Abstract

Studies of English Renaissance literature have long considered Renaissance humanism a linchpin of Western civilization. Such humanism is generally thought to involve a broad based perspective on culture which Renaissance scholars acquired through an increased study of classical texts. Although humanism's specific tenets are usually defined only vaguely, they are often believed to include an increased appreciation of human worth and ability which simultaneously characterizes the Renaissance as a historical era and connects it to classical and contemporary culture. However, the concept of humanism as a broad cultural outlook is actually less than a century old. Turn-of-the-century British classicist R. C. Jebb first employed the idea as a means of defending classical studies against the natural sciences' encroachment upon university curricula. In order to emphasize the value of classical studies, he defined humanism as a set of moral values derived from classical texts that were central to both the university curriculum and Western culture in general. In the United States, Irving Babbitt endorsed a similar form of humanism which stressed classical texts' beneficial moral effects upon readers, and his and Paul Elmer More's "new humanism" gained considerable attention in North America and England in the 1920s. Babbitt's new humanism began to affect academic studies of the Renaissance only around 1930, but once it entered the discipline, it proved pervasive, and it has continued to inform studies of the period ever since. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars' attempts to embrace poststructuralist tenets frequently led them to eschew humanist assumptions, but a basic humanist outlook is nonetheless evident in studies of the period by Stanley Fish and, later, prominent new historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose. Although many new-historicist studies explicitly oppose a humanist viewpoint, they nonetheless encourage a psychological identification with historical figures through an assertion of shared cultural values just as humanism does. Humanism then proves significant to current cultural studies not because it had a widespread influence in early modern culture but because it has had an enduring effect upon twentieth-century historiography