CHAUCER, GEOFFREY
(ca. 1340-1400). The greatest poet of medieval English literature, and the first widely influential poet since Anglo-Saxon times to write mainly in English rather than French. He is enduringly famous as the author of the Canterbury Tales, a collection of verse narratives supposedly told by a band of pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. The poem is remarkable for the socially diverse collection of characters portrayed, for its subtle portrayal of human character, and for its skillful and original treatment of stories that were often traditional folk tales and sometimes were borrowed from earlier authors. The poem is also notable for the anticlerical satire that reflects popular criticism of the clergy, a theme found in much late-medieval literature.
Although Chaucer is usually defined as a medieval author, his great poem shows familiarity with writers of the early Italian Renaissance such as Giovanni Boccaccio. Also important is the role of his writings in establishing the East Midlands dialect of Middle English as the dominant form of the English language. Yet Chaucer knew French language and literature well and was influenced by medieval French literature. One of his early works was an adaptation of the famous French poem The Romance of the Rose. He was also influenced by late medieval and early Renaissance Italian literature—his Troilus and Criseyde, for example, was adapted from a work of Boccaccio.
Chaucer was born into a prosperous London mercantile family (his father was a vintner) and as a boy became a page at the royal court. He made several journeys abroad, sometimes in military service and sometimes on diplomatic missions. One of these missions took him to Italy, where he may have met Boccaccio and Petrarch. He secured a lucrative governmental appointment as a royal customs officer, served as a member of Parliament, and advanced his family in social rank from prosperous middle-class to the outer fringes of the aristocracy.
CHEKE, JOHN
(1514-1557). English humanist and teacher. One of the most brilliant of the Cambridge scholars who fostered the study of Greek, Cheke became the first regius professor of that language at Cambridge in 1540. Strongly sympathetic to Protestantism, he became tutor to the future King Edward VI in 1544 and had an important role in the education of the prince to be a Protestant ruler. He sat as a member of Edward’s first Parliament and was ordained to the clergy in 1549. Upon the premature death of the young king in 1553, Cheke was involved in the attempt to block the succession of the Catholic Mary Tudor and was arrested after she gained control of the government. He fled to the Continent, lived in both Basel and Strasbourg, and taught Greek in the latter place.
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN
(1364-1430). French author. Although born in Venice, Christine moved to France as a child when her father became court astrologer and medical adviser to King.Christine may have received some formal instruction from the tutor who taught her brothers, but since she married when she was 15 and gave birth to three children before the death of her husband of plague in 1390, she must have acquired most of her remarkable learning through independent reading. Her husband’s death left her with very limited means. She became a writer in order to find patrons and win financial support. Her best-known works were defenses of female character against the misogyny of an influential poet, Jean de Meung, who had written a continuation of the Romance of the Rose. In her most influential work, Le livre de la Cité des dames / The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she shows the influence of Giovanni Boccaccio’s book on famous women. At the request of the duke of Burgundy, Christine undertook a history of the deeds of King. After the outbreak of civil war among factions of the aristocracy, she wrote several works pleading for the restoration of peace. Christine eventually retired to a Dominican convent at Poissy where her daughter was a nun, but she remained active in literature and wrote the first literary work devoted to the praise of Joan of Arc.
CHRISTUS, PETRUS
(ca. 1410-ca. 1472). Flemish painter, a disciple of Jan van Eyck, some of whose unfinished works he may have completed. His paintings demonstrate some of the earliest examples of the use of linear perspective in northern art. His Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1450) has the meticulous attention to detail typical of Flemish painting but also has a sensuous spirit and an inwardness not common in his time and place.
CHRYSOLORAS, MANUEL
(ca. 1350-1415). Greek-born scholar, teacher, and diplomat, important in the history of the Renaissance as the first teacher to make a group of Western pupils sufficiently skilled in Greek that they could continue the development of Greek studies on their own. Born into an aristocratic family at Constantinople and renowned as a scholar, he became a friend of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II and in 1394 was sent to Western Europe to seek military and financial support against the Ottoman Turks. At Venice, Chrysoloras met a friend of the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, who persuaded the Florentine republic to employ Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the city. He reached Florence in early 1397 and stayed there until early spring of 1400.
