Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of History, March 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The study begins with the development of the nature and character of fifteenth century Italian humanism. It then proceeds to delineate the humanist methodological approach to three key areas; rhetoric, grammar, and historical criticism. Having thus laid this necessary foundation, the work examines selected portions of the debates of the council with regard to each of the three key areas, in order to ascertain whether or not a humanistic approach was utilized by the Latin participants in their argumentations. This investigation concludes that the Latin advocates of the council did indeed employ humanist methodology in both the preparation and presentation of their arguments in the debates. Therefore, such evidence strongly suggests that an appreciation and acceptance of the humanist approach to rhetoric, grammar, and textual criticism existed in the church in the early decades of the fifteenth century.

Girolamo Savonarola lived at the apex of the Renaissance, but most of his biographers regard him as an anachronism or a precursor of the Reformation. Savonarola, however, was influenced by the entire milieu of Renaissance Florence, including its humanism. Savonarola's major work, Triumph of the Cross, is a synthesis of humanism, neo-Thomism and mysticism. His political reforms were routed in both the millennialist dreams of Florence and the goals of civic humanism. Hoping to translate the abstract humanist life of virtue into the concrete, he ultimately failed, not because the Renaissance was rejecting the Middle Ages, but because the former was reacting against itself. Florence, for all its claims of being the center of the Renaissance, was not willing to make humanist reform a reality.

Duke Humphrey of Gloucester is often given credit for the renaissance of English learning in the fifteenth century. It is true that the donations of books he made to Oxford, his patronage of English and Italian writers, and his patronage of administrators who had humanist training resulted in the transmittal of humanist values to England. But is it also true that these accomplishments were mainly the by-product of his self-aggrandizing style, rather than a conscious effort on the duke's part to promote learning. The duke, however, does deserve recognition for what he unwittingly may have done.

My dissertation examines the cultural history of the Renaissance Venetian maritime empire. In this project I bring into conversation two historiographical subfields, the intellectual history of Venetian Renaissance humanism and the colonial history of the early modern Mediterranean, which have previously developed separately. In doing so, I examine the relationship between power and knowledge as it unfolded in the early modern Mediterranean. The ways in which Venetian Renaissance intellectual culture was shaped by its imperial engagements - and, conversely, how Venetian approaches to governance were inflected by humanist practices - are the central axes of my dissertation. In the first part of the dissertation, I examine the ways in which writing and textual collecting were used by elite Venetian readers to represent the geopolitical dimensions of their empire. I consider a group of manuscripts and printed books which contain technical, navigational, and cartographic writing and images about Venetian mercantile and imperial activity in the Mediterranean. In the second part, I undertake two case-studies of Venetian patrician governors who were trained in the humanist schools of Venice, before being posted to colonial offices in Dalmatia and the Aegean, respectively. I examine how their education in Venice as humanists influenced their experience and practice of governance in the stato da mar. Their personal texts offer an alternative intellectual history of empire, one which demonstrates the formation of political thought amongst the men actually practicing and experiencing imperial governance. Overall, I aim to build a picture of the ways in which literary culture, the physical world of the stato da mar, and political thought came to be entwined in the Venetian Renaissance; and then to describe how these dense relationships worked for the Venetian administrators who experienced them in the Mediterranean.

No description available.