Members of any university faculty like to think of themselves as humanists, whether they be teaching in the sciences or in the liberal arts: five hundred years of tradition demand at least lip-service to Alexander Pope's proposition that "The proper study of mankind is man." I have no quarrel with such idealism, but, having been drawn into a study of fifteenth and sixteenth century humanism, I am more than a little disturbed by the fact that the effort expended by the finest thinkers of the Renaissance seems of so little use to us, today, that our humanist heritage has become little more than a threadbare cloak which we pretend is Elijah's mantle, to be flaunted in the faces of our detractors. It is perhaps symptomatic of our dilemma that the research of scholars like Baron, Garin, and Kristeller has not affected us in the least: their insights into the original humanists remain locked away in scholarly tomes read only by other historians, while modern humanists like us continue to profess an ahistorical "humanism" and at the same time to justify that "humanism" by appealing to a tradition which we neither understand nor appreciate. The "humanism" all too prevalent in the modern university is not purposeful, it is not defensible--especially against challenges from outside of the university--and above all, it is too often nothing more than a hollow, though hallowed, name even to its own "professores." The premises, the ambitions, and the methods of the Renaissance humanists may have no more relevance for our day than the Ptolemaic cosmology now has; I suggest, however, that we first examine our roots before we reject them, and I propose that such an examination include scrutinizing those behaviors which we are wont to label "humanistic" in light of the original models for those behaviors. It might then become necessary to reject those models as outdated, but my studies have led me to believe that such an investigation will in fact lead to a revitalization of the studia humanitatis, and a revival of the holistic sense of purpose and method so efficacious in the Renaissance.

First of all, we must recognize that we still lack a universally accepted definition of humanism, whether it be Renaissance humanism or its modern variants, and this lack is a great affront to our Aristotelian sensibilities. Since there is a marked tendency for each historian and each modern humanist to define humanism for himself, the appellation has become suitable for a wide range of activities, many of which bear only the most tangential relationship to the primary activities of the Renaissance humanists. This dilution of the term is in part a function of a philological confusion: although we know that the terms studia humanitatis and humanista were very much a part of the Renaissance vocabulary, the modern term "humanist" owes much of its meaning to the German term humanismus, a nineteenth-century neologism which was developed by educators of the period to distinguish the classical curricula from the scientific. From such Germanic historicism comes the contemporary tendency to postulate some type of dichotomy between the humanist and the scientist, a dichotomy sanctioned more by contemporary practices within the academy than by Renaissance approaches to humanistic learning.

Attempts to define and delimit the essence of Renaissance humanism have in fact compounded the confusion: confronted with a period of ubiquitous changes, scholars have tended, for reasons of convenience or system, to use one major change occurring in the Renaissance to define the core of the humanist movement: philosophers before Kristeller, for example, tended to see the rise of neoplatonism in the Renaissance as the humanist coup de grace to medieval scholasticism and Aristotelianism, even though scholasticism persisted throughout the Renaissance and helped to shape our modern scientific tradition; literary historians, on the other hand, are prone to extol the humanist's preference for the classics of antiquity as the touchstone of the humanist movement, even while they mock and lament the sterility of eighteenth-century neoclassicism. Still other literary critics are inclined to evaluate the humanism of a writer through his style: the more ornate the style, the more humanist the work; the more restrained, the more medieval, regardless of the content and the sensibilities of the writer. Finally, there are those students of the Renaissance who see a burgeoning sense of individualism as the essence of humanism; they, however, must then explain way the Renaissance consciousness of "republica" and monarchical works such as Salutati's "On Tyranny" either as backsliding or as a manifestation of some type of medieval guilt-complex. All of these phenomena--an aversion to scholasticism, a widespread classicism, a preference for eloquence rather than unadorned dialectical rigor, and a new individualism--are to be found in he operations of the Renaissance humanistae, but, when offered as definitions, their exceptions ruin them as rules.

