De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 47

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The beginning of humanistic literature in Brabant
by J. IJsewijn

We are so used to calling Erasmus ‘the greatest humanist’, that we often forget to define exactly the word ‘humanist’ or ‘humanism’. To us, ‘humanism’ is the profound renovation of man and his culture, which started in Italy and was based on the normative example of an idealized classical civilization. When, further on we talk about ‘humanistic literature’ in Brabant, we will start from this definition and not from all kinds of more or less similar conceptions, as for example ‘biblical humanism’, ‘Christian humanism’ and such like.

The questions we put are: Can we talk of ‘humanistic’ or if necessary ‘prehumanistic’ literature in Brabant in the 15th century? What place does Erasmus occupy here from the regional Brabantine standpoint in the first place and the larger European perspective in the second? So we concentrate on one aspect of humanistic culture, namely literature, because it is Neo-Latin literature which can be called one of the most characteristic expressions of humanism in general.

At the same time we shall limit our investigations geographically to the two main cultural centres of South Brabant of the time: Louvain, where a university was founded in 1425, and Brussels where the ducal court was situated. They are indeed, except for Antwerp, the most important cities of the duchy regarding Erasmus' work.

The university of Louvain - to start with - was founded when in Italy humanism had already long passed its childhood.

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Petrarch had died half a century before, and an outstanding literature mainly in Latin, had developed in Florence, Siena, Naples, Milan, Ferrara etc. It was the age of Bruni, Poggio, Marrasio, Enea Silvio, Valla, Tortelli and many others who excelled in humanistic and in Neo-Latin literature.

If we look at the Netherlands in the same period, then we find there the late middle ages, without one trace worth mentioning of humanistic or even prehumanistic renovation in Latin literature. This is very surprising if we think of the close relations between the Netherlands and Italy in various other fields. But instead of radiating, humanistic literature seems to have had a repulsive influence on the inhabitants of the Netherlands. In a recent work Dr Boeren thinks that the number of curialists from the North diminishes since the reign of pope Pius II¹. This is not surprising at all: people like Pius II hardly wished to have cooperators educated during the late middle ages in Germany, disreputable for its ‘Scottus’-Latin, a country from which these Italians were also separated by an unbridgeable cultural gap: we only have to read the reactions of Pius II and his friend, the poet and bishop Campano, to their stay in the Germanic world².

At first sight we might be inclined with Erasmus to suspect the Italian humanists of chauvinism. But if we read successively texts from the Quattrocento written respectively South and North of the Alps, then we must admit, at least as far Latin literature is concerned, that the Italians had good reasons for being chauvinistic.

Let us take for example the work of two North-Brabantines from the environment of Bois-le-Duc ('s Hertogenbosch), who worked respectively in Brussels and Louvain during the second quarter of the 15th century, namely the historian Edmond van Dijnter and the physician and poet Hendrik Ceuster from Oisterwijk.

The former was a secretary of the dukes of Brabant and Burgundy. By him we possess a voluminous chronicle in six books

1 P.C. Boeren, Twee Maaslandse dichters in dienst van Karel de Stoute, The Hague 1968, p. 83.

2 Cf. F. Arnaldi and others, Poeti Latini del Quattrocento, Milan-Naples 1964, pp. 834-36 (= Carmina VIII. 1).

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about the history of Brabant and Lorraine. Historically undoubtedly important, it has no literary qualities, which we can compare to the beautiful Florentine history of his older contemporary Leonardo Bruni.

The case of Hendrik van Oisterwijk is probably even more remarkable, because this professor who taught medicine at the university of Louvain tried to write Latin verses. In a manuscript of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan we find a copy of his Carmen in laudem Brabantiae, a laudatory poem on Brabant which we think was written in 1430 or shortly after, and which was meant to recommend the duchy to the new sovereign Philip the Good³.

The work is a useful indication of the cultural situation in Brabant shortly after the foundation of the Alma Mater in Louvain, because we can compare it to the Laudatio urbis Florentinae of Leonardo Bruni, written a few decades earlier. In the prose-treatise of Bruni we notice the mastery of a well schooled politician, impressed by classical art, whose Latin is a delight to read and at the same time a weapon for the use of the vital and self-confident Florentine Republic. Our man from Oisterwijk on the other hand with great difficulties set up leonine hexameters; at the same time he made desperate efforts to apply some rhetorical ‘dictamen’ rules, and could not prevent his Dutch from influencing his Latin; and finally, the very conception of his work is typically medieval. The poem shows the typical catalogue-form of the medieval town-panegyric, and half of it is devoted to the allegorical interpretation of the letters of the word BRABANTIA: B means Beatus, this means that Brabant is a country of saints, etc..

