Introduction to volume Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society

Introduction

David A. Lines

What is happiness, and how can it be attained? Which virtues are espe-cially important, and how should they be exercised? What are the best ideals for both individuals and the society in which they live?

Questions of this kind, central to current explorations of ethics, have been pas-sionately discussed since ancient times. The modern lack of consensus on how to resolve such fundamental issues has led to reconsidering a range of past models of ethical and social behaviour, with considerable attention given to the ethical solutions of ancient Greece (in particular to Aristotle’s proposals)1 and to the approaches of medieval and early modern thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Baruch Spinoza. Far less studied have been the models of ethics proposed in the Renaissance, a period which philosophers usually treat as an extension of the Middle Ages or skip over altogether, according to the fash-ion in more general histories of philosophy.2 This volume thus aims to provide a wide-ranging introduction to Renaissance ethics, a field of research that has grown remarkably in the past twenty years.3 Although not all scholars agree, and several points are still open to serious debate, now is a good moment to consoli-

1 See, for example, Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics.2 In general, see Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 329–57.3 See this essay’s final section.

David A. Lines ([email protected]) is Reader of Italian at the Univer sity of Warwick. He is the author of Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Currently he is leading an AHRC-funded project on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400–1650’ and preparing several studies on the University of Bologna in the Renaissance.

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2 David A. Lines

date what has been achieved and suggest possible new directions in exploring the chief developments in ethics between the age of Petrarch and the advent of early modern thought in the seventeenth century.

As the volume’s title indicates, this was a period in which most thinkers agreed on seeing a strong connection between, on the one hand, developing and reflect-ing on personal virtue and, on the other hand, restoring the well-being of society. Humanists like Petrarch looked to the ancient — and especially the Roman — world not just as a repository of pure Latin and great literature, but as a model society whose strength and influence lay in the virtues of its individual citizens. The return of Italian (indeed, European) society to its former glory could only be achieved by a personal and individual internalization of those values, at least on the part of the cultural and political aristocracy. Humanists were keen to empha-size the familial and civic dimension of their cultural programme — as testified for example by the writings of Matteo Palmieri and Baldassarre Castiglione4 — in a trend often referred to in the scholarly literature as ‘civic humanism’.5

Humanists were hardly alone, however, in studying ethics or in associating it with social and political considerations. Francesco Piccolomini’s dense scho-lastic treatise Universa philosophia de moribus (1583) is one of the most impor-tant works on moral philosophy in sixteenth-century Italy; although much of it focuses on ethics, it also deals with politics in its final book.6 By concluding with this discussion, Piccolomini was not just paying homage to the Venetian political class, but also following an influential tradition that saw politics as the end or culmination of ethics. Such scholastic discussions often highlighted the practical and social dimension of the virtues discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (including magnificence, justice, and friendship), since moral philosophy was commonly seen as encompassing not only personal ethics but also family ethics, based on the (pseudo-Aristotelian) Economics, and ethics for the broader social and political community, contained in Aristotle’s Politics.7 Even Girolamo Savonarola’s reflections on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in his Compendium moralis philosophiae underlined these practical aspects by stressing the value of friendship, which could be easily reconciled with the Christian virtue of love.8 Furthermore, the humanists’ view that socio-political renewal must start with the

4 Palmieri, Della vita civile; Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian, Book iv.5 See Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism; Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism.6 For further detail, see Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume.7 See Lines, ‘Humanistic and Scholastic Ethics’.8 See Lines, ‘Pagan and Christian Ethics’.



Introduction 3

individual and be modelled on ancient examples was also shared by exponents of the devotio moderna and by the Protestant and Catholic reform movements, with their emphasis on personal repentance, devotion, and spirituality. One sig-nificant difference was that, in these contexts, the social and cultural radius was broadened to include everyone, from the most humble and illiterate to the most powerful or learned.

The link between personal virtue and social well-being, however strongly and widely felt in the Renaissance, was not of course especially new. Its roots went back to, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible, and Augustine. And already the stratification of medieval society was built on the premise that some groups or classes were ‘better’ (also in terms of moral nobility) than oth-ers. Nonetheless, in several important ways Renaissance writers departed from earlier views of the relationship between virtue and society. Especially impor-tant was the sense, fostered by the development of Italy’s communes, that every-one — men, women, and children; courtiers as well as princes; merchants along with nobles — was at least potentially able to exercise the virtue necessary for achieving a renewed and stable society. Certainly, individual visions of this social utopia varied: Savonarola, Thomas More, and John Calvin did not hold or voice the same ideals. People who did share the same ideals often disagreed as to how they should be achieved. But what they had in common was a conviction that all sectors of society could be brought to buy into and exercise the same virtues — many of them now based on the new ‘merchant morality’. This is precisely why Machiavelli’s Prince, when it appeared, was so vehemently opposed: not only did it emphasize the importance of seeming to be good rather than being good, but it condoned a different morality for the prince from that of his subjects.

