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By Root 2880 0

English humanist, Robert Flemmyng, visited Italy, where he formed connections at the court of Sixtus IV, the learned pope, and won the friendship of his famous librarian, Platina. To go to Italy became the form. Thomas Linacre (1460–1524) went there to sit at the feet of Poliziano alongside Giovanni de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, took a medical degree at Padua and came back to found the College of Physicians, write a Latin grammar and act as tutor to royal children. His friend William Grocyn (c. 1446–1519) also studied under Poliziano and the even more learned Greek scholar Chalcondyles. When he returned, he delivered the first public lecture on Greek at Oxford (1491). Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), Thomas More (1478–1535) and John Colet (c. 1467–1519) all studied under Grocyn, Erasmus coming to Oxford in 1498 because, he said, it was no longer necessary to go as far as Italy to pick up the latest in Greek scholarship—Oxford could provide as good or better.

One feature of English scholarship, at both Oxford and Cambridge, was its spirit of criticism. This is an immensely important point, and is worth dwelling on a little. Of course the critical spirit—that is, the tendency not simply to accept texts at their face value but to examine their provenance, credentials, authenticity and contents with a wary eye—was not invented in Oxford. It was a Renaissance characteristic, and one that was to prove fatal to the unity of the church, once it was applied to sacred texts and ecclesiastical credentials. It long antedated the Renaissance, needless to say. Indeed, it went back to Marcion in the second century A.D., who first subjected the canonical texts of the New Testament to careful exegesis, accepting some and rejecting others. But this kind of approach was rare in the Dark and even in the Middle Ages; it is odd that churchmen-scholars of the caliber of St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas paid so little attention to the integrity and background of the texts that came down to them, and on which they commented so copiously. But so it was. Thus the revival of the skeptical approach of Marcion was one of the most striking aspects of the recovery of antiquity and the most explosive.

The trail was blazed by Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407–57), a clever, difficult, quarrelsome but also painstaking and exact scholar who specialized in rhetoric and lectured on it in Padua, Rome and Naples. He was a man of affairs, both at the papal court and under Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples. In the periodic struggles between the secular and ecclesiastical forces, he tended to sympathize with princes rather than popes. This led him to examine critically the Donation of Constantine. This document was fabricated sometime between A.D. 750 and 850 and purported to be a record of the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the various principalities he conferred on the then pope, Sylvester I (314–35), and all his successors. It made him primate over all the other Christian churches, with secular dominion over Rome “and all the provinces, places and civitates of Italy and the Western Regions, and supreme judge of their clergy everywhere.” It records that Sylvester was even offered the imperial crown of the West, but refused it. The Donation was the Ur-text of papal triumphalism, the chief credential for the Hildebrandine revolution of the eleventh century and of the even more extreme statement of claim by Boniface VIII in the fourteenth century, as well as the title deeds to the lands of the Papal States in Italy. It had been challenged before, more as a gesture of political defiance by aggrieved monarchs than in a spirit of scholarship. But Valla subjected it to textual scrutiny based upon the principles of what was to become modern historical criticism, and showed, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it was a deliberate forgery. He presented his findings in De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio (1440). Valla had already been in trouble with the church authorities over his criticism of the dialectical teaching techniques of church scholars,