The Making of the Humanities Focuses on the Early Modern Period

WESTSTEIJN ( BOD, MAAT & This book launches the first comparative history of the humanities. Specialists in philology, eds musicology, art history, linguistics, literary .) RENS BOD, theory, and other disciplines highlight the JAAP MAAT & intertwining of the various fields and their The THIJS WESTSTEIJN impact on the sciences. MAKING (eds.) This first volume in the seriesThe Making of the Humanities focuses on the early modern period. Different perspectives reveal how the humanities developed from the ‘liberal arts’, via the curriculum of humanistic schools, to modern disciplines. The authors show in particular how ofthe discoveries in the humanities contributed to a The MAKING secular world view, pointing up connections HUMANITIES with the ScientificR evolution. of the Contributions come from a selection of inter- nationally renowned European and American scholars, including Floris Cohen, David Cram, HUMANITIES and Ingrid Rowland. The book offers a wealth of insights for specialists, students, and those interested in the humanities in a broad sense. volume i rens bod is professor in Cognitive Systems at i volume Early Modern Europe the University of St Andrews, and Vici-laureate of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research at the University of Amsterdam. ModernEarly Europe jaap maat is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, and a researcher at the Centre for Linguistics, University of Oxford. thijs weststeijn is a postdoctoral fellow of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, based at the Department of Art History at the University of Amsterdam. 978 90 8964 269 1 · .. amsterdam university press the making of the humanities – vol. i Th e Making of the Humanities Volume 1: Early Modern Europe Edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Th ijs Weststeijn This book was made possible by the generous support of the J.E. Jurriaanse Stichting and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Front cover: Hendrik Goltzius, Minerva, 1611, oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, long-term loan of the Royal Gallery of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague. Back cover: Hendrik Goltzius, Hermes, 1611, oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, long-term loan of the Royal Gallery of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague. Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Lay-out: V3-Services, Baarn, the Netherlands isbn 978 90 8964 269 1 e-isbn 978 90 4851 333 8 nur 685 © Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Th ijs Weststeijn / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2010 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort had been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Table of Contents Introduction: Historiography of the Humanities 7 Rens Bod I The Humanities versus the Sciences Michiel Leezenberg How Comparative Should a Comparative History of the Humanities Be? The Case of the Dutch Spinoza Circle 17 Cynthia M. Pyle Bridging the Gap. A Different View of Renaissance Humanism and Science 39 H. Floris Cohen Music as Science and as Art. The Sixteenth/Seventeenth-Century Destruction of Cosmic Harmony 59 II The Visual Arts as Liberal Arts Ingrid Rowland Representing the World 75 Marieke van den Doel Ficino, Diacceto and Michelangelo’s Presentation Drawings 107 Thijs Weststeijn ‘Signs that Signify by Themselves’. Writing with Images in the Seventeenth Century 133 III Humanism and Heresy Hilary Gatti Giordano Bruno and Metaphor 163 Bernward Schmidt ‘In Erudition Th ere Is No Heresy’. Th e Humanities in Baroque Rome 177 Table of Contents IV Language and Poetics Juliette A. Groenland Humanism in the Classroom, a Reassessment 199 Cesc Esteve Origins and Principles. The History of Poetry in Early Modern Literary Criticism 231 P.M. Mehtonen Transitional Texts and Emerging Linguistic Self-Awareness. Literary Study in the Late Eighteenth Century 249 V Linguists and Logicians David Cram The Changing Relations between Grammar, Rhetoric and Music in the Early Modern Period 263 Jaap Maat The Artes Sermocinales in Times of Adversity. How Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric Survived the Seventeenth Century 283 VI Philology and Philosophy Már Jónsson Manuscript Hunting and the Challenge of Textual Variance in Late Seventeenth-Century Icelandic Studies 299 Piet Steenbakkers Spinoza in the History of Biblical Scholarship 313 Martine Pécharman The ‘Rules of Critique’. Richard Simon and Antoine Arnauld 327 VII The History of History Jacques Bos Framing a New Mode of Historical Experience. The Renaissance Historiography of Machiavelli and Guicciardini 351 Wouter J. Hanegraaff Philosophy’s Shadow. Jacob Brucker and the History of Thought 367 Contributors 385 List of Figures 391 Index 395 Introduction: Historiography of the Humanities RRensens BBodod