The Changing Contexts of Ethics in the Renaissance

What was different, then, about Renaissance discussions of ethics? To begin with, they took place in a changed cultural, intellectual, and religious context. Since the twelfth-century rediscovery of Aristotelian works,9 and particularly of the Nicomachean Ethics, which became the standard textbook for instruction in moral philosophy across Europe, ethics had regained its ancient character as a philo-sophical discipline. Logic, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics were the core elements of the philosophical curriculum and were all based on Aristotle’s writings, occasionally supplemented by those of other authors. Lectures

9 See especially Dod, ‘Aristoteles Latinus’.



4 David A. Lines

and questions centred on Aristotelian treatises constituted the main method of teaching and learning philosophy in formal settings, although there were in fact numerous compendia, florilegia, and other kinds of works which also com-municated (or helped one to remember) his teachings. This strong Aristotelian orientation intensified during the Renaissance, which is no longer regarded by serious scholars as ‘the age of Plato’. Charles Lohr reckons that substantially more Aristotelian commentaries were written in the Renaissance than in the entire pre-ceding millennium.10 This was the case for the Nicomachean Ethics as well, which in the period 1400–1650 was the subject of at least 142 Latin translations, com-mentaries, and other interpretations in Italy alone and continued to be the main university textbook, not only in Europe but wherever Europeans (and especially Jesuits) founded institutions of philosophical instruction.11

Nonetheless, the dominant and pervasive presence of Aristotelian ethics was complemented by a mounting awareness of different philosophical traditions. Interpreters felt increasingly compelled to compare the Aristotelian corpus with the viewpoints of other ancient philosophers as their writings became more widely available. This was particularly the case for Platonism and Stoicism, which enjoyed remarkable revivals in the late fifteenth and the late sixteenth centuries respective-ly.12 But few Renaissance thinkers saw a need to choose between ethical systems; rather, they wished to reconcile them, as had already happened in antiquity and would again take place, especially with regard to Aristotelianism and Platonism, in the sixteenth century.13 In many ways it was too early and too disruptive to envisage that the ancients might have disagreed substantially on something as important as the nature of the Good. It was best to put their differences down to words and expressions — to assume that, even when they attacked each other’s doctrines, it was all due either to posturing or to a lamentable misunderstanding.

But Renaissance ethics was not just about reconciling the sources of pagan phi-losophy; Christianity too had to be considered and was immensely influential.14 Indeed, paradoxically, Renaissance ethics became more overtly Christianized than its medieval counterpart. Medieval philosophy had carved out for itself an independent realm of enquiry: masters who taught the subject were often reluc-tant to address theological issues and (especially after the condemnation of 1277)

10 Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, p. xiii.11 See Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, Appendix C, and Lines, ‘Moral

Philosophy in the Universities’.12 See the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume.13 See Antonino Poppi’s essay in this volume and Poppi, ‘Il problema della filosofia morale’.14 See Risto Saarinen’s essay in this volume.



Introduction 5

doggedly stuck to what seemed right from a strictly philosophical point of view. Even Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Ethics (c. 1270–72)15 is remarkably sober and philosophical, launching only rarely into related theological topics. Such a clean and separatist approach between philosophy and theology became increasingly untenable during the Renaissance. In this period of putatively strong secularism, the Greek patristic and philosophical traditions (in which philosophy and theology could happily merge, for example in the twelfth-century Ethics com-mentary of Eustratius of Nicaea) gave scholars a standard for reconciling different ethical viewpoints from antiquity. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the reconciliation of Platonic and Aristotelian ethics effected by scholars such as Francesco Piccolomini occurred on the basis of religious (i.e. Christian) consid-erations. If one adds to this the preoccupation, within both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations, with right doctrine and living, it becomes clear how strongly Christian assumptions tended to colour philosophical interpretations.16

Finally, in terms of context, another important consideration is that of the set-tings in which moral teaching flourished in the Renaissance.17 Schools, universi-ties, and studia of the religious orders constitute obvious elements of continuity with the medieval educational programme, and in the latter two Aristotle’s Ethics was typically a required text. We know that, at least in Italy, the place of moral philosophy in the university curriculum and the way in which it was taught var-ied over time and from place to place; on certain occasions it was allied with nat-ural philosophy, on others with rhetoric or medicine, whereas the Jesuit colleges often considered it as a propaedeutic subject to theology. The teaching of ethics in the schools and in the mendicant orders is far less clear. What is certain, how-ever, is that the Renaissance saw an expansion in the number of informal settings in which philosophical matters (and therefore also ethics) might be discussed. In princely courts, powerful patrons and courtiers increasingly regarded themselves as members of a cultured elite which engaged in and fostered conversations about art, literature, and philosophy. These discussions usually took place in the vernac-ular and can therefore be likened to the activities of the academies which flour-ished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We know that, at least in some of these, ethics was a subject of interest, giving rise to lectures or publications. At the same time, informal humanist circles developed; although their activi-ties are poorly documented, groups such as the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples

15 See Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, ed. by Gauthier.16 An interesting work in this sense is Vermigli, Aristotelis Ethicorum ad Nicomachum […]

commentarius, on which now see Baschera, Tugend und Rechtfertigung.17 See my essay in this volume.



6 David A. Lines

(founded by Giovanni Pontano, a prolific writer on Aristotelian moral texts) are likely to have given ethics close attention. What most matters is that the par-ticipants and the audience in ethical debates broadened during the Renaissance, changing the field from one intended for professional (or, at least, professionally trained) philosophers, writing mainly for each other’s benefit and in technical Latin, to one in which everyone (including women) might take part.

