Constructing Hellenism: Studies on the History of Greek Learning in Early Modern Europe


EDITORIAL

Constructing Hellenism: Studies on the History of Greek
Learning in Early Modern Europe
Introduction

Han Lamers1

Published online: 10 July 2018

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

The five papers collected in this special issue of the International Journal of the
Classical Tradition show some of the ways in which scholars in early modern
Europe shaped, used and gave meaning to Greek learning. Instead of starting from

one single perspective or discipline, the articles approach early modern Hellenism

from diverse viewpoints, such as the history of classical scholarship (Gerald Sandy),

book history (Natasha Constantinidou), philology and literary history (Filippomaria

Pontani) and Oriental and Jewish studies (Asaph Ben-Tov and Bernd Roling). The

title of the collection, Constructing Hellenism, has a double meaning: it not only
denotes the various ways in which scholars in early modern Europe shaped and used

Greek learning, but also refers to how we, as modern scholars, build and articulate

our own perceptions of Hellenism in this period. Before presenting the individual

articles, I shall first introduce the general theme of the collection, briefly discussing

the early modern notion of Hellenismus, how ‘Hellenism’ has been treated in recent
scholarship on the early modern history of Greek learning and the way in which the

term is used in this collection and may be used beyond it.

***

In Antoine Birr’s revised edition of Robert Estienne’s Thesaurus linguae Latinae
(1740–1743), the word Hellenismus was defined as ‘litterarum Graecarum notitia’:

& Han Lamers
han.lamers@ifikk.uio.no

1
Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, PO Box 1020,

0315 Oslo, Norway

123

Int class trad (2018) 25(3):201–215

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0467-9

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http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12138-018-0467-9&domain=pdf


knowledge of, or familiarity with, Greek letters, or Greek learning.
1
In current

scholarship, too, ‘Hellenism’ is often used to refer to Greek erudition, with shifting

emphases according to the context, whether Byzantium, Classical Islam or German

Romanticism. In Renaissance and early modern studies, the term has been used

casually, and in a mostly unreflective manner, to denote the increasing knowledge of

ancient Greek and Greek literature in humanist circles.
2
While Petrarch (1304–

1374) was still ‘deaf to Homer’ (Epistolae familiares XVIII.2), two centuries after
his death, most of the major Greek authors had been rediscovered and had become

more widely available in translations and editions. From the end of the fourteenth

century onwards, Greek studies spread from Florence to other Italian cities, mainly

Venice and Rome; from there, Greek learning was carried beyond the Alps, not only

by travelling Greek scholars such as George Hermonymus (fl. 1475–1508) and

Janus Lascaris (c. 1449–1535), but also by Northern European scholars such as

Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) in the German-speaking lands and Guillaume Budé

(1467–1540) in France. This period also saw pioneering work in the critical study of

the ancient Greek sources themselves and in making this study productive for so

many domains of art and knowledge, from literature and history to medicine and

geography. Whereas early students of Greek concentrated mainly on ‘classical’

literature and (to a lesser extent) patristics, two centuries after Petrarch’s death, the

improved knowledge of Greek in learned circles, and the renewed interest in the

Greek New Testament, had even stimulated a serious critique of the Latin Vulgate.
3

1
Robert Estienne, Thesaurus linguae Latinae in IV. tomos divisus, cui post novissimam Londinensem

editionem, complurium eruditorum virorum collectis curis insigniter auctam, ed. Antonius Birrius, 4 vols,
Basel, 1740–1743, II, p. 496, s.v. ‘Hellenismus’: ‘Graeci sermonis proprietas, vel litterarum Graecarum

notitia’. The word is not in the first two editions of Estienne’s dictionary (Paris, 1531 and 1543).
2
See, e.g., from the more recent literature, P. Botley, Learning Greek in Western Europe, 1396–1529:

Grammars, Lexica, and Classroom Texts’, Philadelphia, 2010, p. 117; M. Cadafaz de Matos, ‘Helenismo,
filosofia e cultura no Renascimento italiano, de Giovanni Argyropoulos a Constantio e Janus Lascaris’,

Revista Portuguesa de História do Livro e da Edição, Ano 12, no. 24, 2009, pp. 169–241; C. Celenza,
‘Hellenism in the Renaissance’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. G. Boys-Stones, B.
Graziosi and P. Vasunia, Oxford, 2009, pp. 150–66; L. Dorez, ‘L’hellénisme d’Ange Politien’, Mélanges
d’archéologie et d’histoire, 15, 1985, pp. 3–32. Italian scholarship also uses the general term umanesimo
greco to denote the Greek learning of the humanists; see esp. M. Cortesi, ‘Umanesimo greco’, in Lo
spazio letterario del medioevo, 5 vols, Rome, 1992–1998, III, pp. 457–507.
3
Selective bibliography in notes 23–28 below. Concise discussions of the return of Greek learning to the

Latin West in English are e.g. Celenza, ‘Hellenism in the Renaissance’ (n. 2 above); J. Hankins, ‘Greek

Studies in the Latin West’, in Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols, Rome,
2003-2004, I, pp. 273–91; J. Kraye, ‘The Revival of Greek Studies in the West’, in The New Cambridge
History of the Bible: Volume 3, From 1450 to 1750, ed. E. Cameron, Cambridge, 2016, pp. 37–60; F.
Pontani, ‘Greek, Ancient’, in The Classical Tradition, ed. E. Grafton, G. W. Most and S. Settis,
Cambridge MA and London, 2014, pp. 405–9. An essential overview in Italian is Cortesi, ‘Umanesimo

greco’ (n. 2 above). In the Middle Ages, Greek learning was not entirely absent, but it was limited in

many ways. For this ill-understood subject, W. Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From
Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, transl. J. C. Frakes, Washington DC, 1988, is still essential, but also see the
papers collected in The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle
Ages, ed. M. W. Herren, London, 1988. More recently, see, importantly, P. Boulhol, “Grec langaige n’est
pas doulz au françois.” L’étude et l’enseignement du grec dans la France ancienne (IVe siècle–1530),
Aix-en-Provence, 2014, pp. 13–148, with rich bibliography.

