th-century Italians received and interpreted Plato. Vol. 2 consists of appendixes and texts. A paperback edition of Vol. 1 is also available.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino . Translated by Virginia Conant. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964.

Focuses on Ficino’s Platonic Theology , his largest and most important work. Analyzes Ficino’s philosophy in relation to Christianity but pays little attention to his interests in magic and other topics. Originally published in 1943.

Robin 1991 , Douglas 1959 , and Special Issue: Studies in the Classical Tradition offer good scholarship on three other Italian humanists who were influential in their own times: Francesco Filelfo, Jacopo Sadoleto, and Niccolò Perotti. They are little known today because their views were not as arresting or interesting to modern scholars; hence, they have been less studied.

Douglas, Richard M. Jacopo Sadoleto, 1477–1547: Humanist and Reformer . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.

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Study, not yet superseded, of the life and works of a cardinal and humanist. Sadoleto combined an influential career in Rome with humanistic biblical studies and an attempt to find some common ground with moderate Protestants.

Robin, Diana. Filelfo in Milan: Writings, 1451–1477 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Study of the writings and career of Filelfo (b. 1398–d. 1481), a controversial humanist who both defended and criticized his princely patrons.

Special Issue: Studies in the Classical Tradition . Res Publica Litterarum 4 (1981).

A special issue of Res Publica Litterarum with seventeen studies in Italian, English, French, and German on Perotti (b. 1429–d. 1480), who wrote several important grammatical works based on ancient texts.

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (b. 1467–d. 1536) was the most important non-Italian humanist of his own times and afterward. He edited ancient texts, promoted humanism and humanistic education, criticized medieval Scholastic scholarship, advocated a biblically based Christianity, and excoriated the sins of churchmen and princes. Although an avowed pacifist, Erasmus participated in every major intellectual and religious controversy in Europe from 1500 until his death. Bainton 1969 , which views Erasmus as a religious figure, marks a major shift in scholarship, since previous studies saw him as a somewhat skeptical and detached pre-Enlightenment intellectual. Augustijn 1991 continues this reevaluation. Sowards 1975 is an excellent introduction to the works of Erasmus for the beginning researcher. The best way to understand Erasmus is to read his highly accessible works, which Collected Works of Erasmus ( Erasmus 1974– ) makes possible for readers lacking knowledge of Latin.

Augustijn, Cornelis. Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence . Translated by J. C. Grayson. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

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Sees Erasmus primarily as a religious reformer who wanted to renew the church and theology on the model of the Christian Church of the first centuries CE . First published in German in 1986.

Bainton, Roland H. Erasmus of Christendom . New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1969.

Classic biography that emphasized Erasmus as humanist, scholar, and religious reformer who steered a middle road between Catholic and Protestant. Many reprints and paperback editions.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Collected Works of Erasmus . 66 vols. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1974–.

English translation, by an international team of scholars, of almost all of Erasmus’s works, including the works that he edited. All works are heavily annotated, with extensive cross-referencing. The introductions provide a running history of Erasmus’s life, the development of humanism, and the spread of religious controversy across Europe. A projected eighty-six volumes will eventually be published.

Sowards, J. Kelley. Desiderius Erasmus . Boston: Twayne, 1975.

Excellent brief introduction to the major works of Erasmus.

Scholarship since the late 20th century emphasizes Erasmus as a humanist, religious scholar, and sharp critic of his times and traces his broad influence. Rummel 1985 assesses Erasmus as a humanist translator and editor of the classics, while Rummel 1986 and Rummel 1989 show Erasmus battling conservative theologians and scholars in the midst of the Reformation. Tracy 1978 looks at Erasmus’s political views. Seidel Menchi 1987 studies the diffusion of Erasmus’s religious views in Italy.

Rummel, Erika. Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics . Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

DOI: 10.3138/9781442674547 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Assesses the approaches, abilities, and goals of Erasmus as a Latin translator of Greek classics and the Greek New Testament.

Rummel, Erika. Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian . Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1986.

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Traces Erasmus’s development as a New Testament scholar in the midst of controversy.

Rummel, Erika. Erasmus and His Catholic Critics . 2 vols. Nieuwkoop, The Netherlands: De Graaf, 1989.

A chronological account of Erasmus’s many battles with conservative Catholic theologians who opposed his humanist approach to religious texts.

Seidel Menchi, Silvana. Erasmo in Italia, 1520–1580 . Turin, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 1987.

Brilliant study of Erasmus’s influence on Italian religious dissenters and the reaction of church authorities.

Tracy, James D. The Politics of Erasmus: A Pacifist Intellectual and His Political Milieu . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Demonstrates that Erasmus had a thorough knowledge of contemporaneous politics and that he did not hesitate to express his opinions on political events. To some extent he reflected political views current in his native Low Countries.

