This is a book which is difficult for an intellectual historian to review fairly. It is full of interest, but in the end it lacks a satisfactory coordination of its ideas. The reader is left in some uncertainty as to whether it is primarily about the late medieval or the modern scholarly debates about its main subject or subjects. And those subjects sometimes seem to be shaken into new patterns with the randomness of a kaleidoscope.
The author says at the outset that he has tried to give the whole debate a ‘fresh perspective’ by locating humanism and scholasticism ‘within a new frame of reference suggested by’ Umberto Eco's The Search for the perfect language. The introduction then goes on to consider the status quaestionis mainly in terms of the debates of a number of other modern writers.
The first chapter sets out a (but as it emerges not the only) central question. Was there once, before the Fall and before the fragmentation of human language in the episode of the Tower of Babel, an original ‘perfect’ language? If so, can it be recovered? Dante in the De vulgari eloquentia, Raymond Llull and Leibnitz are considered. The chapter ends by proposing to take Lorenzo Valla's Elegantiae linguae latinae as representing the late medieval ‘humanist’ approach to this question and Paul of Venice's Logica Parva to speak for the scholastics, though other protagonists enter the fray as the book progresses. Much of what follows is concerned not only with Valla (Dialectical Disputations) but also with Vives (Adversus Pseudodialecticos), and rather less with Paul of Venice, whose views on truth get a final chapter.
In the body of the book the author engages with a complex of emerging questions, a number of which he might seem to a medieval author to beg. This tendency is perhaps encouraged by his continuing reliance on the views of key figures in the modern scholarly debate rather than the original texts in identifying the points and concepts to be discussed. A sentence may give the flavour: ‘Although linguistic determinism is a modern hypothesis about language, several scholars have adopted it for study of the Renaissance’.
This approach seems to presume that there were two profoundly distinct approaches, the scholastic and the humanist. There were certainly ‘camps’ and active hostilities between them. Yet is not always obvious where the reader is being led in relation to the assumption that two ways of thinking and schools of thought were at war and humanism and scholasticism fought it out at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.
It is hard to be sure that if this book had been put into the hands of any of these medieval and early Renaissance authors he would have found his place in it with ease or recognised himself. This reader longed for more Latin, closer engagement with the problems as the late medieval world put them, and wanted to spend more time with the views of the medieval thinkers themselves. It was startling to find neither ‘nominalism’ nor ‘realism’ in the index.
This is an ambitious book, but perhaps too much so, and too loath to leave the meta-level of modern scholarship for the solid ground of the sources in their original language.
