This volume enriches the currently flourishing research about (verbal) violence, competition, and paragone in the “agonal culture” (Streitkultur) of the Renaissance. Marc Laureys and Roswitha Simons only recently edited a similar volume in 2010 (Die Kunst des Streitens). This new book unites eight contributions covering texts and strategies of arguing in Renaissance Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Poland.
The editors’ introduction, “Towards a Theory of the Humanist Art of Arguing,” gives some valuable indications of how to treat Renaissance satires as texts in the classical tradition. It avoids, however, a sharp generic distinction between satire and invective. The catchy picture of the social structure of humanist circles as a narrow network (corona) of likeminded literati with a common habitus — see, for example, Harald Müller’s Habit und Habitus (2006) — provides the lens through which texts like humanist invectives and their public sphere should be interpreted. The introduction ends with a very detailed “systematic set of categories” (17) intended as a “reference guide in a comparative analysis of different conflicts” (18). It is divided into general rubrics: author and opponent, audience, classical tradition, setting and content, and strategies. This model seems fruitful for further research, but it is not used as a guideline for the contributions that follow.
Roswitha Simons analyzes the military semantic field of satire. Beginning with a poem by the German Jesuit Jakob Balde (1643), she demonstrates the existence of a set of basic patterns drawn from the Roman satirists that integrated themselves into an older tradition stemming from Lucilius, Archilochos, and so on. This attitude was appropriated by the humanist verse satirists, of whom Giorgio Correr (d. 1465), Gaspar Tribraco (1460s), and Lorenzo Lippi (d. 1485) are analyzed. Olga Anna Duhl deals in her rich contribution with “poetic theory and sense perception” (54) in Jodocus Badius’s poem Stultiferae Naves (1501), a transformation of Brant’s Narrenschiff (1494). She shows Badius to be a “devout Christian pedagogus” (58) who attempts in this “didacto-poetic project” (65) to restrain illicit speech in the satires, lifting them to the level of a Christian homily and, via hexameter, into the higher “orbit of the epic” sphere (66).
Arnold Becker deals with the transformations of Lucian’s twenty-fifth dialogue of the dead, which depicts the competitive ranking of great generals (Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal) before the judge Minos, in Ulrich von Hutten’s dialogue Arminius (published in 1529). Becker’s central category for characterizing the fluid literary tradition is ludic “unreliability” (Unverlässlichkeit). Plutarch and Renaissance translations (Aurispa, 1425; Ringmann, 1507) had already transformed Lucian’s text massively. Hutten’s contribution was to add a Germanic identity discourse by introducing Arminius as a Northern hero of German liberty. Becker analyzes the rhetorically gifted argumentation by which Hutten succeeds in establishing this figure in the classical ambiente.
Christine Bénévent analyzes the art of dispute used by Erasmus, mainly in his early Antibarbari (1495) and his later Ciceronianus (1528), and the dependencies between these texts. She parades various topics like the role of the enemy in these dialogues, their “instabilité génerique” (105), the argumentative consequences of Erasmus’s irenism, the role of fiction, and the question of what degree oratio is capable of embracing divine logos. Chris L. Heesakkers treats “Alberto Pio’s Postmortem Prefatio in His Controversy with Erasmus.” Most valuable is his paraphrase of Pio’s last voluminous response. The invectives exchanged in the years 1527 to 1531 were a chain of misunderstandings that began in ritual politeness but then erupted into massive reproaches. Pio accused Erasmus of (Lutheran) heresy, and Erasmus castigated Pio’s Latinity; the basic controversy, however, concerned the role of Catholic traditio.
George Hugo Tucker deals with “Strategies of Argument” in the Centones ex Virgilio (1555/56) of Lelio Capilupi of Mantua. The nucleus of this article is a meticulous edition with commentary of about forty verses of these Centones and their characteristic intertextual technique. The parodical interpretatio christiana evokes especially those textual elements of Virgil that were considered crypto-Christian. Marc Laureys explores the art of slander (“Die Kunst der Verunglimpfung”) in Nikodemus Frischlin’s satires against Jacob Rabus. The young Frischlin (1547–90), an author of late German Protestant humanism, hurled eight Horatian verse satires against the professor Jacob Rabus and his Professio Catholica, which had been published in 1567 after the latter’s conversion to Catholicism. In his initial Apologia, Frischlin provides a justification for the genre of the satire, prompting Laureys to some remarkable general reflections about the limited functions of satire in confessional controversy.
Joanna Partyka provides a second example of a national contextualization for satire. At stake here is the world of the Sarmatian Polish nobility, which was notoriously well educated in the classics. The polemic, full of national stereotypes, was initiated by John Barclay and Thomas Lansius (d. 1667), and the answers against the Obtrectatores Poloniae were furnished by the famous orators Lukasz Opalinski and Szymon Starowolski. Rarely had the authority of the ancients been so assiduously used for the sake of political argument.