What influence did humanism have on the founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, and the development of the Protestant Reformation? Moeller 1982 offers a comprehensive answer. Although Luther scholars do not generally view the mature Luther as a humanist, they do see him using humanistic techniques; see Dost 2001 . Rummel 2000 discusses how Protestant and Catholic controversialists used humanism for their own purposes. Philip Melanchthon (b. 1497–d. 1560) was the most humanistic of the major Protestant reformers; see Kuropka 1999 for an English introduction. Bouwsma 1987 argues for a humanistic John Calvin.

Bouwsma, William J. John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait . New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

A psychological portrait stressing Calvin’s humanist tendencies.

Dost, Timothy P. Renaissance Humanism in Support of the Gospel in Luther’s Early Correspondence: Taking All Things Captive . Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.

Argues for a strong humanist influence on the young Luther in the years 1507 to 1522.

Kuropka, Nicole. “Melanchthon between Renaissance and Reformation: From Exegesis to Political Action.” In Melanchthon in Europe: His Work and Influence beyond Wittenberg . Edited by Karin Maag, 161–172. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1999.

An introduction to Melanchthon as humanist, with an extensive German bibliography. Sees Melanchthon as a Christian civic humanist.

Moeller, Bernd. “The German Humanists and the Beginnings of the Reformation.” In Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays . By Bernd Moeller, 19–40. Edited and translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards Jr. Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1982.

English translation of “Die deutschen Humanisten und die Anfänge der Reformation” (1959). Pioneering study arguing that without humanism there would not have been a Reformation, because Luther’s earliest and strongest followers were humanists. English translation originally published in 1972.

Rummel, Erika. The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany . Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Argues that Protestant and Catholic partisans took from humanism what was useful for their causes, transformed what was unsuitable, and suppressed the humanistic rhetoric of doubt.

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Renaissance

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 11, 2023 | Original: April 4, 2018

The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. Generally described as taking place from the 14th century to the 17th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art.

Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. The Renaissance is credited with bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and modern-day civilization.

From Darkness to Light: The Renaissance Begins

During the Middle Ages , a period that took place between the fall of ancient Rome in 476 A.D. and the beginning of the 14th century, Europeans made few advances in science and art.

Also known as the “Dark Ages,” the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death .

Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated, though many agree that there was relatively little regard for ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and learning at the time.

During the 14th century, a cultural movement called humanism began to gain momentum in Italy. Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.

In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.

As a result of this advance in communication, little-known texts from early humanist authors such as those by Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, which promoted the renewal of traditional Greek and Roman culture and values, were printed and distributed to the masses.

Additionally, many scholars believe advances in international finance and trade impacted culture in Europe and set the stage for the Renaissance.

Medici Family

The Renaissance started in Florence, Italy, a place with a rich cultural history where wealthy citizens could afford to support budding artists.

Members of the powerful Medici family , which ruled Florence for more than 60 years, were famous backers of the movement.

Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.

The movement first expanded to other Italian city-states, such as Venice, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara and Rome. Then, during the 15th century, Renaissance ideas spread from Italy to France and then throughout western and northern Europe.

Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.

Renaissance Geniuses

Some of the most famous and groundbreaking Renaissance intellectuals, artists, scientists and writers include the likes of:

• Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor and “Renaissance man” responsible for painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.
• Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536): Scholar from Holland who defined the humanist movement in Northern Europe. Translator of the New Testament into Greek. 
• Rene Descartes (1596–1650): French philosopher and mathematician regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Famous for stating, “I think; therefore I am.”
• Galileo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.
• Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543): Mathematician and astronomer who made first modern scientific argument for the concept of a heliocentric solar system.
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): English philosopher and author of “Leviathan.”
• Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400): English poet and author of “The Canterbury Tales.”
• Giotto (1266-1337): Italian painter and architect whose more realistic depictions of human emotions influenced generations of artists. Best known for his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
• Dante (1265–1321): Italian philosopher, poet, writer and political thinker who authored “The Divine Comedy.”
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527): Italian diplomat and philosopher famous for writing “The Prince” and “The Discourses on Livy.”
• Titian (1488–1576): Italian painter celebrated for his portraits of Pope Paul III and Charles I and his later religious and mythical paintings like “Venus and Adonis” and "Metamorphoses."
• William Tyndale (1494–1536): English biblical translator, humanist and scholar burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.
• William Byrd (1539/40–1623): English composer known for his development of the English madrigal and his religious organ music.
• John Milton (1608–1674): English poet and historian who wrote the epic poem “Paradise Lost.”
• William Shakespeare (1564–1616): England’s “national poet” and the most famous playwright of all time, celebrated for his sonnets and plays like “Romeo and Juliet."
• Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the Medici family.
• Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510): Italian painter of “Birth of Venus.”
• Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”
• Michelangelo (1475–1564): Italian sculptor, painter and architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Renaissance Impact on Art, Architecture and Science

Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance. In fact, it was a unique time when these fields of study fused together seamlessly.