202 H. Lamers

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In this context, modern scholars sometimes use expressions such as ‘Venetian

Hellenism’ or ‘Florentine Hellenism’ to indicate local varieties of the study of

ancient Greek literature.
4
The term Hellenism also refers to a particular school of

medical thought (‘medical Hellenism’) which was fuelled by the publication of

Galen and Hippocrates in Greek (by Aldo Manuzio in 1525 and 1526 respectively)

and which promoted a return to the ancient Greek sources in the original instead of

relying on the medieval medical tradition, which was heavily indebted to Arabic

translations, summaries and commentaries.
5

What Greek learning, or Hellenismus, meant to early modern scholars becomes
apparent if we take a quick look at some of the ways the word was used in the

Republic of Letters. The Renaissance borrowing of the Greek term Ἑλληνισμός and
its Latin rendering encapsulate the ancient linguistic meaning of Hellenism, while

also adapting it and adding a wider, cultural dimension to the ancient notion.
6
In

ancient Greek, Ἑλληνισμός had denoted the use, and especially the correct use, of
the language, and several works entitled On Hellenism (Περὶ Ἑλληνισμοῦ)
reportedly circulated in antiquity.

7
When the term was adopted by Latin authors, it

denoted the imitation of Greek constructions in Latin poetry, mainly Virgil.
8
The humanists

took over this ‘linguistic’ meaning of the term, and Ἑλληνισμός/Hellenismus for them

4
For Venetian Hellenism, see most extensively the collection of L’eredità greca e l’ellenismo veneziano,

ed. G. Benzoni, Florence, 2002. A. Singer, Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos,
University Park PA, 2010, p. 49, used ‘Florentine Hellenism’ specifically to denote ‘the importation of

Neoplatonic philosophy from the east’. Particularly in the Italian scholarship, expressions such as

ellenismo filelfiano are sometimes employed to denote individual scholars’ Greek learning, e.g. in S.
Fiaschi, ‘Filelfo e “i diritti” del traduttore. L’auctoritas dell’interprete e il problema delle attribuzioni’, in
Tradurre dal greco in età umanistica: Metodi e strumenti, ed. M. Cortesi, Florence, 2007, pp. 79–95 (81–
82 n. 5).
5
V. Nutton, ‘Hellenism Postponed: Some Aspects of Renaissance Medicine, 1490–1530’, Sudhoffs

Archiv, 81, 1997, pp. 158–70. See also N. G. Siraisi, ‘Vesalius and the Reading of Galen’s Teleology’,
Renaissance Quarterly, 50, 1997, pp. 1–37 (3); M. Azzolini, ‘Anatomy of a Dispute: Leonardo, Pacioli
and Scientific Courtly Entertainment in Renaissance Milan’, Early Science and Medicine, 9, 2004,
pp. 115–35 (132: ‘medical Hellenism’); C. Martin, ‘Humanism and the Assessment of Averroes in the

Renaissance’, Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, ed.
A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni, Dordrecht and New York, 2012, pp. 65–79 (71: ‘Renaissance Hellenism’).

D. Campbell, Arabian Medicine and Its Influence on the Middle Ages, 2 vols, London, 1926, I, p. 187,
speaks of a ‘struggle between Hellenism and Arabism’ in this context, for which see, more recently, P.

E. Pormann, ‘La querelle des médecins arabistes et hellénistes et l’heritage oublie’, in Lire les medecins
grecs à la Renaissance, ed. V. Boudon-Millot and G. Cobolet, Paris, 2004, pp. 113–41.
6
See R. Hoven, Lexique de la prose latine de la Renaissance, Leiden and Boston, 2006, p. 242 s.v.

‘Hellenismus’, which partially records the word’s usage in the work of Guillaume Budé and Theodore de

Bèze. Johann Ramminger’s Neulateinische Wortliste (\neulatein.de[) as yet has no lemma for Hellenism.
For the lexicography of the term, see also A. C. Dionisotti, ‘Hellenismus’, in Vocabulary of Teaching and
Research Between Middle Ages and Renaissance: Proceedings of the Colloquium, London, Warburg
Institute, 11–12 March 1994, ed. O. Weijers, Turnhout, 1995, pp. 45–58. For a discussion of the term in
the scholarship before J. G. Droysen, see R. Bichler, ‘Hellenismus’. Geschichte und Problematik eines
Epochenbegriffs, Darmstadt, 1983, pp. 33–54, concentrating on the later early modern period.
7
On the concept of Hellenism and its criteria, see now L. Pagani, ‘Language Correctness (Hellenismos)

and Its Criteria’, in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, ed. F. Montanari et al., 2 vols.,
Leiden and Boston, 2015, II, pp. 798–849, with references to the relevant ancient sources.
8
See on this usage Dionisotti, ‘Hellenismus’ (n. 6 above), pp. 45–53.

Constructing Hellenism 203

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referred to the Greek language,
9
in particular to the use of a good Greek style and

idiom, following the example of approved ancient Greek authors.
10

As such, the

term represented a Greek counterpart to the humanist ideal of Latinitas, or a set of
normative criteria for language correctness.

11
Additionally, and more specifically,

the Latin word and its vernacular cognates came to mean what we would now call a

Graecism: an (allegedly) Greek idiom or grammatical feature, or the imitation of

Greek constructions, in Latin or any other language.
12

This kind of Hellenism had a

special cultural significance, especially for humanists who tried to demonstrate the

affinity of their native languages to ancient Greek, as did Andreas Althamer (d. c.

1539) for German and Henri II Estienne (1531–1598) for French.
13

By

demonstrating the affinity between ancient Greek and their own languages, they

tried to lend dignity to their native tongues: Hellenism becomes a cultural

Kampfbegriff of sorts directed against Italian claims to ‘Latin’ and ‘Roman’ cultural
primacy.

