Renaissance humanism was a program of study committed to the
revival of letters and rhetoric, and it focused on such issues as
the relation of then-present practices to the classical past, the
possibility of exemplarity, and self-fashioning. In general,
humanists did not teach with the aim of placing their students
within specific occupations. But as Douglas Biow shows in this
pioneering study, humanists remained concerned with the formation
of professional identities. Examining a wide range of works that
humanists wrote as doctors, ambassadors, and secretaries, and about
medical, ambassadorial, and secretarial vocations, Biow shows how
humanists embraced and discussed different professions in
profoundly different ways.
Humanists such as Petrarch, for instance, were hostile to medicine,
even though the profession was established long before humanism
became a field of study. Yet more and more doctors sought to raise
the status of their profession by embracing humanism, and some
adopted humanist teachings in writings on syphilis and the plague.
The work of ambassadors, meanwhile, was congenial to humanists from
the outset. The humanist concern for oratory sparked interest in
diplomats as spokesmen for sovereign powers. As humanists wrote
about the work of ambassadors, and in the process directly or
indirectly about themselves, they fashioned the profession against
the classical ethos they revered yet sought to perfect. The
profession of the secretary in the Renaissance, finally, was
largely a humanist invention. Secretarial duties were debated and
defined toward the latter half of the sixteenth century in a spate
of highly influential Italian treatises; in the secretary,
humanistsfashioned a profession for a society in which social
mobility within secular and ecclesiastical bureaucracies had become
increasingly possible.
Examining a rich and diverse selection of treatises, poems, and
other works of literature, "Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries"
shows ultimately how interactions with these professions forced
humanists to make their studies relevant to their own times,
uniting theory and practice in a way that strengthened their
humanism. With detailed analyses of writings by familiar and
lesser-known figures, from Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Tasso to
Maggi, Fracastoro, and Barbaro, this book will especially interest
students of Renaissance Italy, but also anyone concerned with the
rise of professionalism during the early modern period.
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