SELF-IDENTITY AND ALTERITY IN RENAISSANCE HUMANISM BETWEEN ELITE AND POPULAR DISCOURSES

ELITE AND POPULAR DISCOURSES
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Title: Self-Identity and Alterity in Renaissance Humanism between Elite and Popular
Discourses
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Romance
Languages by:
Dean of the Graduate School
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.
Degree awarded June 2014
Title: Self-Identity and Alterity in Renaissance Humanism between Elite and Popular
Discourses
There are two parallel discourses on humanism nowadays. One conceives of
humanism as a worldview and a philosophical position. The other takes it to be a cultural
phenomenon typical of the European Renaissance. The critics interested in considering
humanism conceptually, as a rule, are not Renaissance scholars. Operating from either a
postmodern or a postcolonial perspective, they often speak of humanism as the backbone
of Western thought or the mainstay of European modernity and, in any case, as a bankrupt
ideology of the West. Conversely, the Renaissance scholars are more concerned with the
task of making sense of the idea of humanism in its original historical context than with
considering it in relation to its other, later developments and remain, for the most part,
unwilling to address the broader questions posed by humanism.
This dissertation purports to bring the philosophical and the historical discourses
on humanism together. I focus specifically on Renaissance humanism and ground my
reflection firmly in textual analyses of late XV and XVI century sources. More concretely,
I put forward a reading of two groups of texts. The first group includes three works
exploring the arch-theme of the Renaissance, dignitas hominis, from the perspective of a
relational concept of identity formation. These are: Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio (1486),
v
Bovelles’s De sapiente (1511) and Vives’s Fabula de homine (1518). The second group of
texts contains three works which fall into the category of Renaissance Americanist
literature: Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (1542), Galeotto Cei’s Viaggio e relazione delle
Indie (written after 1553) and Jean de Léry’s Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil
(1578).
The bridge between these two bodies of texts is the idea, found in Pico, Bovelles
and Vives, that arriving at a sense of self always involves a detour through otherness, as
experienced in one’s community, Nature and God. The encounter narratives, in illustrating
the impact of America on the Renaissance European traveler, bring to life what
philosophers theorized in the peace and quiet of their studies – the essential indefiniteness
of the self unless inhabited by meanings drawn from without.
vi
Uniwersytet Warszawski, Warsaw, Poland
Advanced Master, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007, Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven,
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Modernity and the Modern Self
History of Ideas
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Assistant Professor of Spanish, Latin and Italian, Mt. Angel Seminary, St.
Benedict, August 2011- present
Graduate Teaching Fellow in Italian, University of Oregon, Eugene, September
2007 - July 2011
University of Oregon, Winter 2010/2011
FFIS International Understanding Award for International Students, Friendship
Foundation for International Students, University of Oregon, Spring 2009
vii
Socrates-Erasmus Program Scholarship for a term of study abroad, Uniwersytet
Warszawski, Fall 2000
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank especially Professor Massimo Lollini, my advisor for his support
and assistance for the past 7 years. Professor Lollini’s interest in the idea of “humanism
more than human” inspired me to pursue my own research into the ideas of self-identity
and alterity in Renaissance Humanism and his complete trust and unflinching belief in this
project helped me along the way. I would like to thank also Professors Nathalie Hester and
Leah Middlebrook who at the early stages of my inquires offered guidance in my studies
of Renaissance literature in French and Spanish. My gratitude goes also to Professor Sayre,
who graciously agreed to serve on my dissertation committee as the outside member.
I would also like to thank my children: Matthew, Michael and Natalia, who by their
exuberant presence in my life, and by forcing me to be a mom as well as a PhD student,
certainly drove home the major point of my dissertation, namely, the role of others in the
identity-shaping process. My husband Andrew was a constant source of love, support,
patience and encouragement. Without him, I would not have been able to finish this
manuscript. Last, but not least, special thanks go to my parents for their love and firm
confidence in my abilities that inspired me to pursue a career which is both a challenge and
a source of contentment.