Changes of Method, Approach, Genre

Signs of this momentous change are already visible in early humanism. Members of this movement were not content to stay within their own field of the humani-ties but made frequent incursions into the terrain claimed by professional phi-losophers. Petrarch ridiculed the devotion of some contemporary philosophers to Aristotle, maintaining that knowledge of the natural world was irrelevant to man’s true goal of becoming good, and regarding literary and rhetorical writings to be more useful than philosophical ones.18 By 1417 the chancellor of Florence, Leonardo Bruni, had again trespassed onto the territory of the philosophers by offering a fresh translation, in humanistic Latin, of Aristotle’s Ethics; this move threatened to displace the version used in university philosophy courses. Bruni’s audacity gave rise to a heated controversy with the crusty Alfonso da Cartagena, who objected that technical subjects should be treated by specialists and not by a parvenu from another discipline.19 Less than fifty years later, however, the lec-tures of Niccolò Tignosi, a teacher in the University of Florence, were clearly geared to students with little or no exposure to formal philosophy. In a treatise defending his approach, Tignosi argued that they too should be entitled to study philosophy if they were so inclined, even though they lacked the formal training provided by the standard scholastic system of learning.20 In 1490 the humanist Angelo Poliziano interpreted his remit to teach rhetoric and poetry in Florence rather broadly and lectured on the Ethics. By so doing, and by offering a primar-ily philological analysis of the text, Poliziano was doubtless asserting his declared right, as a grammaticus, to subject other fields of knowledge to his humanist method.21 Finally, to remain in Florence, the single most important new edition of the Greek text of the Ethics in Italy was produced in 1547 by Pier Vettori, again

18 Petrarch, ‘On his Own Ignorance’, ed. by Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall.19 See Hankins, ‘The Ethics Controversy’, pp. 193–239.20 Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 206–14.21 Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 101–05.



Introduction 7

not by any means a professional philosopher, but a teacher of Greek and Latin in the university. Further instances of this kind could be mentioned for Italian centres outside of Florence and indeed throughout Europe: Ermolao Barbaro in Padua, Marc-Antoine Muret in Rome, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in Paris, Philipp Melanchthon in Wittenberg, and John Case in Oxford are just a few of the more famous humanists who felt free to teach or interpret Aristotle’s Ethics, showing little or no inclination to respect professional boundaries.

These examples show that the clearest difference between humanists and scholastics as they approached ethics was one of method.22 This point of contrast rested on an ambiguity within Aristotle’s own writings, since he discusses the vir-tues and related subjects both in the Ethics and in the Rhetoric. Scholastics saw ethics as part of the philosophical corpus delivered by Aristotle, whereas human-ists noted the overlap between ethics and rhetoric and therefore felt justified in claiming it as part of their own domain. Scholastics recognized that, unlike natu-ral philosophy, ethics had to do with the realm of changeable human action and circumstance, and therefore could not be described as a science stricto sensu. Like medicine, they observed, it was a practical science, which it would be useless to study but not apply, but this did not mean that general principles could not be discovered that would tend to be universally valid. Humanists instead stressed the mutability of the human world, its setting in time and space, the role of the passions and the power of speech to direct and control them. They too some-times became embroiled in arguments about the best kind of life (for example, whether one should devote oneself to action or contemplation). This strongly suggests that they saw their conclusions as applicable to all or at least most men. When they wished to, however, they could leave behind the format of academic discussions and present ethical issues in ways that seemed more practical, appeal-ing, and accessible than those of their competitors.

Here one needs to tread carefully. Too much has been made in modern scholarship of the humanists’ ignorance of (or opposition to) philosophy and Aristotle or of their supposedly radical departure from the contents and forms of their predecessors. We now know that the humanists included a group of dedicated Aristotelians who not only could but did interpret the works of the Stagirite according to the long-established rules of the Latin commentary tradi-tion. Although some of these humanists initiated certain changes of approach (e.g. writing in classical Latin, adducing historical examples from antiquity, or quoting from classical literature), they largely chose to accept and stay within

22 See Eckhard Kessler’s essay in this volume.



8 David A. Lines

the strictures of the genre in which they were writing, sometimes to the point of maintaining elements of the scholastic disputation and of responding exten-sively to the views of earlier commentators.23 Seeing themselves as scholars, they wrote for other scholars and published compendia, commentaries, or paraphrases which could look very much like what had been produced for centuries. Others, however, experimented with new forms or paid attention to different considera-tions, such as reconstructing the original Greek text, engaging in philological analysis, or using the works of the ancients as an archaeological site for recovering elements of Greek culture. In the hands of several humanists, Aristotelian ethics came to be discussed in dialogues, tables, and other genres which departed from the academic tradition and were meant for diffusion among a different (and often broader) public.

The move towards more informal ethical genres or approaches was clearly eas-ier in the case of traditions where the models of writing were neither Aristotle’s own lectures and treatises nor the university commentaries on those works. A closely related product of Renaissance educational practices (although people often continued to use it long after they had left school) was the commonplace book, in which memorable dicta from classical authors were collected under topi-cal headings (e.g. justice, friendship) for easy retrieval in speaking and writing.24 Although compendia and florilegia serving similar purposes had long been in existence,25 it was sixteenth-century humanists who codified the form and used it extensively. The jumble of sources placed side-by-side may have aided the pro-cess of philosophical reconciliation discussed above. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the dismemberment of the original sources gave rise to a reorganiza-tion of ethical maxims on the basis of different principles from those inherent in the works from which they were drawn,26 resulting in a less dogmatic and more eclectic approach to ethics. This was probably especially true of commonplace books whose entries were ordered alphabetically. As Ann Moss’s essay points out, however, the organization of commonplace books could also reflect (and rein-force) established Christian or pagan frameworks.

What is certain is that the channels for ethical discussion multiplied in the Renaissance. Emblems (whether on their own or as part of commonplace books)

23 For this and what follows, see Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume, and the section on John Case in the essay by David Lines and Jill Kraye in this volume.

24 See Ann Moss’s essay in this volume.25 See, for instance, Hamesse, Les ‘Auctoritates Aristotelis’.26 See Kessler, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the Sixteenth Century’.



