BRUNI, LEONARDO
(1370-1444). Florentine humanist and chancellor. Born at Arezzo, in the early 1390s Bruni migrated to Florence. He intended to study law, but he had the good fortune to be drawn into the circle of the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, where he became imbued with humanistic literary ideals and took advantage of the opportunity to learn Greek under the eminent Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. This instruction was crucial not only for Bruni’s development but also for the further development of Italian humanism, since the ablest of Chrysoloras’ pupils became the first generation of Italian scholars to attain an effective mastery of the Greek language and hence to gain full access to the masterpieces of Greek literature. Bruni seems to have become deeply attached to Florence, but in 1405 he left the city to become apostolic secretary at Rome. He spent nearly all of the following decade in papal service.
In 1415, after the Council of Constance forced the pope he was serving to resign, Bruni returned to Florence. He began work on his greatest literary production, Historiarum Florentinipopuli/History of the Florentine People, a history of the city from Roman times. During this period (1415-1427) as a private citizen, he produced a number of treatises on moral and scholarly subjects, of which the most important was De recta interpretatione / On the Correct Way to Translate, in which he challenged the medieval practice of translating ancient texts word for word. Bruni himself became a skillful translator, producing many Latin versions of Greek authors, including a series of biographies from Plutarch, speeches by Demosthenes and other Greek orators, a few of Plato’s dialogues, and Aristotle’s moral and political works. His most influential translation, however, was a letter of one of the major Greek patristic authors, St. Basil of Caesarea, whose Epis-tula ad adolescentes / Letter to Young Men (1401) encouraged young Christians to study the best works of ancient pagan literature. Renaissance humanists used this translation as justification for their study of pagan authors; hundreds of manuscript copies still survive.
From an early date, Bruni had become interested in both history and current politics. His Laudatio Florentinae urbis / Panegyric on the City of Florence (1403) praised the city as the heir of the tradition of republican government that had made ancient Rome a powerful and civilized city, and he later produced several other works, of which the most important was the History of the Florentine People, that also glorified not only Florence but also its republican constitution. The Laudatio was written just after a military crisis that threatened to subordinate Florence to the duke of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti, and some modern historians have cited it to explain the adoption of republican ideals of active citizenship by the city’s leading intellectuals, a group that previously had regarded involvement in civic life as a hindrance to the higher calling of scholarship.
This concept of "civic humanism," and even Bruni’s personal commitment either to Florence or to republican political ideals have been challenged by other modern historians who have correctly observed that he did not hesitate to pursue a career in the autocratic papal curia at Rome. Yet it is also true that in 1415, after his appointment at Rome ended, he chose to come back to Florence, secured Florentine citizenship (which was not readily granted to non-natives), and devoted much of the rest of his literary career to his history of Florence. In the history, he restates his "republican" ideology, arguing that Rome had grown powerful and achieved literary greatness under republican government and that the rise of the emperors from the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus had introduced a crushing tyranny that snuffed out the free intellectual life of republican Rome and ultimately led to the dissolution of Roman power. Defenders of the concept of "civic humanism" view the literary and historical works of Bruni as marking the moment when humanism became the dominant cultural ideal of the Florentine ruling class.
Florentines of his own time admired Bruni’s political ideas. Impressed by the early sections of his History of Florence, they granted him citizenship and made him the official historiographer of the city. In 1427 the Signoria (governing council) appointed him to the city’s most important administrative office, chancellor of the republic, a powerful position that he held for the rest of his life. Critics have rightly pointed out that the republicanism that Bruni extolled was not a democracy but an oligarchy based on the constitutional rule of the middling and wealthy property-owners (and in practice, on behind-the-scenes domination by a faction of rich merchants); but then neither the Florentine leaders nor Bruni himself ever claimed to endorse democracy, which they rejected as an unworkable political form that put power into the hands of the rabble. Bruni’s writings defend the Florentine constitution as a mixed government, with some limited participation by all property-owning residents but with effective control safely in the hands of the well-to-do, the educated, and the competent. His own career was based on his embrace of this kind of social and political milieu. Starting life as a poor immigrant from a provincial town, he transformed himself into one of the most admired members of the ruling elite, a status marked at his death by the elaborate state funeral that the Signoria arranged and by the impressive marble tomb that the republic commissioned for him in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce.
