Episode 50: The Granddaddy of Netherlandish Humanism

Back to History of the Netherlands

At the end of episode 49, we said that we were going to move away from the political part of the story of the History of the Netherlands for a while to instead focus on some of the other important societal developments that were happening concurrently at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries. To be honest, perhaps it is because we have taken quite a long break, or maybe because of the change of direction we want to make now, but we have found it rather difficult to write this episode. The 16th century saw so many radical developments in such a vast variety of subjects that the prospect of somehow covering this all in a satisfactory way in this podcast without being forever consumed by it is, to put it lightly, daunting, bordering on overwhelming. So bear with us over the next few episodes as we, in our typical way, blithely set off in a new direction and attempt to lay foundations to explain how a new zeitgeist of education and learning that had originated in the Italian peninsula in the 14th century, took hold in the Low Countries in the 15th. As usual, it is not possible nor is it our intention to cover every single facet of every single topic which we bring up in this podcast, so please don’t be too disappointed if we fail to bring up your favourite 15th/16th century Renaissance humanist. Cool? Alright. Let’s go.

Episode artwork by Steven Straatemans

Mediaeval universities

What we want to do in this episode is touch upon the nature of higher education in western-Europe in general and delve into how significant factors contributed to its changing development over the 14th and 15th centuries. The first universities in Europe emerged in the 12th century and by the end of the 15th century could be found in cities from Italy to England. They were not institutions meant purely for the sake of educational growth, but rather corporate bodies given vestiges of independence in return for upholding convention in thought and ideas. As Professor James Hankins put it in his text on Humanism, Scholasticism and Renaissance, “The new corporations of masters and students, known as studia generalia or universities, were allowed to govern themselves, under the mostly nominal authority of a bishop, in return for an undertaking that licentious behaviour by students and dangerous speculation by masters – what we would call ‘‘intellectual freedom’’ –would be reined in. Thought-control was indeed the chief aim of the new corporations, at least initially. The university made sure that every matriculating student was placed under a master who would be responsible for his ‘‘life and science,’’ his good behaviour and attendance at prescribed lectures.”

What would a university experience have looked like before the intellectual wave of Renaissance Humanism came sweeping across the board in the 15th century? The first university in the Low Countries was the University of Leuven, founded in 1425. The university had four faculties; namely canon law, civil law, medicine and the “seven liberal arts”, which were divided into two groups: the quadrivium of the sciences (music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy) and the trivium of the humanities (logic, grammar and rhetoric). Soon after its founding, a theology faculty was also added to the University of Leuven after it received special permission from Pope Eugene IV. 

In general, to go to university you did not need to necessarily have had prior schooling nor be proficient at Latin, although it would have helped a lot as everything was written and taught in Latin. To gain admission, you generally just had to pay a fee (which was the real test) and then swear a formal oath. You were then a student who could attach themselves to a master under whom you would study to gain a bachelor’s degree, which would take 3-5 years. The masters had earned their authority by also completing at least one master’s degree, one of which required a further 1 or 2 years study. According to historian Edward Grant in Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, Students’ “academic fates were subject to his jurisdiction, and he was, accordingly, expected to introduce the students to the university community and to university life. He also prepared his students for examinations by seeing that they met the various test requirements in the proper sequence. Presumably, the master also laid out a course of study for his students whereby they attended his lectures over a period of three or four years and perhaps also took suggested classes offered by other masters. The selection of a master by a student was probably made on the basis of personal criteria, which might involve some considerations such as geography, family connections, and friendships. It seems likely that master-student clusters allowed for more personalised relationships within the more formal and perhaps forbidding institutional structure of the university as a whole.” From the appearance of the first universities until the 14th century, most university learning across Europe was done largely according to the philosophy of scholasticism, although like with everything there were differences between all institutions. 

There would be the lectio, or lectures. You would have ordinary versions of lectures that would be held in the mornings by an active teaching master. These were the core of the curriculum and the key vehicle for masters to present students with the texts that made up the syllabus. Extraordinary lectures would be held occasionally around the ordinary ones, which might also be given by a student and not just a master. Often there would be a period of meditatio, so you could reflect upon the lecture. There might then be a quaestio, in which questions could be asked of the master. In the case of unresolved conflict between the texts, there was a disputatio, or disputation. Ordinary disputations could be held once per week and they required the active participation of students, as opposed to the passive listening of the lectures. In disputations, the presiding master would present a question relevant to the text or texts which would be followed by a formal debate between students.