For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.

Architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi studied mathematics to accurately engineer and design immense buildings with expansive domes.

Scientific discoveries led to major shifts in thinking: Galileo and Descartes presented a new view of astronomy and mathematics, while Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.

They used techniques, such as perspective, shadows and light to add depth to their work. Emotion was another quality that artists tried to infuse into their pieces.

Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:

• The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)
• The Last Supper (Da Vinci)
• Statue of David (Michelangelo)
• The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)
• The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)

Renaissance Exploration

While many artists and thinkers used their talents to express new ideas, some Europeans took to the seas to learn more about the world around them. In a period known as the Age of Discovery, several important explorations were made.

Voyagers launched expeditions to travel the entire globe. They discovered new shipping routes to the Americas, India and the Far East and explorers trekked across areas that weren’t fully mapped.

Famous journeys were taken by Ferdinand Magellan , Christopher Columbus , Amerigo Vespucci (after whom America is named), Marco Polo , Ponce de Leon , Vasco Núñez de Balboa , Hernando De Soto and other explorers.

Renaissance Religion

Humanism encouraged Europeans to question the role of the Roman Catholic church during the Renaissance.

As more people learned how to read, write and interpret ideas, they began to closely examine and critique religion as they knew it. Also, the printing press allowed for texts, including the Bible, to be easily reproduced and widely read by the people, themselves, for the first time.

In the 16th century, Martin Luther , a German monk, led the Protestant Reformation – a revolutionary movement that caused a split in the Catholic church. Luther questioned many of the practices of the church and whether they aligned with the teachings of the Bible.

As a result, a new form of Christianity , known as Protestantism, was created.

End of the Renaissance

Scholars believe the demise of the Renaissance was the result of several compounding factors.

By the end of the 15th century, numerous wars had plagued the Italian peninsula. Spanish, French and German invaders battling for Italian territories caused disruption and instability in the region.

Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.

Later, in a movement known as the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic church censored artists and writers in response to the Protestant Reformation. Many Renaissance thinkers feared being too bold, which stifled creativity.

Furthermore, in 1545, the Council of Trent established the Roman Inquisition , which made humanism and any views that challenged the Catholic church an act of heresy punishable by death.

By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment .

Debate Over the Renaissance

While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn’t much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.

Also, some modern historians believe that the Middle Ages had a cultural identity that’s been downplayed throughout history and overshadowed by the Renaissance era.

While the exact timing and overall impact of the Renaissance is sometimes debated, there’s little dispute that the events of the period ultimately led to advances that changed the way people understood and interpreted the world around them.

HISTORY Vault: World History

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The Renaissance, History World International . The Renaissance – Why it Changed the World, The Telegraph . Facts About the Renaissance, Biography Online . Facts About the Renaissance Period, Interestingfacts.org . What is Humanism? International Humanist and Ethical Union . Why Did the Italian Renaissance End? Dailyhistory.org . The Myth of the Renaissance in Europe, BBC .

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What’s the Difference Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment?

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Enlightenment — The Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment

• Categories: Enlightenment

About this sample

Words: 710 |

Published: Nov 19, 2018

Words: 710 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Appleby, J. H., Hunt, L., & Jacob, M. C. (2017). Telling the truth about history. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Darnton, R. (2018). The business of enlightenment: A publishing history of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. Harvard University Press.
• Gay, P. (2019). The Enlightenment: The rise of modern paganism. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Israel, J. I. (2019). Enlightenment contested: Philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man, 1670-1752. Oxford University Press.
• Kramnick, I. (Ed.). (1995). The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Penguin Books.
• Outram, D. (2019). The Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press.
• Porter, R. (2001). Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world. Penguin Books.
• Schmidt, J. D. (2019). The Enlightenment: A sourcebook and reader. Routledge.
• Vovk, Y. (2019). The intellectual origins of the European Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press.
• Zinman, C. (2019). Philosophy, science, and religion in England, 1640-1700. Cambridge University Press.

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The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period Essay

The Patriot is a 2000 war movie that Robert Rodat wrote. Ronald Emmerich directed this three-hour movie starring various high profile actors. The movie portrays the events that were taking place in South Carolina during the American Revolution War. It was filmed in South Carolina where these events used to take place.

The main actors in this movie include Mel Gibson (Benjamin Martin), Heath Ledger (Gabriel Martin), Joely Richardson (Charlotte Selton), Jason Isaacs (Col. William Tavington), Chris Cooper (Col. Harry Burwell), Tom Wilkinson (Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis), and Adam Baldwin (Apt. Wilkins).

The other high profile characters in the movie include Reverend Oliver, Anne Howard, Jean Villeneuve, Dan Scott, John Billings, Occam, Peter Howard, Thomas martin among others. The movie portrays the American’s victory over their English armies.

