HIST-338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Scholasticism, Renaissance Humanism, Medieval Philosophy
28 Nov 2020
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Cicero"s notions of the role of the citizen in the republican state, of the power and limits of the law, and of the sense of civic responsibility all struck a chord that people increasingly strove to follow. Poems like virgil"s eclogues, with their rhapsodic praises of the glories of rural landscapes and rustic pleasures, helped to encourage artists to paint stirring images, increasingly realistic or representational, of the beauties of nature. Roman interest in biography, in the portrayal of the life histories of individuals, inspired a revival of that genre. Petrarca famously described the difference between medieval scholasticism and renaissance humanism precisely in terms of potency. Scholastic philosophy, he argued, could define a virtue like goodness but was incapable of inspiring anyone to become good, whereas the very greatness of humanistic study was in its capacity to inflame the heart, to make us crave virtue.
