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7 - Humanist classifications of poetry among the arts and sciences

from I - Humanist classifications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
William J. Kennedy
Edited by
Glyn P. Norton
Glyn P. Norton
Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts
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Summary

Humanist theory classified poetry among the arts and sciences in various and sometimes conflicting ways. A given classification affirms not only the priority of some genres, styles, modes, and topics over others, but also the values of a social class or order that poetry might address. Whether for a limited constitutional or patrician republic (Florence, Venice), for a partisan and privileged nobility (the courts of Naples, Urbino, and Ferrara in Italy, or of the Sidney and Leicester circles in England), for an emergently national monarchy (the kings of France or Spain), or for an urban bourgeoisie (Lyons, Barcelona, London), humanist theory formed a canon that defines what literature is or could be among the other arts. It classified poetry chiefly in relation to rhetoric, political philosophy, and the discourse of history.

Medieval grammarians ranked poetry among the natural and moral sciences, as did the Chartrian academician John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon (c. 1160) which associates poetry with diacrisis, ‘vivid representation, graphic imagery’, so that poetry ‘would seem to image all the arts’. Republican humanists of fifteenth-century Florence, however, associated poetry with rhetoric, serving as a practical means to stimulate the intelligence, inspire learning, and persuade to civic virtue. Cristoforo Landino's dialogue on the good life, Disputationes Camaldulenses (c. 1472), for example, interprets the Aeneid as the hero's journey to a Neoplatonic summum bonum. Even though Landino allegorizes the poem in broad abstractions, he grounds its figures of virtue and vice in a historical specificity unknown to medieval commentators.

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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 89 - 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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