Introduction 9

and dichomotous tables, produced according to the fashion of Peter Ramus, offered an appealing visual element.27 Furthermore, writers derived inspiration from genres such as the dialogues of Plato and Cicero, Plutarch’s Moralia, Seneca’s letters, and Lucretius’s poetry. As a result, expressions of Renaissance ethics often lurk in extremely diverse formats and genres: Erasmus’s Adagia and Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano may spring quickly to mind, but one also needs to consider works such as Montaigne’s Essais, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,28 short stories such as those by Marguerite de Navarre,29 or even plays. These more infor-mal genres take ethical discussions in a very different direction, resulting in some-thing far more vague and open-ended than philosophers were (or still are) used to dealing with.

A particularly rich and understudied informal genre, from the standpoint of ethics, are biographies, or even pseudo-biographies. Antonio de Guevara’s for-gery, the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, is replete with imagined speeches by the Roman emperor; the appeal of genres of this kind probably lay behind the work’s translation into several languages.30 Machiavelli’s patently false account of the life of a certain Castruccio shows that the genre’s usefulness as a means for dramatizing ethical problems could be prized more highly than its adherence to ‘facts’.31 Other works, including Plutarch’s Lives, enjoyed a remarkable fortuna, doubtless due in part to his ability to juxtapose the bad with the good.32 The more one delves into this form, the more one realizes that biographies of the ancients or sometimes of near-contemporaries must have exercised an irresistible pull on many readers, who sought in these works concrete models of behaviour, or at least inspiration to follow in someone’s footsteps.33

Some readers may question the wisdom of including these sources in the pre-sent volume. In addition to the considerable interpretive problems already posed by philosophical expositions, such informal works raise a number of challenging hermeneutic headaches — issues of irony, self-representation, audience, autho-rial intent, and so forth — which are neatly represented by the extremely var-ied critical response to works like Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum

27 See Ann Moss’s essay in this volume.28 See Peter Mack’s essay in this volume.29 See Ullrich Langer’s essay in this volume.30 See Peter Mack’s essay in this volume.31 See Alison Frazier’s essay in this volume.32 See Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives.33 See Alison Frazier’s essay in this volume.



10 David A. Lines

Histrum.34 Secondly, one might object that these works are not really philosophi-cal: they may deal with or represent virtue but are not necessarily about ethics. And, since they do not deploy the formal tools of philosophy, they could just as easily be left out. Without offering an extended apology, it is worth pointing out that a sketch relying on an analysis of Renaissance ethical works by profes-sional philosophers writing in the standard philosophical format would be very incomplete. For the reasons outlined above, ethics could be claimed by both pro-fessional philosophers and rhetoricians. However understudied and important, ethical treatises and philosophical commentaries supply only part of the picture. For humanists and many other Renaissance authors, ethics was less a systematized series of answers to fundamental practical questions than a search for how one could order one’s life so as to find the greatest fulfilment and happiness. That quest, with the open-endedness it entails, is better represented by informal genres of ethical discussion than by formal ones, even though, of course, the ensuing interpretations will need to take into account further layers of subtlety. What we need to guard against is imposing our own conception of philosophy on a period in which various definitions of this field were in use.

It is also crucial to address the issue of language which is raised by many of the informal Renaissance works on ethics. As is well known, most learned ethical discussions took place in Latin: since they were often connected with school and university contexts or with the studia of the religious orders, it was natural for the commentaries, compendia, and treatises related to the study of moral philosophy to be in the West’s lingua franca of scholarship. This approach continued among fourteenth- and fifteenth-century humanists, who looked to Cicero as a model of prose style and were intensely doubtful about the ability of the vernacular to carry the freight of philosophical ideas. Petrarch and Boccaccio were most influ-ential in this respect, reserving the vernacular for poetry and short fiction, but turning to classical Latin as soon as they came to deal with learned subjects. It thus comes as no surprise that works such as Lorenzo Valla’s De vero falsoque bono and Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses were written in Latin.

Already early on there had been instances in which the vernacular was used instead — the most famous being Brunetto Latini’s Trésor and Dante’s Convivio.35 These were not popularizing treatments of moral philosophy, aimed at a low-brow audience with little or no education, but rather highly complex and subtle works written for professionals. They were followed, in the fifteenth century, by

34 See, for example, Quint, ‘Humanism and Modernity’.35 See also the adaptation of Thomas Aquinas studied in Guldentops and Steel, ‘Vernacular

Philosophy for the Nobility’.



Introduction 11

vernacular contributions such as Matteo Palmieri’s Della vita civile (c. 1434–36) and Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia (c. 1433–41), both of which explore a number of civic and familial virtues. A poetic contest (the ‘Certame Coronario’) that took place in Florence in 1441 was dedicated to exploring, in the vernacular, the morally charged theme of friendship.36 Contributions on the topic came from several influential figures, including Alberti, Leonardo Dati, and Benedetto Accolti. These works were part of an Italian tradition, especially strong in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of writing poetic capitoli on topics such as ambition, fortune, ingratitude, and envy.37 With the settling of the questione della lingua in early sixteenth-century Italy, one notes a raft of further compo-sitions on ethical topics in the vernacular, by authors including Castiglione, Alessandro Piccolomini, and Bernardo Segni.38 But such departures from Latin for discussing moral issues were hardly limited to Italy — we know, for example, of the fifteenth-century Cuestiones de filosofía moral by Alonso Tostado, a profes-sor at Salamanca; of William Baldwin’s Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547); of L’Ethique ou science morale by Pierre du Moulin (1623). Several similar works from across Europe still await exploration.

