The word renaissance suggests a state of mind, the sense of recovering something neglected by one’s literary ancestors. “Ours is a new day,” says the fifteenth century. “We have escaped from the decadence of our fathers into the purer poetry. We have recovered the great tradition and are setting it forward.” So the English eighteenth century, which had again repudiated “gothic night,” was in turn repudiated in the manifesto of the Lyrical Ballads and scorned by Keats as “a schism nourished in foppery and barbarism.” The Renaissance, then, is it only one such instance of self-consciousness among the many that mark so-called periods of literature? The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were regarded not only at the time, but long and widely, as an actual new day, the Renaissance. Histories of literature, no less than those of politics and society, have treated it as a distinct period. Though more recent histories have found it less distinct, it still claims attention as a widespread cult of the ancient classics. Its leading ideas permeated western Europe; and its new day, though it was bent toward nationalism, was conceived but secondarily as national progress, primarily as a general reanimation from ancient ideals long neglected. Thus it is not only the most familiar example of a typical recurrence in literary history; it remains the cardinal experience of classicism. Though we may no longer speak of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a reawakening of literature equal to that of painting, we may still speak of the Renaissance.

The common sixteenth-century view of accomplished restoration after medieval decadence is expressed (1527) by Guillaume Budé.

In 1558 the sober Minturno is merely less certain as to dates.

The Poetica (1561) of Julius Caesar Scaliger surprised no one by bringing the history of Latin poetry to date without even mentioning the Middle Age. He might include his own poems; he need not include the medieval hymns. Scorn of the Middle Age was a Renaissance literary commonplace. The history of literature has to be rewritten from age to age, first to satisfy such prejudices, then to dispel them. The art that survives these reinterpretations, the books or the paintings that still compel admiration and study, are vindicated, whatever their period, as classics. Meantime the perception of these has been repeatedly obscured both by preoccupation with some idealized great period and by pride in one’s own time.

What, then, has the longer perspective of history shown to be the literary progress of the Middle Age and the distinctive direction of the Renaissance? Two answers have been found in the fourteenth-century borderland: (1) the culmination of medieval development in the literary triumph of the vernaculars, and (2) the beginning of a new literary influence in the revival of Greek. Two more belong to the fifteenth century: (3) the vogue of that humanistic Latin which rejected the medieval freedom for conformity to the style of an idealized great period, and (4) the establishment of printing.

The literary triumph of the vernaculars is forecast in Dante. The supreme achievement of the Divina Commedia is eloquent at once of the Middle Age and of the literary future. The vogue of Boccaccio and the wider influence of Petrarch were not of their Latin, but of their vernacular writings. The traditional superiority of Latin, indeed, as the language of literature not only lingered; it was upheld by humanism; but the tradition had gradually to yield to the facts. The fourteenth century closed with the convincing achievement of Chaucer in English. To French also, though individual eminence was less, the century promised the literary future. The long medieval course of Latin had reached its term. The new literary day was for the new languages. None the less that new day was medieval, not merely in date, but in being the culmination of a medieval progress. The language of literature, medieval experience had learned, must be the language of communication. So it had long been in Latin; so it had become, within medieval conditions, in Tuscan, French, and English. No subsequent change through Greek, or humanistic Latin, or even printing, more affected the outlook and direction of literature than the medieval rise of the vernaculars from literary acceptance to literary eminence.

Greek, generally in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, was studied by both Petrarch and Boccaccio and had its professor at Florence in 1396. Its spread in the fifteenth century was stimulated both by the movement for the reunion of the “Greek” Church with Rome and by the influx of Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But it never threatened the traditional eminence of Latin. Renaissance literary dialogues were less often Platonic in form than Ciceronian; and the direct influence of Theocritus on revived pastoral is hard to distinguish from the indirect influence through the Bucolics of Vergil. Still more important to remember is that Greek influence, direct or indirect, stopped short of Greek composition. Greek dramaturgy, perhaps the cardinal Greek influence on later times, remained ineffective in the Renaissance. The Poetic of Aristotle did not oust the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Slowly grasped, Greek dramaturgy hardly shaped plays before the seventeenth century. The sixteenth century was still repeating Horace and following Seneca or carrying on the experience of the miracle plays or learning by stage experiment. Nor was verse narrative, even when called epic, attentive to the Aristotelian doctrine of sequence. The integration of Tasso’s Jerusalem, which found its model in the Aeneid, is quite exceptional. The manuscripts circulating in the fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, as well as the texts later printed, show as ready a welcome for the decadent Greek literature of Alexandria as for the great names of Athens. With Homer came in not only the Anthology, but even those “Greek romances” which are aggregations of melodrama. The Renaissance vogue of Plato involved from its beginning the cultivation of the neo-Platonists. On the other hand, Greek added to higher education a language experience that held its place for some three hundred years and was expected of all scholars.