When we read such works and immediately after them for instance the praise of the fountain of Gaia in Siena, written about the same time by the Sicilian Marrasio, then I can no longer take offence at the disgust of the humanists at the ‘crassa barbaries’ - to use Erasmus' own words - of the middle ages, as they still knew them. Then it becomes clear how senseless and unrealistic it is to pronounce panegyrics on the so-called living Latin of the late middle ages and cry down humanistic Latin. I wish to make it

3 J. IJsewijn, Henricus de Oesterwijck, the First Latin Poet of the University of Louvain (ca 1430), in Humanistica Lovaniensia, XVIII (1969). pp. 7-23.

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quite clear that I am here concerned only with the products of 15th century Latin, not of mediaeval Latin literature in general.

But to return to Brabant: during half the century between the foundation of Louvain and the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, there was little change. There are at least two reasons for this:

First, Louvain was first of all a theological university, which traditionally looked with suspicion upon the works of heathen authors, as Erasmus found, to his cost.

Secondly, the court in Brussels was French and had - unlike the Italian princely courts - little interest in Latin. The Latin authors and even the Italian humanists were read in French translations.

Both negative factors play a role in the typical case of Stephanus Surigonus. This man was a travelling poet from Milan. In 1472 he arrived in Louvain from Cologne, where he tried to excite the interest of the professors, students and town-magistrate of Louvain in the study and the practice of classical Latin poetry, to him a necessary addition to scholarly activity. At the same time he applied for a post as official panegyrist of Charles the Bold's feats of arms. Neither in Louvain nor in Brussels was he successful and after a few months he left Brabant, ‘the rich country which could not appreciate poets’, and went to England, which was (it is true) as barbaric as Brabant, but where already for half a century Italian humanists found a few interested protectors. The only professors who seem to have supported Surigonus in Louvain were the jurist Robertus a Lacu (Van de Poel) and the latinist Carolus Virulus (Menneken), president of the college ‘De Lelie’ (‘the Lily’) and the first man in Louvain whom we would dare to call a prehumanist.

Virulus is the author of a successful little book on the composition of letters in Latin, which was later unfairly treated by Erasmus in his De conscribendis epistolis. Vives was fairer when he wrote that Virulus had been a very deserving man, who did not make headway as a humanist because of the ungrateful world he lived in. Virulus' letters were written in an already tolerable Latin and contain passages which show in what direction the author intended to work. He writes about the problem whether to spell ‘nihil’ or ‘nichil’

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that Vetustas forte C littera non utitur. Leonardus tamen Aretinus non futilis auctor C poni consulit testes adducens Dantem, Petrarcham, Bocacium et Collutium Salutatum ... Idemque vir acuti amenique ingenii Gasparinus.

It is not improbable that he owed these references to Surigonus, who we believe helped him with the wording of his book.

Shortly before the arrival of Surigonus in Louvain, a cleric of Liège, Simon Mulart of Heinsberg, had written a work in 1469 in verse and prose, De ortu victoria et triumpho Domini Karoli ducis Burgundie moderni. Not very long ago Dr Boeren of Leiden discovered the text, and published it last year for the first time⁴. It is a very important contribution to the problem with which we are concerned. Dr Boeren calls Mulart a prehumanist. But looked at him from literary humanistic standpoint we cannot agree with him.

Certainly Mulart's Latin is noticeably better than Van Oisterwijk, but what he writes is purely medieval. His verses are partly medieval ‘rhythmi’, but his ‘classical’ metres too show nothing classical. For example:

Ut leo cunctarum dominus est rite ferarum,

Karolus ita novus maximus est dominus.

Flos fons vas clarum laus lux dux victoriarum:

Hunc promo non parum magnificum dominum⁵.

Perhaps there were after all a few people in Charles the Bold's environment who deserve the name of prehumanist, in the first place Charles' praeceptor Antonius Haneron. The poet Jodocus Beissel, about whom more later, praised him after his death as the first Dutch humanist:

Pieridum primus Belgis hic intulit artes,

which reminds us strikingly of what Erasmus said about the first real humanist in the Netherlands, the Frisian Rodolfus Agricola:

Rodolphus Agricola primus omnium aurulam quandam melioris literaturae nobis invexit ex Italia.

4 See note ¹.

5 Boeren, p. 221.

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With Haneron and Agricola starts a new period of the spread of humanism in South-Brabant.

Here we must mention an important political fact: the entry of the Hapsburgs through the wedding of Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian of Austria. This seems to have been a favourable factor for the development of Latin literature because Latin played an important part at the Viennese Court. There were not only regularly competent Italian humanists as secretaries, teachers, diplomats etc...; but the native humanism had already taken root: Conrad Celtis with Maximilian's support had founded a humanistic Academy, the Sodalitas Danubiana, where poetry as well as scholarship flourished.

