ABSTRACT
The word 'humanist' seems to have been coined by Abraham Fleming in his translation of Virgil's Georgies in 1589. Fleming's humanists are schoolmasters, like Harrington's Hume. Fynes Moryson's polymathic humanist owes something to the Ciceronian ideal of the orator well seen in the artes humanae, but Cicero's orator owes much in his turn to the universalism typically required in the grammaticus. Moryson's definition of the humanist is clearly based on the Ciceronian ideal of the perfectus orator. Cicero used the word humanitas to refer to writings in his own vernacular as well as those written in Greek. A genuinely Ciceronian interpretation of the literary sense of the word 'humanity', then, would be defined in terms of what the eighteenth century called belles lettres. George Puttenham's example of Kermesine and Temir Cuzclewe is amusingly deviant in terms of the usual conception of literary humanity in its courtly and amorous context.