The influence of Aristotle

There is scant evidence of the actual lived classroom experience of masters and students in university classrooms of this period, but we do know the conventional structures that defined the way texts, ideas and topics were taught, learned and debated. These structures had been integrated within the establishment of European Christendom and their foundation was largely the work of a pagan Greek called Aristotle who had lived about two thousand years earlier. Luckily for us, this is not a History of Philosophy podcast! Woooo-hooooo. So we are not going to go into this deeply at all. Essentially though, a collection of six of Aristotle’s works (which were Categories, On Interpretation, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations) had been grouped together into a collection called Organon. Organon is widely seen as the first ever formal study of logic. The word Organon means instrument or tool in Greek, and although Aristotle himself never gave his works this title, it was seen by his admirers as a tool for careful thinking which could be applied to any discipline. In these writings, Aristotle goes into excruciatingly meticulous detail explaining how exactly words describe the world (he creates a list of 10 categories of “kinds” or “things things that are said”), how true logical propositions are formed and how arguments are structured, amongst a lot of other stuff.

Now, a pretty important fact to remember about Aristotle is that he had lived in Greece in the 4th century BCE and had, of course, been writing in Greek. After the collapse of the Roman empire in the west, knowledge of the Greek language had declined and Aristotle’s works were mostly lost to Western Europe, save for Latin translations of a few of his works which had been made in the 6th century by a guy named Boethius. Boethius had planned to translate all the works of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but only managed to complete translations (and commentaries on) Porphyry’s Isagoge (or ‘Introduction’ to logic and philosophy), as well as Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation. Boethius also wrote his own textbooks on logic and philosophy, and all of this, alongside the philosophical and theological works of Augustine of Hippo, became the most important foundations for education up until the 12th century. In the wake of the Roman empire’s collapse in the West, the Catholic Church filled the void that was left behind. By the 12th century, pretty much all efforts at education were happening in monastic or church schools which primarily had the goal to educate the children of aristocrats or to train people for a life in service to the Church, as either clergymen, monks or clerks. As such, everything they learned was wrapped up in a Christian philosophical outlook. Perhaps this Christian outlook on philosophy is best summed up by Boethius himself at the end of a text he wrote about the Holy Trinity: “But if you are in any point of another opinion, examine carefully what I have said, and if possible, reconcile faith and reason.” 

The rediscovery of Greek works

For the sake of brevity we are going to fast forward a bit here and just say that as a result of the Reconquista in Spain, the Norman conquest of Sicily in 1061 and the crusades into the Holy Land in the 12th and 13th centuries, there was a wave of interest by Europeans into knowledge which had been accumulated and preserved by Arab scholars. Thanks to the efforts of translators such as Gerard of Cremona, Willem van Moerbeke and James of Venice, works by Greek, Roman and Arabic writers such as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Archimedes and Averroes, amongst so many others, which had been lost to Western Europe but had survived in the Arab world were translated from Arabic, Hebrew and (more importantly later) Greek into Latin. Philosophers worked to incorporate the Aristotelean worldview and synthesise it with Christianity. The most notable was Thomas Aquinas, who in his Summa Theologica argued that both faith and reason were necessary to understand the world. The appearance of all these new writings, many written by pagans or non-Christians, represented a threat to the authority of the Catholic Church and in 1277 the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, made up a list of 219 Aristotelian philosophical and theological theses that were condemned for being heretical, including points made by Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas was canonised by the Church in 1323, however, and two years later the condemnation of 1277 was overturned and the Thomist philosophy became the theological and philosophical basis for Roman Catholic church doctrine.

One area of study which was greatly affected by the influx of these new works by Aristotle was the field of logic. Aristotle laid out a system of argumentation based around syllogisms, or deductions. A syllogism is normally represented in a three line argument, in which two premises which are assumed to be true, necessarily lead to a true conclusion. The classic example of this is “All men are mortal”, “Socrates is a man”, therefore “Socrates is mortal”. From this, Aristotle explains a system of argumentation called dialectic, in which two people holding opposing points of view engage in a discussion using the logical principles he has set out. He begins Book 1 of Topics with: “Our treatise proposes to find a line of inquiry whereby we shall be able to reason from opinions that are generally accepted about every problem propounded to us, and also shall ourselves, when standing up to an argument, avoid saying anything that will obstruct us”. In a nutshell, the idea is to learn how to win any argument. He writes further: “it is useful, because the ability to raise searching difficulties on both sides of a subject will make us detect more easily the truth and error about the several points that arise…for dialectic is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries.” The art of dialectic is for a questioner to ask yes/no questions to an opponent who is attempting to defend a thesis, in such a way that they will eventually contradict themselves. Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but also again, not the History of Philosophy podcast. So in those disputations in the mediaeval universities, students would engage in this sort of adversarial dialectic debate. 

