Giovanni Dominici’s Opposition to Humanism

Scholarly fashions have rightly reacted against the division of the renaissance into ‘two cultures’, the Christian and the pagan, and tend now to emphasise more the positive side of the relationship between religion and humanism. The early humanists themselves were at pains to defend their activities by stressing the contributions that poetry and classical studies could make, the divine origins of poetry and the moral value of many pagan writings. Yet these very defences were necessitated by a series of assaults, mostly by churchmen, on the activities of these early humanists. The old misgivings about the value and permissibility of the study of pagan authors inevitably came to the fore again with the revival of such studies. And the humanist stance was developed specifically in response to such criticisms. Mussato defended his profession against the pulpit denunciations of Giovannino of Mantua: Petrarch against the claims of a doctor of Avignon that medicine, not poetry, was the handmaid of philosophy: Salutati against successive strictures by Giuliano Zonarini, Pellegrino Zambeecari, Giovanni of Sanminiato and Giovanni Dominici

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  Gene A Brucker, Gene Brucker et al.•Renaissance and Reformation•1969

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