ABSTRACT
Humanism was not an institution in the sense that some agenda existed that enjoyed the universal consensus of all self-professed humanists throughout Europe; nor did these men and women as a group behave according to laws that were in some sense higher or better than those of other people. 1 That said, however, powerful traditions, both political as well as intellectual, did exist that gave definite corporate identity to early modern Europe's learned elite. The perception of these shared mental and historical bases led in turn to the deliberate formation of organizational structures in which wide-based humanistic activities and ideas were fostered. Foremost among these were the sodalities, the intellectual societies. It is important to see their rise as in part negatively motivated by dissatisfaction with existing institutions:
In schools and universities, courts and churches, [humanists] encountered social institutions that they had had no hand in forming but to which they were obligated to conform. In their academies, language and literature societies, and sodalities, however, they could act according to rules that they themselves had devised. No institution therefore was more suited to the self-expression of the humanists of Europe than these sodalitates literariae. The forms of communication that the learned members created in these sodalities offer a picture of how they understood their social roles, what hopes of social recognition they entertained, in what regard they held intellectual achievement, and how they valued the levels of rational activity ... [T]he sodalities represented, as a whole, the most important agency within the European movement of national languages and literatures. 2
The welcome recent scholarly tendency towards a more differentiated view of humanists and humanism may be followed in the studies by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, sometimes in collaboration. See, e.g., their essays in From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), or Grafton's Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books & Renaissance Readers, Jerome Lectures, 20 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