The futility of such definitions, however, has not deterred the modern humanist from donning the mantle of historical precedent, but has made his investiture easier, for the heterogeneity of such definitions facilitates the playing out of a wide range of humanistic masquerades: Today, one humanist can deride modern science sanctimoniously while another sees in science man's's only hope for discovering the truth about his nature, worth and end. One humanist looks for the ecstatic experience, either natural or synthetic; another looks for values through empirical systems. Humanist confronts humanist in English departments when courses in the "greats" compete with courses "relevant to the concerns of today's youth." One writer shows his humanism through an elegant, graceful, studied style, while another, decrying such pretension, proclaims his heartfelt humanism in a style that would not be inappropriate at the local bar. Some humanists today rush to defend the individual against institutions, while others are busy holding forth on the necessity for cooperation, organization, and institutionalization in causes dear to their hearts. In short, nobody needs to admit that he is not a humanist; by the same token, however, we can easily excommunicate anyone from our humanist orthodoxy who is unwilling to agree with us. While this flexibility may be the occasion for a great deal of personal satisfaction, it does little to promote a common understanding of humanism.

Unfortunately, much of the basic scholarship was also colored by the pedagogical quarrels of the nineteenth century, for much of the basic research of humanist education dates from that period or is based upon the findings of that period. For example, we know the works of many Renaissance educators such as Vittorina de Feltre, Coluccio Salutati, and Battista Guarino chiefly through the end of the century translations and studies of William Woodward, whose words are still in print today as classics in education. Woodward is willing to admit that da Feltre, among others, included natural philosophy in his curriculum, but nonetheless he dismisses the historical evidence to argue that the main end in view of the humanist teacher was gradually confined to a provision of just so much information as would enable a boy to understand the allusions to Astronomy, Geography, or Natural History contained in the ancient poets and historians. As classical education became more precisely defined, these subjects ceased to obtain an independent place and philosophy lost all content other than that of ethics. The works of the elder Pliny, of Solinus and Pomponius Mela,, VALUED FOR THE VARIETY OF THEIR SUBJECT MATTER BY EARLIER HUMANISTS, then dropped out of the school curriculum."

Such an assertion probably reinforced the righteousness of Woodward's contemporaries, and satisfies many readers today. I, however, find it (and others like it) facile, unsupported, and unsupportable, for those educational ideals extrapolated by Woodward and others, and then made manifest in the practices of the nineteenth and twentieth century, lose much of their credibility when viewed within the context of medieval patterns of thought and education which the Renaissance humanists first inherited and then converted into the studia humanitatis.

It is the work of Paul Kristeller, then, which seems to me to offer a way out of such self-serving snares inherent in most attempts to define humanism. Kristeller abandons the search for facile definitions and instead sets forth a new approach towards the understanding of Renaissance humanism when he says

If we compare the works of different humanists we are led to the conclusion that they held a great variety of opinions and ideas, and that their common denominator is to be found in an educational, scholarly, and stylistic ideal _and_ in the range of their problems and interests, rather than in their allegiance to any given set of philosophical or theological views.

Although these words were written in 1961, Kristeller had already taken the first important step in this direction as early as 1940's when, in the course of attacking various polarized definitions of humanism, he had, for the first time in print, called attention to the philological confusion surrounding the term humanism. More importantly, he went on to establish an etymology for the word that was not only valid historically, but potentially of great interest to modern academics. Kristeller calls our attention to the fact that some educators in the Renaissance began, for the first time, to call their field of learning the studia humanitatis or studia humaniore; and that in the university slang and, later, the official language of the university, the term humanista came to be employed to describe those teaching the studia humanitatis. Kristeller is careful to point out that this new vocabulary did not entail something completely new: "The new name," he cautions us,

certainly implies a new claim and a new program, but it covered a content that had been designated by the more modest names of grammar, rhetoric and poetry . . . and we have several contemporary testimonies showing that the studia humanitatis were considered as the equivalent of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.