We notice immediately an improvement in Latin poetry in Brussels, although there is a big gap compared with men like Angelus Politianus or Johannes Jovianus Pontanus in Italy in the same period. Let me illustrate this with two examples.

The death of Charles the Bold and the wedding of his daughter were treated in a collection of Latin verses by a certain Bartholomaeus of Tongeren, whose work has recently been published by Dr. Boeren⁶. Again it is difficult to call this poet a prehumanist. Not only his verse-style - which is not so bad after all - is unhumanistic; but perhaps even more typical is the place he assigns himself in Latin literature. In a collection of poems which he dedicated to pope Sixtus IV, he called himself a ‘versificator’. The Italian prehumanists early in the 14th century had made the difference, not known in the middle ages, between on the one hand the ‘poeta’, that is the ancient poet and humanistic imitator, he who follows the ‘veterum vestigia vatum’ to use Lovato Lovati's own words, and on the other hand the ‘versificator’ of the middle ages. A man who tries to write humanistically will call himself a ‘poeta’ and not a ‘versificator’: one only has to read for example the title which Erasmus and Cornelius Goudanus give each other in Erasmus' youthful correspondence. Bartholomeus of Tongeren seems to have known this difference. His poems for Mary of Burgundy end with the following distich, which is connected with

6 See note ¹.

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the age old custom of writers and copyists of asking for the good-will of their readers for their work:

Edidit ex Tongris hec carmina Bartholus unus:

Lingua poetarum propicietur ei!⁷

He seems to ask the poetae not to be too critical about his verses. This, to start with, is an expression of an inferiority complex, which a humanist does not have, and in my opinion it shows surely that he did not feel himself to be a ‘poeta’, in other words not a humanist or a prehumanist.

At the court of Maximilian lived other Latin poets too, for instance the patrician Judocus Beissel from Aix-la-Chapelle, a graduate of Louvain (where he had followed the law lectures of Robertus a Lacu) and a counsellor of Maximilian. He was a friend of Rudolf Agricola and not unknown to Erasmus. About 1498, his collection of prose and poetry with the title ‘Rosacea augustissime Cristifere Marie corona’, was published in Antwerp, one of the very rare copies of which is in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. When we read through this work we are very disappointed at the little value of both the contents and the form and only with a lot of good-will can we call this author a prehumanist. The prose is nothing but a collection of medieval legends about the Virgin Mary. The verses are hopeless rhetorical stammering almost exclusively about religious and pious topics, with sometimes an attempt at classical phrasing, which is supposed to add humanistic colour. Here is a small example, the poem ‘De Christo assessore delegendo’:

Pectus in offensam properas qui carpere vitam,

Expertum hoc memori pectore dogma tene.

Nil sine teste Deo patrare aut dicere temptes;

Assideat factis assideatque animis!

Nam tibi presentem Cristum si credere possis,

Mirum si turpem te sinat esse rubor.

Sic fratri Cicero testis fuit: ipse Cathonem

Respexit: Lelium Scipio et ipse suum.

7 Book cited above (note ¹), p. 196.

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Ethicus ex ficto potuit splendescere teste:

 

Tu sacer ex vero numine non poteris?

The more texts we read of so-called Dutch humanists from before 1500 the better we can understand the reaction of the exceptional persons, who deserve this title. It is not surprising that Agricola, who had lived four years among Italian humanists, refused the professorship in poetics at Louvain which was offered to him. Erasmus did the same. It also becomes clear why the first great German humanist, Conrad Celtis, could about 1500 still write an ode ‘Ad Apollinem repertorem poetices ut ab Italis ad Germanos veniat’, and in it could pray Apollo finally to exterminate Barbarism in Germany. We ask ourselves what real humanists like the Venetian diplomat Ermolao Barbaro must have thought when they visited the court of Maximilian⁸. We will even have to agree with Erasmus when in the colloquium for the wedding of his friend Petrus Aegidius from Antwerp, he writes that the muses can for the time being not get on well in Louvain because there are only braying donkeys and grunting pigs. We also understand why even several years later, the professor of Latin from Louvain, Petrus Nannius deformed the name Lovanium to Ludivanium, i.e. ‘school of foolishness’⁹.

It is in this non-humanistic Brabant that Erasmus is found shortly after 1500. With the knowledge of Latin and Greek, which he possessed, he must have been an important ray of hope for the not very many admirers of humanism at the university and the court. A man who wrote Latin so exquisitely, clearly and spontaneously as Erasmus, somebody who could translate Euripides and other Greek authors, was something exceptional in Louvain and in Brussels even after 1500. His example surely contributed to the fact that during the first quarter of the sixteenth century there had been a quicker advance of humanistic literature than in the whole of the 15th century. Soon there is an attempt to revivify the classical

8 It is significant that the answer to the Latin speech, held by Barbaro before the emperors at Bruges in august 1486, was delivered not by a native of the Low Countries but by another Venetian, Antonius Gratiadei, attached to the court. See J. Öberg, Notice et extraits du manuscrit Q 19 de Strängnäs, Stockholm, 1968.