What made Chrysoloras more successful than earlier Greek language teachers in Italy was his broad mastery of ancient literature, Latin as well as Greek. He was fluent in Latin and hence could communicate with his Italian pupils far better than the masters who had tried to teach Greek to early humanists like Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio. Chrysoloras’ reputation spread rapidly, and not only Florentines but also humanists from other parts of Italy came to study under him. Leonardo Bruni, one of the leading humanists of the next generation, abandoned the study of law to study with Chrysoloras because such an opportunity to learn Greek might never come again. Thus Chrysoloras opened the way to the permanent establishment of Greek studies among Western European humanists. Many of the most successful teachers of Greek in the next generation had been his pupils. He also influenced the humanists’ ideas about translating texts. He was critical of medieval translators’ practice of translating word for word. He argued that a good translation must convey the sense, not the words, of its original.
About 1403 Chrysoloras returned to Constantinople, where he continued teaching and welcomed a number of Italian scholars who came east to learn Greek in its homeland. He made at least two later diplomatic missions to Italy and about 1405 became a convert to the Roman Catholic form of Christianity. In addition to seeking military assistance for his homeland, he also worked for the reunion of the Greek and Latin churches. Between 1407 and 1410 he travelled widely in northern Europe. He lectured on Greek literature at the University of Paris, but unlike Italy, where the growth of humanism had made many scholars realize the importance of Greek, neither Paris nor the other northern universities he visited felt the excitement that Chrysoloras’ teaching had aroused in Renaissance Italy. In 1414 he accompanied the pope’s delegation to the Council of Constance; while there, he fell ill and died, being then buried in the Dominican church in Constance.
CICERONIANISM
The tendency of Renaissance humanists to define Cicero (106-43 b.c.) as the sole model for good Latin style. Marcus Tullius Cicero was the most influential ancient Roman prose author. Medieval knowledge of his works focused primarily on his philosophical writings. For Petrarch, Cicero continued to be conceived primarily as a wise philosopher. Petrarch also admired Cicero’s Latin style, but he made no attempt to purge his own Latin of words and usages not found in Cicero’s works. Yet his discovery of Cicero’s orations and personal letters initiated a major shift in the perception of the Roman author. These orations and letters revealed that the Cicero whom Petrarch had revered as a moral philosopher interested only in wisdom and virtue was also an ambitious politician eager for power and fame. In the early 15 th century, humanists also found manuscripts of Cicero’s mature works on rhetoric.
Thus the image of Cicero changed from that of scholarly moral philosopher to that of ambitious statesman, eloquent orator, and supreme master of Latin style. By the beginning of the 15 th century, his reputation as the unquestioned authority for all questions of Latin style and vocabulary was growing rapidly. This stress on Cicero as the perfect model for writing Latin was the foundation of what later came to be called Ciceronianism. The early "Ciceronians" did not utterly reject Latin words and grammatical constructions found in other ancient authors, but following Cicero whenever possible seemed the safest way to attain an excellent style.
This emergent Ciceronianism did not pass unchallenged. Lorenzo Valla, himself one of the most brilliant Latinists of his time, caused a scandal when he openly declared that the recently discovered rhetorician Quintilian was a better guide to good Latin than Cicero. In the later 15th century, the Florentine humanist Angelo Poliziano criticized those who attacked his writings as insufficiently Ciceronian. Like Valla, he practiced a consciously eclectic style, looking to other ancient authors in addition to Cicero for models and not hesitant to accept words and structures never found in a known work of Cicero.