In the centuries following the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works on logic, the field developed greatly due to thinkers such as Peter of Spain (who wrote Tractatus or as it is often called Summule Logicales or “Little Logicals”), which would become one of the most influential textbooks in mediaeval universities), as well as Jean Buridan and William of Ockham, famous for his razor. To quote Lodi Nauta, a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Groningen: “The divergences between scholastic thinkers are immense but what these thinkers have in common is the conviction that an analysis of the world and of ourselves as knowing subjects and moral beings, while perhaps starting with what we daily perceive and think, will soon lead away from this common world, introducing all kinds of entities and corresponding vocabulary: form and matter, act and potency, universals, transcendentals, predictables, substantial and accidental forms, formal distinctions, intentions, species, active and potential intellect, categories, all kinds of distinctions in the analysis of language and argumentation, and so on – it makes reading scholastic authors philosophically immensely rewarding but often also very difficult and puzzling.” Mediaeval logicians developed all sorts of systems and theories, using the tool they had at their disposal at the time, the Latin language (as opposed to the more modern tool of symbolic notation) that is used in logic today. As such, their writing is notoriously complicated and baffling to the untrained eye. As Terence Parsons writes in the introduction of his book “Articulating Medieval Logic”: “Logicians made this work in part by stipulating how Latin is to be understood, holding e.g. that surface order of words determines their semantic scope, so that a sentence having Latin words in this order: ‘A woman owns each cat’ is understood to have exactly one reading, meaning that there is a woman such that she owns every cat.” This leads to arguments such as “Some farmer’s every donkey sees every horse which a merchant owns. Therefore not every horse no donkey sees.” If that makes sense to you, well then, congratulations you’re probably a medieval logician.

The origins of humanism

Whilst all of this was going on, a new trend in education was beginning to take hold in Italy. In the 14th century, scholars emerged there who were analysing ancient works with a greater focus on the style of Latin used by ancient writers. One of these early Italian “humanists” (a term that would emerge in the 19th century) was Francesco Petrarca, a poet and scholar who found a collection of Cicero’s letters that nobody alive had ever seen. Over the course of his relatively long life, he produced numerous works, becoming most known for his poetry and letters which he wrote to the very-long-dead Cicero. He sought to emulate the Latin language that he read in Cicero and the other ancients’ words, as opposed to the dry and scholastically complex Latin that had developed in the Church and universities ever since. He also took aim at the extent to which scholastic philosophy leaned on Aristotle. He himself was more a Plato man, but argued in general that no single philosopher should just be followed without question. Rather, as Christians, he and everybody else already had a theological position to stand by, and did not necessarily need a philosophical one as laid out by one pagan, millennia before. As Petrarca himself wrote, “Now, I believe that Aristotle was a great man and a polymath. But he was still human and could therefore have been ignorant of some things, or even of many things.” 

Petrarca and the humanists who followed believed that the most important thing to learn was how to be eloquent and how to live a virtuous life and that the best way to do this was by reading the works of classical authors. Again, to quote Petrarca: “For it is one thing to know, and another to love; one thing to understand, and another to will. I don’t deny that [Aristotle] teaches us the nature of virtue. But reading him offers us none of those exhortations, or only a very few, that goad and inflame our minds to love virtue and hate vice ... What good is there in knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn’t make us love it? What point is there in knowing vice, if this knowledge doesn’t make us shun it? By heaven, if the will is corrupt, an idle and irresolute mind will take the wrong path when it discovers the difficulty of the virtues and the alluring ease of the vices”. This is summed up by James Hankins as follows, “The humanists claimed that study of good letters made people better, more virtuous, wiser, and more eloquent. It made them worthy to exercise power and made them better citizens and subjects when not exercising power.” The values which are often heralded within or ascribed to humanism are such things as civic virtue and celebration of the arts and culture with humans at the centre. In general, this became known as studia humanitatis, and went in different directions than the Church-based studia divinitatis that had dominated education for so long.