Kristeller's careful analysis of the data leads him to conclude that

the humanists . . . did not claim that they were substituting a new encyclopedia for the medieval one, and they were aware of the fact that their field of study occupied a well-defined and limited place within the system of contemporary learning. To be sure, they tended to emphasize the importance of their field in comparison with the other sciences and to encroach upon the latter's territory, but on the whole they did not deny the existence of the validity of those other sciences.

Kristeller thus not only reestablishes the proper etymological locus for humanism in the Renaissance; he also offers new perceptions of Renaissance humanism. His argument begins to dispel the myth that the studia humanitatis were intrinsically antithetical to other disciplines, including natural philosophy, the precursor of modern science. (NOTE: HE HIMSELF DOWNPLAYUS IT -- SEE ESSAYS) Instead, he suggests that what conflicts existed between the disciplines stemmed more from the political dynamics within the universities than from any ideological conflicts. Moreover, his analysis lays the groundwork for an appreciation of the fact that the studia humanitatis, for both Renaissance teachers and Renaissance students, were virtually identical to the medieval trivium, the basic course of preparatory studies in both the medieval and the Renaissance academies; that is, they were not an end in themselves, but rather the occasion for essential preparation for other studies and indeed, for life itself. The self-styled humanists of our day may be wont to persist in fighting the wars begun in nineteenth-century Germany, deriding science and offering, as ends in themselves, their separate specialties, and they may be justified in doing so. I, however, am personally more than a little sceptical, for I have found that such an attitude is not in keeping with the attitudes of the Renaissance humanistae towards the studia humanitatis within the university.

Instead, I have been led by my reading and research to a critical reexamination of the humanist statements on education, a body of works without medieval precedent, in an attempt to more objectively identify the humanists' educational ideals. While I believe that these works were part of the humanist' attack against the methods of the medieval scholastics. I find them invaluable inasmuch as they take the form not only of broadsides and textbooks on the principles of pedagogy, but also the forms of letters to princes and prefaces to humanistic editions and student texts. While my study of these sources is by no means complete, I would like to offer a conjecture which I believe goes far towards an appreciation of the humanists' educational, scholarly, and stylistic ideals. I do not see the work and ideals of the humanists springing so much from a mere antipathy towards the barbarous Latin , the inane and sterile logic, and the mangled historicism of the medieval schoolmen, though they patently detested such practices and lost no opportunities to deride and vilify such practices. Rather, I see the humanists and educators rediscovering a perspective on the acts of teaching and learning not shared by the medieval scholastics, and then modifying the content of the trivium in such a way that they could justly claim to be more effective teachers. I would argue that Renaissance humanists rediscovered the fact that knowledge possessed by a teacher does not communicate itself by virtue of its truth-content, but rather is communicated by the teacher through his eloquence. For them true learning takes place only when the students is affected by his teachers's eloquence and is thus moved to accept the truth represented by that knowledge. Medieval scholastics, having been bewitched by part, but only a part, of Aristotle, did not share this view of the act of teaching. For them, learning involved only the intellect--the emotions were the interfering consequences of original sin--and the intellect was already inclined to learn and be innately responsive to the truth. As the twelfth-century schoolman John of Salisbury describes the process in his Metalogicon (one of the few medieval treatises on education):

A good intellect readily assents to what is true and rejects what is false. Such mental capacity is originally a gift of nature and is fostered by our inborn reason. It rapidly waxes in strength as a combined result of love for what is good and exercise. Practice makes perfect and begets a skill in proving and investigating the truth, but the intellect investigates the truth even more readily and expeditiously when its investigation is founded upon the essential principles of the art of logic and its rules.