This volume brings together scholars and historians who share a common goal: to develop a comparative history of the humanities. Although separate histories exist of some single humanities disciplines – such as the history of linguistics or the history of history writing – we feel that a general history of the humanities would satisfy a long-felt need and fill a conspicuous gap in intellectual history. In the field of the history of the natural sciences, overviews have been written at least since the nineteenth century (e.g. William Whewell’s well-known History of the Inductive Sciences). It may thus be surprising that no such history exists for the field of the humanities. The lack of such a history constituted one of the major motivations for organizing the First International Conference on the His- tory of the Humanities: The Making of the Humanities, held at the University of Amsterdam from October 23rd to 25th, 2008. As the first conference of its kind, we felt the need to create sufficient coherence and focused on one period only: the early modern era. The Call for Contributions attracted far more papers than could be accommodated: we received 89 submissions, of which only 20 could be accepted. In addition to the submitted papers, we had 4 invited talks by Floris Cohen, David Cram, Anthony Grafton and Ingrid Rowland, resulting in a total of 24 papers divided over 3 days. We decided to have no parallel sessions, so that all conferencees could attend each other’s talks and participate in the general dis- cussions. By the end of the conference, there was an increasing awareness that a general history of the humanities could and should be written. 1 Defi ning the humanities and their historiography What are the humanities? It is as with the notion of ‘time’ in St Augustine’s philosophy: if you don’t ask, we know, but if you ask, we are left with empty hands. Since the nineteenth century the humanities have typically been defined as those Rens Bod disciplines that investigate the expressions of the human mind (Geisteswissen- schaften).1 Thus, the study of music, literature, language, visual arts all belong to the realm of the humanities, in contrast to the study of nature which belongs to the domain of the natural sciences. And the study of humans in their social context belongs to the social sciences. But these definitions are unsatisfactory. Mathematics is to a large extent a product of the human mind, and yet it is not considered a humanities discipline. A pragmatic stance may be more workable: the humanities are those disciplines that are taught and studied at the various humanities faculties. According to this definition, the humanities usually entail: linguistics, musicology, philology, literary theory, historical disciplines (including art history) as well as more recent disciplines such as film studies and media studies. In some countries theology and philosophy are also taught in humanities faculties, whereas in other countries they constitute faculties on their own. But why should one wish to separate the history of the humanities from the history of the sciences – rather than aiming at a history of all scientific activities, from the natural and the social to the humanistic? The endeavor to write a history of all sciences was attempted by George Sarton in the 1930s.2 However, the result of his work, which is based on a strongly positivistic concept of progress, does not go beyond the fourteenth century, and even within that period, the humanities occupy a severely marginal position in Sarton’s history. Although Sarton includes linguistics and musicology to some extent, he leaves out other humanistic disciplines such as art history and literary theory. According to Sarton, the history of the visual arts (painting, architecture and sculpture) only throws light upon the sciences from ‘the outside’ and does not contribute to scientifi c ‘progress’, in contrast to the study of music.3 Sarton does not elaborate any further on this issue, but it seems that he is pointing to the history of art itself rather than art history as a discipline. Of course, for a history of the humanities, we need to include both art history and the study of music (musicology). Of these two, Sarton only accepts musicology, mainly because of its importance for scientifi c progress. Th ere is no at- tempt to come up with a general history of all sciences in his work, despite Sarton’s lofty intentions. After his death, no-one seems to have picked up Sarton’s goal. Both in content and period, the history of the humanities has remained underex- posed. Th is is all the more striking because many histories of the natural sciences were written during the last two centuries.4 And more recently, the history of the social sciences has also been taken up.5 Th us, from a historiographical point of view, a history of the humanities is dearly missing.

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