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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Humanism and Secularization from Petrarch to Valla. By Riccardo Fubini, translated by Martha King. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. viii + 306 pages.
Professor of Renaissance History at the University of Florence, Riccardo Fubini has long been one of the most respected historians of Quattrocento humanism and diplomacy. In the 1970s, he edited the first two volumes of the collected letters of Lorenzo de' Medici; and in the 1990s he began to anthologize his groundbreaking essays in Renaissance thought and politics. The first such anthology was Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla (1990), a volume assembling five magisterial studies on humanist thought written between 1961 and 1987 and revised to include more recent bibliography, with a particular emphasis on Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla. (Between 1994 and 2001, Fubini published three more volumes of essays on Quattrocento politics and diplomacy, which one hopes will also be translated for a wider audience.)
In his introduction, Fubini describes some of the problems that face any student of humanism. He observes that it is often hard to detect the sources behind the writings of the humanists, who frequently disguise their debt to previous thinkers or reinterpret their ideas in provocative and polemical ways. Characteristic of the humanist movement is what he calls "secularization," a term he defines as an intellectual viewpoint that broke with scholastic paradigms without renouncing Christian belief.
"Consciousness of the Latin Language among Humanists: Did the Romans Speak Latin?" examines a linguistic dispute that arose in the papal Curia in 1435. There were two...
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