Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofilosvy.net. Today's episode, do as the Romans did, French humanism.

As Norman Teppet once said to the unemployed of Britain, get on your bike, because having wrapped up our look at the Northern Renaissance and Reformation in Central Europe and the low countries, we're now going on a tour of France.

French culture in the 15th and especially 16th centuries, we'll be occupying our attention for about 20 episodes, a mini series that will take in such figures as Ravelet, Marguerite de Neva, Jean-Baudin, Marie de Corne, and Montagne.

As you can tap from my attempt to pronounce these names, my spoken French is not what it could be. It is reputed to be one of the world's most beautiful languages, but this podcast will be offering no evidence to support that claim.

To the contrary, I will be subjecting it to the sort of treatment, meet it out in the St. Bartholomew's day massacre of 1572, something else we'll be mentioning along the way.

So I apologize for that in advance. On the bright side, at least you don't have to see my facial expressions, so you will be spared what PG Woodhouse once memorably described as, the look of firt of shame, the shifty hang dog look, which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.

I'm American, of course, but it applies to us too. As it happens, this first episode will be devoted to a similar topic, what happened when Frenchmen undertook to speak Latin, and even more controversial when they undertook to speak French.

These were the two languages of the humanist movement that swept France in our period, just as it had swept Italy. In fact, it is generally agreed that humanism swept into France because of its emergence in Italy.

The French Renaissance is often traced to the impact of Petroch, the 14th century poet and humanist, who inspired later Italians like Salutatti and Bruni.

Petroch's poetry was imitated in French lyric first, and translated by Jean Merot in 1534.

Merot also exemplified the way that French writers were engaging with classical literature in this period, he translated avid and Virgil from Latin into French.

Yet medieval French literature still remained relevant in this period. In fact, that is illustrated by Merot too, as he produced an updated version of the 13th century poem, Romance of the Rose.

We looked at this allegorical work back in Episode 254, and in Episode 295 we saw how Christine de Pizzan and other intellectuals in early 15th century France debated its value.

Despite Christine's complaints about its misogyny, it remained a central work. The poet, Zohim de Boulet, pronounced it the only thing worth reading from older French literature.

De Boulet made this judgment in his defense of the French language, published in 1549. By this point people had actually been writing fine literature in French for quite some time, raising the question of why the practice would need to be defended.

Even leaving aside the Romance of the Rose and early 15th century authors like Christine de Pizzan, we can mention the school of authors called the Rectoriqueux, poets who worked around the end of the 1400s.

The very titles of their works show that they were conscious of working in French rather than Latin. Jean Moyenay, for instance, wrote a work called the art of vernacular rhetoric.

Even though Moyenay anticipated de Belé's attitude that vernacular poetry should follow as closely as possible, the model of Latin verse, de Belé was dismissive of the earlier efforts of Moyenay and the other Rectoriqueux.

Like so many Renaissance figures, whether in science, philosophy or literature, he thought that it was only in his own time that the glories of antiquity were finally being revived and imitated with any degree of success.

Modern-day scholars don't entirely disagree with de Belé about this. The French Renaissance is typically seen as a kind of delayed reaction to events in Italy with a real humanistic flowering only in the 16th century.

This was, in part, thanks to the presence of teachers of ancient Greek. As Italians had done earlier, French intellectuals benefited from the presence of emigres from the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean.

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