In this movie, Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), a South Carolina farmer and a hero of the French and Indian war is shown as being reluctant to join the Revolutionary war of 1776 (The American Movie Database, para. 1). Martin is a widower and lives with his seven children in South Carolina.

One of his sons, Gabriel, becomes a member of the Continental army contrary to his acknowledgment. One day, Gabriel comes home wounded from war and the British army comes for him to hang him. His younger brother tries to release him from the British army but Tavington shoots him.

Benjamin, with the help of his other two sons, manages to rescue Gabriel after killing a number of the British soldiers. Benjamin then is drawn into the revolutionary conflict against his anti-war feelings. He makes a vow to exterminate Tavington before the end of the bloody battle and allows his children to go to his wife’s sister while he links with his old friend Colonel Burwell, and, pilots the local army in the conflict against the British forces.

In the end, Benjamin succeeds in killing Tavington and Cornwallis moves back and admits defeat. The arrival of French forces to confront the weakened British army in the battle of Yorktown is what compelled the opponents of the Americans to give in.

The Patriot has both historical accuracies and inaccuracies. The writer of this movie wanted to bring out the events that took place during the American revolutionary war when the American people were fighting to get their independence from the British government. The movie uses characters that represent the real people during this revolutionary war but with changed names (Lindahl, para.3).

Many of the battles in the film are also historically accurate as well as other events, which the writer did not openly mention. It is important to note that the movie is not a historical documentary and therefore contains some historical inaccuracies. The author had to fictionalize the characters and some events in order to tell the best drama story.

The battles presented in this movie are historically accurate in that they are those that took place during the American Revolutionary war. These battles include those at Camdem, Charleston, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse and Yorktown.

The author used Benjamin Martin to represent other personalities who played a significant role during the revolutionary war, but also added some other elements to him to suite other prominent historical figures, and, the approach shown in the movie of using the band of soldiers to draw British Army in the last battle is the same approach that Daniel Morgan used in the Battle of Cowpens. General Charles Cornwallis was an actual historical character making this movie historically accurate. It is also true that Cornwallis mentored Lt.

The other events depicted in the movie that are historically accurate include Martin’s raid on Fort wilderness, Tavington’s acts of burning a militia leader’s home and killing his son, use of projectiles during the revolutionary war, and the existence of slave colonies during the revolutionary war. It is also true that slaves became free after participating in the Revolutionary war for one year. These and many other events in the movie show the historical accuracy of this movie.

The movie also has some historical inaccuracies. Because the movie is not a historical documentary, the author added some fiction, which makes it historically inaccurate.

The movie gives a number of misrepresentations of the battles and other incidences surrounding the American Revolutionary war as well as the personnel used. The movie does not use the actual historical characters in presenting the message. The author had to incorporate many characters in Benjamin in order for him to represent more than one of the historical characters.

The battles in South Carolina were also brutal than portrayed in the movie. The movie also shows Benjamin killing Tavington but this did not happen historically. General Cornwallis also never lost any battle in the field as the movie portrays. In the movie, the British army releases the members of the militia group an issue that never happened with the army in history. These and many other events portray the historical inaccuracies of this movie.

The Patriot Presents the historic victory of the Americans against the British in the battle of Yorktown. This happened in 1781 when the forces of the Americans, led by General Washington, with the help of the French forces, led by Comte Rochambeau, forced the British army, led by Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis, to surrender. This historically happened as it is shown in The Patriot.

The French army came in to give reinforcement to the American Army in fighting the British army and end its control over Yorktown and America as a whole. The American patriots were determined during this time to gain their independence. Lord Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781. He surrendered to the American army through his second in command and this action ended the revolutionary war with Britain.

The writer of The Patriot tried to bring out the message of the revolutionary war in his own style. He tried to bring out the events as they happened during the Revolutionary war. Most of the events and actions of the patriots during this revolutionary period were true as presented in the movie (Leong, para. 1). It is true that most of the patriots, as shown through Benjamin, did not want to participate in this revolutionary war at first.

The historical accuracies presented in the film also support the authenticity of this film. The film shows that some colonists wanted independency, a rare tactic was employed to defeat the British at the battle of Hanna’s Cowpens, and the French assisted the Americans to make the war unsustainable for them. This was factual in the history of the Revolutionary war. Even though this was the case, the author presents gross misrepresentation of some events and characters in the movie making The Patriot a propaganda film.

The movie shifts blame between the two rival groups making the movie a propaganda film. Most of things that the movie portrays the redcoats doing, especially their deeds and purposes, were really those of the patriots towards the redcoats who were devoted to the king and the film illustrates the wicked character of Tavington on Britain’s Dragoon Colonel Banastre Tarleton.

