Theological Origins of Modernity

314 notes to pages 75–77
21. Charles Trinkaus, Th e Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1983), 244.
22. On this point see ibid., 241–44; Trinkaus, Poet as Philosopher, 54; Smalley, English
Friars; and Heiko Oberman, “Some Notes on the Th eology of Nominalism with
Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Th eological Review 53
(1960): 47–76.
23. Ultimately there is a conjunction of these two in later humanist thought. Beginning
with Nicholas of Cusa and extending through Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo,
and their successors this becomes a logic of number, which serves as the foundation
for a mathematical science of motion. On this point` see Amos Funkenstein,
Th eology and the Scientifi c Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth
Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Alexander Koyré,
From Closed World to Infi nite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1957).
24. Petrarch wrote to his brother Gherardo that it is “the simplest matter for [God]
to change not only a single mind but the entire human race, the entire world, in
short, the entire nature of things.” Petrarch, Rerum familiarum libri, trans. Aldo
S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975–85), X, 5
(3:80). See also Petrarch, “On his Own Ignorance and that of Many Others,” in Th e
Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1948), 94, and Kenelm Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 150. Cf. also Petrarch, De otio religioso.
On Religious Leisure, ed. and trans. S. Schearer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Ithaca Press, 2002),
37. On this point see Trinkaus, Scope.
25. Petrarch endorses the primacy of the will in striving to be good as developed by
Scotus and Bonaventure’s emphasis on charity, widely taken up by Augustinian
Friars with whom Petrarch had intimate ties. Trinkaus, Poet as Philosopher, 111.
On this point, see Ugo Mariani, Il Petrarca e gli Agostiniani (Rome: Storia e Letteratura,
1957). Th e primacy of the will is even clearer in later humanists, especially
Salutati and Pico.
26. Ockham and Marsilius of Padua both developed heterodox doctrines of authority
that are strikingly similar to many of the more Augustinian humanists.
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Th e Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University press,
1993), 26. On this point and particularly on the diff erent political outlooks within
humanism see William J. Bouwsma, “Th e Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and
Augustinianism in Renaissance Th ought,” in Itinerarium Italicum (Leiden: Bill,
1975).
27. Trinkaus, “Italian Humanism and Scholastic Th eology,” 330.
28. Th e publication of Diogenes Laertius’compendious if superfi cial Lives of Eminent
Philosophers in 1431 played an important role in this revival.
29. John F. D’Amico, “Humanism and Pre-Reformation Th eology,” in Renaissance
Humanism, ed. Rabil, 3:355.
30. Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: Th e Intellectual Genesis (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002), 99.