Thus the preparatory trivium of the medieval schools was dominated by "the essential principles of the art of logic and its rules," a logic which manifested itself in logical grammars, most notably the scholastic expansions of the twelfth-century Doctrinale, a logical analysis of rhetoric (which, the Metalogicon says, draws all of its rules from logic), and, above all, in the formal study and exercise of logic itself. Nowhere in the Metalogicon or in medieval educational theory as a whole is there any conscious appeal to any facet of the personality save the intellect. Such an appeal was the humanists' gift to the their own age (and, I suggest, to ours): a more complete awareness of what teaching (and, by extension, all communicative acts) requires of both the teacher and the student, of both the speaker and the listener. This awareness, I suggest (and not mere classicism, mere platonism, or mere aestheticism) shaped their educational, scholarly and stylistic ideals and controlled the range of their interest and activities.

The humanists' educational ideal was an education that was everywhere affective, an education which gave more than an intellectual assent. The verities communicated in this way by the Renaissance humanists differed little from those systematically set forth by the medieval schoolmen: no new ethics, no new teleology were invented by the humanists to supplant the traditional Christian schema. The innovations of the humanists in response to their educational ideal were functionally oriented, for they viewed with horror the pedagogical consequences of scholasticism. Again and again humanists such as Valla, Agricola and Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples complain, "Oh, how the schoolmen torment the minds of youth with vain and petty arguments, with pointless sophismata, and with expositions which for all of heir pros and contras, their sic and their nons,, cannot teach their students anything." Counterpoised in those same humanist sources is the recurring formula "Ad utilitatem adoluscentulis studiis"--"for the advantage of the industrious youth"--a formula which the humanists almost invariably used to characterize the purpose of their own work. The very ubiquity of this formula, especially when compared to its virtual absence in earlier non-humanist texts and tracts, is a vivid indicator of the humanists' new orientation. Most significant, however, is the fact that the humanists produced the first significant body of pedagogical theory, and almost always prefaced such discussion of means and methods with an analysis of the students' mentality, its strengths and its weaknesses. Their analyses were very medieval--they had no quarrel with the premise that the true has an innate appeal to the intellect; they merely thought it to have been overworked. Nonetheless, these analyses are markedly holistic and attempt to identify both the impediments which a teacher and a course of study must overcome and a much broader range of natural inclinations which can be exploited by a teacher in any course of study. It was easy for the humanists to criticize the teaching methods of the scholastics; it was noble of them to seek after the utilitatem adoluscentulis; and it was perceptive of them to analyze their students' mind-sets. All of this would have come to naught, however, had the Renaissance humanists not developed stylistic and scholarly ideals which complemented their educational aims and which ultimately drew them into arenas and activities far beyond the university, ideals which are first and last utilitarian.

The stylistic ideals of the Renaissance humanists manifest themselves in a conscious effort to duplicate the Latinity of Augustan Rome, in an ornate eloquence which seems to use every trope ever devised by rhetoricians, and in an appeal to the classical writers as the arbiters of elegance. Modern humanists may artfully ape such behaviors, but there was for the Renaissance humanists a reason for what seems mere affectation today. A return to the Latinity of Augustan Rome is perhaps the easiest phenomenon to justify, for the humanists originally sought such a return in response to a problem we still find facing us today: professional jargon and the cultural isolationism it engenders. While regional variants of classical Latin were long-standing, the medieval universities were doing new damage. Each of the professions--law, theology, and diplomacy--was industriously engaged in the independent formulation of new words for old ideas and new syntactical constructions for old relationships. The humanists' desire for a return to classical Latinity, as expressed in Lorenzo Valla's De elegantia linguae latinae was based not so much on the aesthetic qualities of the Latin language as on its ubiquity in space and time and on its consequent potential for creating a "commonwealth of the mind." Put more pragmatically, the humanists argued that a mastery of classical Latin by all learned men would give them access to the ideas of their contemporaries and the ideas of the ancients (who, as I shall argue, had articulated ideas of especial value to the humanists). Medieval latinists had never enjoyed such access, for most of them (the humanists argued) could barely understand one another, much less someone from outside their discipline. The Latin of Augustan Rome, the humanists argued, had elegantiam, but for them elegantia meant preferability, not elegance, and that preferability stemmed chiefly from its potential contributions to the ready communication of ideas, a facility denied the medieval Latin dialects promoted by the various professions.

