Ciao tutti! Here’s a story of two good friends: Francesco Petrarch, the father of humanism, and Giovanni Boccaccio, best known for “The Decameron,” a collection of raucous love stories he compiled in 1350 from the far reaches of mercantile Italy.
Timothy Kircher, professor of history, gave a lecture titled “Adventures through the 14th Century Italian Renaissance” on Oct. 25 in the Founders Hall Gallery.
Kircher provided an overview of his latest book, “The Poet’s Wisdom: the Humanist, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance.” Ten years in the making, his book presents Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s philosophies and describes their role in the origin of humanism.
“I wanted to demonstrate that these humanists have something important to say philosophically that is not often recognized in scholarship or in understanding the content of contemporary religion,” Kircher said. “The moral and the philosophical are the center of the book. Humanists contributed to the understanding of subjective experience, the power of time in formulating moral decisions, more than one’s sense of eternity, and the effect of our emotional life on reasoning.”
Kircher invited audience questions throughout his lecture and cleared up misconceptions about early humanists.
“The humanist critique of hypocrisy, living up to ideals adequately by the individual, is their focus,” Kircher said of Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s break from church teaching. “They were raised in the church culture, but they took issue with the ecclesiastical latitude of expression – with the higher clergy.”
“They were critics of Christendom rather than Christianity,” Kircher said when asked about similarities between humanists and Voltaire. “Voltaire, on the other hand, wanted to get rid of the church.”
Another audience member asked how Dominicans rationalism related to empiricism.
“Rationality had nothing to do with empiricism,” Kircher said and went on to explain why humanists’ acknowledgement of time, subjectivity and emotion set them apart from Dominicans’ focus on rational dominance, objective certainty and immutable knowledge.
Kircher showed slides of Giotto’s Bell Tower, in central Florence, with its repeating sculpted tableaus of Bible scenes, occupations and planetary maps that represent ordering society and the cosmos with “with frightening rigidity.”
“I knew surface facts about Dominicans, enough to know a bit of their history,” said sophomore history major Melissa Alexander, “but I didn’t know much about the stance Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other humanist writers took against a seemingly cold and unfeeling ‘order’ of all things.”
Kircher ended his lecture by comparing two 14th-century tales that cast women as either wicked or virginal.
“The Princess and her Stepmother” is a moralistic story in which a jealous stepmother chops off a princess’s hands, and the Virgin Mary restores the princess’s hands.
Boccaccio’s “The Scholar and the Widow” is “The Decameron’s” longest story. The scholar takes revenge on his lover who forgets him and leaves him in the winter cold. He locks her unprotected on a tower roof in the heat of summer. The scholar says vengeance “trumps the feeling of compassion.”
“Boccaccio writes that the women (narrators in the story) were disturbed by the story and felt compassion for the widow even though they felt she was wrong,” Kircher said. “Dominicans, on the other hand, state the moral of the story rather than evoke thoughtful consideration by the individual.”
However, Boccaccio’s scholar does place blame on the widow.
“A persistent presence in the history of western thought has been that women are responsible for others and take the blame when things go wrong,” said Nancy Daukas, associate professor of philosophy. “Certainly, these major trends continue to shape our current society, although it may not be as obvious or as ubiquitous as once before.”
Heather Hayton, assistant professor of English, encouraged her students to attend Kircher’s lecture to get an enriched viewpoint and the chance to look through a multi-disciplinary lens as they study of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.”
“Humanists were the first to examine textual accuracy,” Kircher said. “It’s fundamental. How much do we learn about ourselves and our values from the authorities in the community in which we live, and how much do we learn on our own by trial and error from our experience?”
“I think humanists speak to values of tolerance and diversity – a part of the Guilford ethos,” Kircher said.
“When you read his book,” Alexander said, “a real love for the subject emerges, and because of that his work is void of the dryness and monotony of a lot of research.