The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  30 Jerome, Select Letters, p. 127.

  31 Ibid., p. 129.

  32 “It is no small thing for a noble man, a man fluent of speech, a wealthy man, to avoid the accompaniment of the powerful in the streets, to mingle with the crowds, to cleave to the poor, to associate with peasants.” Ep. 66.6, in praise of Pammachius, cited in Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 81.

  33 Jerome, Select Letters, Letter XXII (to Eustochium), p. 125.

  34 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, trans. Odo John Zimmerman (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 2:55–56.

  35 Not everyone agreed that Plato and Aristotle could be accommodated. Cf. Tertullian, “Against the Heretics,” ch. 7:

  For philosophy is the material of the world’s wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy…. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all attempts to produce a Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after receiving the gospel! When we believe, we desire no further belief. For this is our first article of faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.

  See Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951), 3:246. Conversely, as we will see, efforts were made in the fifteenth century and later to reconcile Christianity with a modified version of Epicureanism.

  36 Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover and Gerald H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library, 250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 345 (mockery of Christians), p. 385 (mockery of pagans). See, similarly, in the same volume, Tertullian, Apologeticus (“Apology”), “I turn to your literature, by which you are trained in wisdom and the liberal arts; and what absurdities I find! I read how the gods on account of Trojans and Achaeans fell to it and fought it out themselves like so many pairs of gladiators …,” p. 75.

  37 Tertullian, Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh, trans. A. Souter (London: SPCK, 1922), pp. 153–54.

  38 Ibid., p. 91.

  39 See James Campbell, “The Angry God: Epicureans, Lactantius, and Warfare,” in Gordon and Suits, eds., Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance. The shift in Christianity toward an angry God, Campbell observes, comes only in the fourth century, with the growth of power and prominence in the Roman world. Before then, Christianity was closer to the Epicururean attitude and more sympathetic to its doctrines. “Indeed Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Athenagoras found so much to admire in Epicureanism that Richard Jungkuntz has warned that ‘any generalizations about patristic antipathy to Epicureanism really need careful qualification to be valid.’ The Epicurean practice of the social virtues, emphasis on forgiveness and mutual helpfulness, and suspicion of worldly values so closely paralleled similar Christian attitudes that … DeWitt has observed that it ‘would have been singularly easy for an Epicurean to become of Christian’—and, one might suppose, a Christian to become an Epicurean,” p. 47.

  40 Then he added: “though indeed the gods have already in their wisdom destroyed their works, so that most of their books are no longer available”—Floridi on Sextus, p. 13. In addition to Epicureans, Julian wishes to exclude Pyrrhonians, that is, philosophical skeptics.

  41 Strictly speaking, the term did not mean atheist. An apikoros, explained Maimonides, was a person who rejected revelation and insisted that God had no knowledge or interest in human affairs.

  42 Tertullian, Apologeticus, 45:7 (Loeb, p. 197).

  43 See Lactantius, De ira (“A Treatise on the Anger of God”), in Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers, ed. Roberts and Donaldson, vol. 7, ch. 8.

  44 See Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 3–1.

  45 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, 2:60.

  46 Flagellation had widespread use as a punishment in antiquity, and not only in Rome: “If the guilty man is sentenced to be flogged,” Deuteronomy (25:2) declares, “the judge shall cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence.” For the history of flagellation, see Nicklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, trans. Graham Harman (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

  47 Public punishments did not, of course, end with paganism or die out in antiquity. Molinet reports that the citizens of Mons bought a bandit at a high price in order to enjoy the pleasure of seeing him quartered, “at which the people were happier than if a new sacred body had been revived”—(Molinet, in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990; orig. 1983), p. 107. The Swiss diarist Felix Platter remembered all his life something he had seen as a child:

  A criminal, having raped a seventy-year-old woman, was flayed alive with burning tongs. With mine own eyes I saw the thick smoke produced by his living flesh that had been subjected to the tongs. He was executed by Master Nicolas, executioner of Berne, who had come expressly for the event. The prisoner was a strong and vigorous man. On the bridge over the Rhine, just nearby, they tore out his breast; then he was led to the scaffold. By now, he was extremely feeble and blood was gushing from his hands. He could no longer remain standing, he fell down continually. Finally, he was decapitated. They drove a stake through his body, and then his corpse was thrown into a ditch. I myself was witness to his torture, my father holding me by the hand.