14

Beyond the linguistic level, Ἑλληνισμός/Hellenismus in humanist discourse also
referred to the worldview of the ancient Hellenes in both its philosophical and

religious aspects. This wider usage of the term, too, at least partly had roots in Greek

9
E.g., Joseph Justus Scaliger, Epistolae omnes quae reperiri potuerunt, nunc primum collectae ac editae,

Leiden, 1627, p. 700, and Thomas Reinesius, Ad viros clariss[imos] D[ominos] Casp[arum]
Hoffmannum, Christ[ophorum] Ad[amem] Rupertum, Profess[ores] Noricos epistolae …, Leipzig,
1660, p. 90.
10

For some examples of Hellenismus meaning ‘good Greek’, see Scaliger, Epistolae (n. 9 above),
pp. 362 and 635. Isaac Casaubon, Epistolae, insertis ad easdem responsionibus, quotquot hactenus
reperiri potuerunt secundum seriem temporis accurate digestae, Rotterdam, 1709, p. 295, similarly speaks
of ‘Hellenismi leges’ in a letter to Scaliger of 1607. Earlier examples include a letter of 1501 by Johann

Reuchlin, in Heinrich Bebel, Clarorum virorum epistolae Latinae Graecae & Hebraicae variis temporibus
missae ad Ioannem Reuchlin Phorcensem LL. Doctorem, [s.l.], 1514, sig. Cvir, in which he complains that
κύριε ἐλέησον is generally pronounced kyrieleison (i.e., with five instead of seven syllables) ‘ob
ignorantiam Hellenismi’.
11

E.g., Scaliger, Epistolae (n. 9 above), p. 490.
12

E.g., Thomas Reinesius, Epistolae ad Cl[arissimum] V[irum] Christianum Daumium …, Hamburg,
1670, p. 3, and Z. C. von Uffenbach, Commercii epistolaris Vffenbachiani selecta variis observationibus
illustravit Io. Ge. Schelhornius, Ulm and Memmingen, 1756, p. 154.
13

See Andreas Althamer, Commentaria Germaniae in P. Cornelii Taciti Equitis Rom[ani] libellum de
situ, moribus, et populis Germanorum, Nuremberg, 1536, and Henri Estienne, Traicté de la conformité du
langage françois avec le grec, Paris, 1569. After Léon Trippault, Celt’-Hellenisme ou etymologic des mots
francois tirez du graec. Plus. Preuves en general de la descente de la nostre langue, Orléans, 1580, French
Hellenism of this kind is sometimes referred to as celt’hellénisme.
14

There is a scattered and disparate literature on this subject. See, e.g., P. U. Dini, ‘Baltic

Palaeocomparativism and the Idea that Prussian Derives from Greek’, in Studies in Baltic and Indo-
European Linguistics, ed. P. Baldi and P. U. Dini, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2004, pp. 37–50; J.
F. Eros, ‘A 17th-Century Demonstration of Language Relationship: Meric Casaubon on English and

Greek’, Historiographia Linguistica, 3, 1976, pp. 1–15; M. Tavoni, ‘Renaissance Linguistics’, in History
of Linguistics, III: Renaissance and Early Modern Linguistics, ed. G. Lepschy, London, 1998, pp. 1–108;
J. B. Trapp, ‘The Conformity of Greek with Vernacular: The History of a Renaissance Theory of

Languages’, in his Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition, Aldershot, 1990, §I; T. Van
Hal, ‘Bevoorrechte betrekkingen tussen Germaans en Grieks: Wilhelm Otto Reitz’ Belga graecissans
(1730)’, Leuvense Bijdragen: Tijdschrift voor Germaanse Filologie, 99–100, 2016, pp. 427–43. For a first
attempt at synthesis, see H. Lamers, ‘Wil de echte Griek opstaan? Verwantschap en vereenzelviging met

de oude Grieken in vroegmodern Europa’, Tetradio: Tijdschrift van het Griekenlandcentrum, 26, 2017,
pp. 101–29.

204 H. Lamers

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sources, where Ἑλληνισμός could refer to the philosophy or the religion of the
ancient Hellenes. With this meaning, it was normally used polemically in religious

contexts to denote the opposite of what was seen as ‘orthodoxy’ (from either Jewish

or Christian perspectives) and thus came to mean paganism or heresy.
15

This usage

of the word survived in humanist discourse, but not without modification.

We see this happening in Guillaume Budé’s treatise De transitu Hellenismi ad
Christianismum (1535), which is perhaps the first time the word was used in a wider
cultural meaning in a manner not attested previously. In this work, the term

Hellenismus refers to ancient pagan Greek culture or ancient civilization generally.
As such, Budé understood Hellenism as sometimes being in discord with

Christianity, and sometimes as foreshadowing or anticipating it, depending on

context. Moreover, in Budé’s hands, the term seems to have gained, for the first

time, a more generalized meaning, not linked to a specific historical culture or

period, but expressive of a worldview oriented towards ‘the world’, rather than

towards God, in the word’s biblical sense and carrying negative overtones.
16

A much more profound exploration of the history of the notion of Hellenism, and

how it eventually reached us in the twenty-first century, is a desideratum of

Begriffsgeschichte and the history of scholarship. Even a brief glance at its early
modern usage, however, reveals the principal awareness of scholars of this period

that ancient Hellas was not confined to the remote past but stood in a meaningful

relationship to their own languages, literatures and cultures – a relationship which

some perceived as constructive and formative, while others regarded it as inherently

problematic and even dangerous.
17

***

In order to capture something of the complexity of Greek learning in early modern

Europe, the term ‘Renaissance Hellenism’ has sometimes been used in recent

Anglophone scholarship as a retrospective label which yokes together, for analytical

15
The locus classicus in the Old Testament is II Maccabees 4:13. In the Christian context, the word was

used to refer to paganism or heresy in the work of, among others, Gregory of Nyssa, Eusebius of

Caesarea, Epiphanius of Salamis, Philostorgius, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrus, Sozomenus and

John of Damascus, all with their own nuances. It was also used in this sense at the Council of Chalcedon,

where Hellenism was mentioned in one breath with Judaism as a form of heresy; it was discussed as well

at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1439).
16

On Budé’s notion of Hellenism, see the insightful discussion in the introduction to Guillaume Budé, Le
passage de l’hellénisme au christianisme, transl. M.-M. de La Garanderie, Paris, 1993, pp. xxv–lvi (xxxv–
xxxviii). It is interesting to compare it with Budé’s usage of similar terms such as italismus and medismus:
‘Italismus sic dici potest ut medismus. Morum Italiae et verborum et cultus imitatio’, cited by L.

