Renaissance Humanism, 1300-1550 by Frederick B. ArtzReview by: Wallace K. FergusonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Jan., 1967), p. 557Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1859278 .

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Medieval 557 to the role of ritual in these early medieval cultures. His arresting arguments are blunted after almost ninety pages. Had Fisher, in his historiographical inquiry, availed himself of the studies of N. Rubinstein, G. Arnaldi, and others, he would have transformed a most useful treatment into a revealing amplification of that shaded continent between communal psychology and nascent historicism. The two Renaissance studies are aptly done and contain few surprises: De Roover's findings fit nicely on the ideal parabola of Florentine quattrocento economic con- ditions, while Chambers is urbane in his treatment of the problems nmembers of the Curia had keeping up with the cardinals. Surely there is need for such a journal, although it would seem this one suffers from two rather common defects: first, that, to be published, a study must present either new facts or a novel interpretation; second, that "solid history" must resemble an "A" examination, wherein legions of "real" facts are marshaled in response to "'unreal" questions. A journal of this kind has an unrivaled opportunity to encourage syntheses, review findings in related fields, make discoveries in the arts and music available to the researcher occupied with medieval and Renaissance political behavior, and so forth. Some boldness might be in order, lest Nietzsche's observation be proven true: One studies history to learn how to accept boredom.

University of Rochester MARVIN B. BECKER

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM, 1300-I550. By Frederick B. Artz. ([Kent, Ohio:] Kent State University Press. T966. Pp. ix, I03. $5.00.)

Tills book will provide students with a brief but comprehensive introduction to the whole course of the humanist movement from its origins in the Age of Petrarch to its culmination in that of Erasmus. It is a topographical survey in which only the peaks are noted, but the main outlines emerge all the more clearly.

Professor Artz rightly emphasizes the enormous critical labor involved in the textual rehabilitation of all that survived of ancient Latin and Greek literature, but he also makes it clear that it was the content as well as the form of the classics that aroused the enthusiasm of the humanists, and that their own contribution was not limited to philology. In Italy antique moral philosophy enabled the hu- manists to create a lay morality for a secular urban society, while in the North the Christian humanists found in the combined study of pagan and Christian antiquity the inspiration for religious reform. On both sides of the Alps the hu- manists revolutionized the ideals and methods of education. Above all they per- formed the invaluable service of bringing back into the mainstream of Western civilization its antique heritage. "This was a heritage," Artz concludes, "so valu- able in itself that human life would be poorer without it, and also a heritage so fraught with power to educate and stimulate that the permanent loss of it would have been the annulment of an inestimable agency in the development of the human faculty." It is heartening to have this truth, no longer universally ac- cepted as self-evident, thus reasserted.

University of Western Ontario WALLACE K. FERGUSON

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