BRUNO, GIORDANO
(1548-1600). Italian philosopher, famous in his own time for his publications on religion, natural philosophy and magic, but most commonly remembered in later times as a "scientist" burned at the stake in Rome for heresy. Born at Nola in southern Italy, he became a Dominican friar in 1565. In the schools of his order, he ran into trouble when his reading of banned books by Erasmus led to his arrest on suspicion of heresy. Early in 1576 he escaped from custody and began an itinerant career. He moved first to Rome and then north of the Alps to Geneva (where he had a brief and stormy career as professor of theology in the Calvinist university), then to several places in France, including Paris. His publications at Paris dealt with systems of memory (De umbris idearum / On the Shadows of Ideas and Ars memoriae / The Art of Memory) and with the mnemonic writings of the medieval Catalan philosopher Ramon Lull. In these works Bruno rejected traditional Aristotelian psychology and claimed to have invented a far superior new method of learning.
In 1583 Bruno moved to England, where he lectured on Copernican astronomy at Oxford and then settled in London, publishing additional works on memory and on the cosmological implications of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory (especially La Cena de le ceneri / The Ash Wednesday Supper). Other Italian-language publications at London in 1584, including De I’infinito, universo, e mondi/On the Infinite Universe and Worlds and Spaccio della bestia trionfante /Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, presented his speculations about human nature and his view of the world as an emanation from God. His radical Neo-platonic and Cabalistic thought dismissed traditional Christianity as a muddle of superstitious ideas. His De gli eroici furori / On Heroic Frenzies (1585) continued the exposition of his anti-Christian ideas and extolled Platonic love as the true path to contemplation of God. In the autumn of 1585 Bruno returned to France, where he publicly disputed against the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy. In 1586 he moved to Germany, where he lectured at Wittenberg on Aristotle, then spent periods lecturing at Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, and Zürich.
Bruno had associated with Calvinists at Geneva and with both Calvinistic Puritans and Anglican theologians at Oxford, but his unconventional ideas alienated both groups. At Wittenberg, although he converted to the Lutheran faith, his radical religious beliefs soon caused him to be excommunicated. While he was at Frankfurt, a Venetian aristocrat invited him to come to Venice and teach his patron his art of memory. He moved there in August 1591. Some biographers have called the invitation itself a trap, designed to lure him back within reach of the Inquisition. About a year after he settled in Venice, his patron had him arrested by the Venetian Inquisition. In 1593 the far more strict Roman Inquisition had him extradited to Rome, where, after seven years of incarceration and a lengthy trial, he was condemned as an unrepentant heretic and burned at the stake early in 1600.
Bruno probably always thought of himself as a loyal Catholic who wanted to lead a drastic reform of Catholicism. The problem was that he wanted to preserve the authoritarian structures of Catholicism while transforming it into a philosophical religion based not on the Bible or church tradition but on his own peculiar blend of Neopla-tonic mysticism and the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus. Bruno’s strong interest in magic rested on his confidence that an understanding of the religion of the Egyptians, transmitted by the Jewish Cabalists, the Zoroastrian oracles, the Hermetic books, and the philosophy of Plato and the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, would lead humanity to a harmonious relationship with God and a control over physical nature that would improve both the eternal destiny and the earthly life of the human race. Although anticlerical historians of the late 19th century attributed his execution to his support of Copernicus and his belief in an infinite universe, thus making him into a martyr of modern science, the real cause of his execution was his speculative philosophical and theological ideas.
BUDÉ, GUILLAUME
(1468-1540). The most famous French humanist of the first half of the 16th century. Born into a recently ennobled family of royal officials, he studied law at Orléans but left without taking a degree. In 1491 he underwent a sort of secular conversion to humanistic learning, acquiring his outstanding mastery of Greek largely through independent study. He also resumed his study of law, but this time on his own, making his mastery of classical Latin and Greek the key to a radically new, philologically based approach to the Roman civil law (Corpus Juris Civilis). These ideas constituted a rejection of mos italicus, the medieval Italian tradition of legal education, and called for application of humanistic skills to interpretation of the legal texts, a method that came to be known as mos gallicus (the French manner), introduced from about 1518 by the teaching of Budé’s Italian friend Andrea Alciati at Avignon and later at Bourges.
Though Budé never either taught or practiced law, his first major publication, Annotationes in Pandectarum libros, a linguistic explication of the pandects, became a landmark of Renaissance jurisprudence. In it he applied the philological methods developed by the Italian humanists Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano to explain legal terms that medieval law professors had debated endlessly. In 1515 he published another widely admired book, De asse, which began as a study of Roman coins, weights, and measures, but grew into a vast compilation of information on the material basis of Roman life.