Delaruelle, Guillaume Budé: Les origines, les débuts, les idées maîtresses, Paris, 1907, p. 270. Note that
Budé also used the term simply to refer to Greek as distinct from celticismus, meaning French; see L.-A.
Sanchi, Les Commentaires de la langue grecque de Guillaume Budé. L’œuvre, ses sources, sa préparation,
Geneva, 2006, p. 112.
17

In the Renaissance, the word Hellenism was thus not restricted to indicating the Greek language of the

Jews – if, indeed, it was used in that way at all. Compare the discussion of Bichler, ‘Hellenismus’ (n. 6
above). Hellenistica (lingua or dialectus) was sometimes used, however, to denote Semitized or Judaized
Greek, most notably by Daniel Heinsius and Claude de Saumaise; see also R. Van Rooy, ‘Through the

Vast Labyrinth of Languages and Dialects: The Emergence and Transformations of a Conceptual Pair in

the Early Modern Period (c. 1478–1782)’, PhD dissertation, KU Leuven, 2017, p. 217, with references

cited there.

Constructing Hellenism 205

123



convenience, a whole range of early modern engagements with the Hellenic

tradition.
18

As such, the term is used to mean not just knowledge of ancient Hellas
but also refers more broadly to the ways in which this learning was built up, used

and valued in new contexts. This is also how the word is used in the title of this

small collection of papers. Thus, importantly, it does not represent a unified view of

Greek civilization; it is not the culture of the historical period which is known, with

different emphases, from the work of Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) and

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), nor the philosophical notion which is found in the

work of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888).
19

As indicated above, the term ‘Hellenism’ tends to be used rather unreflectively in

Renaissance and early modern studies. Although it is commonly recognized that the

notion of ‘transmission’ captures the cultural dynamism involved only very

imperfectly,
20

there is hardly any methodical reflection on how we can understand

the manifold aspects of early modern Hellenismus, or Greek learning, in a more
systematic and comprehensive manner. This silence contrasts with discussions of

the reception of the Greco-Roman heritage within classical reception studies and

scholarship on the classical tradition generally.
21

It also contrasts with discussions

in adjoining areas of scholarship where Hellenism has been studied intensively (for

example, in imperial Rome and late antiquity) and in which scholars have developed

a rich – even if sometimes bewildering – vocabulary for discussing the various

cultural processes which lurk behind the tidy façade of the word ‘Hellenism’, such

18
It was perhaps first used as a programmatic phrase in an academic setting in English in the title of a

conference at Princeton University (12–14 April, 2007), where it was also the title of the paper delivered

by Christopher Celenza. The proceedings of this conference have not been published, but the programme

is still available online (\princeton.edu/hellenic/renaissanceconferenceabstracts.html[).
19

On Droysen’s concept of Hellenism, see, apart from his own works, Geschichte Alexanders des
Grossen, Berlin, 1833, and Geschichte des Hellenismus, Hamburg, 1836–1843, with a fully revised
edition in 1877–1878, esp. A. Momigliano, ‘J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews’, History and
Theory, 9, 1970, pp. 139–53, who emphasizes that Droysen’s own definition of Hellenism was not at all
clear-cut. See also Bichler, ‘Hellenismus’ (n. 6 above), pp. 55–109. On Toynbee’s concept of Hellenism,
see A. J. Toynbee, Hellenism: The History of a Civilization, Oxford, 1959 and V. Ehrenberg, ‘Toynbee’s
Hellenism’, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 8, 1959, pp. 491–6. For Arnold’s view, see M.
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, London, 1869, pp. 142–66
(160), with D. D. Stone, ‘Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism’, Poetics
Today, 19, 1998, pp. 179–98.
20

Criticism of the transmission paradigm was already apparent in the fundamental studies of D.

J. Geanakoplos, stressing the transformative agency of individual scholars and discussing the complex

relationship between Greek-Palaeologan and Latin-humanist cultures in terms of ‘fusion’; see his

Constantinople and the West: Essays on the Late Byzantine (Palaeologan) and Italian Renaissances and
the Byzantine and Roman Churches, Madison WI, 1989; Interaction of the “Sibling” Byzantine and
Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance, 330–1600, New Haven CT, 1976; Byzantine
East and Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance. Studies in
Ecclesiastical and Cultural History, New York and Evanston, 1966; and Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies
in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe, Cambridge MA, 1962.
21

M. Silk, I. Gildenhard and R. Barrow, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought, Malden MA,
2014, pp. 166–172 and passim. See also the discussions in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception,
ed. S. Butler, London, 2016; Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas,
Malden MA, 2006; and L. Hardwick, Reception Studies, Oxford, 2003, to cite only four prominent
examples from the Anglosphere.

206 H. Lamers

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as Hellenization, cultural fusion, appropriation and so forth.
22

Scholars of early

modern Hellenism are, by contrast, at the beginning of the discussion.

To define early modern Hellenism more precisely, we can start by looking at the

ways in which Greek learning has so far been studied. Roughly distinguished, there

are three main objects of research: the various ways of transmission and

dissemination of ancient Greek, as well as Greek texts, objects and ideas; the

ways in which they were interpreted and studied; and the many different ways in

which they were used in new contexts. As previously mentioned, early modern

Europe was a key period in all these respects.