Over his life, Petrarca set about building a position against the inflexibility of scholasticism. He developed, in the words of James Hankin, “the standard humanist critique of scholastic philosophy... Petrarca’s model of culture effectively reverses Augustine’s, arguing that human life in this world has its own structure of ends and means, and that this structure, though ultimately temporal and finite, is nevertheless not reducible to what is necessary to achieve eternal life. Since the moral life of human beings is autonomous, it demands a form of culture suited to it, a culture that makes us better as human beings in society and in this life, a culture that does not rely on divine grace.” 

Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, the scholars around Europe who would become known as humanists set about with the core focus of bringing the style of the ancients and the values within back to within the functioning realms of contemporary society. Following on from Petrarca, humanist thinkers such as Lorenzo Valla scorned scholasticism and its adherents and went about using their linguistic and textual analytical skills to cast a new eye over ancient works. In 1440, Valla wrote “who ever wrote on any science or art without criticizing his predecessors? What reason could there be for writing unless to correct the errors, omissions or excesses of others?”. He did this shortly after having proven that the “Donation of Constantine”, a supposed Roman imperial decree made by Constantine the Great in the 4th century which handed temporal power over the western Roman empire to the Pope, was a forgery which had actually been written centuries later. Whoops! Perhaps the best summation of the humanist critique on scholasticism was made by Juan Luis Vives, who wrote “[Scholastic dialecticians] have invented for themselves certain meanings of words contrary to all civilized custom and usage, so that they may seem to have won their argument when they are not understood. For when they are understood, it is apparent to everyone that nothing could be more pointless, nothing more irrational. So, when their opponent has been confused by strange and unusual meanings and word-order, by wondrous suppositions, wondrous ampliations, restrictions, appellations, they then decree for themselves, with no public decision or [verdict] a triumph over an adversary not conquered but confused by new feats of verbal legerdemain”

Although renaissance humanism first sprouted in Italy, it would also take root in the Low Countries. Despite his Spanish name, the man who we just quoted, Juan Luis Vives, actually spent the bulk of his adult life in Bruges. So in the second part of this episode, we are going to head back into our swamp and take a look at one individual who is often labelled as the father of North European renaissance humanism, Rudolph Agricola.

Brethren of the Common Life

We last properly spoke about education in the low countries in episode 23, Over-achieving Overijsselers and Holland vs Hansa. That episode was set in the latter half of the 14th century, covering how a man called Geert Grote began preaching and facilitating a more simple and pious lifestyle, turning his house into a shelter for poor women. This led to the religious reform movement Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devotion and foundation of communities known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. With some exceptions, such as the famous Windesheim monastery near Zwolle, the participants of these communities were lay members of society - so not belonging formally to the clergy - who nonetheless lived in a monastic fashion, in alignment with the principles of Modern Devotion. By 1500 this had spread throughout the Low Countries and into western and southern part of what is now Germany. Schools, communities and workshops emerged which put their members to work, often in the production and copying of illuminated manuscripts and texts. This work required literacy, something which Grote himself had advocated that people be accomplished in and which was a focus of the schools that the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life set up, using Modern Devotion as their guide. 

This podcast narrative is soon going to reach a period of immense religious upheaval. Historians have long made the connection between the existence of Common Life schools and religious communities functioning outside of church authority and how susceptible the societies of the low countries will prove to be to the surge of Reformation Protestantism. Jonathan Israel, in his seminal Dutch Republic from the 90s wrote: “The emphasis on literacy, and schooling, and removing the spiritual life of the individual from outward, formal religion, paved the way for the spiritual upheaval which was to follow, the linkage being reflected in the emergence, and early flourishing, of Christian humanism in the north-east Netherlands, the heartland of the former Devotio Moderna.” Having said that, however, these Brethren of the Common Life schools were hyper focused on the establishment theology of the time. At its core it was a religious movement that was set on instilling scriptural values that informed regular people on how to express their relationship to Christ. As Christine Kooi puts it in her recent work Reformation in the Low Countries, “It is more useful to think of Modern Devotion as an example of the depths of devotion among lay Netherlanders that late medieval Christianity could inspire.” 