Budé was an intensely patriotic French citizen, resentful of the arrogant superiority assumed by many Italian scholars, and he dreamed of making France rather than Italy the center of Renaissance culture.The succession of the young king Francis I to the throne in 1515 filled him with hope that the new ruler would become a great patron of Renaissance learning. Not until 1522, however, did he become a regular participant in royal administration, being appointed a master of requests. This position involved spending much time in attendance on the royal court. Budé used his connections there to agitate for the founding of a trilingual college (teaching classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew language and literature) at Paris on the model of the famous trilingual institutions founded at Alcalá and Louvain. In 1517 and again in 1524 Budé participated in unsuccessful attempts by King Francis to attract the Dutch humanist Erasmus to the French court, perhaps with the idea of making him the star attraction of such a new royal college. In 1530 Budé finally attained partial success, when the king provided salaries for royal lecturers on Hebrew and Greek, the small beginings of what later became the Collège Royal.
Budé intervened to calm a nasty scholarly quarrel between Erasmus and the most important of the older French humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples in 1517-1518. From 1516 until the late 1520s, Erasmus and Budé conducted an extensive correspondence. Contemporaries universally regarded them as respectively the greatest Dutch and the greatest French humanistic scholar, but there was always an undercurrent of tension over the implied question of which of the two was the greater. Budé found in Erasmus’ dialogue Ciceronianus (1528) a reference to himself that he took to be slighting, and Erasmus, in turn, resented the failure of an important new book of Budé on the Greek language, Commentarii linguae graecae (1529), to include a courteous acknowledgment of Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament.
Though they shared a common love of classical literature and the Greek language, the two humanists were very different. Budé’s French patriotism did not square with Erasmus’ explicitly cosmopolitan internationalism. While Erasmus employed satire and humor as a means of advancing ideas, Budé was an intense, humorless, and rather narrow man, perhaps superior to Erasmus in mastery of Greek but not his equal in catching the inner spirit, as distinguished from the technical details, of Greek language and literature.
Until the Reformation became an issue in France in the 1530s, Budé had relatively little to say about religion, though like Erasmus he could be critical of clerical abuses and corruption. Erasmus, on the other hand, was more interested in the spiritual regeneration of Latin Christendom than in any other issue. Only in 1535, when a native French Protestant movement was beginning to emerge, did Budé write directly and at length on religion. His De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum / The Transition from Hellenism to Christianity reiterated his earlier criticisms of clerical corruption but denounced the Protestant reformers. He strove to demonstrate that the humanistic scholarship that he cherished was in no way subversive of Catholic orthodoxy and if properly subordinated to Christian goals was a valuable resource for the defense of the Catholic faith. The provisions of his will in 1540 confirm that he was a pious and obedient Catholic. The later decision of his widow and children to go into exile at Calvinist Geneva represents the conditions of a later generation and does not indicate that Bude himself ever favored Protestantism.
BURGUNDY, DUCHY OF
Strictly speaking, the duchy of Burgundy was a large fief held in feudal tenure from the king of France and located in east-central France. But in the 14th and 15th centuries, the term also designated a much larger political unit, including the original duchy but also incorporating most of modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This powerful state developed expansionist ambitions that endangered the territorial integrity of both France and the German Empire. It originated in 1364 when King John II of France granted the duchy of Burgundy to his younger son Philip the Bold as a virtually independent principality. John then secured for Philip the adjacent Free County of Burgundy, a fief of the German Empire, and arranged for him to marry the heiress of the count of Flanders, the richest, most industrialized, and most urbanized part of northern Europe. Duke Philip and his descendants began acting like rulers of a sovereign kingdom, negotiating with foreign powers and scheming to expand their principality. Some of its regions were French-speaking; some spoke Flemish and Dutch. Each province had its own regional courts, assemblies, and other institutions. The rulers created central judicial, representative, and administrative agencies for the Netherlandish provinces, but until the 16th century, these efforts at centralization had little effect.
Since the dukes were still members of the French royal family, they became major players in the turbulent factional politics of the French court during the Hundred Years’ War. During the second phase (1415-1453) of that conflict, Duke Philip the Good (1419-1467) allied himself with the English king, Henry V, and negotiated a division of all of northern France between himself and Henry, whom he recognized as king of France. Burgundy’s defection from this English alliance in 1435 was a major turning point in the struggle to drive the English out of France.This attempt led to conflict with the Swiss Confederation. His only child, Mary of Burgundy, sought to preserve her principality by marrying Maximilian of Habsburg, the heir of the German emperor. King Louis XI of France seized the duchy of Burgundy but was unable to conquer the Free County of Burgundy and the Netherlandish provinces. Thus Mary and her husband Maximilian remained rulers of most of the Burgundian lands. Mary died a few years later, leaving her son Philip as her successor, under the regency of his father. In 1496 Maximilian negotiated Philip’s marriage to Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Spain.