The humanists' predilection for ornate rhetoric was equally functional, for it was intimately allied with their functional educational ideals. Rudolph Agricola makes this alliance explicit: echoing Cicero, he writes

Any utterance and thus any speech about any subject whereby we set forth the thoughts of our mind, first and foremost has this function: to inform him who listens. . . . a polished utterance, however, ought to accomplish three things: to wit, it should inform, it should move, and it should please: it is easy to inform someone about something, and not only that which can be set forth for the dullest of minds; to strike the hearer through his emotions, however, to transform the inclination of the soul into what you desire, to draw the listener along, to hold him suspended through the pleasure of listening, that cannot happen save to an intellect inflamed through some greater inspiration of the Muses.

John of Salisbury and the medieval schoolmen, however, had argued that the logical appeal of a well-drawn syllogism was motivation enough for learning: "Demonstrative logic," John writes,

does not pay much attention to what various people might think about a given proposition. Its sole concern is that a thing must be so. Demonstrative logic thus befits the philosophical majesty of those who teach the truth, a majesty which is the result of logic's own conviction that it is teaching the truth, and a majesty which is independent of the assent of its listeners.

After reading extensively in humanist writings, I have become very conscious of the many failures in communication which result from this ornate rhetoric, but, having also read much medieval Latin, I am able to appreciate the power of that rhetoric, when well-employed, to move, to affect, and more powerfully to instruct a reader. Inasmuch as I am talking about humanist ideals, failures as such are beside the point: the best Renaissance teachers, I suggest, through the employment of rhetoric created a sense of "you are there" for their student listeners, a sense hardly if even suggested by any scholastic text on any subject. The preface to Valla's De elegantia, for example, with its rich imagery and oratorical vividness, could make a student believe that he was listening to an intellectual Cicero calling him to a holy war against academic barbarians; such a listener would have a more heartfelt understanding of the need for fluency in classical Latin than ever could have been obtained from hearing the dry analyses set forth by medieval grammarians. I would be the first to admit that the ideals of the humanists which shaped their preference for rhetoric were never fully realized, but I will also argue that those ideals are as praiseworthy today as they were in the Renaissance, and that they are still honored today, though more in the breach than in the observance.

The same cannot be said of the humanists' use of the classical writers as their standards of excellence, for that practice resulted in part from a view of history which we moderns no longer share. Nonetheless, within the context of that view of history, their reliance upon the authors of antiquity makes good sense, and can be seen as a marked improvement over the practices of the medieval schoolmen. In effect, the humanists identified a contradiction between medieval theory and medieval practice: while both the humanists and the medieval scholastics shared the belief that temporal history was characterized by progressive decay, the school practices of the scholastics were in flagrant contradiction to such a belief, a contradiction roundly criticized by the humanists sharing that view of history. Their criticism was simple but devastating: if the greatest medieval schoolmen truly believe that their efforts are inferior to the accomplishments of antiquity--the logical consequence of the shared view of history--then why did they force upon students their own medieval language, their own medieval texts, and their own medieval patterns of thought. Would not students have greater access to truth through a first-hand study of the classical writers, both pagan and Christian? What advantage really was there in studying the admittedly inferior and second-hand products of the medieval schoolmen? For the humanists, then, it was eminently reasonable to prefer the wisdom of the ancient to the vitiated mumblings of the schoolmen, and to measure excellence against classical rather than medieval standards. The humanists were, of course, never so blunt, but their prefaces reiterate this argument again and again. Moreover, there is still another argument supporting their preference for the classics: as Aeneas Sylvius, pedagogue and pope, points out, "The loftiness of theme and the romantic spirit of the Iliad and the Aeneid mark them out . . . as inspiring training for boys." Leonardo Bruni, lawyer by training and papal diplomat by choice, expands upon this same theme, entwining the twinned values of greater authority and greater affection accruing to the classics:

. . . familiarity with te great poets of antiquity is essential to any claim to true education. For in their writings we find deep speculations upon Mature and upon the causes and origins of things which must carry weight with us both from their antiquity and their authorship. Besides these, many important truths upon matters of daily life are suggested or illustrated; all this is expressed with such grace and dignity as to demand our admiration. . . .we should consider the value of the best poetry, its charm of form and the variety and interest of its subject matter; we should consider the ease with which from our childhood on it can be committed to memory; we should consider the peculiar affinity of rhythm and metre to our emotions and intelligence. . . Poetry has, by our very constitution, a stronger attraction for us than any other form of expression, and anyone ignorant of and indifferent to so valuable an aid to knowledge and so ennobling a source of pleasure can by no means be entitled to be called educated.

Writers of antiquity, the humanists argued, spoke with a greater authority and a greater affectiveness than the dry and debilitated schematizations of the scholastics; they offer a better education and should therefore be preferred.

Thus the humanists' educational ideals also shaped their scholarly ideals and practices, for the value they attributed to the works of classical antiquity in educating the individual demanded that they focus their attention not on constructing new scholastic schemata and sophismata, but on retrieving and reconstructing the texts of the classical authors. Given the humanists' educational and stylistic ideals as I have portrayed them, it becomes apparent that such endeavors were more than antiquarianism run rampant: the textual studies of Valla, Poggio Bracciolini, Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples and others represent a scholarly ideal that we have lost, an ideal which postulates as the end of scholarship the discovery of affective truth. In their textual studies the humanists were as rigorous as any medieval schoolman or modern scientist, and their work represents a quantum improvement in the accuracy of those texts. The humanists, however, did not value such accuracy for itself, but for the additional impact it would give to those texts when read by a student. Those are the sentiments of Poggio Bracciolini, the most famous of the Renaissance book-hounds, as set forth in a letter celebrating the rediscovery of parts of Quintillian:

From Quintillian alone we could learn the perfect method of public speaking, even if we did not have Cicero, the father of Roman oratory. But among us Italians, he so far has been so fragmentary, so cut down by the action of time that the shape and style of the man has become unrecognizable. Surely we ought to feel sorrow and anger that we have done so much to the practice of oratory by our careless destruction of a man so eloquent. But the more we regret and blame ourselves for the damage that was formerly done to him, the more we should congratulate ourselves that by our energetic search he has now been restored to us.

The textual scholarship of the Renaissance humanists, while done for the better use of those texts by students, was motivated by a concern for the "utilitas," the advantage those works afforded a student in learning. Poggio is excited not by the uniqueness of his scholarly success, but by the fact that his discovery restores a body of truth, hitherto thought lost, to the benefit of students and society as a whole. The petty antiquarianism which passes for humanism in some modern circles, then, is only a pale shadow of the interactive educational, stylistic, and scholarly ideals which give Renaissance humanism its unique identity.

Humanism more than a set of interactive ideals, however, for Kristeller went on to insist that humanism must also be identified in terms of the range of interests and activities evidenced by the humanists. Already I have mentioned some individuals who were not educators--Aeneas Sylvius,. Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini--but who participated fully in the humanist movement. Kristeller, however, was a philosopher, and thus it remained for Eugenio Garin and Hans Baron to illustrate the operations of the humanists within the larger Renaissance society. To modern humanists huddling within the walls of the university, such humanism may seem to be an unnatural act, but Garin suggest, and Baron demonstrates, that such involvement, which Baron calls "civic humanism," was a natural consequence of the humanists' efforts. Baron's analysis is most forcefully set out in his study "The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance." Here he analyzes the radical changes occurring at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Florence, and in Part IV, discusses the relationship he finds between Renaissance humanism and social change. Summarizing his findings in his epilogue Baron writes,

