Humanly Possible summary

In the fourteenth century, two men created the template for what we consider humanism today:  Francesco Petrarca, commonly referred to as Petrarch (1304–1374), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). And they did it as the most normal act of teenage rebellion you could think of. Petrarch’s father was a notary, and Boccaccio’s father was a merchant. Both fathers demanded their sons take up their professions. And both sons rejected their fathers’ demands to pursue literature.

This all-in devotion to seeking knowledge, and to unburying the works of the past, is a key characteristic of humanism. Petrarch became obsessed with recovering and collecting manuscripts to the point where he would send wish lists with friends who were traveling in case they came across some rare work that might look good on his shelves.

In 1984, a historian named Joan Kelly-Gadol wrote a paper entitled “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” And the answer was, well, mostly, no. During the fifteenth century there was more opportunity for women than there had been before, but the majority of families still saw little reason to provide their daughters with a substantial education. However, there were some notable women humanists who made a name for themselves at this time.

Christine de Pizan, born in Venice in 1364, lived an exceptional life. She ended up living in France, and as a result learned to speak and read both French and her native Italian. Some speculate that she also learned Latin.

In 1480, a Dutch humanist named Rudolf Agricola spoke at a school in the Netherlands. He talked about the value of education – but not the kind you get at school. He urged the students to pursue their own education in things like history and philosophy and poetry. Rather than have material handed to them, translated by others, they should seek out primary sources on their own.

One young boy in the audience was deeply affected by the speech. His name was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), one of the greatest humanists of all time. Erasmus wrote in a wide range of styles, from dialogues to theological tracts to collections of proverbs.

In 1755, an earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal while a large number of citizens were at church. Many of the people who survived the earthquake were killed in a tsunami triggered by that earthquake. The death total is said to have been around 70,000.

This tragedy reached deep into the continent, affecting people all over Europe. At the time of the earthquake, the prevailing wisdom doled out by the Church was that everything is for the good: God had created the world in the best form possible, which surely meant that any other world would be far worse than this one. Therefore, human suffering aside, everything that happens in this world must be okay.

Critics of Erasmus cited his refusal to acknowledge the evil inherent in mankind. There wasn’t a note of Machiavelli in anything he wrote, nor an acknowledgment of man’s darker side as a question unanswered by humanism. The twentieth century saw that dark side come to life in the form of fascism and subsequent anti-humanist sentiment.

The German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955), who was a student of humanism and interested in the failings in Erasmus’s beliefs, started out believing that authors should remain apolitical. But when Hitler and Mussolini began doing away with humanist education and replacing it with whatever they wanted in order to shape citizens for their own ends, Mann could no longer remain silent. He spoke out against fascism in speeches and in fiction, forcing him to move to Switzerland to preserve his life and the lives of his family.