The son of Philip and Juana,became the heir to Spain and its many territorial claims in Italy and the Americas, to the hereditary Habsburg lands in Germany, and to the Burgundian territories, including the Netherlands.Although he inherited the Spanish crown in 1516 and was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519, initially his political goals and closest advisers were Burgundian.He had grown up among the Burgundian aristocracy and retained their loyalty, even though by the late 1520s it was becoming obvious that he was making Spain rather than the Netherlands the foundation of his rule.
Under his son Philip II, a thoroughly Spanish king, the latent conflict between royal centralization and Burgundian regionalism became more obvious. Local resistance to the centralizing policies of the crown and to the ruler’s efforts to extirpate heresy produced a movement of protest in the mid-1560s, civil disorders in 1566, and a full-scale civil war after 1568. Ultimately, the leaders of the resistance movement declared independence from Spain in 1581. The Spanish army eventually regained control of the southern provinces, leaving the Burgundian lands permanently divided between the independent United Netherlands and the Habsburg-ruled Spanish Netherlands (known as Belgium since 1830, when it became an independent kingdom).
BUSCHE, HERMANN VON DEM
(Hermannus Buschius, ca. 1468-1534). German humanist. Descended from a noble West-phalian family, he studied at Münster and at the famous school at De-venter directed by Alexander Hegius, then briefly under Rudolf Agricola at Heidelberg before a period of study in Italy under Pom-ponius Laetus at Rome and the elder Filippo Beroaldo at Bologna. Thus his education was directed by some of the most distinguished humanists of the day. Although he entered the University of Cologne in 1495 intending to study law, he became an itinerant teacher of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and poetry for brief periods at a number of German schools and universities. He also published poems and other writings. Busche agitated for a sweeping reform of the liberal arts curriculum of the German universities in order to increase attention to humanistic studies.
In 1502 he became one of the original faculty of the new University of Wittenberg, and the following year he lectured at the University of Leipzig, where he received a baccalaureate in law. Busche’s open disdain for traditional academic studies led to his expulsion from Leipzig and later from the University of Erfurt. While teaching at Erfurt he established a lasting connection with the influential humanist Mutianus Rufus and the latter’s Erfurt disciples, Ulrich von Hutten and Crotus Rubianus. Between 1506 and 1516 Busche again taught at Cologne, where he became one of a circle of outspoken humanist critics of scholastic learning and engaged in a bitter feud with a more conservative humanist, Ortwin Gratius. During the famous controversy between the humanist Johann Reuchlin and the theological faculty and Dominican friars of Cologne, Busche became an outspoken defender of Reuchlin. Although he was only marginally involved in composition of the satirical attack on the Cologne theologians, Epistolae obscurorum virorum, he probably contributed a number of authentic local details to Crotus and Hutten, the principal authors. The selection of Ortwin Gratius as the butt of the satire may well be an echo of Busche’s earlier conflict with him. In 1518 Busche published an influential defense of humanist learning, Vallum humanitatis /The Fortress of the Humanities.
By 1521, when he attended the Diet of Worms, Busche had become an outspoken defender of Martin Luther. While at Basel in 1522, he joined a group of pro-Lutherans in publicly breaking the Lenten fast. When the new Lutheran University of Marburg opened in 1527, he became professor of poetry and classical literature. In 1533 he debated for the Lutheran cause against the revolutionary Anabaptists in his native region at Münster.
BYRD, WILLIAM
(1540-1623). English composer, born in London and probably trained in the Chapel Royal under Thomas Tallis. He became organist and choirmaster at Lincoln cathedral (1563-1572), and in 1572 he was named a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and organist conjointly with his teacher, Tallis. In 1575 Queen Elizabeth I granted the two of them a privilege (a legal monopoly) for the publication and sale of printed music. Byrd’s compositions included much music for the services of the Church of England, though Byrd and his family remained Roman Catholics. In the early 1590s he retired to Essex, but he continued composing and publishing religious and secular music, both vocal and instrumental. His Anglican service music, his few but highly regarded masses, and his motets are leading examples of English contrapuntal music of the late Renaissance.