In the Florentine city state lovers of ancient literature, when reading Aristotle and Cicero, began to perceive that the ideals accepted by the citizens of the ancient city-states could serve as an ethic of social engagement for citizens in their own modern states. Beside the type of humanistic scholar who defended withdrawal on the double ground that it was apt to minimize his contacts with the inferior modern world and could serve him as a bridge to religious contemplation, there was henceforth to be a type of humanist who found the crucial subject for his studies in history and politics and who, following the ancient model, was expected to be not only a man of culture but also a better and more useful citizen.

The significance of this transformation is made clear a few pages later:

We come much nearer to the truth when we think of Humanism as an organism some vital parts of which did not develop until the Quattrocento. Humanism, as molded by the Florentine crises, produced a pattern of conduct and thought which was not to remain limited to Florentine humanists. From that time on here would exist a kind of Humanism which endeavored to educate a man as a member of his society and state; a Humanism which refused to follow the medieval precedent of looking upon the Rome of the emperors as the divinely guided reparation for a Christian 'holy Empire' and the center of all interest in the ancient world; a Humanism which sought to learn form antiquity by looking upon it not melancholically as a golden age never again to be realized but as an exemplary parallel to the present, encouraging the moderns to seek to rival antiquity in their vernacular languages and literatures and in many other fields. . . . Renaissance humanism would by no means occupy the place in the growth of the modern world that is rightly attributed to it had those traits even disappeared again after they had emerged from the early Quattrocento crisis.

Even the most cursory of historical surveys will clearly bring forth additional evidence supporting Baron's contention that the fruition of humanism is to be found not only in the universities (though its original impetus derived from a radically new set of educational, stylistic, and scholarly ideals), but in the active life of society, where those intellectual ideals, Baron proves, were both valid and advantageous for their subscribers. Humanism was more than a super-sophisma, more than a super-construct created by academics for their academic delectation; it was historically a social force and can be such a force today, if we in the universities come to appreciate and share its ideals and leave off mistaking humanism's various and sundry parts for its whole.

What made humanism viable in the fifteenth century was a cohesive set of educational, stylistic, and scholarly ideals which ultimately proved their worth within the context of Renaissance society as a whole. I suggest that we in the modern university have failed to develop an analogous set of ideals equally responsive to today's society. If we want to be worthy of the name humanist and yet dwell within the sheltering walls of the university, we must first, individually and collectively, attempt to formulate and articulate such a set of ideals. If we cannot do so, we ought to face up to the fact that our activities are without purpose and, then, having given up the ghost of the humanistic tradition, we should take up some study which is purposeful and defensible.

But I, for one, am not yet at that point of despair. As I noted earlier, we in the university have been so busy claiming to be humanists that we have not been able to live up to the real ideals of the Renaissance humanists. I believe that we can articulate our ideals, if we are willing to rethink some assumptions all too widespread among today's professional humanists. First of all, I think that it would be healthy to admit that, while the studia humanitatis are worthy of a free man's life-long concern, they are, within the university, not an end in themselves, but a means of preparing the student for those professional studies and professional activities for which he is best suited. While a few may follow us into our profession, the vast majority of students will pass through our classes on their way elsewhere. We cannot escape this fact; instead, we must accept it and, if we are to be worthy of the name "humanist," exploit it.

Such exploitation is possible, however, only after we understand better what we have to offer within the university. The studia humanitatis are neither abstract nor necessarily logical, but then neither are our judgments and consequent acts; nonetheless, it is not only possible but desirable to consider and discuss both if we desire to judge and act more appropriately and effectively in the future. If we can articulate the potency and immediate relevance of the affective knowledge available to students in such studies, then perhaps we could better focus our energies on conveying to and instilling in our students the affective knowledge they contain, a type of knowledge different from yet a vital complement to the empirical data and methods offered them by the social and physical scientists. Each of us -- rhetorician, historian, philosopher, linguist, litterateur-- must work at identifying and exploiting such a body of knowledge for ourselves, suspicious always of others' set formulae; if we are not affectively convinced of the validity of our contribution, how can we even begin to impress our students (much less administrators and the public at large) with its validity?