However, it is of essence to note that even though Tarleton was not an angel, he was not the kind of giant that the film wants to portray him to be and he did not pass away in the conflict as portrayed in the film; however, he passed away some fifty years afterward.

There are also many misrepresentations in the movie that are misleading as far as the patriot’s history is concerned. The movie managed to depict happy slaves in the farms when in the real sense slaves where not easily granted freedom and were not happy. The author shows that the colonists beat the French and the Indians but this was not the case.

The riots in Charleston in the movie look very normal while in the real case they were brutal and bloody as they were a show of one against the loyal majority. Generally, the movie gives a wrong impression of the war and depicts the Britain army in a negative way, which was not the case. The filmmaker seems to shift the blame to the British and make them seem bad than they actually were.

Stereotypes are evident in this film. The film presents stereotypes about women and ethnic groups, including Africans (slaves) and the British army. The movie shows women performing a secondary role of taking care of children during the Revolutionary war. In reality, women were actively involved in the war and some of them joined the army to fight the British army. The movie also brings out stereotypes about the British army.

Whenever a British soldier comes to stage, he is backed up with all sorts of negatives and evils to make him appear bad. The patriot is presented with positive characters and inaccurate facts to make him appear good. The movie also shows the British army gathering people into a church and burning them all in it. As much as this shows the stereotypes that the movie presents towards the British army, it also presents religious stereotyping. In reality, the British army never burnt people in a church.

The events and personalities presented in this movie reflect what is happening in our society currently. Many militia groups have formed in many countries to fight the ruling governments. Brutality is a common happening and people witness bloody attacks that disrupt peace and development in these regions. Stereotypes still exist in our modern society. Racial discrimination, though reduced, is also common in some areas. These negative attributes have led to poor developments in our countries and regions.

In conclusion, The Patriot is a movie that depicts the events that were taking place during the American Revolutionary war. Even though this movie has some historical accuracy, it also has gross inaccuracies that misrepresent the events of this war; therefore, this reduces its overall credibility.

Works Cited

Leong, Anthony. “The Patriot Movie Review.” Media Circus Navigation . 2000. Web.

Lindahl, Lars. “ The Patriot Review .” Killer Movies , 2000. Web.

The American Movie Database (IMDb). “ Storyline for the Patriot .” IMDb, n.d. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, December 22). The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-age-of-renaissance-enlightenment-revolutionary-period/

"The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period." IvyPanda , 22 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-age-of-renaissance-enlightenment-revolutionary-period/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period'. 22 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period." December 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-age-of-renaissance-enlightenment-revolutionary-period/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period." December 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-age-of-renaissance-enlightenment-revolutionary-period/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Age of Renaissance, Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period." December 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-age-of-renaissance-enlightenment-revolutionary-period/.

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Women in Art History

Artistic representation of the female gender from the renaissance to the enlightenment, katryna santa cruz.

Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders , 1555-6; Wikipedia

Introduction

Art is a product of its time. It is a result of the social, political, and religious context in which it was made. Because of its consequential nature, it has become the center of focus for historians interested in revisionist theories about the representation of its subjects. This research guide has compiled sources of information that lend itself to a research paper on the representation of women in art history. The sources in this research guide form connections between art and history to provide arguments for or against the idea of a factual representation of women in art.

The guide consists of a General Overview section with sources that cover a broad sense of the representation of women in art in several art periods but focusing on Victorian Art, Renaissance Art, and Art of the Enlightenment. Other sections in this research guide include Representation of Rape in Art History , Women in Religious Art and Imagery , Gender Neutrality in Art, Gender Differences in Art, and Sexuality and Eroticism in Art.

Manet, Olympia , 1865; Wikipedia

General Overview

• FEMINISM AND ART HISTORY: QUESTIONING THE LITANY

In  Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany , authors Norma Broude and Mary Garrard place art production in social context. Through several essays, the authors show how the social, political, and religious circumstances of different art periods affect the way women were represented.  Feminism and Art History   includes a wide range of art periods including Egyptian Pharaoh Art, Roman Art, Medieval Art, 18th and 20th-century art and concludes with American quilts. The authors spread the content of the essays among different regions in Europe which I feel is essential to a study on the representation of women in art as it lends itself as an enciclopediac-like source for all of Europe, rather than just one country or region.

I feel this source is critical in doing research on the representation of women in art as it offers variety in content relative to the thesis, extensive evidence to support its arguments, and a generally unbiased presentation of information as it seeks to create a new art history rather than simply working with the modern version.

Broude, N. & D Garrard, M.  Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany .  New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

• THE EXPANDING DISCOURSE: FEMINISM AND ART HISTORY

The sequel to  Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany ,  The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History   presents an even more influential source of information as it aims to expand the knowledge delivered in  Feminism and Art History  to art outside of Western culture. Written in the same style, a compilation of essays,  The Expanding Discourse   begins in Early Renaissance culture and paves a new path of art history through the critiques of works by Botticelli, Rubens, Degas, Gauguin, Kahlo, O’Keeffe, and many other iconic artists.