Where these schools did “pave the way” for the events to follow, is in how they affected the literacy rates of the societies whose young men and women were channelled through them. To quote…myself from episode 23, but referencing work done by scholars Bas Ter Weel, Dinand Webbink and Semih Akçomak, “Through the copying of books, and eventually printing after the invention of the press, by creating educational institutions and promoting learning for all, the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life helped raise the level of literacy in the Low Countries to a much higher level than other contemporary and nearby societies. In the Netherlands in 1500 the number of book editions created per capita was 25% higher than in Germany, 3 times higher than France, around 8 times higher than in Spain and Portugal, and 10 times higher than England. In addition to this, the presence of a Brethren of the Common Life house also played a strong role in city growth in the period between 1400-1560; those cities with a Brethren house grew on average 35% more than those without. This suggests that the strong presence of the Brethren of the Common Life also helped fuel economic growth within the Low Countries in this time period.”  The reason we bring all this up (again) is because the ‘humanist’ educational developments that we spoke about in the first half of this episode, that originated in Italy with people like Petrarca, will begin to shift over the Alps, through the Empire, France and into the Low Countries, especially into the north east area from which this culture of grass-roots schooling had emerged. It was from a small village near Groningen that the person who would become the posterboy for Netherlandish Renaissance Humanism would be born and raised.

Rudolph Huisman is born in Baflo

In either 1443 or 1444, a young woman called Zycka Huisman, likely the daughter of a local, prosperous peasant family, gave birth to a son in Baflo, around 15 km north of Groningen. The baby, called Rudolph, was born out of wedlock. His father was a Baflo cleric and person of local importance, called Hendrick Vries. According to an anecdote from one contemporary, the day that Hendrick was informed of his illegitimate son’s birth was the same day that he was elected abbot to the convent of Selwerd, on the outskirts of Groningen city. This story, though almost certainly false, has Hendrick saying upon hearing the news of his bastard son’s birth: “Very well. Today I have become a father twice.” 

The young Rudolph was given his mother’s name, Huisman, and was raised by her and the bloke she ended up marrying and having more kids with. Later in life, Rudolph Huisman would Latinise his name to Rudolphus Agricola. In Latin, agricola means farmer; a huisman is a farmer who owns a house on a leased plot of land. According to former Associate Professor of Neo-Latin at the University of Groningen, the late Fokke Akkerman, Rudolph’s “illegitimate birth must always have been a painfully hushed-up fact both to Rudolph himself and his family” . He clearly remained connected to his real father, with each of them referring to the other in various correspondences, although never with direct reference to the true paternity. When he was still just a boy, around 10, half the proceeds of a local farm were designated to him by the local bishop, the same one who had promoted his father to the position of abbot. It has been speculated that Rudolph’s education may have been a negotiated part of the job offer. However it came about, this arrangement provided income to Rudolph for the rest of his life and he was officially a person of means.

It’s worth pointing out here that most details of his life come from six different biographies that emerged in the decades after his death, from people who knew or were greatly influenced by him, including the man who would become his intellectual successor in the Low Countries, Desidirius Erasmus. These accounts both collate and contradict with one another in different ways, some mentioning certain things a lot while others not at all. For instance, one very impactful part of Agricola’s life and work was that he lived in Pavia, Italy for seven years, yet only one of the six biographers mention it at all. A lot of work has been done since the 1980s to try and round all of these up into a more coherent understanding. We have leaned heavily on the recent work by Fokke Akerman. It is still true, though, that many aspects of Rudolph Huismans life remain obscure and open to interpretation. What is a lot clearer is the level of influence that Rudolph would end up having on the world around him, but we’ll get to that later. 

As a child, Agricola was clearly intelligent, talented and curious about the world. One of his biographers, Goswinus van Halen, wrote about the young Rudolph’s passion for music: “When Rudolph had been weaned and started to want to play with other children, he developed the greatest admiration for the harmony of sounds and a love of anything having to do with music. Thus it came about that he eagerly listened to the ringing of bells and to flutes, and that one could not give the boy a more welcome present than a flute. As a boy he followed the blind as they went from door to door collecting alms, in order to listen to their hurdy-gurdies; among the shepherds he used to follow bagpipers, hornblowers or shepherd’s pipe players into the field, nor could he be forced to leave them until either fear of the birch or pinching hunger would drive him back home, so much did he love music. In churches he admired only the organs and the paintings.” It’s pretty cool to have a van Halen compliment your musical ability.

Agricola’s education in the Low Countries

When he wasn’t following blind people around listening to their hurdy-gurdies, Rudolf went to school. Another of his biographers, Johann von Pleiningen, wrote of his early education in Groningen “As soon as he was old enough to be susceptible to teaching, he was sent to school at Groningen and there very rapidly mastered grammar, the foundation of all learning”. Although there isn’t any direct evidence one way or the other and different writers on this take different positions, we can tentatively assume that the young Rudolph was educated in a Brethren of the Common Life School. There are, in fact, only two things known concretely about his education via university records. The first is that in the summer of 1456, at the age of twelve, he was enrolled in the University of Erfurt and the second is that he received a master of arts degree at Leuven in 1465. Other details are added by his biographers, like that he got his baccalaureate in Erfurt and that he also studied theology in Cologne, which he mentions a bunch in his own letters but whose university has only very flimsy evidence that he may have studied there.