CABALA
(also written Kabbalah). A body of Hebrew mystical speculation, purporting to represent an ancient oral tradition of biblical interpretation and meditation that contained secret insights into the true spiritual meaning of Scripture. Originally, cabalistic writings were esoteric—something to be divulged only to persons who were intellectually and spiritually prepared to seek direct experience of God. The earliest cabalists passed their doctrines on by word of mouth, but eventually the texts were written down. There is considerable evidence of mystical practices and secret (sometimes quite unorthodox) beliefs going all the way back to the first century b.c. One of the earliest cabalistic texts to be preserved, Sefer Yetzirah / The Book of Creation, was probably written between the third and sixth centuries. It contains speculation on the elements of which the world is composed, which are identified as the 10 primordial numbers (the sephiroth) and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are symbols for the forces through which God made the world. This secret knowledge is believed to confer power over the universe; hence Sefer Yetzirah, like many cabalistic works, is linked to magic—that is, to efforts to gain practical control over material things—as well as to mystical contemplation.
Cabalistic learning flourished in Italy and Spain in the 13 th and 14th centuries. One of the most influential scholars, Abraham Abu-lafia (1240-after 1291), born in Spain, spent several years travelling in the Middle East and Italy in quest of spiritual enlightenment. After returning to Spain about 1270, he studied Sefer Yetzirah and wrote several commentaries on it. From other cabalists he also learned techniques of biblical interpretation based on manipulation of the numerical values of letters and words in the Hebrew Bible, seeking to learn the true name of God and the names of the sephiroth. The greatest medieval cabalistic book was the Sefer ha-Zohar / Book of Splendor, which claimed to have been written in the second century but in fact was compiled by an anonymous mystic in 13th-century Spain.
In the later 15 th century, a number of Italian Christian scholars, mainly Neoplatonists interested in mystical speculation, studied Cabala. The most important of these was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who learned Hebrew and sought religious truths in cabalistic texts. Like most of the early Christian cabalists, Pico interpreted these treatises in a Christian sense. A similar desire to prove Christian truths out of cabalistic literature motivated the first important Christian cabalist from north of the Alps, Johann Reuchlin, and the Christian cabalist who most aggressively pursued the idea that magical power could be obtained from the Cabala, Agrippa von Nettesheim. Cabalistic learning was suspect among traditional theologians because of its Jewish origins, because it was often associated with doctrines (transmigration of souls, for example) incompatible with Christian belief, and because of its links with magic.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1509-1564). French religious reformer. Although identified mainly with the Protestant Reformation, Calvin began his intellectual development as a follower of humanism. Born at Noyon in northern France, he studied liberal arts at the University of Paris and law at Orléans and Bourges. He was more interested in the new humanistic movement and in the vague ideas of religious reform associated with it than in the traditional academic curriculum. At Paris he studied with a prominent humanist, Mathurin Cordier; at Orléans he received private lessons in Greek from the German humanist Melchior Wolmar, who was already a follower of Martin Luther; at Bourges he studied with the humanistic reformer of legal studies Andrea Alciati. After his father’s death freed him to pursue his own goals, Calvin returned to Paris (1531) to study the Greek language, the Bible, and classical literature. In 1532 he published his first book, a humanistic commentary on the treatise De clementia by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. Like many young French humanists of his time, he admired the biblical humanism of Lefèvre d’Etaples and Erasmus and probably had read some works of Luther. As late as 1532 he still seems to have regarded himself a Catholic.
Sometime between 1532 and 1535, however, Calvin changed from reform-minded Catholic humanist into committed Protestant. Twice, in 1533 and 1534-1535, he left Paris during periods when the authorities were actively hunting heretics. During the second of these exiles, Calvin spent several months in the Protestant city of Basel, where in 1535 he wrote the first version of his masterpiece of Protestant theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion, published the following year. After a few months at the court of the French-born duchess René of Ferrara, who sheltered a circle of Protestant sympathizers, he returned briefly to France and then began an exile that lasted for the rest of his life and transformed him into a major Protestant theologian and the leader of the Reformation in Geneva, where he spent most of his remaining years.
Nevertheless, Calvin’s humanist background remained evident. Aside from his frequently reprinted Institutes, his principal theological works were his commentaries on the Bible. In them he applied the humanistic techniques of historical and linguistic analysis to probe the Scriptures. Also reflecting his humanist background was his emphasis on humanistic education as the essential preparation for leaders of religious reform. This commitment to education in the humanities culminated in the founding of the Genevan Academy in 1559.