Renaissance scorn of the Middle Age was not merely a general complacency; it was especially a repudiation of the freedom of medieval Latin. Latin style must conform to the habits of its great period; and this restoration was a prime object of Renaissance classicism. In 1472 Guillaume Fichet, scholar and rhetorician, wrote to another rhetorician, Robert Gaguin:

In 1476 Lorenzo Valla prefaced a manual widely current in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, De elegantia linguae latinae, with his shame at medieval Latin and his confidence in the restoration.

The Middle Age, then, could not write Latin. Not John of Salisbury, not Dante, not even Aquinas was really eruditus! Fifty years later the judicious Bembo reports the restoration as accomplished.

Renaissance classicism thus ignored the medieval Latin progress. This deliberate breaking with the past could not, indeed, stop the sun; but it did put back the hands of the clock. The humanistic cult of Augustan Latin as a literary norm widely affected all language study. Though its literary achievement has faded in the perspective of history, its literary experience has permanent significance.

The rapid diffusion of printing in the late fifteenth century was a change of so wide and deep consequence to literature as to become a revolution. The suddenly increased and rapidly increasing availability of books was by itself enough to make a renaissance. Further it gave their role to the great publishers: Aldus, Gryphius, the Juntas, Froben, the Étiennes, Plantin. But one of the first effects of printing was to prolong or widen the influence of books characteristically medieval: Boethius and Bede, Alain de Lille, Aquinas, Hugh of St Victor. With Geoffrey of Monmouth were printed such romances as Mélusine and Pontus and the Fair Sidoine. Even Merlin was resuscitated. Neither Ariosto for his Carolingians nor Spenser for his Arthurians needed manuscript sources. Moreover the presses answered continuing demand for the Golden Legend and for such typically medieval compends as that of Petrus Comestor, the Speculum of Vincent of Beauvais, and even the Etymologiae of Isidore. They brought out not only the greater Cicero, recovered in 1422, but also the elder Seneca, Lucan, Aulus Gellius, Statius, Ausonius, Claudian, Sidonius, the medieval favorites. They multiplied for schools Donatus and Priscian, Diomedes and Martianus Capella. The collection entitled Auctores (or Actores) octo set before boys the De contemptu mundi, the Tobias of Matthieu de Vendôme, an Isopet and Cathonet, and the Proverbia of Alain de Lille. The hackneyed De inventione, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the hardy perennial “Ars poetica” of Horace had new lease of life. Medieval courtly verse forms, especially the balade, though scorned by Du Bellay and Ronsard, persisted not only with Villon, but in the huge printed collection of 1501, Le Jardin de plaisance. One of the first effects of printing was to prolong the Middle Age.

If the recovery of Greek, then, and even the establishment of printing, did not upset historical continuity, what of the lapse of feudalism? The most picturesque scene of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was such a ducal court as that of Urbino, Mantua, or Ferrara. Its lavish splendor broke from the ruins of feudalism. It was a triumph of individual violence amid the dislocation of medieval loyalties. This type of court, established and maintained by such professional soldiers as Sir John Hawkwood, became in Elizabethan imaginations a proverb at once of magnificence and of ruthlessness. Macchiavelli’s realistic statesmanship was interpreted as diabolic; and Italian dukes were staged with daggers and poison. Though this foreign prejudice and exaggeration were largely melodrama, the court poets themselves hint at actual ruthlessness in contrast to their idealized Carolingian chivalry. Boiardo made the romantic literary escape frankly; and even Ariosto felt its spell. So Sir Thomas Malory, who needed no lessons in violence from Italy, escapes from the bitter Wars of the Roses to Camelot. So a French professional soldier is idealized as the Chevalier Bayard. With feudal service already obsolete in the fourteenth century, chivalry had become altogether what it had always been in part, poetry. There, indeed, was a breach with the Middle Age; and it is earliest and clearest in Italy. The ducal court is distinct both from the idealized castle of the medieval romances and from the actual castle of the Middle Age.

Patrons of painters and architects, the ducal courts had also their orators and their poets. The orators had the more distinct function of furnishing on occasion ceremonious letters and addresses; they might be secretaries and sometimes librarians. The poets devised the characteristic Renaissance pageants for the solemn entries of distinguished visitors or triumphing dukes. Both were spokesmen in obituary, in nuptial greeting, in other encomium. The pervasive encomium of the Renaissance may have been directly stimulated by the ducal courts. How important they were as literary centers is more difficult to determine. Having a poet or an orator on the premises has not always constituted a literary center. In some cases the courts may have fostered literature less than they added it to their own adornment; in some cases a court poet might feel himself rather thwarted than stimulated. At least they were important enough to become literary fictions. The setting of one of the most characteristic and influential dialogues of the Renaissance, Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) is the court of Urbino. Idealized of course, this fixed the type of gracious culture which offsets Macchiavelli’s realism and the Elizabethan melodrama of lust and murder. The very name of the book has literary significance. No single word is more characteristic of Renaissance literature than courtier. In its wider sense it describes not only Ariosto and Tasso, but also Ronsard and Spenser.

