This chapter moves to the French Enlightenment, arguing that echoes of Renaissance humanism emerge in the Encyclopédie. This project, famous in the history of the book, was the brainchild of Diderot and D’Alembert, two luminaries who believed that a comprehensive account of all branches of human knowledge was needed. They financed the project themselves, through subscriptions, made expert use of illustrations, and created a monument in the history of the book. In their comprehensiveness, Diderot and D’Alembert were the heirs to Poliziano’s multidisciplinary drive. In their views of religion, they were the distant progeny of Valla. And in their antiinstitutional nature, they reflect Italian Renaissance humanism, a cultural movement whose protagonists often took care to situate themselves outside of existing institutions. After the treatment of the Encyclopédie, Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. In his “Jefferson Bible,” he literally cut and pasted parts of the New Testament that he believed showed Jesus’s true nature – not, in Jefferson’s view, as a divine personage (Jefferson discarded all the stories of miracles), but rather as an ethical exemplar. Doing so, Jefferson reflected one very important tendency in history of philology, one that Valla had begun, the Protestant Reformation spread, and the French Enlightenment completed: the desacralizing of the Bible

This chapter examines the fifteenth-century thinker Lorenzo Valla (1406–57), whose work serves both as an emblem of a certain style of reading in the fifteenth century and as a connector to today’s debates on the humanities. Through his meticulous reading and scholarship, Valla accomplished a number of things. He uncovered a historic forgery claiming that the Church was owed substantial property by secular rulers, doing so with both emotional appeals to common sense and technical criticism of the language of the forgery. He wrote the most successful presentation of the Latin language’s grammar and syntax in the Renaissance – an exceedingly important accomplishment, since Latin was the language of international scholarship. He opened the floodgates to the later, 16th-century Reformation by suggesting that the Latin Vulgate Bible’s language could be changed to reflect the meaning of the original Greek in which the New Testament was written. This move was momentous, since by Valla’s day 1,000 years of Christian theology had been practiced with the Latin Vulgate as its basis. The chapter also argues that to understand him – and by extension the humanities at large – emotions need to be brought into the picture.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter introduces readers to philology, defined as “making sense of texts,” and argues that it is a good way to view how certain thinkers in the Italian Renaissance read, interpreted, and worked their way through texts. It introduces the main themes of the book: that the available technologies of reading and writing – whether these are quills and animal skins or screens and the cloud – have great impact on what thinkers conceive as possible when it comes to their work; that authorship can be conceived as collective; that the use of the Latin language by Renaissance thinkers opened up meaningful possibilities even as it circumscribed their thinking within limits they did not always recognize; and that, especially for Renaissance thinkers, philosophy – defined as the search for wise way of life – and philology were inextricably linked. This chapter also suggests that recent work on history of women in the Renaissance – especially on women’s authorship – opens up new windows onto the intellectual history of the period. Finally, this chapter sets out one of this book’s guiding principles: to relate the episodes under consideration to problems in the humanities that have relevance today.

This chapter focuses on an important work of Angelo Poliziano, called Lamia. In it, Poliziano does two things relevant to the humanities today: he offers a new way of thinking about the enterprise of philosophy as it was understood since antiquity – the search for human wisdom and a wise style of life. In doing so, he suggests that academic philosophy as practiced in universities is not enough in the project of gaining wisdom and living wisely. Second, he suggests that philology – the deep, borderless reading of texts – represents a master discipline and one that is in fact more in line with philosophy’s authentic mission. Poliziano makes his most trenchant points by using narratives and fables, rather than syllogistic argumentation. In so doing, he makes a case for philology as an overarching discipline of disciplines and sets forth a new way of looking at philosophy

This chapter addresses the work of Jean Mabillon and Jean Hardouin. Mabillon, a Benedictine scholar, created a new field, paleography (the field that teaches how to date and authenticate handwritten texts) with the publication in 1681 of his On Diplomatics. Defending the authenticity of the documents he and his order were charged with curating, Mabillon set out criteria for determining authenticity. The handwriting in question, the location where the manuscript was produced, and dating formulas: these aspects and more came into play. The book succeeded, not least because Mabillon published exact replicas of the documents in question. Printing had evolved into a tool that could build trust in books as truth-bearing instruments. By contrast, Jean Hardouin came to create a wild conspiracy theory: that all of ancient literature save for a few authors was forged, as were the records of the Church Councils and even the work of Church Fathers like Saint Augustine. All of it was invented – in Hardouin’s view – by medieval theologians seeking to give themselves a backstory for their logic-chopping, sometimes heretical work. How could one know? Hardouin claimed that printing was the cause: now that so many books were printed and easily available, it was easier to compare them and thus easier to “prove” forgery.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter focuses on the philosopher René Descartes. While Descartes is often seen as the initiator of modern habits of thinking – especially of the idea that the mind and body are distinct – here we view him as an outgrowth of Italian humanism. Descartes was educated by the Jesuits, at the time a new but influential religious order. From them, he imbibed Italian humanism’s respect for antiquity, its deep commitment to classical Latin, and most importantly its sometimes unarticulated through-line: that, to look at the world clearly, one needs to imagine oneself outside of it. But the Jesuits added something to Italian humanism: a deep respect for medieval Catholic theology, something that Descartes also took on board. His humanist education left him dissatisfied, however, laden with a feeling that it was not enough to establish a sure foundation on which could build a new way of looking at the natural world. Accordingly, he jettisoned the world of books, texts, and philology, grounding his perceptions of truth in the only thing about which he could be absolutely certain: that he existed. It is with Descartes that we can locate the beginnings of the modern separation of disciplines, as “natural philosophy” evolved into our modern natural sciences and separated itself from “philosophy” broadly conceived.

This chapter moves to the French Enlightenment, arguing that echoes of Renaissance humanism emerge in the Encyclopédie. This project, famous in the history of the book, was the brainchild of Diderot and D’Alembert, two luminaries who believed that a comprehensive account of all branches of human knowledge was needed. They financed the project themselves, through subscriptions, made expert use of illustrations, and created a monument in the history of the book. In their comprehensiveness, Diderot and D’Alembert were the heirs to Poliziano’s multidisciplinary drive. In their views of religion, they were the distant progeny of Valla. And in their antiinstitutional nature, they reflect Italian Renaissance humanism, a cultural movement whose protagonists often took care to situate themselves outside of existing institutions. After the treatment of the Encyclopédie, Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. In his “Jefferson Bible,” he literally cut and pasted parts of the New Testament that he believed showed Jesus’s true nature – not, in Jefferson’s view, as a divine personage (Jefferson discarded all the stories of miracles), but rather as an ethical exemplar. Doing so, Jefferson reflected one very important tendency in history of philology, one that Valla had begun, the Protestant Reformation spread, and the French Enlightenment completed: the desacralizing of the Bible