x
ALTERITY .................................................................................................................. 10
Individuality, Interiority and Subjectivity.............................................................. 26
Humanism and the Renaissance Travel Literature ............................................... 39
III. GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA: THE SELF AS THE IMAGELESS
IMAGE OF GOD ......................................................................................................... 46
IV. CHARLES DE BOVELLES: THE SELF AS THE MIRROR OF THE
OTHER ................................................................................................................... 76
V. JUAN LUIS VIVES: THE SELF BETWEEN DIVINE MIMICRY AND
SOCIETAL RESPONSIBILITY ................................................................................ 107
VI. ÁLVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA: THE AMERICANIZED SELF ........... 134
VII. GALEOTTO CEI: HOMELESSNESS OF THE SELF ...................................... 173
VIII. JEAN DE LÉRY: THE SELF AS THE SPACE OF THE OTHER .................. 204
IX. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 238
REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 245
INTRODUCTION
There are two parallel discourses on humanism nowadays. One conceives of
humanism as a worldview and a philosophical position. The other takes it to be a cultural
phenomenon typical of the European Renaissance. The critics interested in considering
humanism conceptually, as a rule, are not Renaissance scholars. Operating from either a
postmodern or a postcolonial perspective, they often speak of humanism as the backbone
of Western thought or the mainstay of European modernity, and in any case, as a bankrupt
ideology of the West. Conversely, the Renaissance scholars are more concerned with the
task of making sense of the idea of humanism in its original historical context than with
considering it in relation to its other, later developments and remain, for the most part,
unwilling to address the broader questions posed by humanism. Yet the Renaissance, as
the historical moment that brought about the crystallization of the Western notion of
humanitas, deserves to be considered more fully in relation to the philosophically defined
humanism.
In recent years, two interesting attempts have been made to speak philosophically
about humanism in terms that seem to recapture some of its original XIV and XV century
meanings. Edward Said, one of the foremost postcolonial theorists and a fierce critic of
Eurocentrism, in his 2004 Humanism and Democratic Criticism pledged his ongoing
allegiance to the ideals of humanism. Said, in the spirit of the early humanists always in
2
search of new books, believed in redeeming the humanities by expanding the canon of a
humanistic education and insisting that a true humanist ethos is always inclusive rather
than exclusive:
“I […[ still] believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of
humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and
empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and
text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past […]
and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present”.1
Said believes that an extension and not an abolition of the canon harbors the
solution to the problem of Eurocentrism as implicit in the Western humanities curriculum.
We cannot forget “the great lessons of the past”, but we must also remain willing to hear
the voices of the present: proud heirs to the legacy of the past, yet open towards our
multicultural future. Educated according to a humanities program inclusive of canonical
and emergent, metropolitan and peripheral, hegemonic and subaltern discourses, students
will be a new brand of humanists, equipped with moral tools to pursue political justice and
equality. It is perhaps that characterization of humanism in the twin terms of literary studies
and ethical engagement that is most reminiscent of the attitudes of the Italian humanists.
The second voice I would like to bring in belongs to Stephan Toulmin. In his 1990
Cosmopolis, Toulmin associated the passage to Modernity with what he called “the XVII
century Counter-Renaissance”. According to this scholar, in that period Europe’s
intellectual attention was diverted from the humane and concrete preoccupations typical of
1 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 11.
3
the Renaissance humanists towards more abstract and universal ones. This virtual rejection
of Renaissance values (in the name of a new philosophy and a new science) lasted until
recently, but nowadays is “wearing out its welcome”:
“Since 1945, the problems that have challenged reflective thinkers on a deep
philosophical level, with the same urgency that cosmology and cosmopolis had in
the 17th century, are matters of practice: including matters of life and death. [...] All
the “changes of mind” that were characteristic of the 17th century’s turn from
humanism to rationalism are, as a result, being reversed. The “modern” focus on
the written, the universal, the general, and the timeless – which monopolized the
work of most philosophers after 1630 – is being broadened to include once again
the oral, the particular, the local, and the timely.”2
Toulmin thinks that Modernity has finished its cycle and advocates a return to
humanism, which, for him, is composed of four elements: a return to the oral (by which he
seems to mean “to the rhetoric”3), a return to the particular, a return to the local, and a
return to the timely. Even though Toulmin’s idea of Renaissance humanism sometimes
appears sketchy,4 his characterization of humanist thought as concerned more with the
domain of human experience than with the realm of objectivity is a valuable contribution
2 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis. The hidden agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 187.
