Decolonizing Renaissance Humanism

Abstract

Abstract This article traces the origins of the Eurocentric vision of Renaissance humanism and shows that in fact the revival of letters in thirteenth-century Italy had a much wider impact than traditionally thought. This “decolonized” vision of Renaissance humanism is centered on three trends: imperial humanism (humanist ideas of empire, both within and beyond the metropole), Indo-humanism (syncretic humanisms, especially in Asia and the Americas), and post-humanism (the movement’s long shadow into the eighteenth century). When placed in this new light, Renaissance humanism emerges as neither purely graciously cosmopolitan and proto-liberal, nor chauvinistically imperialist and statist, although it was very frequently embedded in imperial and evangelization projects. Rather, at a fundamental level it represented a toolbox of ideas and scholarly techniques that could be put to differing ends depending on the circumstances, while retaining certain common features that endured well into the age of “Enlightenment.” In making its argument about the past, present, and future of the scholarship on Renaissance humanism, this article also relies on a large corpus of little-known texts in various languages by a host of non- and extra-European humanists