Considering both vernacular and Latin works opens a window onto the range of audiences and participants involved in Renaissance ethical discussions.39 Although vernacular writings did not necessarily address less educated people than their Latin counterparts, their potential audience was far broader. In addi-tion to the learned and the religious, many works were aimed at (or written by) rulers, nobles, courtiers, merchants, and soldiers. Advice books for rulers (also called ‘mirrors for princes’) were, of course, an established genre, but it is inter-esting to note how Latin and vernacular works could view and promote virtues differently.40 More specific to the Renaissance were works on the behaviour of women — whether as wives, mothers, or daughters. These books attracted con-siderable attention, not least because women readers were seen as indispensable

36 McLaughlin, ‘Humanism and Italian Literature’; see also Altamura, Il certame coronario.37 See the introduction by Inglese, ‘Introduzione’. My thanks to Robert Black for raising

this point.38 Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. by Cian; Piccolomini, De la institutione de la vita

de l’homo; Segni, L’Ethica d’Aristotile tradotta in lingua vulgare. See also Luca Bianchi’s essay in this volume.

39 For extended comments on the Latin and vernacular audiences of the Ethics, see Lines, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics in the Renaissance’ and ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism’. For the various contexts in which ethics was discussed, see also my essay in the present volume.

40 See Strack, ‘Piety, Wisdom and Temperance in Fifteenth-Century Germany’.



12 David A. Lines

conduits of the vernacular.41 Especially noteworthy, however, is the growing role of women as participants in discussions of ethics. Although we know of no female commentators on Aristotle’s Ethics, women increasingly wrote on moral themes both in the vernacular and in Latin. The Tuscan letters of Alessandra Macigni Strozzi (1406–61) to her Florentine sons living in exile are full not only of practi-cal detail, but also of warnings and advice of a moral nature.42 From the end of the fifteenth century, the vernacular production of Italian women consisted mainly in verse written in the newly popular vogue of Petrarchism; here, discussions of love, loss, and other themes could also constitute (as they had for Petrarch) a springboard for moral reflection. Women’s writings in Latin were even more directly connected to ethics. In 1451 Isotta Nogarola (1418–61) penned a seri-ous philosophical disquisition of an ethical-religious nature (Quaestio utrum Adam vel Eva magis peccaverit), in the form of an imagined dialogue between herself and a Venetian patrician, the humanist Lodovico Foscarini.43 At the end of the fifteenth century, Laura Cereta wrote a collection of Latin letters based on moral topics.44 In verse, her contemporary Angela Nogarola produced a Liber de virtutibus; in 342 lines this poem sequentially discusses paired virtues and vices, such as superbia and humilitas, ira and mansuetudo, tristitia and laetitia.45 All of this shows that the multiplication of genres and channels of ethical discussion was linked to a broadening of authorship and audience.

Themes and Solutions

So far I have argued that Renaissance ethics developed in a very different context and adopted new approaches and genres with respect to the medieval period. It is now the moment to ask whether anything changed in terms of the issues that were discussed and the solutions that were proposed.

Since Aristotelianism continued to be the dominant philosophical tradition, many of the problems discussed in medieval treatments of philosophy remained alive in Renaissance ones. Issues particularly relevant to ethics were, for example,

41 Sanson, Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del Cinquecento.42 Cocco, ‘Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi’; additional bibliography in Cox, Women’s Writing

in Italy, p. 265, n. 53.43 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, p. 11; text in Nogarola, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed.

by Ábel, ii, 185–216. Now see Nogarola, Complete Writings, ed. and trans. by King and Robin.44 Most recently, see Gill, ‘Fraught Relations in the Letters of Laura Cereta’.45 In Nogarola, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. by Ábel, ii, 312–26; see also Parker, ‘Latin

and Greek Poetry’.



Introduction 13

the role of the intellect or the will in the generation of virtue, the essence of hap-piness, the relationship of the virtues, the process of moral education, the validity of Aristotle’s definition of justice, the place of the passions in the life of the virtu-ous man, and the subject matter and method of ethics. Were topics such as these posed or solved any differently in the Renaissance, or did Renaissance interpret-ers mainly repeat the conclusions of medieval philosophers, whose works were well known to them?

One answer is that new dimensions were added to earlier debates and that new points were emphasized or new interpretations given. For example, Protestant interpreters raised much more sharply than medieval commentators the ques-tion of the role of grace in developing the habitus of virtue, and Aristotle’s views of friendship were applied more specifically to man’s relationship to God. As mentioned above, some humanists insisted on the importance of the active ver-sus the contemplative life (a point, however, on which there was no complete agreement)46 or stressed the positive relationship between pleasure and virtue. Some interpreters even offered, quite against Aristotle’s own teaching, ingenious but lame justifications for letting young people hear ethics in the classroom.47

On the originality of Renaissance solutions within ethics, however, scholars disagree. As the essays by Poppi and Ebbersmeyer underline, the very concept of happiness and the understanding of the role played by the passions within eth-ics underwent fundamental transformations in the Renaissance. According to their research, these are not minor shifts of emphasis, although they can be tied to the much broader cultural and intellectual changes introduced by the humanist movement. Langer’s essay comes to a different conclusion: his examination of vir-tue ethics and advice books for princes finds little difference between Renaissance and earlier formulations of the topic of princely virtues. For him, the real change is not in the general framework or in the solutions provided, but in the genres and means of presentation of the issues.