The Venetian scholar Pietro Bembo in 1512 argued that Cicero ought to be the model for all who wanted to write good Latin. The humanists at the papal curia in Rome, who made their reputations and their professional careers as experts in classical Latin, were notoriously devoted to a narrow and restricted brand of Ciceronianism. As the influence of Italian humanism spread across the Alps, some natives of northern Europe also began judging Latin style according to Ciceronian models. The young Netherlander Christophe de Longueil spent years among the Ciceronians at Rome and became a sharp critic of contemporary authors who did not write Ciceronian Latin. Other northerners, however, resented the Italians’ claim to a monopoly on good style. Their most eloquent spokesman was the Dutch humanist Erasmus, whose dialogue Ciceronianus (1528) made Longueil a particular target of criticism. Erasmus humorously treated Ciceronianism as a disease needing to be cured. In a more serious vein, he defended a model of good Latin that was far less narrow. While he admired Cicero, his own preferences among modern Latinists were those who had adopted an eclectic style, such as Valla and Poliziano. Erasmus’ main argument was that because society had changed greatly since ancient times, language must be adapted to express new realities — in particular, the religious change from Roman paganism to Christianity. Accompanying his criticism of the Italian Ciceronians was his conviction that most of them, especially the arrogant curial secretaries at Rome, had very little real religious spirit and in practice lived, thought, and wrote like pagans. A sharp controversy followed the publication of Erasmus’ book.
Despite such criticisms, Ciceronianism not only survived but grew in the middle decades of the 16th century. In 1535 Mario Nizzoli published a dictionary of Ciceronian words to guide those who wished to avoid any non-Ciceronian terms. Probably because the practice of defining Cicero as the standard was more easily teachable to students than Erasmus’ eclectic style, which depended on a sophisticated taste that few writers possessed, Ciceronianism dominated (and still dominates) the teaching of Latin. Cicero’s works were used as school-books. Protestant educational reformers like Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg and Johann Sturm at Strasbourg, as well as Catholic educators in Italy and Spain, upheld Ciceronian standards, and the Jesuit order, which became a major force in Catholic education, officially adopted Ciceronian standards in its schools.
CIMABUE
(ca. 1250-after 1300). One of the major painters of the late-medieval maniera greca (Byzantine manner) that dominated Italian art during the 13th century. His work Madonna Enthroned at Florence is a significant example of the adaptation of Byzantine artistic style to Italian taste. Renaissance artists believed that he was the master who trained Giotto, the late-Gothic painter whose work is commonly thought to mark the first great step toward the Italian Renaissance style of painting.
CIOMPI
Florentine term for unskilled wool-carders employed in the woollen industry, one of the lowest-ranking social and economic groups. Their violent rebellion in 1378 was a memorable incident in the troubled political and economic history of 14th-century Florence. After the failure of the attempt by a group of wealthy merchants to put a military dictator into power in 1343, the guilds representing the middling elements of the population had compelled the guilds of rich businessmen to grant them an increased share in the city’s government. Encouraged by this development, the Ciompi, who were totally excluded from a political voice and were suffering from low wages and unemployment, sought a voice of their own in government. When they were turned down in 1378, the Ciompi rebelled and forced the regime directed by the 21 established guilds to grant them the right to organize two new guilds and thus to gain some voice, though not a very powerful one, in the political system. The members of the 14 lesser guilds, however, resented the new privileges of this propertyless group and tried to limit their gains. In 1382, since tension between the Ciompi and the middling classes was paralyzing local government and threatening further violence, rich conspirators from the seven greater guilds staged a coup d’état, dissolved the two new guilds of the Ciompi, and then used their military force to restore order. Within a few years, the wealthy guilds had managed to carry through a "reform" of the political system that reduced the representation of the lesser guilds on the ruling executive council and restored the dominance of the rich over the political system.
CLASSICS
Some familiarity with the literary works of ancient Rome continued from late antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, but even well-educated medieval scholars were familiar with only those parts of Latin literature that seemed germane to their own society, and they knew at first hand almost none of the literary masterpieces of ancient Greece. In addition, medieval thinkers often understood the works of ancient authors in ways that impress modern students as strangely anachronistic. The work of Petrarch revived interest in rediscovering the whole corpus of ancient Latin literature—that is, the "classics"— because he and his followers identified Roman literature with the sophisticated, highly civilized society that had produced it, and longed to restore familiarity not only with that literature but also with the values reflected in it. Thus the classics became "the classics" because they were thought to be markers of high civilization. The Petrarchan dream of restoring the power and culture of ancient Rome was closely linked to enthusiasm for discovering, diffusing, and learning from the writings of the ancient authors—that is, from the classics.
