by Scott McGill
Both scholastics and humanists embraced late ancient patristic authors, using the same authors and even the same texts to defend their positions. For instance, Jerome’s dream of being condemned as a Ciceronian rather than as a Christian (Ep. 22) and Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana were mined by both parties to defend their use or rejection of classical texts (Rummel 1995, p. 29). The fact is that many of these patristic authors held similar levels of authority for both sides; humanists and scholastics simply appreciated the texts differently, employing divergent methods of reading and analysis to glean their lessons. While humanists “were inclined to examine the source texts rather than their interpretations” and to examine biblical texts via “a philological approach, arguing on the basis of grammatical rules, etymology, and classical usage,” the scholastics tended to pursue arguments that were “logical rather than philological,” and to quote in support of their positions “a slate of authorities, from scriptural texts to Latin Fathers and medieval theologians” (Rummel 1995, p. 12). Patristic writings were, thus, central to all parties in the major intellectual and educational debate of the early modern period.
Also crucial to the intellectual culture of early modernity was the proliferation of texts, both in manuscript and in print. Population growth in cities, the rise of secular education, the emerging consensus that civic and political engagement required literacy, and the “unremitting enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie for edification and self‐improvement” (Rice and Grafton 1994, p. 6) all contributed to an expansion of readership from aristocrats and monastics to the populace more broadly in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Humanism, indeed, played an important role in this expansion of text culture. One of its defining features was “intellectual curiosity” (Rummel 1995, p. 12), and this curiosity manifested itself not only in the exploration of a wide range of texts (bringing to light new things about commonly used texts by focusing on philology, translation, and an unlimited array of questions), but also in exploration for a wide range of texts. Humanists visited the great libraries of their day, locating and copying manuscripts of all sorts to bring home with them and share, many of them making their reputations as humanists with such ventures (Davies 1996, p. 47). Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), for example, found time during the Council of Constance (1414–1417), despite his role as papal secretary, to travel to Cluny, St. Gall, Fulda, and other nearby monasteries to seek out texts, many of which he then took back to Italy (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, pp. 136–138). Most humanists did not abscond with their discoveries but, instead, copied them for their own personal use and circulation, often transcribing the text in a clear, accessible “humanist hand,” which had been invented at the turn of the fifteenth century as a response to the visual difficulties presented by Gothic scripts.
The necessary components of print culture had all coalesced by 1450: affordable paper, suitable ink, movable metal type, a profusion of accessible texts to print, and, finally, a sufficient customer base – “a highly literate society with a highly organized book trade” (Davies 1996, p. 53). Over the next 50 years, printing expanded at a remarkably rapid pace, spreading across Europe and producing, by the turn of the century, roughly six million books, representing (on a conservative estimate) approximately 40 000 editions (Rice and Grafton 1994, p. 7). Though the copying of manuscripts continued to thrive and even to outpace the output of all previous centuries combined (Davies 1996, p. 58), print quickly became the dominant medium of textual transmission (Hunter 2007, p. 25). The sheer volume of texts available in print had a profound effect on intellectual culture, making a wider range of sources accessible to a wider array of people, and (for better or worse) in a generally standardized form that could be easily referenced and discussed. Demand for texts supported publishing enterprises, whose success then entrenched and increased demand for texts.
And many of the texts in high demand were late ancient. Of 53 surviving incunabula from the publishers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz (fl. 1465–1473), 11 are editions of the works of late ancient authors, including Lactantius (1465), Augustine (City of God, 1467–1470), Jerome (1468), Leo the Great (1470), Cyprian (1471), and Aelius Donatus (1472). Prior to 1502, across all publishers (and once again based on surviving incunabula, according to the British Library’s Incunabula Short Title Catalogue [ISTC]), texts printed included at least 200 editions of Augustine; 166 of Jerome; 90 of Boethius; 61 of Gregory the Great; 25 of Proba; 18 of Ambrose and Prosper; 16 of Claudian; 14 of Prudentius; 8 of Juvencus, Sedulius, and Leo the Great; 7 of Cassiodorus, Orosius, and Cyprian; 6 of Ausonius and Macrobius; 4 of Sulpicius; 3 of Hilary; 2 of Sidonius, Maximianus, Tertullian, and Rufinus; and 1 of Ammianus and Symmachus. Greek works were available in print in Latin translation: The surviving incunabula include 28 editions of Basil and 4 of Athanasius. Survivals are not necessarily representative: Approximately 30,000 incunabula survive, out of millions printed, and an edition’s preservation may be more likely to indicate later popularity than fifteenth‐century market demands. Nonetheless, the variety and ubiquity of late ancient authors among this first generation of printed texts is striking.