The different aspects of early modern Hellenism – the transmission and

dissemination, the study and interpretation, and the use of ancient Greek sources –

have for the most part been discussed in different branches of a rich body of

scholarship, ranging from traditional reception history or Überlieferungsgeschichte
via the history of scholarship and education, and of printing and reading, to the

study of the classical tradition or, in more recent decades, classical reception

studies. The reception history of individual manuscripts and the fortunae of specific
authors have been traced, the activities of individual scribes charted and the role of

editors, translators and printers in the dissemination of Greek texts explained.
23

There is an ever-growing interest among scholars in the teaching and learning of

Greek in the early modern period as, for instance, the recent volume edited by

22
Scholarship is extensive. Here I mention only A. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution,

Cambridge, 2008, pp. 4–37, and T. Whitmarsh, ‘Greece and Rome’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic
Studies, ed. G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi and P. Vasunia, Oxford, 2009, pp. 114–28, with further
references. See also the discussion of scholarship on Hellenism in late antiquity in Pontani’s article in this

collection, with references cited there.
23

The literature is extensive. On the transmission and dissemination of Greek literature generally, see the

third edition of the classic study by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to
the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, Oxford, 2013. On scribes involved in the reproduction of
Greek manuscripts, see mainly M. Vogel and V. E. Gardthausen, Die griechischen Schreiber des
Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Leipzig, 1909, with several later supplements, and H. Hunger and E.
Gamillscheg, Repertorium der Griechischen Kopisten: 800–1600, 3 vols., Vienna, 1981–1997. For the
role of the Byzantine scholars in the dissemination of Greek learning, see esp. Geanakoplos, Greek
Scholars in Venice (n. 20 above) and N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian
Renaissance, London, 2017. For Greek printing, R. Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth
Century, Oxford, 1900, is still fundamental, even if it is now obviously out-dated in many respects. For
more recent work, see, e.g., N. Barker, Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script and Type in
the Fifteenth Century, 2nd edition, New York, 1992, H. Jones, Printing the Classical Text, ‘t Goy-Houten,
2004, pp. 130–94, and K. Staı̈kos, Charta of Greek Printing: The Contribution of Greek Editors, Printers
and Publishers to the Renaissance in Italy and the West, Cologne, 1998 (to be consulted with caution: see
Davies’ review in The Library, 7th series, no. 1, 2008, pp. 454–5). For the incunabular editions of
individual Greek authors, see esp. O. Mazal, Die Überlieferung der antiken Literatur im Buchdruck des
15. Jahrhunderts, 4 vols, Stuttgart, 2003, I, pp. 85–334. The fortunae of individual authors (up to 600) are
examined in the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin
Translations and Commentaries. Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. P. O. Kristeller et al., Washington DC,
1960–, covering the period from antiquity itself to 1600. The reception of Byzantine Greek literature is

not entirely understudied but the attention is scarce and distributed unevenly. For Byzantine

historiography, for example, see A. Pertusi, Storiografia umanistica e mondo bizantino, Palermo, 1967
and, more recently, D. R. Reinsch, ‘The History of Editing Byzantine Historiographical Texts’, in The
Byzantine World, ed. P. Stephenson, London and New York, 2010, pp. 435–44.

Constructing Hellenism 207

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Federica Ciccolella and Luigi Silvano shows.
24

Studies have moreover been

devoted to how scholars expanded their knowledge of ancient Greek literature and

history, including Greek antiquities such as inscriptions, coins and monuments, as

well as of various branches of Greek thought, both pagan and Christian: the Greek

philosophers, grammarians and philologists, the Church Fathers and theologians.
25

The early modern study, interpretation and edition of the ‘rediscovered’ Greek New

Testament and its implications have also been studied intensively.
26

The ways in

which writers, thinkers and artists used their knowledge of Greek letters beyond

Greek studies strictly speaking have been explored from many different perspec-

tives and in various fields of scholarship including the history of science and

political thought, art history and literary studies, among numerous others.
27

Generally speaking, however, the uses of Greek learning have been studied less

systematically than the transmission and dissemination of Greek learning, probably

because these uses were so manifold that it is difficult to systematize them.

24 Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in Renaissance Europe, ed. F. Ciccolella and L. Silvano,
Leiden, 2017, mainly focusing on Italy. On the study of Greek in the early modern period, see also

Botley, Learning Greek (n. 2 above); F. Ciccolella, Donati Graeci: Learning Greek in the Renaissance,
Leiden, 2008; J.-C. Saladin, La bataille du grec à la Renaissance, Paris, 2000 and 2004 (2nd revised
edition), to be consulted in conjunction with the review of A. Pontani in Aevum, 76, no. 3, 2002, pp. 852–
67 (also relevant to the revised edition). For monographic treatments of two major geographical areas in

the history of Greek studies, France and Germany, see recently, e.g., Boulhol, “Grec langaige n’est pas
doulz au françois” (n. 3 above) and W. Ludwig, Hellas in Deutschland. Darstellungen der Gräzistik im
deutschsprachigen Raum aus dem 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, Hamburg, 1998.
25

To get an idea of how early modern scholars working in diverse contexts studied Greek history, and

how their work has been studied in the scholarship, see, e.g., M. Chatzidakis, Ciriaco d’Ancona und die
Wiederentdeckung Griechenlands im 15. Jahrhundert, Petersberg, 2017; A. Ben-Tov, Lutheran Humanists
and Greek Antiquity: Melanchthonian Scholarship between Universal History and Pedagogy, Leiden,
2009; W. Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late
Renaissance, London, 2005; and R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, Oxford,
1969. On Greek philosophy and philology, see the work of James Hankins (e.g., Plato in the Italian
Renaissance, 2 vols, Leiden, 1991), Jill Kraye (e.g., Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy,
Aldershot, 2002) and John Monfasani (e.g., Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy: Studies on Humanism
and Philosophy in the 15th Century, Aldershot, 2004). For the reception of the Church Fathers see, most
comprehensively, The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the
Maurists, ed. I. D. Backus, 2 vols, Leiden, 1997. The incunabular editions and translations of Greek
patristics are recorded in O. Mazal, Die Überlieferung (n. 23 above), IV, pp. 900–925.
26