  48 One of these exceptions was St. Anthony, who, according to his hagiographer, “possessed in a very high degree apatheia—perfect self-control, freedom from passion…. Christ, who was free from every emotional weakness and fault, is his model”—Athanasius [attr.], Life of Anthony, section 67, quoted in Peter Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., Cambridge Ancient History: Late Empire, a.d. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13: 616.

  49 See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, a.d. 200–1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 221; R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  50 Nothing is ever—quite—an innovation. The active pursuit of pain in emulation or imitation of the sufferings of a deity has precedents in the cults of Isis, Attis, and others.

  51 Cited, with much other evidence, in Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, pp. 90, 188.

  52 Ibid., p. 36. Largier also rehearses the stories that follow.

  CHAPTER FIVE: BIRTH AND REBIRTH

  1 Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus: Leben und Werke (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974).

  2 Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (Boston: David Godine; 1986, orig. 1957).

  3 Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 22.

  4 “By the end of the fourteenth century there was hardly a well-to-do household in Tuscany without at least one slave: brides brought them as part of their dowry, doctors accepted them from their patients in lieu of fees—and it was not unusual to find them even in the service of a priest”—Origo, Merchant of Prato, pp. 90–91.

  5 Ibid., p. 109.

  6 Fine wool was purchased from Majorca, Catalonia, Provence, and the Cotswolds (the last being the most expensive and highest quality) and shipped across borders and through a tangle of rapacious tax authorities. The dyeing and finishing required further imports: alum from the Black Sea (to make mordant for fixing the dyes), oak gall-nuts (to make the highest quality purple-black ink
), woad from Lombardy (for deep blue dyes and as a foundation for other colors); madder from the Low Countries (for bright red dyes or, combined with woad, for dark reds and purples). And these were only the routine imports. Rarer dyes, the kind displayed on the costly clothes proudly worn in aristocratic portraits from the period, included deep scarlet from murex shells in the eastern Mediterranean, carmine red known as grana from tiny cochineal insects, orange-red vermilion from a crystalline substance found on the shores of the Red Sea, and the extravagantly expensive and therefore much prized kermis red from the powdered remains of an oriental louse.

  7 Martin Davis, “Humanism in Script and Print,” in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 48. The experience, Petrarch remarked, was more like looking at a painting than reading a book.

  8 Pious Christians were urged to suppress its impulses and to spurn its contaminated fruits. Though Dante’s poetry confers a magnificent dignity on Ulysses’ determination to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the Inferno makes it clear that this determination is the expression of a fallen soul, condemned for eternity to reside near the innermost circle of Hell.

  9 See esp. Charles Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

  10 “Aurum, argentum, gemmae, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, pietae tabulae, phaleratus sonipes, caeteraque id genus mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem: libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consultunt, et viva quaddam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.” Quoted in John Addington Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (New York: Georg Olms, 1971; orig. 1875–86), 2:53 (translated by SG).

  11 “Among the many subjects, I was especially interested in antiquity, inasmuch as I have always disliked my own age, so that, had not love of dear ones restrained me, I would always have wanted to be born in any other age. In order to forget my own time, I have always tried to place myself in spirit in other times.” Posteriati, ed. P.G. Ricci, in Petrarch, Prose, p. 7, quoted in Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 276.

  12 The Doctor utriusque juris (DUJ) (the degree in both canon and civil law) took ten years.

  13 Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 263.

  14 Rerum fam. XXII.2 in Familiari, 4:106, quoted in Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 62. The letter probably dates to 1359.

  15 Quoted in Martines, Social World, p. 25.

  16 For Petrarch, there were values that transcended mere style: “What good will it do if you immerse yourself wholly in the Ciceronian springs and know well the writings either of the Greeks or of the Romans? You will indeed be able to speak ornately, charmingly, sweetly, and sublimely; you certainly will not be able to speak seriously, austerely, judiciously, and, most importantly, uniformly”—Rerum fam. I.9, in Witt, In the Footstep s, p. 242.

  17 in the early 1380s, at the urging of a friend, he wrote a massive defense of the monastic life, and he was ready, even in the midst of praising active engagement, to acknowledge the superiority, at least in principle, of contemplative withdrawal.

  18 See Salutati to Gaspare Squaro de’ Broaspini in Verona, November 17, 1377: “In this noble city, the flower of Tuscany and the mirror of Italy, the match of that most glorious Rome from which it descends and whose ancient shadows it follows in the struggle for the salvation of Italy and the freedom of all, here in Florence I have undertaken a labor that is unstinting but for which I am exceptionally grateful.” See Eugenio Garin, La Cultura Filosofica del Renascimento Italiano: Ricerche e Documenti (Florence: Sansuni, 1979), esp. pp. 3–27.