This reverence for ancient literature was one of the principal characteristics of the Italian Renaissance, and while it began to mature only with the lifetime of Petrarch, evidence of its growth in northern Italy can already be found in the writings of a number of influential authors of the late 13 th century. Beginning with the work of Petrarch himself, the classicizing humanist scholars of the 14th and 15th centuries rediscovered unknown works even of classical Latin authors who had been relatively well known in the Middle Ages, such as Cicero, while works of other ancient Latin authors whose works were virtually unknown, such as Livy and Quintilian, were brought to light by Petrarch’s successors. The restoration of a knowledge of Greek language by the teaching of Manuel Chrysoloras at the turn of the 15 th century opened the way to a parallel rediscovery of Greek classical literature. The invention of printing in the mid-15th century diffused the rediscovered Latin and Greek classics (along with other books) among the educated classes of all of western and central Europe. See also CICERONIANISM; GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE; HUMANISM.
CLEMENT VII, POPE
(Giulio de’Medici, 1478-1534). Elected pope in 1523. An illegitimate and posthumous son of the murdered Giuliano de’Medici, Giulio was brought up with the sons of his uncle Lorenzo de’Medici, educated by the humanist Gentile Becchi, and committed to the service of his cousin Giovanni when the latter became a cardinal in 1492. When Giovanni de’Medici became pope as Leo X in 1513, he made Giulio archbishop of Florence and a cardinal. From 1519 Giulio also managed the Medici family’s restored control of Florentine political life. Although his humanistic education and early exposure to the artistic patronage of his Medici relatives created great expectations of his becoming a munificent patron of Renaissance art and humanistic studies, his many political and financial setbacks, culminating in the Sack of Rome by the army of the Emperor in 1527, meant that Pope Clement had neither the leisure nor the financial resources to accomplish much in the field of culture—or, for that matter, in the field of church administration and reform, since his desperate fiscal situation blocked any possibility of reforming the abuses rampant in the Roman curia because reform inevitably would mean reduced income for the papal treasury. Despite his promising background, Clement was largely a failure as a patron of Renaissance culture.
COLET, JOHN
(1467-1519). English humanist and reform-minded clergyman. He was an outspoken (but strictly Catholic) critic of the worldliness and neglect of duty typical of many English clergymen. Born the son of a rich London merchant, Colet studied at Cambridge University and spent three years in Italy, where he became familiar with the writings of the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He then entered Oxford University and received a doctorate in theology. His father’s influence won for him the important office of dean of St. Paul’s cathedral as soon as he had the theological degree. Colet’s inherited wealth made it possible for him to re-found St. Paul’s school in a way that emphasized literary study but in many respects was not typical of humanistic education, since Colet’s religious traditionalism made him critical of the practice of exposing young students to the pagan religious beliefs and the questionable moral tone found in much classical literature. Although the new St. Paul’s School ultimately became an important center of humanist education in England, this was done, mostly after Colet’s death, by headmasters who quietly abandoned Colet’s insistence that his school should avoid pagan authors and should concentrate its studies on Christian authors.
Colet in 1510 delivered before Convocation (the assembly of the clergy) a powerful and brutally frank sermon attacking the worldli-ness of many of the clergy and urging reform. Though he meant well and was widely admired as a morally upright and well-educated clergyman, Colet was also resented by many, for he was often rude and unfairly critical of others. But his acknowledged religious orthodoxy, his narrow but genuine learning, and his eloquence as a preacher made him widely admired. He was insistent on the central role of the Bible in religious life, and in a course of lectures at Oxford produced commentaries on biblical books that were much admired. He encouraged his friend Erasmus to become a biblical scholar, but unlike his Dutch friend he had very little awareness of the crucial role of Greek for any serious student of the New Testament.