Literature on early modern biblical scholarship is extensive. For an overview, see e.g. the relevant

chapters in A History of Biblical Interpretation, II: The Medieval Though the Reformation Periods, ed.
A. J. Hauser and D. F. Watson, Michigan and Cambridge, 2009; Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in
the Age of Erasmus, ed. E. Rummel, Leiden and Boston, 2008; and The New Cambridge History of the
Bible, III: From 1450 to 1750, ed. E. Cameron, Cambridge, 2016, with the bibliographies there. The
impact of the humanists’ return to Greek on biblical scholarship is also concisely discussed in A.

Hamilton, ‘Humanists and the Bible’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed.
J. Kraye, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 100–117.
27

Literary scholars have recently returned to the use of ancient Greek as a literary language in the early

modern Republic of Letters, among other fascinating research areas enjoying renewed interest. For a first

Europe-wide discussion, see Hellenisti! Altgriechisch als Literatursprache im neuzeitlichen Europa.
Internationales Symposium an der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal vom 20. bis 21. November 2015, ed.
S. Weise, Stuttgart, 2017. For a recent discussion of the German context, see mainly S. Weise, Ἑλληνίδ’
αı’ ̃αν εỉσδεῖν ἱμείρομαι – Neualtgriechische Literatur in Deutschland (Versuch eines Überblicks)’, Antike
und Abendland, 62, 2016, pp. 114–81. See also Pontani’s article in this collection, with the references
there.

208 H. Lamers

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Scholarly attention has been distributed unevenly over the different areas of early

modern Europe, with Italy attracting most interest, followed by France and

Germany, although the situation is gradually changing in favour of a more inclusive

picture also covering, for instance, Eastern and Central Europe as well as

Scandinavia and the Baltics.
28

Apart from the aspects of Hellenism mentioned so far, another, less intensively

studied, question is: how did scholars themselves reflect upon Greek leaning? The

different, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints scholars have expressed about the role

and value, as well as the scope and limits, of Greek studies can bring interesting

perspectives to our understanding of early modern Hellenism. Dissenting voices are

particularly relevant in this respect: from the earliest critics and ‘Hellenophobes’ of

Quattrocento Italy to Counter-Reformation reservations about Greek and, towards

the end of the period, the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’.
29

Such

contested views shed light on the social and political struggles in which Greek

learning was implicated as well as the cultural tensions involved. In the scholarship,

this perspective has sometimes been eclipsed by the humanist enthusiasm for Greek

– or even ‘Grecomania’ – and triumphalist discussions of the subject explaining

how, from Manuel Chrysoloras (d. 1415) onwards, Greek learning flourished and

expanded in the Latin West.
30

The various perspectives early modern writers took on Greek learning also shed

light on another important question which is, perhaps surprisingly, seldom posed

rigorously: what exactly was Greek learning in the early modern period? Modern
scholars have been inclined to concentrate, often tacitly, on the reception of what

they regarded as ‘classical’ literature. The transmission, interpretation and use of,

for instance, Hellenistic, late antique and especially Byzantine Greek texts have

been studied less intensively and often in more or less unrelated branches of

scholarship. Early modern readers and writers were, however, differently selective

and presumably made connections different from ours. This sparks the question of

how they saw the relationships between the various ‘Greek archives’ – not only

between pagan and Christian Greek literatures but also, for example, between

‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Byzantine’ materials. And perhaps even more importantly: what

are the implications of their views about the scope and limits of Greek learning for

28
For the Eastern European context, see, e.g., the relevant chapters in A Handbook to Classical Reception

in Eastern and Central Europe, ed. Z. Martirosova Torlone et al., Chichester, 2017, with the references
there. For some aspects of Greek in the Scandinavian (Swedish) and Baltic (Estonian and Livonian) areas,

see, e.g., T. Korhonen, ‘The Dissertations in Greek Supervised by Henrik Ausius in Uppsala in the Middle

of the Seventeenth Century’, in Classical Tradition from the 16th Century to Nietzsche, ed. J. Päll, M.
Steinrück and I. Volt, Tartu, 2010, pp. 89–113, and J. Päll, ‘Humanistengriechisch im alten Estland und

Nord-Livland’, ibid., pp. 114–47. There is also interest in areas traditionally less central to classical

learning, e.g., C. Joby, ‘The Reception of Ancient Latin and Greek Authors in Early Modern Norwich’,

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 28, 2018, pp. 1–35.
29

Some of the early quarrels involving Greek studies are discussed, e.g., in F. Ferri, Una contesa di tre
umanisti: Basinio, Porcelio e Seneca. Contributo alla storia degli studi greci nel Quattrocento in Italia,
Pavia, 1920, and Saladin, La bataille (n. 24 above), pp. 177–202 and 257–300. On the polemics about
Greek studies surrounding Erasmus, see also S. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural
History of Hellenism, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 14–59.
30

Similar criticism in Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? (n. 29 above), pp. 4–5.

Constructing Hellenism 209

123



the ways in which we, modern scholars, understand early modern Hellenism as well

as the range of our field of study? These questions cannot be pursued here, but they

deserve a more serious treatment elsewhere.

The different facets of Hellenism discussed so far can seldom be treated in

complete isolation from one another. Whoever examines the study and use of, say,

Ptolemy’s Geography can hardly ignore the ways in which the work reached the
Latin West and how it was transmitted and disseminated there.