So what can we say about his time at Leuven? Not much. As Josef Ijsewijn points out in The beginning of Humanist literature in Brabant: “The university of Louvain - to start with - was founded (in 1425) when in Italy humanism had already long passed its childhood…Petrarch had died half a century before, and an outstanding literature mainly in Latin, had developed in Florence, Siena, Naples, Milan, Ferrara etc. It was the age of Bruni, Poggio, Marrasio, Enea Silvio, Valla, Tortelli and many others who excelled in humanistic and in Neo-Latin Literature. If we look at the Netherlands in the same period, then we find there the late middle ages, without one trace worth mentioning of humanistic or even prehumanistic renovation in Latin literature.” Ijsewijn identifies two main reasons why there was little “humanistic” growth in the educational culture of Leuven from its foundation until the death of Charles the Bold. Firstly, it was a theological institution that shunned the work of ancient pagans and, secondly, the ruling Burgundian court and upper echelons were French speaking and influenced. At this time, French haute couture shunned Latin, preferring French translations. There is an argument, however, that a stream of Italian influence flowed into the Low Countries during the extremely pro-Italian court of Charles the Bold between 1467-77. Richard Walsh, in a critique of Ijsewijn, points out that Charles had close, childhood friends growing up at his father’s court who were the sons of powerful Italians. During his rule he also brokered many political alliances with Italian states, including the most powerful ones of Naples, Milan and Venice, while the ruling family of Florence, the Medicis, had an office in Bruges. This meant plenty of high-ranking and well-read Italians hanging around, particularly in Brabant and Flanders. Walsh writes that “Charles the Bold loved to surround himself with foreign ambassadors and he was especially fond of those from Italy, treating them with both honour and intimacy. None of them could truly be described as humanists of the first rank and the nature of their vocation prevented them becoming prolific writers, but most were men of considerable education and some revealed literary or intellectual inclinations.” 

So at the time Agricola was studying in Leuven the fashion of studia humanitatas was seeping into the intellectual circles that were occupied by upper-class and elite members of society, students and teachers from this region and beyond. This was arguably heightened due to the top-down emanation of Italian influence at the court in Brussels. In this context, Agricola was a young man of means who had access to the most privileged possibilities of higher education for commoners that the Low Countries had to offer. At some point after his stay in Leuven, it seems likely that Agricola then journeyed to France where he continued studying further until he was forced to leave due to another of Charles the Bold’s passions, warfare. During the time of Charles the Bold’s wars with Louis XI, which we spent many episodes talking about, there are no records of students from Leuven being in Paris. So where did this intellectually curious guy head to instead? Italy, of course. From 1468 until 1475 Agricola found himself at the renowned University of Pavia, where he first began to study civil law. 

Agricola goes on an Italian holiday

According his biographer Von Pleiningen, whose words will show that he was quite a big fanboy of Agricola: “For the first few years he read Roman law, and did so more to please his family than because that study pleased him. For in this man there lived a spirit too lofty and exalted to allow itself to be humbled to those matters of little weight and minor importance of which (to use his own words) Roman law for the greater part consists. Nor did he tolerate his being shackled to this discipline, especially since he held that it could hardly be practised by anyone with unbroken honesty and integrity. Having therefore relinquished the study of law in order to strike out for higher things, he applied his mind to the more polished literature and arts termed the humanities and in particular to the reading of Cicero and Quintilian”. During this time, he also wrote a biography of Petrarca, that founder of humanism who we spoke about in the first half of this episode. I must say, I find this guy quite relatable, given I too am currently enamoured by an Italian Christian Petracca.  If any of you understand that reference, how good is that? 

After this he hung out in Italy for a few more years, from 1475-79, intent on doing the thing which all his favourite Italian heroes did, learn Greek. So he moved to Ferrara, where he was taught Greek by two of the most famous humanist teachers of the time, Battista Guarino and Ludovico Carbone. Whilst there, he fell in with a circle of other intellectuals from Groningen who had also come to Ferrara intent to receive the trendy, humanist education. He probably also taught classes himself but he never held any official academic position. His talents did not go unnoticed by the establishment and he became a part of the court of the Duke of Ferrara, Ercole d’Este, from whom he received a healthy stipend in return for being his organ player. With the money he received from his musical skills, he bought Greek books and was soon adept enough to translate a bunch of them into Latin. 