  19 Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 308.

  20 Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, pp. 80–81.

  21 “Just imagine,” Niccoli wrote to the fiscal officials near the end of his life, “what sort of tax my poor goods can bear, with all the debts and pressing expenses I have. Which is why, begging your humanity and clemency, I pray that it will please you to treat me in such a way that current taxes will not force me in my old age to die far from my birthplace, where I have spent all I had.” Quoted in Martines, Social World, p. 116.

  22 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence (Libri della Famiglia), trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 2:98. It is sometimes claimed that this vision of companionate marriage was only introduced by Protestantism, but there is considerable evidence of its existence much earlier.

  23 Origo, Merchant of Prato, p. 179.

  24 Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of the Illustrious Men of the XV Century, trans. William George and Emily Waters (London: Routledge, 1926), p. 402.

  25 “One day, when Nicolao was leaving his house, he saw a boy who had around his neck a chalcedony engraved with a figure by the hand of Polycleitus, a beautiful work. He enquired of the boy his father’s name, and having learnt this, sent to ask him if he would sell the stone; the father readily consented, like one who neither knew what it was nor valued it. Nicolao sent him five florins in exchange, and the good man to whom it had belonged deemed that he had paid him more than double its value”—Ibid., p. 399. In this case at least, the expenditure proved a very good investment: “There was in Florence in the time of Pope Eugenius a certain Maestro Luigi, the Patriarch, who took great interest in such things as these, and he sent word to Nicolao, asking if he might see the chalcedony. Nicolao sent it to him, and it pleased him so greatly that he kept it, and sent to Nicolao two hundred golden ducats, and he urged him so much that Nicolao, not being a rich man, let him have it. After the death of this Patriarch it passed to Pope Paul, and then to Lorenzo de’ Medici,” ibid., p. 399. For a remarkable tracking of the movements through time of a single ancient cameo, see Luca Giuliani, Ein Geschenk für den Kaiser: Das Geheimnis des grossen Kameo (Munich: Beck, 2010).

  26 In reality, Niccoli’s vision exceeded his means: he died massively in debt. But the debt was canceled by his friend Cosimo de’ Medici, in exchange for the right to dispose of the collection. Half of the manuscripts went to the new Library of S. Marco, where they were housed in Michelozzi’s magnificent structure; the other half formed the core of the city’s great Laurentian Library. Though he was responsible for its creation, the idea of the public library was not Niccoli’s alone. It had been called for by Salutati. Cf. Berthold L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Library of San Marco (Padua: Antenore, 1972), p. 6.

  27 Cino Rinuccini, Invettiva contro a cierti calunniatori di Dante e di messer Francesco Petrarcha and di messer Giovanni Boccacio, cited in Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 270. See Ronald Witt, “Cino Rinuccini’s Risponsiva alla Invetirra di Messer Antonio Lusco,” Renaissance Quarterly 23 (1970), pp. 133–49.

  28 Bruni, Dialogus 1, in Martines, Social World, p. 235.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Martines, Social World, p. 241.

  31 Vespasiano Memoirs, p. 353.

  32 Martines, Social World, p. 265.

  CHAPTER SIX: IN THE LIE FACTORY

  1 See Poggio to Niccoli, February 12, 1421: “For I am not one of those perfect men, who are commanded to abandon father and mother and sell everything and give to the poor; that power belonged to very few people and only long ago, in an earlier age”—Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, p. 49.

  2 William Shepherd, Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 185.

  3 Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, p. 58.

  4 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 115.

  5 Lapo da Castiglionchio, On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court, in Christopher Celenza, Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger’s De curiae commodis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 111.

  6 Ibid.
, p. 127.

  7 Ibid., p. 155.

  8 Ibid., p. 205.

  9 See Celenza, Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia, pp. 25–26.

  10 Ibid., p. 177.

  11 Poggio, The Facetiae, or Jocose Tales of Poggio, 2 vols. (Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1879), Conclusion, p. 231. (References are to the volume in this Paris edition and to the number of the tale.) The manuscript of the Facetiae did not appear until 1457, two years before Poggio’s death, but Poggio represents the stories as circulating among the scriptors and secretaries many years earlier. Cf. Lionello Sozzi, “Le ‘Facezie’ e la loro fortuna Europea,” in Poggio Bracciolini 1380–1980: Nel VI centenario della nascità (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), pp. 235–59.

  12 Ibid., 1:16.

  13 Ibid., 1:50.

  14 Ibid., 1:5, 1:45, 1:123, 2:133.