3 Cf. Toulmin, 186-188.
4 My main objection is against his almost exclusive focus on the French and Northern humanists.
4
to a discussion dominated by the notion of humanism as exemplifying Europe’s
“objectifying” or “totalizing” impulse.5
As previously pointed out, Said and Toulmin’s take on humanism is quite unique
in that they do not shun the idea of speaking about Humanism philosophically and yet they
try to advance an understanding of it which has its roots in Renaissance thought. My own
contribution purports to continue this tradition of bringing the philosophical and the
historical discourses on humanism together. At the same time, I differ from Said and
Toulmin in focusing specifically on Renaissance humanism and in grounding my reflection
firmly in textual analyses of late XV and XVI century sources. More concretely, I put
forward a reading of two groups of texts. The first group includes three works exploring
that arch-theme of the Renaissance, dignitas hominis, from the perspective of a relational
concept of identity formation. These are: Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio (1486), Bovelles’s
De sapiente (1511) and Vives’s Fabula de homine (1518). The second group of texts which
I will analyze contains three works which fall into the category of Renaissance Americanist
literature: Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (1542), Galeotto Cei’s Viaggio e relazione delle
Indie (written after 1553) and Léry’s Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578).
The inclusion of the latter group of works in a thesis concerned with the notion of
humanism might be considered problematic and requires explanation. In what sense can
they help us understand the phenomenon of Renaissance humanism and what exactly is
5 A similar thesis concerning discontinuity between Renaissance humanism and Modernity is advanced by
Donald Verene in Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (Cf. “As modern philosophy is built, the
mind is disconnected from human wisdom, and it is disconnected from the divine in order that it be fully
connected to the object. The mind ceases to be nous or the soul and becomes the Understanding. The
concern with of the Understanding is not with itself but with the object.”( Donald Phillip Verene,
Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1997), 132)
5
their relationship with the “humanistic culture” of their time? In rejecting the notion that
only elite discourses can be considered “humanistic”, I follow the lead of Joan-Pau Rubiés
who in “Travel writing and Humanistic Culture: A Blunter Impact?” posits the existence
of a popular humanism, “many of whose expressions can be linked to urban culture and
sometimes also to court culture.”6 Addressing more specifically the problem of humanist
writing about the New World, Rubiés further explains:
‘popular’ writers (or the authors of oral reports who dictated to someone else) were
often subtly influenced by the concepts and strategies formulated by intellectual
elites, and, to that extent, there is never a purely ‘popular’ discourse; many of the
writers who were also observers, and quite a few who acted as editors or compilers
like Columbus, Vespucci, Varthema, Pigafetta and Cortés, for example, albeit not
having full-blown humanistic education […] in fact operated at the crossroads
between popular and elite discourses. That is, they had a limited access to formal
education and especially to Latin and Greek, but nevertheless were capable of
reading and interested in vernacular translations of ancient authors.”7
The three travel writers at the center of this project: Cabeza de Vaca, Cei and Léry,
considered next to Pico, Bovelles and Vives or even next to humanists writing on the New
World like Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, Montaigne or even Oviedo, must be viewed as
“popular writers”. However, quite apart from their actual acquaintance with “vernacular
translations” of the classics or even from their familiarity with vernacular literary
6 Rubiés, “Travel Writing and Humanistic Culture: A Blunted Impact?” in Bringing the World to Early
Modern Europe. Travel Accounts and Their Audiences, ed. Peter Mancall (Boston: Brill, 2007), 141.
7 Ibid.
6
traditions, the very existence of their accounts testifies to their membership in a culture
which placed a very high value on the written word. In fact, their narratives only make
sense in the context of a European, humanistic environment that produced the conditions
for the emergence of travel literature readership.
