Ann Moyer (History -- Univ. of Pennsylvania) has a wonderful review up on H-Net of Paul McLean's recent book, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence. Many aspects of this review should be of interest to a medical humanities audience.
Moyer notes:
To get things done, then, required knowing whom to ask; it also required that the petitioner have something to offer, whether now or later, tangible or intangible, to repay the favor. And of course these urban citizens lived their lives embedded in a number of relationships of different sorts: family, profession, neighborhood, political party, and so on, to a very long list of social groupings and obligations, any or all of whose members might hope to make claims on one another over the course of a career or a lifetime.
These matters are exactly what the studia humanitatis were targeted towards: a practical engagement with the world. But not simply any practical engagement will suffice; virtuous engagement is needed, and the studia humanitatis was intended to facilitate. This is in part why the apparent belief that the humanities are impractical vexes me no end. If this belief is actually accurate -- if the humanities as currently practiced are in fact disengaged and impractical, then those of us responsible for such practices are abandoning the hopes, lessons, and programs of our forefathers.
Thus, Moyer notes that
McLean’s specific focus on Florentine letters of recommendation and request then leads him to look at the role of the humanist educators who set a high standard for quality of writing and dispensed rules about the specifics. These men helped establish formal norms for such letters, and the literary skills they imparted aided Florentines in both composing and reading such letters strategically.
It is no accident that so many humanists and humanistically-educated personages were active participants in social and political life as diplomats, jurists, couriers, advisors, officials, attorneys, professors, etc.
More from Moyer:
[McLean] argues that good letter writers were able to give a shape in their letters to the ongoing relationship between author and recipient, such that the request and its granting would, it was hoped, ring true with the recipient and inspire him to undertake the desired action. The rhetorical tools of the humanists, along with their goals of shaping people’s understanding of their world and bringing them to appropriate action within it, thus had a major role to play in the lives of scholars and of middle-class Florentines. As McLean notes, in Florence these tools served not only social ends, but political ones as well; indeed, political and social goals often overlapped.
These considerations are why I continue to believe that those of us interested in the medical humanities should ground our work in an historically and philologically informed understanding of those who mediated antiquity into the educational program we continue to call the humanities. There is, if not an essence to the humanities, at least a set of family resemblances that can shed a great deal of specific light on the nature and potential goals of the interdiscipline. And those resemblances emerge in important part from examination of the humanists, the studia humanitatis, and the local social worlds in which these conversations took place.
Thoughts?
(H/T H-SCI-MED-TECH)
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