31
Beyond the level

of such specific case studies, concerted attempts in recent scholarship to produce a

more integrative overview of early modern Hellenism, of its multiple channels of

transmission and diffusion as well as its diverse uses and meanings, are few and far

between.
32

Perhaps it is simply too early to arrive at such an understanding of the

phenomenon given the state of research in the field. Indeed, a good deal of work still

needs to be done to smooth out the imbalances and fill lacunae in our knowledge of

the subject.
33
The relative lack of general, more integral accounts probably has to do

with the fact that researchers in this field have generally worked in relative isolation

from each other. To bring together scholars from different backgrounds who study

early modern Hellenism in workshops and conferences (of which we have seen

many in the last couple of years) is an important step to identify the main lacunae

and imbalances and to find common perspectives on both the subject and the field of

study. The articles collected here were presented at such a meeting.
34

The authors of the papers presented here do identify some lacunae and

imbalances in the current scholarship, as they themselves make clear. They also

invite scholars to explore the less trodden paths of this field of study and to connect

various strands of scholarship to arrive at a more balanced understanding of early

modern Hellenism. On the premise that the story of Greek learning in early modern

Europe cannot be written exclusively in terms of textual transmission, in their own

ways, these articles address how it was shaped, used and given meaning at various

important moments in European history, from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth

century, and in diverse areas, including Italy, France, Germany and England. They

do not focus exclusively on the philological minutiae of intellectual history, but

consistently connect detailed analyses of sources with a consideration of the specific

social, cultural or political settings of Greek learning. Thus, they present an attempt

31
See P. Gautier Dalché, ‘The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning

of the Sixteenth Century)’, in The History of Cartography, III: Cartography in the European Renaissance,
ed. D. Woodward, Chicago, 2007, pp. 285–364.
32

Transcending regional boundaries, the 2007 conference at Princeton University (n. 18 above), covered

various aspects of early modern Hellenism. For specific regions there are some more integrative

overviews: for Venice, e.g., L’eredità greca (n. 4 above); for France, E. Egger, L’Hellénisme en France, 2
vols, Paris, 1869, to mention only two examples.
33

E.g., the absence of the perspective of the Greek world is a striking lacuna. Sometimes this is a matter

of lacking evidence from visual culture, literature and scholarship, as is the case for the Gattilusio

lordships in the Aegean; see C. Wright, The Gattilusio Lordships and the Aegean World, 1355–1462,
Leiden, 2014, pp. 9 and 13–14. For other places such as Cyprus and Crete, however, there is plenty of

material awaiting further study: for the context of Greek studies, see Ciccolella and Silvano, Teachers,
Students, and Schools (n. 24 above), p. x.
34

‘Constructing Hellenism in Renaissance Europe and Classical Islam’, Humboldt University in Berlin

on 21 and 22 November 2014. See also n. 37 below.

210 H. Lamers

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to give historical substance to the premise that ‘the story of Hellenism’s

transformation in Europe … is a story of acquisition, appropriation and domesti-

cation’.
35

Together they illustrate that, if we want to arrive at a fuller understanding

of early modern Hellenism, the transmission and dissemination of Greek texts, their

interpretation and study, and their use in entirely new contexts should not always be

treated as separate fields of interest but must be ‘thought together’ as communi-

cating vessels.

While the first paper in this collection concentrates on how Italian humanists used

ancient Greek to create a Hellenic literature of their own, the second and third papers

discuss, from different perspectives, how scholars in the sixteenth century helped to

build up Greek learning in France and tried to integrate it into French and European

intellectual culture. The two final papers then explore some of the ways in which

knowledge about Greek history was used beyond the limits of Greek language and

literature studies, focusing on two illuminating early modern episodes, one from

England, the other from Germany. In the next section, I shall briefly lay out the main

arguments of each paper and relate them to the general theme of the collection.

***

In terms of how humanist scholars used Greek learning, one of the more astonishing

effects of the renewed interest in ancient Greek in the Latin West was the

emergence of a Greek literature outside the Greek world, which, starting from Italy

in the fifteenth century, spread all over Europe. Writing Greek letters, poems and

speeches became a characteristic of the more sophisticated branches of European

humanism, not only in Italy but also in France, Germany and even as far north as the

Baltic and Scandinavian lands. In ‘Hellenic Verse and Christian Humanism’,

Filippomaria Pontani sheds light on this (understudied) aspect of Renaissance

Hellenism, showing how Greek learning was exploited to ‘construct a plausible

Hellenic poetry in a learned Christian world’. Discussing the production of ancient

style Greek poetry from late antiquity via Byzantium to the Italian Renaissance,

Pontani focuses on the perceived conflict between Hellenic forms and Christian

content. How can Christian notions be expressed in ancient forms? Do Hellenic

forms eclipse the tenets of Christian thought, or does an allusive Hellenic style, by

contrast, ‘ennoble’ Christianity? Concentrating on a selection of Greek poems by

Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), Marcus Musurus (c.

1475–1517) and Janus Lascaris (c. 1445–1534), Pontani demonstrates how, and

explains why, these Renaissance poets used Greek poetic models to express

Christian ideas. His analyses go beyond tracing textual affinities and draw our

attention to structural analogies between the culture of late antiquity and the Middle

Ages, on the one hand, and the Italian Renaissance, on the other: ‘two changing

worlds, where the tension between Hellenism as form and Hellenism as content is a

paramount element for the shaping of a new poetic texture’. Accordingly, Pontani

argues, any future exploration of humanist Greek literature will benefit from a

comparison with late ancient and medieval literatures, in which we find similarly

controversial appropriations of Hellenic sources in Christian milieus. By inviting

35
Celenza, ‘Hellenism in the Renaissance’ (n. 2 above), p. 151.

Constructing Hellenism 211

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scholars of Renaissance Hellenism, more generally, to explore new ways to relate

their findings to previous and other ‘Hellenisms’, this article also contributes an

important methodological point of its own to the discussion.

