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Early Modern Europe
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978 90 8964 269 1 o
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· .. amsterdam university press
the making of the humanities – vol. i
Th e Making of
the Humanities
Volume 1:
Early Modern Europe
Edited by
Rens Bod,
Jaap Maat and
Th ijs Weststeijn
This book was made possible by the generous support of the
J.E. Jurriaanse Stichting and the Netherlands Organization for
Scientific Research (NWO).
Front cover:
Hendrik Goltzius, Minerva, 1611, oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm, Frans Hals
Museum, Haarlem, long-term loan of the Royal Gallery of Paintings
Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Back cover:
Hendrik Goltzius, Hermes, 1611, oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm, Frans Hals
Museum, Haarlem, long-term loan of the Royal Gallery of Paintings
Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Lay-out: V3-Services, Baarn, the Netherlands
isbn 978 90 8964 269 1
e-isbn 978 90 4851 333 8
nur 685
© Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Th ijs Weststeijn / Amsterdam University Press,
Amsterdam 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans-
mitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author
of the book.
Every effort had been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations re-
produced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Historiography of the Humanities 7
Rens Bod
I The Humanities versus the Sciences
Michiel Leezenberg
How Comparative Should a Comparative History of the Humanities Be?
The Case of the Dutch Spinoza Circle 17
Cynthia M. Pyle
B ridging the Gap. A Different View of Renaissance Humanism and
Science 39
H. Floris Cohen
Music as Science and as Art. The Sixteenth/Seventeenth-Century
Destruction of Cosmic Harmony 59
II The Visual Arts as Liberal Arts
Ingrid Rowland
Representing the World 75
Marieke van den Doel
Ficino, Diacceto and Michelangelo’s Presentation Drawings 107
Thijs Weststeijn
‘Signs that Signify by Themselves’. Writing with Images in the
Seventeenth Century 133
III Humanism and Heresy
Hilary Gatti
Giordano Bruno and Metaphor 163
Bernward Schmidt
‘In Erudition Th ere Is No Heresy’. Th e Humanities in Baroque Rome 177
Table of Contents
IV Language and Poetics
Juliette A. Groenland
Humanism in the Classroom, a Reassessment 199
Cesc Esteve
Origins and Principles. The History of Poetry in Early Modern Literary
Criticism 231
P.M. Mehtonen
Transitional Texts and Emerging Linguistic Self-Awareness. Literary
Study in the Late Eighteenth Century 249
V Linguists and Logicians
David Cram
The Changing Relations between Grammar, Rhetoric and Music in the
Early Modern Period 263
Jaap Maat
The Artes Sermocinales in Times of Adversity. How Grammar, Logic and
Rhetoric Survived the Seventeenth Century 283
VI Philology and Philosophy
Már Jónsson
Manuscript Hunting and the Challenge of Textual Variance in Late
Seventeenth-Century Icelandic Studies 299
Piet Steenbakkers
Spinoza in the History of Biblical Scholarship 313
Martine Pécharman
The ‘Rules of Critique’. Richard Simon and Antoine Arnauld 327
VII The History of History
Jacques Bos
Framing a New Mode of Historical Experience. The Renaissance
Historiography of Machiavelli and Guicciardini 351
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Philosophy’s Shadow. Jacob Brucker and the History of Thought 367
Contributors 385
List of Figures 391
Index 395
Introduction: Historiography of the Humanities
RReennss BBoodd
This volume brings together scholars and historians who share a common goal:
to develop a comparative history of the humanities. Although separate histories
exist of some single humanities disciplines – such as the history of linguistics or
the history of history writing – we feel that a general history of the humanities
would satisfy a long-felt need and fill a conspicuous gap in intellectual history.
In the field of the history of the natural sciences, overviews have been written
at least since the nineteenth century (e.g. William Whewell’s well-known History
of the Inductive Sciences). It may thus be surprising that no such history exists
for the field of the humanities. The lack of such a history constituted one of the
major motivations for organizing the First International Conference on the His-
tory of the Humanities: The Making of the Humanities, held at the University of
Amsterdam from October 23rd to 25th, 2008. As the first conference of its kind,
we felt the need to create sufficient coherence and focused on one period only:
the early modern era. The Call for Contributions attracted far more papers than
could be accommodated: we received 89 submissions, of which only 20 could be
accepted. In addition to the submitted papers, we had 4 invited talks by Floris
Cohen, David Cram, Anthony Grafton and Ingrid Rowland, resulting in a total
of 24 papers divided over 3 days. We decided to have no parallel sessions, so that
all conferencees could attend each other’s talks and participate in the general dis-
cussions. By the end of the conference, there was an increasing awareness that a
general history of the humanities could and should be written.
1 Defi ning the humanities and their historiography
What are the humanities? It is as with the notion of ‘time’ in St Augustine’s phi-
losophy: if you don’t ask, we know, but if you ask, we are left with empty hands.
Since the nineteenth century the humanities have typically been defined as those
Rens Bod
disciplines that investigate the expressions of the human mind (Geisteswissen-
schaften).1 Thus, the study of music, literature, language, visual arts all belong
to the realm of the humanities, in contrast to the study of nature which belongs
to the domain of the natural sciences. And the study of humans in their social
context belongs to the social sciences. But these definitions are unsatisfactory.
Mathematics is to a large extent a product of the human mind, and yet it is not
considered a humanities discipline. A pragmatic stance may be more workable:
the humanities are those disciplines that are taught and studied at the various
humanities faculties. According to this definition, the humanities usually entail:
linguistics, musicology, philology, literary theory, historical disciplines (includ-
ing art history) as well as more recent disciplines such as film studies and media
studies. In some countries theology and philosophy are also taught in humanities
faculties, whereas in other countries they constitute faculties on their own.
But why should one wish to separate the history of the humanities from the
history of the sciences – rather than aiming at a history of all scientific activities,
from the natural and the social to the humanistic? The endeavor to write a his-
tory of all sciences was attempted by George Sarton in the 1930s.2 However, the
result of his work, which is based on a strongly positivistic concept of progress,
does not go beyond the fourteenth century, and even within that period, the hu-
manities occupy a severely marginal position in Sarton’s history. Although Sarton
includes linguistics and musicology to some extent, he leaves out other humanistic
disciplines such as art history and literary theory. According to Sarton, the history
of the visual arts (painting, architecture and sculpture) only throws light upon the
sciences from ‘the outside’ and does not contribute to scientifi c ‘progress’, in con-
trast to the study of music.3 Sarton does not elaborate any further on this issue,
but it seems that he is pointing to the history of art itself rather than art history
as a discipline. Of course, for a history of the humanities, we need to include both
art history and the study of music (musicology). Of these two, Sarton only accepts
musicology, mainly because of its importance for scientifi c progress. Th ere is no at-
tempt to come up with a general history of all sciences in his work, despite Sarton’s
lofty intentions. After his death, no-one seems to have picked up Sarton’s goal.
Both in content and period, the history of the humanities has remained underex-
posed. Th is is all the more striking because many histories of the natural sciences were
written during the last two centuries.4 And more recently, the history of the social
sciences has also been taken up.5 Th us, from a historiographical point of view, a history
of the humanities is dearly missing. While various histories of some single humanis-
tic disciplines have been written, such as the history of linguistics6 or the history of
literary theory7, connections between methods and principles in literary theory and
those in art history or between musicology and linguistics are rarely made – perhaps
because of the notorious fragmentation of the humanities during the last century.
Introduction
Fig. 1: Egidius Sadeler after Hans von Aachen, Minerva Introduces Painting to the Liberal Arts,
engraving, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
