Ideals of Eloquence and Silence in Petrarch

Fundamental to the program of Renaissance humanism was the desire to combine wisdom with eloquence, to join together philosophy and rhetoric. Around the humanists' pious hope for the union of a true knowledge of things with literary skill clustered the most characteristic features of their cultural program: the demand for a kind of intellectual activity which would find fulfillment in virtuous action; the attack on scholasticism; the revival of ancient literature itself. Recent students of humanism have brought us closer to an understanding of the importance of this basic aim of humanist thought.' Yet the meaning of the slogan and the place it occupied in the development of humanism are still not fully understood. A careful consideration of humanist demands for the union of eloquence and wisdom reveals that the desire to join these things together affected humanist culture in pervasive and sometimes unsuspected ways. The present paper is an attempt to define and analyze the relationship between oratory and philosophy as it appears in the thought of the first and most influential humanist, Petrarch

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Silence · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

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