The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence

The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years.

Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Author)

9781107619647, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 June 2017

312 pages
23 x 15.4 x 2 cm, 0.47 kg

'In recent years, a number of scholars have belittled or denied the importance of Italian Renaissance humanism. This excellent book sets the record straight. Using an array of archival, manuscript, printed, and secondary sources, Maxson demonstrates that the humanist movement in Florence had an early impact (1420s), included many more individuals than previously thought, and played a major role in Florentine government and society in the fifteenth century. Summing up: highly recommended.' P. Grendler, Choice

This book offers a major contribution for understanding the spread of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence. Investigating the connections between individuals who were part of the humanist movement, Maxson reconstructs the networks that bound them together. Overturning the problematic categorization of humanists as either professional or amateurs, a distinction based on economics and the production of original works in Latin, he offers a new way of understanding how the humanist movement could incorporate so many who were illiterate in Latin, but who nonetheless were responsible for an intellectual and cultural paradigm shift. The book demonstrates the massive appeal of the humanist movement across socio-economic and political groups, and argues that the movement became so successful and widespread because by the 1420s–30s the demands of common rituals began requiring humanist speeches. Over time, humanist learning became more valuable as social capital, which raised the status of the most learned humanists and helped disseminate humanist ideas beyond Florence.

Introduction. A social conception of the humanist movement
1. Learned connections and the humanist movement
2. Literary and social humanists
3. The social origins of the Florentine humanists
4. The humanist demands of ritual
5. Civic failure of the literary humanists or literary failure of the civic humanists?
6. The rise of the social humanists, 1400–55
7. Humanism as a means to social status, 1456–85.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD]