Chapter 4 Justus Lipsius on Travelling to : From a Humanist Letter-Essay to an Oration and a Political Guidebook

Jan Papy

Vagari, lustrare, discurrere quivis potest; pauci indagare, discere, id est, vere peregrinari. Anyone can roam, traverse regions or trot around; few, however, can investigate, learn, that is: really travel. Lipsius, letter to Philippe de Lannoy (1578) ⸪

1 , Lipsius and a Famous Humanist Letter

Having travelled and studied in Italy and Rome as a young man,1 the human- ist scholar and man of letters Justus Lipsius time and again put all his efforts to guide his students and friends who planned to travel to the homeland of humanism themselves.2 However much his views on Italy may have been

1 Ruysschaert J., “Le séjour de Juste Lipse à Rome (1568–1570) d’après ses “Antiquae lectiones” et sa correspondance”, Bulletin de l’ Institut historique belge de Rome 24 (1947–1948) 139–192; Vervliet H.L., Lipsius’ jeugd, 1547–1578. Analecta voor een kritische biografie (: 1969) 24–29. 2 Papy J., “Italiam vestram amo supra omnes terras! Lipsius’s Attitude towards Italy and Italian Humanism of the Late Sixteenth Century”, Humanistica Lovaniensia 47 (1998) 245–277. With Laureys M., “The Grandeur that was Rome: Scholarly Analysis and Pious Awe in Lipsius’s Admiranda”, in Enenkel K.A.E. et alii (eds.), Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period ( − Boston – Köln: 2001) 123–146 (esp. 122–123) – opposing the misinterpretations of Luijdjens A.H., “Chronologische lijst van beschrijvingen van Italië en Rome tot 1900 in de Nederlanden ge- schreven of verschenen”, Mededelingen van het Nederlands Historisch Instituut te Rome, 2nd series 1 (1931) 205–229 (esp. 206) and Etter E.-L., in der Geistesgeschichte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Basel − Stuttgart: 1966) 115 – it must be repeated that Lipsius’s Admiranda

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401068_006 JUSTUS LIPSIUS ON TRAVELLING TO ITALY 93 determined by literary commonplaces stemming from the anti-Italian French feelings of his days that “L’Italie n’est plus rien”, a proper understanding of Lipsius’s repeated efforts to write moralizing and admonishing letters to stu- dents and friends departing for an Iter Italicum should not only start from his personal experiences or connected to his humanist-pedagogical programme, it should equally be framed into his Neostoic views on travel itself. For Lipsius, the mature master and Stoic guide of his contubernales or stu- dents who were lodged in his home, personally monitored them during their studies and their peregrinatio academica after leaving Louvain.3 A striking and famous example of Lipsius’s pedagogic concerns and efforts is a letter from 1578 in which he extensively advised Philippe de Lannoy, a young nobleman from Tourcoing on his planned travel to Italy. Whether or not this letter is fictitiously dated in 1578 or rewritten afterwards before it was published as letter no. 22 in Lipsius’s first letter-collection, his Epistolarum Selectarum Centuria Prima (Leiden, Christopher Plantin: 1586),4 it is more important to point at its telling impact. For, Lipsius’s well-structured letter on travelling – addressed to De Lannoy but aiming at the general reader – has been reprinted time and again in all new editions of Lipsius’s Centuriae of letters. It has also been included in the multi-volume Opera omnia-editions of 1614 and 1637. And, finally, it was taken up in Nicolaus Reusners’s Itinerarium totius orbis (Basle, Nicolaus Reusner: 1592), in Georgius Loysius’s Pervigilium Mercurii in quo agitur de praestantissimis peregrinantis virtutibus (Speyer: 1600; Wittenberg: 1631), in Caspar Laudismann’s Mercurius apodemicus (Frankfurt am Main, Conradus Eifridus: 1623), in Piotr Mieszkowski’s Institutio

sive de magnitudine Romana libri IV, published in in 1598, are by no means to be considered as a guide to or a description of Italy and Rome. 3 Sabbe M., “De humanistische opleiding van Plantin’s kleinkinderen”, Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal – en Letterkunde (Brussels: 1924) 732–748; Bouchery H., Waarom Justus Lipsius gevierd? (Brussels: 1949) 23–24 and 56, n. 107; Gerlo A. − Vervliet H.D.L. – Vertessen I. (eds.), La correspondance de Juste Lipse conservée au Musée Plantin-Moretus, Gerlo A. − Vervliet H.D.L. – Vertessen I. (eds.), (Antwerp: 1967) document nr 21; Morford M., Stoics and Neostoics. Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton: 1991) 30–33 and Fig. 10; Sacré D., “An overlooked and unpublished letter from Balthasar Moretus to Justus Lipsius”, Lias 22 (1995) 163–173. 4 Modern critical edition in Iusti Lipsi Epistolae (Brussels: 1978) viz. ILE I, 78 04 03. The editors based their edition on the known extant printed editions of Lipsius’s Epistolarum Selectarum Centuria Prima, and on a manuscript copy preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève, ms. 851, fol. 209–213. Strikingly, however, they forgot to use the manuscript draft, in Lipsius’s hand, which is preserved in Library, ms. 16, fol. 2r–2v. Blom F.R.E., Justus Lipsius, brief aan Philippe de Lannoy: De ratione cum fructu peregrinandi, et praesertim in Italia, Ph.D. dissertation (Leiden: 1992), though preparing his pre-doctoral study of this letter at Leiden University, equally overlooked the Leiden document.