COLLÈGE ROYAL
The present-day Collège de France has long regarded itself as the descendant of the pre-revolutionary Collège Royal and traces its foundation back to a group of lecturers appointed by King Francis I in 1530 to promote humanistic studies in France. In reality, however, the king merely appointed four leading scholars to teach publicly in Paris on the humanistic subjects to which each was assigned. These lectureships had an ill-defined and often troubled relationship with the well-established and predominantly antihumanist University of Paris, which tried to establish its own supervisory power, guaranteed by its 13th-century charter, over all higher-level teaching in Paris. Two of the initial lecturers taught Greek and two taught Hebrew, the biblical languages. Additional appointments in the next few years added lectures in mathematics and in classical (that is, Ciceronian) Latin. The so-called Collège had no corporate structure, no degree-granting function, and until the early 17th century not even a building of its own: the lectures were held in various buildings of the university.
The king’s act in initiating this series of lectureships was partly the result of agitation by French humanists, especially Guillaume Budé, who were inspired by the founding of trilingual (Latin-Greek-Hebrew) colleges at Alcalá in Spain and Louvain in the Netherlands. Francis, who fancied himself a great patron of arts and letters, announced a plan to create a similar French institution as early as 1517, but his political and territorial ambitions, which involved him in costly wars, delayed the first steps toward fulfillment of the plan until 1530.
COLONNA, FRANCESCO
(ca. 1433-1527). Italian writer and Dominican friar, educated in Dominican schools and at the University of Padua. The work for which he is remembered, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), is a vaguely allegorical romance, written in a language that is neither normal Italian nor Latin but seems to be the author’s own invention, based on the Venetian dialect, but blending in words taken from Latin and even from Greek. Although contemporaries discovered what they thought were profound mysteries in the book.
COLONNA, VITTORIA
(ca. 1492-1547). Italian poet, born into one of the most ancient and powerful noble families of Rome. She married the marquis of Pescara, ruler of a small principality, and lived at Naples while her husband pursued his career as a military commander. At Naples she presided over a court society that included many of the leading intellectuals of her time, and she became famous for her intellect, personal virtue, and piety. She concentrated on intellectual and spiritual matters even more strongly after her husband died in 1525. Her devoutness drew her close to a number of reform-minded Catholic clerics and laity.
These close associates were known as the spirituali, including important figures like Gasparo Contarini, Bernardino Ochino, Reginald Pole, and Juan de Valdes, two of them cardinals and all of them inclined to think of religion as essentially an inward, personal experience. Colonna also became close to the artist Michelangelo, who wrote poems addressed to her and shared with her a mutual love that remained purely spiritual. She and several of her Roman circle were attracted to the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, though only one of the inner group (Ochino) ended by becoming a Protestant. Her spiritualizing ideas and sympathy for reform brought her under the suspicion of the Inquisition in the 1540s. Her poems have caused her to be ranked among Italy’s leading female poets, and their publication (without her approval) in 1538 made her a much-admired author.
COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER
(in Italian, Cristoforo Colombo; in Spanish, Cristobal Colon; 1451-1506). Italian-born Spanish navigator, explorer, and colonial administrator, conventionally recognized as the discoverer of the Americas. Although recent criticisms by ethnic groups who feel victimized by European imperialism rightly point out the defects of Columbus as a colonial administrator, he remains a great seaman and explorer. The claim that he did not "discover" America because its inhabitants were not lost is verbal sophistry: perhaps in one sense he did not "discover" America, but he certainly was the first to establish a route leading from Europe to the Americas, an event that has had enormous consequences (both for good and for ill) not only for the Americas but for all parts of the world.
Beginning with his first voyage of 1492-1493, Columbus led four expeditions to the Americas, discovering several of the islands of the Caribbean on his first voyage and exploring the region from Cuba in the north to the northern coast of South America on his three subsequent voyages of 1493-1496, 1498-1500, and 1502-1504. On his second voyage, he founded the first permanent European settlement in the New World on Hispaniola, the predecessor of modern Santo Domingo. Columbus’ original goal had not been the discovery of new islands or continents but finding a direct route to Japan and China. Despite the obvious differences between the peoples and lands that he found and his best information on East Asia, he never fully realized that he had discovered a portion of the earth completely unknown to Europeans.