Clarifying our understanding of the persistent strengths and weaknesses of the modern studia humanitatis is only a first step, for both stylistic and scholarly ideals are needed to realize such educational ideals. How many of you would want to take your most recent scholarly article home to mother? To be sure, she might cherish or reject it because she cherishes or rejects you, but would it move her? Milton may have been willing to limit his appeal to "a fit audience . . . though few"; I wonder, however, if we can afford to. Nowhere is a true humanistic style more important than in the classroom, for if our strength lies in our ability to educate the emotions and the intellect together, then we must direct our teaching to the whole person, a task that requires more than a neoscholastic recitative of empirical (or quasi-empirical) facts and figures. We are too often suspicious of the teacher who moves his students, especially if he also claims to be a scientist or a scholar; such suspicions are not only unworthy of a humanist; they run counter to common sense and to the ideals of humanistic education. Don't evade the issue by interpreting my remarks to mean that we must all lecture in Vergilian hexameters and carry around a copy of Cicero for easy reference; don't think that I recommend only that which titillates; if you must disagree, then tell me, if you can, why shouldn't the style and the tenor of our presentations, to our students and our peers, not only inform but move and please as well. That is the essence of the humanists' stylistic ideal, an ideal which everywhere supports their educational ideals, both then and now.

Then, lest our newfound humanistic sensibility manifest itself only in the best of intentions and moving lectures, let us continue to sift and winnow for truth, as they say in Wisconsin, looking for the humanistic truth which is our special provenance. We are not in competition with the empirical scientists; we are not attempting to marshal masses of self-evident data; our scholarship should be a continuous search for the truth that moves, the insight that draws our listeners to a new movement of heart and mind. How can we excite our students to search for truth unless we ourselves are excited by that search? Far too many modern academics, especially at institutions like ours, stand confident in the purity of their intentions and the power of their facility with words, only to fall when they reach the pursuit of truth which they, by choice or by happenstance, have long since foregone. We need to search for deeper insight, respond wholeheartedly when we find them, and share them with others if we are to move our students to do likewise not only in the classroom but in their adult lives when they are ready to exercise the full power of their humanity in the life-long studia humanitatis. That was the scholarly ideal of the Renaissance humanists: why should it not also be ours?

Finally, as the humanists of Trecento Florence discovered, we cannot immure ourselves totally within the university: if our ideals are valid, we should be able to articulate them to the larger society for its betterment. I would put it even more strongly: I believe that we MUST articulate our ideals in a way that moves contemporary society, lest we be annihilated by other causes which have already affectively demonstrated their intrinsic value. Listen, if you will, to the voice of the people as articulated by Louise Weiner, the arts and humanities liaison person on President Carter's transitional staff: "The humanities community has very little sense of self-identification. . . . The key word is visibility. It is terribly important that the humanities community identify itself and spread the concerns of the humanities over a broader base." She quite accurately sees the problem as one of "broadening the base and popularizing a scholarly awareness without sacrificing quality." The sciences and the arts, she points out, have been successful in creating greater public awareness, and so, she believes can the humanities. Based upon my studies, I believe that unless we do identify ourselves and spread the concerns of the humanities over a broader base, unless we popularize our scholarly awareness, we are not worthy of the name humanist, and deserve only those shadowed crannies to which society will soon justifiably banish us. If, on the other hand, we do develop a defensible and moving set of educational ideals, if we do articulate those ideals so that they come to have an affective reality for our contemporaries, and if we continue to pursue the fuller realization of those ideals through rigorous humanistic scholarship, then we stand a good chance of regaining the stature of the Renaissance humanists in our modern society.