One element responsible for these disagreements is doubtless that of sources: literary works may give a very different impression from philosophical ones. But there can be little doubt that, although some viewpoints and positions remained unchanged, on others there were bound to be some (perhaps even considerable) shifts over the course of three centuries.

Let us consider as an example the Renaissance debate concerning the status of ethics and its relationship to other branches of moral philosophy. Given the

46 See Kristeller, ‘The Active and the Contemplative Life’.47 Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 199–201, 260, 272–79, 302, 318–

20, 337–38, and passim.



14 David A. Lines

centrality of Aristotle’s works, in practice this discussion was about the relation-ship of the Ethics, Economics, and Politics. As we have seen, earlier views, cham-pioned especially by Eustratius of Nicaea and Thomas Aquinas, had emphasized the tripartite nature of moral philosophy, geared as it was to the concerns of the individual, the family, and the broader political community. In this scheme, each of the three corresponding works in the Aristotelian moral canon provided both the doctrinal teachings and the practical know-how necessary to exercise virtue, even though politics might (according to some interpreters, including Thomas) be superior to ethics. Especially in the sixteenth century, however, an increas-ingly popular view (borrowed from Averroes, Albertus Magnus, John Buridan, and Gerard of Odo) saw the Ethics as providing the doctrinal underpinning for the Politics, which was regarded instead as a practical book.48 (Ironically, politics would come to be viewed as a science, especially from the end of the sixteenth century on.)49 According to this view, moral philosophy was therefore bipartite rather than tripartite, and the Ethics was thus theoretical, not a mix of theory and practice. This may have been in part a strategy to pry ethics away from rhetoric and reclaim it for philosophy, but it meant that it was possible for ethical dis-cussions to become ever more conceptual, without for a moment implying that moral philosophy as a whole was not practical. This approach provided ethics with a high status akin to that of the theoretical sciences. It would eventually lead to the abstraction of Spinoza’s Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, published shortly after his death in 1677.

New views of ethics were not, however, limited to a different perspective on the status of moral philosophy and the interrelationship of its subparts, or even (as Kessler argues in his chapter) to a different emphasis on the practical aspects of ethics. Issues of substance included powerful debates about the nature of the soul and, by implication, about the role played by the soul’s various parts in the generation of virtue. Pietro Pomponazzi’s famous views about the immortality of the soul developed at around the same time as a furious debate was taking place between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus on the freedom of the will. Disagreements on the goodness of human nature, man’s place in the universe, weakness of will, and other problems reflected increasingly polarized ideas as to how people (and therefore society as a whole) should be reformed and governed.50

48 For a fuller explanation of the two views, see Lines, Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ in the Italian Renais-sance, pp. 123–27, 143–49.

49 See Scattola, Scientia architectonica.50 For these issues, see Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought;



Introduction 15

Lines of Enquiry

In this final section, I would like to offer some observations about how the field of Renaissance ethics has developed, what we have tried to achieve in this volume, and what avenues of research remain to be explored.51

Especially when compared to studies of ancient or medieval ethics, until recently Renaissance developments have received relatively little attention, despite the fact that good overviews of philosophy in the period have been avail-able for some time.52 Although there had been some earlier explorations (most notably related to humanism, Renaissance concepts of man, and the like),53 Renaissance moral philosophy started to be studied much more intensively in the wake of Jill Kraye’s seminal 1988 article, which offered the first real map of the subject.54 We are now starting to see an increasing number of modern translations or editions of Renaissance ethical works, which is an encouraging development.55 Several collective explorations of Renaissance ethics have also begun to appear.56 The present volume consolidates much of what has been achieved, while also pointing in several new directions.

for an example of Italian vernacular debates on the freedom of the will, see Lines, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Aristotelianism’.

51 For a general historiographical overview, see also Frank, ‘Die zweite Welle der Wieder-aneignung des “Corpus Aristotelicum”’ and Quondam, Forma del vivere, pp. 35–70. The latter particularly notes developments in Italy, France, and the English-speaking world.

52 The best overviews in English are Schmitt and others, The Cambridge History of Renais-sance Philosophy, Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, and Hankins, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy. Also useful are Vasoli, Le filosofie del Rinascimento and Kessler, Die Philosophie der Renaissance.

53 See especially Trinkaus, ‘In Our Image and Likeness’; Garin, ‘La fortuna dell’etica aristo-telica’.

54 Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’.55 See, for example, Kraye, Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts;

Ebbersmeyer, Kessler, and Schmeisser, Ethik des Nützlichen; Vermigli, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, ed. by Campi and McLelland; and the series Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca Versiones Latinae Termporis Resuscitarum Litterarum (CAGL), ed. by Charles H. Lohr (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), which offers facsimiles of Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle.

56 See Kraye and Saarinen, Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity and special issue of Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale; and Bejczy, Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages. Ebbersmeyer and Kessler, Ethik — Wissenschaft oder Lebenskunst? ranges from antiquity to the early modern period.



16 David A. Lines

Scholarship on Renaissance ethics has largely developed out of a broader surge of interest in Renaissance Aristotelianism. René-Antoine Gauthier placed his historical survey of ethics (including substantial descriptions of the subject in the Middle Ages and Renaissance) in the introduction to a French translation of Aristotle’s Ethics.57 The impulse to study Renaissance ethics was facilitated, in no small way, by a number of repertories of Aristotle editions and commentaries and by the analysis of Aristotelianism as a Renaissance cultural movement by eminent authorities such as Charles B. Schmitt.58 Several scholars, including Jill Kraye, Antonino Poppi, Luca Bianchi, Eckhard Kessler, Ullrich Langer, and myself have come to Renaissance ethics through strong interests in the Aristotelian tradition.