These printed editions were not always of high quality. Early modern readers of any given late ancient text would likely have encountered a textus receptus that was largely standardized, but also typically flawed. The printing press established a level of conformity that, although not precisely intentional (more the product of expediency than anything else [Davies 1996, p. 57]), benefited scholarly communication, as all students of a work could be sure that they were reading and commenting on the same text. At the same time, these editions were based on whatever manuscripts editors had access to (many of which “had no merit except availability” [Kenney 1974, p. 5]), and they had been edited with less than exemplary care (even when care was shown, editorial theories and practices varied – see Kenney 1974, pp. 21–74). The situation was so dire, in fact, that, to combat the corruption of texts by “men of slight learning” who just happened to be in charge of publishing houses, papal curialist Niccolo Perotti proposed in 1471 that the pope appoint someone to supervise all texts printed in Rome (Davies 1996, p. 57). Nonetheless, despite the recognized shortcomings of many of the texts on offer, print editions tended to be reprinted largely without emendation: It was far easier and more cost effective to base print editions on previous print editions. Thus the process of manuscript transmission became largely monogenous – “with remarkably few exceptions the descent of any given text through the printed editions is in a single line” (Kenney 1974, p. 18). The situation improved, for some texts, with later interventions of humanist scholars, editors, and publishers. While the first generation of printers went to great effort to “rush classical texts into print…[so that] their presses should not stand idle” (Kenney 1974, p. 14), the next generation of printers, critics, and editors saw their task as improving the texts, using their erudition and intellect alongside available manuscripts and printed editions to “emend, correct, and make stainless” the texts, thus once more changing how early modern readers engaged with late ancient literature (Kenney 1974, p. 25). Nonetheless, whatever the quality of the text encountered, late ancient literature was more widely available in the early modern era than it had ever been, and it was engaged with more substantively than it had previously been.
The foregoing account of early modern text culture is only partially illuminating for late ancient texts written in Greek. Knowledge of Greek in the Latin west was relatively rare throughout the early modern period – even some humanists who recognized its importance and advocated its inclusion in the educational curriculum, like John Colet (1467–1519), did not themselves acquire the skill. Outside of Italy (where Greek instruction was regularized but still a “luxury option”), western Europeans in the fifteenth century had a difficult time finding instruction in Greek, as the experience of Guillaume Budé, who paid exorbitantly for a mediocre Greek tutor whose instruction Budé “would soon have to unlearn,” attests (Grafto
n 1997, p. 146). Before they became available in print, elementary Greek grammars and learning aids in manuscript form were anxiously sought, with demand vastly outweighing supply (Botley 2010, p. 115). Despite this widespread desire to learn and to read ancient Greek, printing presses were slow to supply Greek texts – both because of the difficulties of establishing an appropriate typeface and because demand was still not sufficient to make such printings profitable. Before Aldus Manutius (1449–1515) began printing and marketing Greek texts in Venice in 1495 (first a grammar, then Aristotle), only a dozen or so Greek texts had found their way into print (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, p. 155; Davies 1995, p. 9). Once this threshold was crossed, however, and it became possible for scholars to learn Greek on their own outside the classroom with an introductory grammar, the reading of Greek texts from classical and Christian antiquity flourished.
Finally, the early modern era was characterized by increased religious turmoil. The Council of Constance, which brought Poggio within hunting distance of late ancient literature ensconced in monastic libraries, had been convened in the hopes of ending the Great Western Schism, one of the significant low points in the history of the Latin Church, during which there were at one point three claimants to the chair of St. Peter. The reformers had high hopes for the Council, and its decrees, especially Haec Sancta (asserting the authority of church councils over the pope in matters of faith), seemed to presage change. But the very papacy the council had helped restore rejected conciliar infringement on its power, and the decrees were ignored. This only underscored the perception that the papacy and religious orders were rife with corruption, immorality, and hypocrisy, and calls for a “return” to simple piety (as exemplified by the Church Fathers) gained traction. In addition, with print facilitating the spread of ideas and humanists advocating the ad fontes model of scholarship – for example by reviving the study of Greek and then using it to read (and, for Erasmus, to produce a critical edition of) the Greek New Testament – diverse perspectives (both ancient and modern) on religious matters arose and were disseminated to an extent never before seen in Christian Europe. With the onset of the Reformation, which we can mark by the excommunication of Martin Luther in 1521, this diversity of opinions on matters of faith contributed to many and lasting confessional divisions.
Although Martin Luther’s insistence on the principle of sola scriptura and his concomitant rejection of tradition as a source of authority in sacred matters precipitated a general devaluation of patristic literature among Protestant reformers, the Church Fathers, nonetheless, continued to appear as guiding lights in their thought. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans all made use of patristic sources not only in establishing their own ideas but as polemical weapons in confessional debates, especially as each denomination sought to prove its continuity with Jesus and the “early church” (see, in particular, the essays collected in Backus 1997). For example, Luther excoriated the Catholic Church for abandoning Augustine’s more difficult teachings about grace in favor of a “Pelagian” view of human agency in salvation; he cited Gregory the Great and other patristic sources to undercut the papacy’s claims to temporal power; and he used Jerome’s insights when he agreed with them but in general thought him overesteemed by Catholic thinkers (Schultze 1997, pp. 579, 599, 600). He read and engaged with patristic authors extensively but minced no words when he thought them mistaken, and he refused to allow their judgments to stand alone; everything, for Luther, boiled down to whether he thought the patristic opinion was grounded in Scripture (Schultze 1997, p. 621). Catholics, meanwhile, doubled down on the authority of the Fathers within the church – the patristic tradition, understood to be perfectly harmonious, vindicated the teaching authority of the church and could only be properly understood within that context. Thus, appealing to the Fathers to critique the church would be “inherently erroneous” (Keen 1997, p. 701).