Although this sequel is heavily shaped by feminist theories, creating a somewhat biased presentation of information, I believe the authors were more effective in setting the sociopolitical context. Without inserting gender theories, ones relevant to the time when the art was created, their thesis would have become out of context and their arguments would have lessened in relevance and influence. Although the majority of this book focuses on post-Renaissance art, I feel it is important in conducting research on the representation of women in art as it touches upon subjects that were not discussed in the prequel including sexual violence, lesbianism, and early feminism (all during or before the Renaissance).

Bourde, N. & D Garrard, M.  The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History . Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.

•   WOMEN IN RENAISSANCE ART: GENDER, REPRESENTATION, IDENTITY

Paola Tinagli gives a general overview of women as subject-matter in Italian Renaissance painting. I believe this is an essential source of information as the author places a heavy focus on one of the key concepts in studying art history; the relationship between the patron and the artist. Most subject-matter in Renaissance Art is a direct product of this relationship and no art history critique is complete without consideration of it. The author’s evidence for these relationships are found in letters, poems, and treatises that she revises herself, rather than the use of the already established art historical stories.

  Tinagli, P.  Women in Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity . Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1997.

• THE FEMALE NUDE: ART, OBSCENITY, AND SEXUALITY

Lynda Nead’s The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality seeks to find  why the female nude has become an icon of Western culture. The prevalence of images of the female body in the history of Western art has begun to tie the female nude to an ‘art’ connotation, even in modern art. Nead discusses the dissemination of the ‘high art’ female nude in art education and supports her argument by using  art publications and the language of art criticism itself to bring together an entirely new analysis of the historical tradition of female nudes in art. Although The Female Nude  attempts to discover the reason for the trend, I felt this source can provide evidence of early nudes in art pertinent to the age periods for which this research guide is catered to.

Nead, L.  The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality . London: Routledge, 1992.

• WOMEN FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

In this short essay, Saylor Academy offers a compact look at the effects of 15th-18th century European society on the representation of women in art. They offer concise summaries regarding women’s status in society, Dual Representations of Women During the Renaissance , Effects of the Protestant and Catholic Reformation on Women , and Women and the Enlightenment .

As the author explores, women didn’t have a voice in their communities regarding economics or politics. Their most important job was to be a mother and wife, before being a woman. As the Enlightenment pervaded the European society, “women began to take advantage of new intellectual trends.” The author then discusses dual representations of women during the Renaissance — a complex developed by Sigmund Freud called “the Madonna-Whore complex” where men see women as either Madonnas or whores. As the author explains, figures of the Renaissance represented women as they were in seen in their times — “as either virtuous and chaste or seductive and deceptive.” Effects of the Protestant and Catholic Reformation on Women explores the idea of the patriarchy (and in turn, the Church, the most powerful political force of the time) controlling women in a way that led to their discrimination and persecution throughout Europe and North America (using the Salem Witch Trials as an example). Women and the Enlightenment explores women and their involvement in salon culture and literature. Although this essay doesn’t provide any specific artistic examples of the representation it discusses, it does provide social, political, and religious reasons for why Renaissance art represents women the way it does.

“Women From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.” Saylor Academy . January 1, 2014. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/HIST201-8.2.3-WomenRenaissancetoEnlightenment-FINAL1.pdf .

• WOMEN AS SUBJECT IN VICTORIAN ART — REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN

This source, although in an informal format, provides numerous links that represent the most common trends in Victorian Art (late 19th century). These categories include Female Power (e.g. goddesses, femme fatale , monster women, etc.), Female Powerlessness – Woman as Victim (e.g. women in chains, martyrs, fallen women, etc.), Objects of Desire (e.g. the adoring woman), Women as Ideal (e.g. madonnas and mothers), and Miscellaneous (e.g. servants and governesses).

I find this source to be a healt hy complementary to the previous source ( Women From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment ) as it offers a visual representation of the reasons that  Women From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment   delivered for the representation of women in art, although this source focuses on a later art period. Some of the links in this source lead to essays digressing into each of the topics while other links provide a wide array of paintings, symbols, and illustrations that fall under each category ( Female Power, Woman as Victim , etc.).

“Women as Subject in Victorian Art — Re presentations of Women.” Victorian Web . July 13, 2009. Accessed November 13, 2014.  http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/arts2.html

Representation of Rape in Art History

Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women, 1637; Wikipedia

• FROM VICTIM TO VICTOR: WOMEN TURN THE REPRESENTATION OF RAPE INSIDE OUT

From Victim to Victor is the fourth part of a seven-part essay series written by Roger Denson covering topics in art history ranging from gender performance to gender divides. The writer aims to develop a discourse concerning the representation of rape in art. I believe the most interesting part of this essay is the fact that he addresses the time differences in the art he critiques. He is well aware that most historical rape scenes are a product of male artists while the pivotal, modern rape scenes are a product of female artists. Taking this into consideration, Denson takes a look at the “dramatic differences between the artistic tenors and depicted ethical values of men and women, ancients and moderns, that we can discern how and why rape not only persists at such a high incidence in civilization, but as well how visual representations factor into this persistence.”