9 At the end of his De rebus inferis... somnium.

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theatre¹⁰: here were 200 years behind Italy, where Mussato in Padua had written a modern drama after the Senecan style in 1300. Soon the real humanistic poetry flourished which still before Erasmus' death culminated in the immortal work of Janus Secundus. We have to admit though, that this latter poet was not educated in the Netherlands, but mainly in Bourges by an Italian, Alciati, with a rich library of Neo-Latin Italian humanists.

In Brabant, Erasmus was as a humanistic literator surely a person of exceptional, even unique calibre. But we have to admit that measured by the Italian standard of the time, he was not so exceptional and in fact rather onesided. Indeed, almost every Italian humanist of some importance manipulated Latin prose as well and as gracefully as our Rotterdammer. The best were at the same time highly esteemed poets and poetry was and would always be the highest indication of true humanistic culture.

Brilliant examples of such doubly talented contemporaries of Erasmus are the Neapolitan diplomat J.J. Pontanus and the younger cardinal Petrus Bembus. Erasmus can not be compared to them in literature: he could, it is true, build a correct Latin verse like every properly educated classical scholar, but he knew very well himself that his ‘venae paupertas’ had prevented him from realizing his youthful dream to become a ‘poeta’. At the same time he realized very well himself how essential poetry was to the humanist: ‘Nae, tu bonam eruditionis partem excipis cum carmen excipis’, says Bulephorus in the Ciceronianus.

Added to this restriction was the fact that Erasmus through the years and under the influence of the mainly theological atmosphere of the North, where he lived, became in a certain way a stranger to purely humanistic literature. His negative judgement of the poet Marullus, one of the greatest of the Quattrocento, was typical of this. What Erasmus wrote in the Ciceronianus about Dorpius can be said of himself: ‘Tandem theologiae studium retraxit hominem a Musis’.

Could we suppose that all this contributed to the circumstance that Erasmus did not find the estimation in Italy which could be

10 By Martin Dorpius.

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compared to his success elsewhere and that he himself on his turn was averse to the native country of humanism? When we read Erasmus we sometimes get the impression that this underestimation must have hurt him, the more because he could establish how others from the North, who had assimilated humanism on the spot, like the Frisian Rudolf Agricola or Christophorus Longolius from Malines, received full recognition and were honoured in public. An echo of this resentment is expressed clearly in the Ciceronianus, where he talks about Longolius and says for instance with some kind of envy ‘Nunc autem quid est esse civem Romanum? Profecto minus aliquanto quam esse civem Basiliensem’.

It was exaggerated and unfair to classify Erasmus more or less with the Barbarians, but on the other hand Brabant from a humanistic standpoint was still very barbaric around 1500 and this inevitably created a negative prejudice, even against a good Latinist like Erasmus, who belonged to that distant country and who, in Italy, never had proved his knowledge by means of such public demonstrations as for instance festive speeches. His railing at Italian orators in the Ciceronianus was perhaps in part determinated by the fact that he had never attained success in Italy by the spoken word, as did Agricola and Longolius. Finally one has to consider that a lot of Erasmus' work, that in the North sounded most original and even revolutionary, from the Cisalpine point of view was not so new. Long before Erasmus, Valla for instance, had worked on a better text of the New Testament; the Florentine Manetti had made a new translation based on the Greek original text and for the psalms even based on the Hebrew version. The Ciceronianus of 1528 came after the refinement of prose in Italy begun by Petrarch, and continued by Valla, Cortese, Politian, Pontano, and Bembo, which had lasting results and which even today determines the style of papal documents. Otherwise the question concerning the Ciceronianism by 1530 was no longer the great problem in Italy, as writers were shifting from Latin to Tuscan¹¹. By the time humanism was showing the first modest signs of development in

11 Only minor Italian writers thought it still worth while to attack Erasmus' views.

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Brabant, under the influence of Erasmus among others, humanism in Italy was virtually over.

The value of Erasmus as a humanistic literator lies therefore, in our opinion, not in the fact that he was greater than his contemporaries, but in the fact that he, as the first thoroughly formed Neo-Latin author, worked in Brabant with lasting results. Others had already prepared the way, but without Erasmus' remarkable talents Brabant would most probably have had to wait another fifty years for the break through of humanistic literature, as was the case in the Scandinavian and Baltic countries.