Greek was in vogue because in 1453 the Ottomans had sacked and captured Constantinople, exacerbating a migration trend that had accompanied the fall of Christian Byzantium to Muslim Ottomans. Many of these refugees brought with them original Greek texts of the writings of classical authors. There was now a lot more Greek stuff to read and humanist scholars, with their skills, got busy translating what they found, often discovering new information which had been literally lost in translation in previous editions which had often been translated from Greek to Arabic and then to Latin. As we saw with Valla’s discovery that the pope’s temporal authority was based on a forgery, being able to translate and decipher ancient languages and texts is going to contribute greatly to some pretty monumental upheavals pretty damn soon. Agricola must have been known for his oratory skills already when he was invited to the honour of giving the opening address at the beginning of the academic year 1476 at the University of Ferrara’s Arts and Medicine faculty, in front of Duke Ercole d’Este himself. After this speech, however, his reputation went through the roof. Van Halen writes of it: “When he had delivered it, the Italians stood dumbfounded with admiration, hunching their shoulders, as is their wont, asking who was that man and from where. Some replied: he is a Phrygian, others: he is a Frisian from a far corner of the earth, from the northern shore of the Ocean. When they heard this, some Italians started cursing themselves, saying: “This foreigner, born and bred in that uncivilised country, surpasses any native Italian as regards the purity of his Latin speech. Whom do we have among all the Italians who would, if he is compared to this barbarian, not be tongue-tied?” There were many people from Groningen at Ferrara at the time, from whose lips I heard that he delivered the oration almost word for word as it stands in writing“. Whilst there he also got busy copying and editing as many classic Latin writings as he could, such as the works of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.  After over a decade in Italy, Agricola decided it was time to move back to his uncivilised and barbarous homeland. He made a leisurely return through Germany and up into the Low Countries, stopping for a few months in Dillingen, where he stayed at the summer palace of the Bishop of Augsburg, and put the finishing touches on his most famous original work, De Inventione Dialectica. 

In this three part magnum opus, Agricola builds off the work of Aristotle and Boethuis, but also the classical writers who were greatly admired by humanists, such as Cicero and Quintillian. In it, he synthesises dialectic and rhetoric together, creating a theory which emphasises how to use “topics” to find arguments which will be convincing and persuasive to listeners, rather than one which judges the formal validity of arguments. In De Inventione Dialectica, Agricola says “All speech...has this for its end, that one person makes another the sharer of his mind. Now it is clear that three things must be present in all discourse: one who speaks, one who listens, and the subject of the discourse. And three observations are accordingly to be followed in speaking, that the speaker be understood, that the hearer be eager to listen, and that what is said be rendered convincing and be accorded belief. The first is taught by grammar, which discusses the way to speak correctly and clearly; the second by rhetoric, which discovers ornateness and elegance of language and all the devices for captivating the ears; and what remains, it seems, dialectic claims: speaking convincingly on any subject which is expressed in language.” Think about how this goal for dialectic, speaking convincingly, stands in stark contrast to the technically brilliant but utterly confusing medieval Aristotelean logic we described in the first half of the episode. In the other parts of De Inventione Dialectica, Agricola shows how his method of topical analysis can be applied to texts and uses it to analyse one of the writings of his hero, Cicero, demonstrating his theory in practice. In the very last section of the book, titled “Practical application and exercise”, Agricola waxes lyrical about the capacity human beings have for learning: “Enormous, immeasurable, unbelievable is the power of the human spirit: almost nothing is difficult for it if it only wants it. To put aside here marvels I have experienced - that one who was deaf from infancy and consequently also mute, had nevertheless learned to understand everything anyone had written down, and himself, so as if he knew how to speak, could write down everything that was in his mind”. This is one of the earliest known statements which show that a person who was deaf and mute could be taught to communicate and as such Agricola is seen as one of pioneers of education for deaf people. Along with De Inventione Dialectica, another of Agricola’s works, De formando studio, would become important textbooks which would be followed by future generations of humanist scholars well into the 18th century.