Although Denson places a heavy focus on modern art made by female artists, he does provide substantial evidence to support his comparison; thereby lending itself effectively to a research paper on the representation of women in historical rape scenes.

Denson, G. Roger. “From Victim to Victor: Women Turn the Representation of Rape Inside Out.” Huffington Post . November 11, 2007. Accessed November 12, 2014.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/facing-the-interior-and-t_b_1073672.html

Botticelli, Primavera , 1482; Wikipedia

• IMAGES OF RAPE: THE ‘HEROIC’ TRADITION AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Diane Wolfthal’s Images of Rape: The ‘Heroic’ Tradition and Its Alternatives can become a very influential source of information if used in a research paper focused on the representation of women through rape scenes in art history. Wolfthal’s main thesis is to address the “heroic” act of rape, as depicted in art history. She does this by dividing the book in two sections: “the first section will examine how these [rape scenes] glorify, sanitize, and aestheticize sexual violence; the second section will investigate how art historians have reinforced this construction.” In a salient, revisionist tradition, Wolfthal breaks down the most inflentual works of art depicting rape scenes and provides a range of visual documentation, including pictorial Bible scenes, law treatises, history paintings,  war prints, and the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan , a Medieval author who was arguably one of the first persons to ever write about women’s rights.

Wolfthal, D.  Images of Rape: The ‘Heroic’ Tradition and Its Alternatives .  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Women in Religious Art and Imagery

Haulage Augen – und Gemüthslust, Augsburg, Charity as Holy Spirit , 1706; Representation of Women in Religious Art and Imagery .

• THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN RELIGIOUS ART AND IMAGERY

The Representation of Women in Religious Art and Imagery is a chapter in  Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750-1830 . Written by Stefanie Schäfer-Bossert, this chapter covers the slow disappearance of women in religious imagery and the disparity in gender representation in religious art: “one depicts the male in the historical present and legitimizes him through his profession and his social prestige; the other makes women appear ahistorical by means of mythological metaphor.”

Although concise, Schäfer-Bossert provides enough imagery and evidence to support her argument. She uses a wide variety of resources, herself, in writing this chapter; she uses theories developed by theological gender studies scholars, forms her own theories from imagery seen in chapels around Europe, and provides the reader with a clear timeline of events that supports her thesis.

Schäfer-Bossert, S. Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750-1830 :  The Representation of Women in Religious Art and Imagery . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Lucas Van Leyden, Lot and His Daughters , 1530; Wikipedia.

•   ART: REPRESENTATION OF BIBLICAL WOMEN

Part of The Jewish Women’s Archive ‘s Featured Collection on Feminism , Art: Representation of Biblical Women , is an extensive compilation of research comparing the portrayals of women in biblical stories among Christian and Jewish biblical texts. An alternate approach to the portrayals of women provided in the rest of this guide, Mati Meyer takes a cross-religious look at how the social implications brought on by religious communities affected the art it produced. As Meyer points out, because “in early Christian and medieval art the image of biblical women served primarily to emphasize a typological meaning,” I found it essential that this essay be a part of this research guide as art reflects society just as much as society reflects its art.

Meyer, M. “ Art: Representation of Biblical Women .”  Jewish Women’s Archive . March 20, 2009. Accessed on December 8, 2014. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/art-representation-of-biblical-women

Bernardo Cavallino, Lot and His Daughters , 1656; Wikipedia.

Gender Neutrality in Art

Géricault, Raft of the Medusa , 1818; Wikipedia

• GÉRICAULT, OR THE ABSENCE OF WOMEN

Linda Nochlin’s  Géricault, or the Absence of Women  is an essay published in the Spring 1994 edition of  October , a journal at the forefront of contemporary arts critique and theory. As the title suggests,  Géricault, or the Absence of Women  looks at one artist in particular, Théodore Géricault, and the portrayal of femininity in his work, or rather the lack thereof.

Although quite specific in content, I find this source to be essential to this research guide as Nochlin’s methodology in critiquing Géricault’s work can be used when looking at other artworks from the same art period.

Nochlin, L. “ Géricault, or the Absence of Women .” O ctober , Vol. 68,  Spring, 1994, pp. 45-59.   Accessed December 1, 2014. MIT Press.  http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.bu.edu/stable/10.2307/778696?origin=crossref

•   DID MEN INVENT ART TO BECOME WOMEN? MUST WOMEN BECOME MEN TO MAKE GREAT ART?