In a way this is as it should be: as we have seen, Aristotle’s moral philosophy was part of the shared cultural heritage of educated people across Europe, and even humanists were strongly influenced by his writings.59 As this volume points out, however, other influential moral perspectives and channels should not be neglected. Stoic ethics and its renewed appreciation by Justus Lipsius and his circle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are now a central concern for many his-torians of Renaissance and early modern philosophy. By comparison, we have far fewer studies about fifteenth-century Stoicism or about Platonic and Epicurean ethics.60 Also, little work has been done on the moral influence of authors typi-cally taught within the grammar and rhetoric curriculum. Cicero’s shorter moral works (e.g. De officiis, De senectute, De amicitia) were studied in schools all over Europe, and his De finibus and Tusculan Disputations were also well known. To what extent did these works help mould Renaissance ethical discussions? And how did the widespread interpretation of Homer and Virgil’s works as moral allegories (for example by Cristoforo Landino in Florence and Filippo Beroaldo the Elder in Bologna)61 reflect ethical debates or contribute new ideas? We also need a much better sense of how the Bible and the patristic tradition influenced Renaissance ethics. This observation may seem tame enough, but it is surprising how seldom scholars have shown in practice an awareness that, for Renaissance thinkers, antiquity embraced both pagan and Christian writings and doctrines.

57 Gauthier, ‘Introduction’, pp. 147–202.58 Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries; Cranz, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions; Schmitt,

Aristotle and the Renaissance.59 Ebbersmeyer, ‘Feind oder Verbündeter?’.60 This gap has been partially closed by a new study on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century

ethics in Italy; see Ebbersmeyer, Homo agens.61 See Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, pp. 170–71; Poppi, ‘Beroaldo e Codro’.



Introduction 17

Secondly, since many pioneers in the field of Renaissance ethics have been experts in intellectual history and the classical tradition, they have tended to focus on the Latin production of humanist and scholastic writers, who privi-leged this medium as the European language of scholarship. Many of these works remain understudied and unfamiliar to the larger public; yet to a large degree modern scholars have been successful in emphasizing the importance of Latin works to the Renaissance through a series of important initiatives such as the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum and the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Regrettably, this enthusiasm may have gone too far in countering nine-teenth-century prejudices against Latin, resulting in an unconscious adoption of Renaissance prejudices against the vernacular. For it is clear — as Ullrich Langer and Luca Bianchi have demonstrated62 — that Italian, French, Spanish, English, and other vernaculars could function as powerful vehicles for the discussion of ethics; and we now realize that vernacular works were not only important chan-nels for the diffusion of new perspectives in ethics, but could constitute impor-tant interpretations in their own right. Views which equated Latin with learned and the vernacular with popular culture are looking increasingly dated, as we begin to appreciate that vernacular discussions could be just as philosophically challenging and subtle as (and sometimes even more so than) their Latin counter-parts. It is therefore crucial for future studies of Renaissance ethics to give serious attention to vernacular commentaries, treatises, and other such works, which so far have been very much at the margins of the field and for which until recently we lacked even the most basic repertory.63

Furthermore, at present we know too little about ethical discussions outside of the commentary tradition. Commentaries tend to be explicit and very reward-ing for illustrating developments in method and doctrine, and the recognition of their importance has been a fairly recent accomplishment in the field of Renaissance thought. Despite the seminal contributions by Schmitt, Lohr, and others, many such works still remain to be studied. It is striking, however, that genres such as translations, compendia, florilegia, dialogues, and treatises have been barely explored and continue to be very hard even to identify. A recent rep-ertory of philosophical works compiled by Wilhelm Risse is of considerable help

62 See their essays in this volume, but also Langer, Perfect Friendship and Bianchi, ‘Per una storia dell’aristotelismo “volgare”’.

63 The situation is now being addressed through a research project which I am leading, with funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400–c. 1650’. A census of vernacular works has now been published; see Refini and others, Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy.



18 David A. Lines

in exploring the range of genres associated with ethics: an entire volume is dedi-cated to writings of moral philosophy published between the beginning of print and 1800.64 Risse’s volume has the merit of including contributions (even anony-mous ones) from all philosophical perspectives and written in very diverse gen-res; it lists works in both Latin and the vernacular. Even so the repertory is selec-tive, since Risse does not include other related works (such as orations, letters, histories, biographies, commonplace books, plays, and poems) and since manu-script works are excluded. The last point is important, because the discussion of ethical matters in manuscript continued (sometimes very intensively) into the age of print and well beyond 1600. In this volume we have tried to underline the relevance of informal works as well as commentaries and to point to the impor-tance of both the vernacular and the Latin traditions. But the extent to which this was possible was limited by the range of existing scholarship. We hope that much more work will be done in this area in coming years.

A further challenge concerns the geographical range of ethical discussions. At present we know a fair amount about how ethics developed in Italy (at least according to surviving works in Latin), and how this differed from the approach of the early Protestant reformers, particularly interpreters of Aristotle such as Melanchthon. Nevertheless, we are only slowly coming to appreciate the role of less-known French, German, and Swiss writers (e.g. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Theodor Zwinger) in the development of ethics in the sixteenth century.65 Despite the importance of England for Renaissance polit-ical ideas, we know very little about its contributions to ethics. Relevant studies for Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and other European areas are likewise extremely few, particularly in English. Nor do we have a good understanding of Byzantine ethics and its relationship with the Western tradition, although we may hope for improvements here, particularly as Byzantine philosophy develops into a recognized field of scholarship.66 We have encouraged our contributors to roam as widely as possible across Europe and even to its little-studied overseas colonies. But much more work will need to be done before we have even a rough outline of developments beyond Italy, France, and central Europe.