Reception of late ancient literature in the early modern era was thus characterized by improved access to sources; altered attitudes toward reading, analyzing, and investigating them; a renewed and pointed enthusiasm among their readers; and the recognition of their utility in religious debates. A case study that illustrates all of these elements is that of Erasmus’s reception of Jerome.
37.3 Erasmus and Jerome
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) had a special affinity and regard for Jerome, counting him first among the doctors of the church, just as Peter had been first among the apostles (Rice 1985, p. 116; Antibarbarians, CWE [Collected Works of Erasmus] 23: 113). The renowned Dutch humanist encountered Jerome’s works as a child studying and living with the Brethren of the Common Life, a community of education‐focused pietists who followed the devotio moderna and who themselves held Jerome in such particular esteem that they were nicknamed Hieronymiani (Rice 1985, p. 116). Later, as an Augustinian canon at Steyn, Erasmus read and copied Jerome’s entire correspondence (Ep. 22, to Cornelis Gerard 1489, CWE 1: 35), and he began to articulate his admiration for the church father in his own letters.
What appealed to Erasmus about Jerome above all else was the skill with which he navigated the demands of culture and of faith. As he wrote to his friend Antoon van Bergen in 1501, Jerome was “the only scholar in the church universal who had a perfect command of all learning both sacred and heathen, as they call it” (Ep. 149, CWE 2: 27). Jerome’s style was, in Erasmus’s view, comparable to, if not an improvement upon, Cicero’s: “Look at all the classical learning, the Greek scholarship, the histories to be found in him, and all those stylistic and rhetorical accomplishments in which he not only far outstrips all Christian writers, but even seems to rival Cicero himself” (Ep. 141, CWE 1: 309). And Jerome’s personal piety only adds to Erasmus’s good opinion of him: The humanist can enjoy Jerome’s style with unqualified enthusiasm, knowing that “lack of culture is not holiness, nor cleverness impiety” (Ep. 22, CWE 1: 35). Spiritually, Erasmus felt he was in good hands with Jerome: “with his burning energy and the divine inspiration in that amazing heart, he can at the same moment delight us with his eloquence, instruct us with his learning, and sweep us away with his religious force” (Ep. 335, CWE 3: 107).
It was with promulgating his own high opinion of Jerome in mind that Erasmus embarked on a critical edition of and commentary on Jerome’s epistolary corpus, a project that took the better part of sixteen years, eventually grew to include various apologia and treatises, and was published alongside a further five volumes edited by the Amerbach brothers of Basel as the first opera omnia of Jerome in 1516. As he wrote to the advocate Greveradus in 1500:
I have long had a burning desire to write a commentary on the letters of Jerome; and some god is now firing my spirit and impelling me to dare to contemplate this massive enterprise, never before attempted by anyone. What prompts me to this is the goodness of the saintly man who of all Christians was by common consent the best scholar and best writer, whose works deserve to be read and got by heart by all mankind, whereas only a very few have read them and fewer still respect them, while fewest of all understand them….I consider it most disgraceful that Jerome should be forgotten for the very reason that earned him his title to be remembered. That very excellence of style, which benefited our faith, has done harm to its creator. Many are put off by his profound learning which ought to have been the especial source of his fame; so there are few to admire an author who is comprehended by few indeed.
(Ep. 141, CWE 1: 308)
Working primarily from previously printed editions with support from unidentified manuscripts and transcriptions of manuscripts he had at hand (Rice 1985, pp. 120–124), Erasmus used humanist principles of textual analysis to “restore” the original text, to right the wrongs that generations of poor scribes and “half‐taught critics” had inflicted on the collection “through ignorance of classical antiquity and of Greek” (Ep. 149, CWE 2: 26). He identified passages that were stylistically divergent, anachronistic, or theologically dissonant with Jerome’s broader thought and excised them as
interpolations; using those same tools he identified and separated out misattributed letters (including what we now know as Pelagius’s Letter to Demetrias); he corrected grammatical and syntactical errors; and he did all this with relative transparency, noting alterations and his reasoning for them in his commentary – though sometimes with less substantiation than modern scholars would desire, as in the case of his assessment of a spurious letter reputedly from Jerome to Pope Damasus: “Can an eye, ear, or mind be found so insensitive as to suppose that Jerome could have written such obvious rubbish?” (Rice 1985, pp. 124–129; Ep. supp. 47). The commentary was intended to introduce readers to the correct avenue of approach to the Church Father, that is, the humanist approach. The annotations included (in addition to textual variants and assessments of authenticity) Erasmus’s rhetorical analyses of particular letters, explanations of classical figures of speech, identifications of names and places as well as literary and scriptural allusions, and, sometimes, commentary on the religious and intellectual debates of Erasmus’s own era – he used his scholia, for instance, to weigh in against scholasticism and to note that, despite Jerome’s own practice of translating Scripture into the common tongue, reading it in the vernacular would have been seen as “a sin” in the present day (Olin 1994, pp. 16–17).