Part five of Roger Denson’s seven-part essay series, Did Men Invent Art to Become Women? Must Women Become Men to Make Great Art? Although very biased in content, as to support his argument, Denson provides examples of art pieces that portray women in a gender-neutral state. This source provides variety to this research guide as it presents a new portrayal of women in art history — not that of a victim or a femme fatale (always imposing the female gender), but rather lacking the things that make her a woman and not yet a man.

Denson, R. “ Did Men Invent Art to Become Women? Must Women Become Men to Make Great Art? ” Huffington Post . January 20, 2012. Accessed November 3 0, 2014.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/did-men-invent-art-to-bec_b_1218788.html

Gender Differences in Art

These sources, using examples of both genders in art history, give a different perspective on the way revisionist historians look at the representation of women. By critiquing the way men are portrayed, a conclusion can be drawn by contrasting the portrayal of women.

Art History Webmasters Association

• O H WHAT A DIFFERENCE GENDER MAKES: GENDER IN THE VISUAL ARTS

Noted as an an illustrated lecture for a Bluffton College Forum,  Oh What a Difference Gender Makes: Gender in the Visual Arts , is one of the most informal sources of information pertinent to this research guide. Although Mary Ann Sullivan provides the reader with many examples to prove her point, she does so in a quick manner, leaving the art to support her argument rather than the writing itself. The series includes essays on: Gender Definitions in Portraits , Depictions of Male and Female Nudes , Depictions of Motherhood and Fatherhood , Gendered Working Roles , and Critiques of Gender Roles .

I felt this was essential for sources and because it compares both genders, rather than just one, despite the title,

Ann Sulli van, M. “Oh What a Difference Gender Makes: Gender in the Visual Arts.” Bluffton.edu . 2002. Accessed on November 23, 2014.  http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/forum/gender.html

• XX CHROMOSOCIAL, PART 1: WOMEN’S HIDDEN HOMOSOCIAL PAST

Roger Denson’s XX Chromosocial, Part 1: Women’s Hidden Homosocial Past can be summarized in one sentence:

“It’s through art history that we see what contemporary art can only suggest: how art over time promotes cultural codes, and as part of its historicizing and status-raising functions–the very functions that make art attractive to the affluent and powerful–art normalizes and perpetuates the specific conventions for a society’s arrangement of sex and gender relations and the objects accorded them by the requisites of the dominant homosocial order.”

In this source, Roger Denson takes a look at homosocial order in history, as portrayed by art. The author takes examples from pre-historic, Renaissance and post-Renaissance art to show just how factual is the representation of gendered activities in art history. I’ve decided to include this source in this research guide because I feel Denson supports his arguments with heavy amounts of examples and provides a research paper on the representation of women in art with an angle that has not been reached by the other sources in this guide.

  Denson, R. “ XX Chromosocial, Part 1: Women’s Hidden Homosocial Past .” Huffington Post . March 8, 2011. Accessed November 30, 2014.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/xx-chromosocial-women-art_b_832867.html

Sexuality and Eroticism in Art

Ingres, La Grand Odalisque , 1814; Wikipedia

• SEXUALITY IN WESTERN ART

Edward Lucy-Smith’s Sexuality in Western Art is a comprehensive look at portrayals of sexuality in art. The book starts with pre-historic art and places a heavy focus on art of the Renaissance. He considers the traditions in society and the time the art was made and compares them to symbols in the artwork.

Lucy-Smith, E. Sexuality in Western Art . Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1991.

• SEXUALITY: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY

Sexuality: An Illustrated History is a pictorial history of sexuality in Western art. The book covers art periods ranging from the Middles Ages to contemporary art. Sander Gilman’s reason for starting his study in the Middle Ages is that he uses the early roots of Christianity to trace myth-making about the sexual form through art, literature, anatomy, and medicine. In using Christianity as a guideline of sorts for Sexuality: An Illustrated History , Gilman provides evidence to show how cultures are self-defined and shaped by systematic concepts of beauty and ugliness, masculinity and femininity, health and sickness, and the sacred and the secular and how these concepts have remained prevalent for nearly two millennia.

Although this book doesn’t always use art as visual evidence, I believe it’s use of Christian art, specifically, caters to a research paper on the representation of women in art pertinent to the Renaissance Period as it is the culmination of Christian art.

Gilman, S. Sexuality: An Illustrated History . New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1989.

Related Sources

• THE ART HISTORY ARCHIVE

Although informal in format, The Art History Archive remains a fairly thorough resource of information on artworks, art periods, artists, critiques, art by country/culture, and art history.

The video below provides visual context of most of the nudes aforementioned in the previous sources:

I’ve included the video below as some of the aforementioned sources compare female nudes to male nudes, also providing visual context to the research guide:

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