64 Risse, Bibliographia philosophica vetus.65 See, for example, Kaluza, ‘Les Cours communs sur l’Éthique à Nicomaque’. On the three

individuals named, see my articles ‘Lefèvre and French Aristotelianism’, ‘Il metodo dell’etica nella scuola padovana’, and ‘Theodor Zwinger’s Vision of Ethics’.

66 See Kupriev, ‘The Modern Study of Byzantine Philosophy’; Podskalsky, Von Photios zu Bessarion.



Introduction 19

A similar imbalance characterizes our knowledge of the Renaissance cultural and institutional contexts of ethical discussion. Many intellectual historians of the Renaissance are deeply interested in humanism and tend to slight or ignore the contributions of scholasticism. They have focused on schools, informal cir-cles, and academies (more rarely, on courts) as settings in which humanist ideals were increasingly discussed or embodied. Often the documentation about these contexts is scanty and subject to sharply different interpretations, so that little agreement exists among scholars as to whether, for example, humanist schools were indeed places of moral instruction and, if so, what ideals educators wanted their students to practice. Slowly, however, scholars are starting to acknowledge that a concern with ethics was not an innovation or a monopoly of the human-ist movement. Universities and schools of the religious orders had been teaching ethics for centuries and continued to do so in the Renaissance. Although in this volume we have tried to take into account recent studies in all of these contexts, it will be of special value in the future to have a better understanding of how Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinian Hermits (among others) thought about ethics and taught it in the schools of their orders.

The field of Renaissance ethics will also need to continue to move away from the conventional ‘history of philosophy’ model of focusing on major (and only male) figures. General trends are best studied through the works of second-rank writers, who tend to be more representative than the ‘greats’ of literature and thought, however marked their influence. Many recent studies have already shown the way, by combining intellectual and cultural history. Perhaps the field will, in the future, be kinder to the ethical concerns expressed by women, mer-chants, soldiers, peasants, and others whose voices may still be heard or recon-structed. We have not attempted, in this volume, to corral these figures into a separate chapter, but have preferred to leave them free to rub shoulders, as the contributors thought fit, with their ‘betters’. We are conscious, however, that their treatment still leaves much to be desired.

Further studies are urgently needed into various themes discussed within Renaissance ethics but not fully explored in this volume. The roles of the will, intellect, and fate in the exercise of virtue may seem like an obvious topic, but we still know too little about Renaissance debates on this issue,67 which was of particular interest to Spanish interpreters such as Luis de Molina. Although the

67 Good starting points include Poppi, ‘Libertà e fato nel pensiero’ and Knebel, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit. An excellent and recent treatment is also Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought.



20 David A. Lines

topic of friendship has received some attention,68 much more remains to be said, especially since religious discussions flourished in the sixteenth century on the possibility of friendship with God. Several questions remain unanswered con-cerning the moral virtues as well; for example, how was Aristotle’s view of justice in the Ethics applied by Protestant writers to problems of soteriology? How was the pagan catalogue of virtues reconciled with Christian ideals such as love, hope, and patience? To what extent did a resurgent Platonism lead to the identification of the morally Good with the Beautiful or instead with the True? How and why did interpreters of different confessional backgrounds discuss the topic of heroic virtue?69 And did the interminable sixteenth-century discussions about nobility lead to new views and solutions?

Finally, although we believe that one of the strengths of the present volume lies in bringing together the insights of literary scholars, intellectual historians, and philosophers, there is room for further groundbreaking scholarship by con-sidering the interconnections between ethics and a range of other disciplines which touched on it — rhetoric, music, politics, law, medicine, theology, and biblical studies. As noted above, numerous topics of an ethical nature were dis-cussed in Renaissance theological treatises, in commentaries on the Scriptures, in legal deliberations, in musical theory, and in medical manuals (which sometimes asked whether it was licit, for example, for a physician to treat an enemy). There is much that awaits discovery through collaboration among specialists in different fields. Likewise, we need to remember that texts are not the only relevant sources for Renaissance ethics: one must also consider the products of Renaissance visual and material culture. The significance of emblem books ought to be obvious; yet they have been studied almost exclusively from a formal and stylistic standpoint, with very little attention given to what they might tell us about developments in thinking about and representing virtue.70 Paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and cassoni are likewise rich sources; although such items, along with domestic interiors, have occasionally been explored for their expression of virtues such as magnificence,71 one also wonders whether they reflect particular views about the organization of the virtues, how they should be represented or enacted, or how

68 Langer, Perfect Friendship; Sère, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge.69 For interesting comments on this problem, see Saarinen, ‘Virtus heroica’, pp. 108–11; see

also Saarinen’s essay in the present volume.70 Ann Moss’s essay in this volume is a notable exception.71 Cole, Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue. See

also Berger, ‘The Ethics of Posing’.



Introduction 21

to acquire virtue. A different way of approaching similar questions is to ask how the act of viewing — or reading — specific works of art and literature or attend-ing performances (of music and drama) in the Renaissance affected the ethical views of the audience involved.72 While we cannot investigate all of these subjects ourselves, we hope that the present collection will not only offer a much-needed overview of current scholarship in Renaissance ethics, but also encourage new explorations by others.

72 See the discussion in Grossman, ‘Introduction’.



22 David A. Lines

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Introduction 23

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Introduction 25

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Documents

Introduction to volume Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society