Columbus was born at Genoa in Italy, the son of a weaver. From an early age he went to sea. He had little or no formal education. In 1476 he was shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal. He then settled in Lisbon, which was Europe’s greatest center of maritime exploration. He sailed on Portuguese ships, and made at least one voyage to a Portuguese trading post in West Africa and another to England, Ireland, and perhaps Iceland. He married a Portuguese woman in 1479 and from about 1482 lived for a time at Funchal in the Madeiras.
It remains uncertain just when Columbus conceived his plan to reach the fabled riches of China by sailing due west rather than pursuing the Portuguese enterprise of seeking a way to Asia by way of South Africa. Although he may still have been illiterate when he reached Lisbon in 1476, he learned to read not only vernacular languages but also Latin, and he seems to have read widely. In Lisbon he must have matured, if not even invented, his plan to sail west to Asia. His connections with his wife’s family gave him ready access to the maritime experience of Portuguese explorers of West Africa. Columbus was also well informed about medieval and classical geographical theory; he knew the description of China by Marco Polo, and his plan may have been influenced by correspondence with the prominent Florentine geographer Paolo Toscanelli. From about 1483 he vainly attempted to persuade the king of Portugal to support his plan. About 1485-1486 he went to Spain and again was unsuccessful in selling his plan, though the Spanish rulers were sufficiently attracted to appoint a commission to study the project. Though the commissioners knew perfectly well that the earth was spherical, they concluded (correctly, as things turned out) that the distance was too great and the direct route to East Asia was not feasible. Queen Isabella, however, seems to have remained interested, and after Spain had completed its conquest of Granada in 1492, the rulers agreed to provide financial backing, even conceding his ambitious demands for personal and economic gain from any lands that he discovered. Although Columbus’ failures as a colonial administrator eventually led the rulers to revoke some of the concessions they had granted, leaving Columbus bitterly aggrieved, he died a wealthy man.
Except through his contacts (probable but disputed) with Toscanelli and his use of printed editions of classical texts on geography, Columbus had little contact with the high culture of the Renaissance. His dream of using his anticipated fortune to finance a crusade to recapture Jerusalem as well as his hope of converting China to Christianity show him to be in most respects a man of the late Middle Ages rather than a participant in the Renaissance culture of his Italian homeland.
COMMUNE
Italian term for the self-governing city-states of late-medieval and early Renaissance Italy. The commune originated as a spontaneous organization of the citizens of an urban community. At its origin, such a commune had no legal status but assumed de facto control of the city and sometimes also control of the surrounding countryside. This development was a result of the struggle between popes and emperors during the 12th and 13th centuries, which brought about the collapse of effective control of northern and central Italy by the emperors or any other external political authority and left the cities practically independent.
Although the formation of communes was almost always led by wealthy landowners and merchants, the early communes were organized as republics in which most inhabitants who owned property and belonged to one of the guilds had some political voice. During the 13 th century, these informal urban communities came to be more systematically organized as city-republics which might acknowledge some nominal subordination to the emperor, the pope, or some other external authority but in practice were independent republics. From the late 13 th to the middle of the 15 th century, military threats from outside and internal social conflict caused most of these republics to accept the rule of a signore, or dictator. In the same period, many of the smaller cities of northern and central Italy were conquered by larger ones, so that the northern and central Italy of the communes gave way to medium-sized territorial states. Florence and Venice were the most important of the cities that resisted the tendency toward princely rule and retained their republican form of government through all or most of the Renaissance. The consolidation, rivalries, and wars of these independent states form the political background for the cultural developments of the Italian Renaissance.
In many respects, the political condition of Italy was similar to the political condition of ancient Greece, in which the independent poleis (city-states) provided the social and political background for the growth of classical Greek civilization. Renaissance Italians did not fail to note this similarity. In particular, living in fully or largely self-governing cities made the Italians regard themselves as citizens rather than subjects. Many of them found in the political and social thought of the ancient Greeks and Romans a set of ideals and values that they attempted to assimilate into their own urban life, a development that some modern historians have labelled "civic humanism." This development helps to explain the attractiveness of Roman and Greek literature, and especially republican political thought, to the political elites of Renaissance Italy. See also HUMANISM.