The more permanent literary center of the period of rapid commercial expansion was first Florence, where the new commercial aristocracy lived cheek by jowl with the bourgeoisie; then Lyon, commercial for a thousand years, literary outpost of Italy in France. These are cardinal examples of the intellectual interests and achievements stirred in Venice, Bruges, London, and the other commercial cities, by trade and printing. In Medicean Florence social eminence demanded not only some interest in the arts, but some acquaintance with them. Nicolao Nicoli, merchant and scholar, was connoisseur enough to see at a glance that the chalcedony on a boy’s neck was a “Policreto.” The ideal of educated taste and skill set up by Castiglione for Urbino is no less clear among the merchant princes and their courtiers in Florence. The great Cosimo dei Medici commissions Vespasiano to make him a library worthy of his position, though he is daringly reminded that libraries should not be made to order. In Venice Minturno addresses the preface of his De poeta to Gabriel Vinea, “pride of commerce, delight of scholars” (mercatorum decus ac deliciae literatorum). Lyon had wealthy leisure for the same reason as Venice. Among the greater publishers of the sixteenth century were its Gryphius, Rouville, and De Tournes. Its large Italian population had been swelled by the exile ensuing upon the Pazzi conspiracy. It published the romances of Alamanni. Its most original author, Louise Labé, wrote some of her sonnets in Italian. Maurice Scève was the more typically a poet of his time in composing elaborate pageants for its solemn entries. His uncle Guillaume’s house was meantime a resort of scholars; and there is abundant other evidence of lively and various literary interchange. The literary leadership of Italy, then, was maintained less by the ducal courts than by the commercial cities. There it had animated the genius of Boccaccio and of Chaucer. The later influence of Italy on Wiat, Surrey, and Spenser, its more diffused influence through France, seem less fruitful for the progress of literature than the end of the Italian Middle Age.

Tardy recognition of this Italian continuity has led some historians to include in the Renaissance not only Chaucer, but Petrarch and Boccaccio, and even to begin it with Dante. But this, though it rebukes the complacency of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, tends to obscure the generally received significance of both Middle Age and Renaissance. The terms are not outworn. The division that they still express, after much revision of dates, is of general literary habits. It is the change from the feudal society living by manuscripts and reading aloud, with Latin for an international language of communication existing beside the established vernacular, to the rapidly commercializing society living by printed books amid widening education and nationalist aspirations, with Latin specialized as the vernacular widens its circle of readers. The latter is the society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The distinctive literary changes, indeed, were hardly attained before the sixteenth century. Though humanism as a theory was established in the fifteenth, the literary product of that century was generally feeble, as of a Middle Age gone to seed. Even the sixteenth century, conscious of revival, eager for standards, proud of learning, preoccupied with classicism, is more significant in its theorizing than in its achievement, in criticism and study than in literary advance. Whereas medieval poetry ranged far beyond medieval poetic, first in Dante and last in Chaucer, Renaissance poetry shows less advance in composition. It has no Dante, no Chaucer. The novella does not seize and carry forward the more intense narrative found in his various experiments by Boccaccio. The Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre is narratively inferior to the Decameron. The chivalric romances show a departure rather in style than in method from medieval romance; and their literary history from Ariosto to Spenser is not in terms of narrative art. Spenser is but the more typical of the Renaissance in that his great achievement of verse and style suffices without onward movement. The narrative slowness of his pageantry, the descriptive dilation, descend through the Renaissance partly from revived Alexandrianism, partly from medieval patterns discarded by Chaucer. Renaissance poets are not often even concerned with such a problem of composition as Chaucer’s reconceiving and recomposing of a long old story, lately retold with new life by Boccaccio, in his verse novel Troilus and Criseyde.

For all its confidence in a new day, Renaissance literary theory repeats some medieval commonplaces. The arts poétiques of the sixteenth century prolong the vogue of the “Ars poetica” of Horace. The old doctrine of poetic inspiration is renamed Platonic. The slighting of composition by medieval manuals is continued. Renaissance manuals are no less generally limited to style; for the old preoccupation is confirmed by the new insistence on style as an accomplishment and as conformity to standard. Thus the Renaissance long accepted tacitly the medieval confusion of poetic with rhetoric. Cicero’s De oratore was found to have lessons for poetry; Bembo, even as Johannes de Gerlandia, transferred from oratory to poetry the conventional classification of the “three styles”; and Minturno’s De poeta is by itself a complete identification of poetic with rhetoric. But Renaissance theory gradually advanced. The successive reinterpretations of Aristotle’s Poetic finally opened the way for seventeenth-century French classical drama. The better Renaissance rhetorics, using Quintilian as well as the greater Cicero to guide the increasing range and control of sixteenth-century prose, set forth a sounder and more fruitful classicism. Wherein classicism is typically a hindrance to literary progress, and wherein it is stimulus and guide, is amply revealed by the literary experience of the Renaissance.