There is however, an even more important reason for including travel writers in this
project. As I will illustrate more fully in the introductory chapter, the chief grievance
advanced against humanism is its supposed focus on the self and its consequent blindness
to the other. It seems to me that under the rubric of this general objection to the humanist
ethos, we can subsume practically all of the particular criticisms, be they made from a
purely philosophical perspective (like Heidegger’s for instance), or more historically
grounded (like those advanced by post-colonial critics). In the chapters dedicated to the
highly abstract works by Pico della Mirandola, Bovelles and Vives, I will inevitably be in
an implicit dialogue with those criticisms of humanist thought which themselves operate
on a purely conceptual level. I will map the ways of thinking about identity and alterity in
Pico, Bovelles and Vives while at the same time keeping in mind the question of their
relationship to modernity as the cradle of the new concept of selfhood. I will try to show
that in all three cases we are dealing with a conception of the self cast in terms of a project.
It is a weak self which has to be made/shaped/fashioned through its contact with alterity.
In other words, it is not the meaning-giving ego, but an ego in search of its own meaning
via alterity. It is precisely this understanding of alterity as foundational for the emergence
of selfhood embraced by the Renaissance elite thinkers that convinced me of the
importance of exploring the idea of otherness as possibly constitutive of the Renaissance
traveler’s sense of identity.
7
It has been argued that humanism began with the realization of a rupture between
the Ancients and the medievals and moderns, in other words, that the recognition of alterity
was its founding moment. The point was made by Garin8 and is still in wide circulation.
Philippe de Lajarte in his work on French Humanism9 takes up this idea, but connects it
with the further transformations of humanism as the awareness of alterity grew to
encompass the newly encountered difference of the New World inhabitants. Lajarte draws
attention to the fact that, after discovering the Ancients as “others”, there came the second
and even more radical explosion of the context in which Europeans had to think of their
own identities. It became necessary to find ways to relate to the American Other. The
Encounter forced the Europeans to think themselves not just in relation to God, Nature and
their own societies, but also in their face-to-face with alterity which, in many ways, was
much more disturbing.
And yet, the Renaissance author, writing on America is usually portrayed as
performing, within the realm of literature, the same appropriating gesture as the
conquistador in the political sphere. While the European man of arms strived to dominate
the New World physically, the European author is said to have conspired to subjugate it
through language – imposing his own understanding and value system on the reality he
wrote about. According to this line of interpretation, language, just as much as weapons,
8 Cf. “Antiquity, therefore, came to be defined as something that confronted the humanists. Its discovery
was the discovery of an object which had to be placed into a valid relationship with the people who
discovered it. The humanists thus found themselves vis-à-vis a historical past that was very different from
their own world. […] There was a detachment; and as a result of this detachment a classical author ceased
to be part of me and I began to define my own identity by discovering his.” (Eugenio Garin,
“Interpretations of the Renaissance,” in Science and civic life in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 18-19)
9 Cf. Philippe de Lajarte, L'Humanisme en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009).
8
was an instrument of appropriation, beginning with the seemingly innocent practice of
giving Christian names to geographical locations and culminating in the usurpation by the
European author of the role of the historian of the “peoples without history”. The European
writer is thus believed to have been trapped by his tendency to subdue the American Other
on the literary level (by the imposition of his “authority”) in a process parallel to that of
the material conquest.
In my reading of the travel narratives of Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Cei and Léry I will
not be interested in analyzing textual practices by the means of which European authors
mastered the New World, rather I will try to name those narrative elements which betray
the extent to which they themselves were shaped by their travel experiences. In fact, I will
be looking at the various ways they imagined themselves in relation to the very concrete
alterity of the Americas within the framework of recorded life experience. Why the choice
of autobiographies rather than histories of the New World? In the chapters on Pico,
Bovelles and Vives I will have illustrated how the early modern humanistic subject never
completely thinks himself as impermeable with respect to the world. In contemplating
alterity, he always considers himself a part of a larger picture.10 Autobiography as a genre
captures this fundamental feature of the humanist understanding of selfhood. The exercise
of writing an autobiography is very dialogic in nature – at the most basic level it
presupposes an other who will listen and maybe even respond.
Moreover, since autobiography is a form of writing in which the process of self-
construction can be witnessed in actu, a careful reading of the…