The Granddaddy of Netherlandish Humanism

Upon his arrival back in Groningen in 1480, Agricola took on the job of city secretary and in essence became a travelling ambassador, which, amongst other duties, twice brought him to the court of Maximilian in the role as an orator, at least one of these occasions being for a 6 month stint. He obviously impressed however, as he was offered a more long-term position. However this kind of work was not for Agricola. He hated it, describing it as “doing the work of a humanist in the rude noise of this barbarity.” Agricola was offered a very tempting position to teach in Antwerp, a city which he greatly admired, but instead took a role in Heidelberg, which gave him the opportunity to start learning Hebrew, which had joined Latin and Greek as the fashionable ancient languages to learn, not least because it allowed any dutiful Christian who wanted to read scripture in its original form. Johan von Pleiningen wrote in his biography: “In fact, as his years advanced he had resolved to find peace in a careful study of Holy Scripture, and he deemed that he could not achieve this more easily in another way or with greater profit and commendation than if he should, in one and the same effort, learn the proper idiom and secrets of the Hebrew tongue, previously unknown to him; so he applied himself completely and in the most praiseworthy manner to the reading of Holy Scripture, as he had planned. And for the following reason too did he want so much to learn or rather know Hebrew literature: the very learned man maintained that he had several times heard from persons well versed in Hebrew that the Latin rendering of our Bible was awkward and not faithful enough.” In May 1484 he left his home region once again and set off to do just that, joining the circle of intellectual humanists in that Rhineland-Palatinate capital. Not long after, he joined his patron the Bishop of Worms on a trip to Rome to witness the inauguration of the new Pope, Innocent VIII. He penned a speech that was delivered at the investiture by the bishop. Sadly, on the way back to Heidelberg though, he fell ill. While he did make it back to his new home, the illness overcame him in October 1485 and Rudolph Agricola passed away at the (even at that time pretty young) age of 41. 

The growth of Renaissance Humanism into the Low Countries did not happen in one action, nor can it be ascribed solely to one particular individual. However, such was Agricola’s influence over the generations of humanists that came after him that, from the early 1500s, he was the poster boy for the new, cultural celebration of classical texts and expressive Latin. In stature and renown he would eventually be succeeded by Desidirius Erasmus, whom he had a great influence on. On his way back from Ferrara in 1479, he taught Latin and Greek to a guy called Alexander Hegius, who himself was already the principal of a Latin school in Emmerich, Guelders. Hegius would later become the director of a Latin school in Deventer, where for a brief period he became a teacher of Desiderius Erasmus. Agricola himself would later visit that school in 1484, where Erasmus saw him speak. This clearly left a great impression on Erasmus, as he would later write of Hegius and Agricola, “I owe the latter as it were the love of a son and the former the esteem of a grandson”.  As mentioned earlier, much of the information about Agricola comes from Six Lives, being a compilation of six different biographies that were written between 1492 and 1539 about Rudolph Agricola by various humanists. As Erasmus’ words show, Agricola was seen as the grandfather of humanism in the Low Countries, which is testament to the influence he had on the generation of Netherlandish humanists that followed him, and whose work in the 16th century would become most widespread among non academics and intellectuals, bringing humanism to the people. But we will get to all of that another time, on the History of the Netherlands.

Sources used:

‘Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy’ by James Hankins in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy

‘History’ https://www.kuleuven.be/english/about-kuleuven/history

Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages by Edward Grant

‘Whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit May Be Substantially Predicated of the Divinity’ by Boethius, translated by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand

‘Aquinas, Scientia and a Medieval Misconstruction of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics’ by Alex Hall

Topics by Aristotle

‘Aristotle on the Uses of Dialectic’ by Robin Smith

‘The Critique of Scholastic Language in Renaissance Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy’ by Lodi Nauta in Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy

Articulating Medieval Logic by Terence Parsons

Invectives by Francesco Petrarca

‘Humanistic Critiques of Scholastic Dialectic’ by Alan Perreiah

Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620 by Christine Kooi

‘This convent flourished under the father of Rudolphus Agricola’ https://www.rug.nl/library/heritage/exhibitions/virtual-exhibitions/yesse/dit-klooster-floreerde?lang=en

Rudolph Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus’ Testimonies by Fokke Akkerman

‘The Coming of Humanism to the Low Countries’ by Jozef Ijsewijn in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations

Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment edited by Magna Sæbø

‘Lorenzo Valla and the rise of humanist dialectic’ by Lodi Nauta

Rudolph Agricola’s de inventione dialectica libri tres: A translation of selected chapters by J. R. McNally

De inventione dialectica libri tres / Drei Bücher über die Inventio dialectica by Rudolf Agricola, edited by Lothar Mundt