John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism

by Andrew Galloway, Cornell University

The label "vernacular humanism" has increasingly appeared in discussions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English literature and culture, and it offers a provocative broadening of the issues currently addressed by "humanism" alone. Applied to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, "humanism" is no longer credibly used in the sense of a Zeitgeist of individualistic, human-centered values and philosophy; instead—largely due to the rigorously nominalist focus of Paul Oskar Kristeller—it now more narrowly refers to the pursuits of scholars and writers who, in mid-fourteenth- century Italy and then fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England and Europe, pursued a new depth of knowledge of Latin (and, later, Greek) writings, sought a new capability for producing classical Latin style, and, often, cultivated a particularly clear and 'Roman' handwriting, all following what they perceived to be the usages of antiquity with more insight and sophistication than previous generations of writers and scholars (although the handwriting was in fact based on Carolingian script). Yet as Kristeller argued in a seminal 1979 essay, the professional roles of such writers—outside of a very few exceptional amateurs like Petrarch—were mostly continuations of medieval traditions, and in fact changes neither in philosophy nor in society generally could be summed up by "humanism." As a grammatical and stylistic fashion, "humanism" after Kristeller serves merely as a starting point for exploring further shifts in intellectual and social history.