The various ways in which Greek learning was shaped and given meaning beyond

the Alps is the topic of ‘Guillaume Budé and the Uses of Greek’, in which Gerald

Sandy discusses the key role of the famous French philologist in the establishment of

Greek studies in sixteenth-century France. He illustrates Budé’s contributions by

following the career of Jacques Amyot (1513–1593): an early student of the Collège

de France (established in 1530), whose translations of Heliodorus and Plutarch,

among others, helped to reorient Europe’s literary history and emancipate European

literature from Neo-Latin. After outlining the state of Greek studies in France before

Budé, Sandy discusses how the French philologist helped to overcome the three main

obstacles to studying Greek: (1) the absence of competent teachers of Greek, (2) the

absence of Greek manuscripts and printed editions and (3) the lack of reference works

such as reliable dictionaries. Budé’s contributions, Sandy argues, transformed France

into a centre of Hellenic studies, in which a scholar such as Amyot could flourish.

Thus, the article shows the construction of Hellenism in its most fundamental form:

the implementation of Greek studies in French scholarly culture by teaching, editing

and translating activities. At the same time, it also shows how learning Greek became

implicated in wider cultural discourses, beyond scholarship: French Hellenism, this

article reminds us, was also regarded as the principal way to snatch cultural

superiority away from the Italians, so that, by 1517, as Sandy reminds us, Erasmus

could write that he did ‘not believe that there is any Italian at this time who is so

perverse or arrogant that he would be foolhardy enough to join arms and do battle with

Budé for recognition of this field of accomplishment’.

The establishment of Greek studies not only involved producing language study

tools such as grammars and dictionaries but also relied on editing and publishing

Greek works. This obviously involved processes of selection, and the choices made

in the process reflected, as well as well as helped to shape, specific understandings

of what Greek learning meant. In ‘Constructions of Hellenism through Printing and

Editorial Choices’, Natasha Constantinidou discusses how the French scholar

Adrien de Turnèbe (1512–1565) constructed his view of Hellenism through the

Greek works he edited and published during the short period in which he served as

royal printer in Greek (1551–1555). Unlike members of his circle such as J.

J. Scaliger, Montaigne and Ronsard, Turnèbe’s work has generally remained

understudied, so Constantinidou’s article fills a conspicuous lacuna in the history of

French Hellenism. During his time as royal printer, Turnèbe published about twenty

Greek volumes, covering literature and philology, natural philosophy and medicine,

as well as religious syncretism and Neoplatonism. Distinguishing between

publications for students, editions intended for Turnèbe’s own classes and books

mainly serving his own philosophical interests, Constantinidou reveals that there

was an intellectual programme behind the printer’s selections. Drawing on the

paratexts to his editions such as prefaces and dedicatory epistles, she maintains that

Turnèbe’s publications often served the purpose of promoting ancient Greek

philosophy as a handmaid of the Christian faith. For instance, she shows that

Turnèbe coupled his study of Theophrastus’s De odoribus – which he translated into

212 H. Lamers

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Latin – with thoughts about the role of perfumes in the contemplation of God and

religious worship. In particular, the editions centred on Plato’s Timaeus reflect
Turnèbe’s profound interest in Christian Platonism, prisca theologia and Christian
apologetics. Constantinidou interprets his editions of works by Hermes Trismegis-

tus, Plato, Plutarch, Philo of Alexandria, Synesius of Cyrene, Apollinaris of

Laodicea and Gregory Palamas, as well as his edition of the pseudo-Clementine

Homilies, as part of the printer’s attempt to project an interpretation of Greek
philosophy as ‘prefiguring’ Christianity. According to her, Turnèbe attempted to

harmonize Greek thought and Christian doctrine along the lines set out by Italian

humanists, most famously Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), as well as French

colleagues such as Guillaume Budé. In order to bring out the specificities of

Turnèbe’s use of Greek learning, Constantinidou finally compares his editorial

activities with the intellectual programmes of Rutgerus Rescius (Rutger Ressen, c.

1495–1545) and the French scholars Robert Estienne (1503–1559) and Jacques

Toussain (1490–1547).

While some humanists addressed the tension between Hellenism and Christianity

by revealing affinities between Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine, or by

showing that Christian ideas could be expressed in ancient Hellenic forms without

‘disintegrating’, others had recourse to other means of aligning Hellenism and

Scripture. With the flourishing of the studia orientalia in the seventeenth century,
some scholars insisted on the cultural primacy of the Near East – especially Hebrew

writings – and regarded the civilization of ancient Greece as having freely adopted

and adapted elements from the East.
36

In a work called Homerus ἑβραίζων, Zachary
Bogdan (1625–1659), for example, ‘revealed’ manifold Homeric and Hesiodic

borrowings from the Old Testament in an attempt to show that the founding father

of ancient literature had been familiar with Scripture. Such dazzlingly learned

arguments entailed a profound revaluation – and not, as one might suspect, a

devaluation – of Greek antiquity.

In ‘Joshua Apollo: Edmund Dickinson’s Delphi phoenizantes and the Biblical
Origins of Greece in Seventeenth-Century England’, Bernd Roling shows how one

of Bogdan’s contemporaries, the English physician, alchemist and antiquarian

Edmund Dickinson (1624–1707), attempted to demonstrate that ancient Greek

culture had been built on Phoenician foundations and on the soil of Israel. In his

demonstration, he ‘de-Hellenized’ one of the hallmarks of ancient Greek paganism:

the famous oracle at Delphi as well as its mythic founder, Apollo, whom he

identified with Joshua. Anticipating one of the central arguments of Pierre-Daniel

Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1694), Dickinson argued from the assumption that
the mysteries of Scripture were echoed in the myths of the Greeks and Romans.

Roling offers a detailed account of how Dickinson expanded this general idea by

using, among other things, comparative etymology and mythological archaeology as

his principal tools. Whereas Turnèbe, as Constantinidou reminds us, still found that

the Hebrews had ‘inherited the Platonic Muse and admitted her to their innermost

36
As Asaph Ben-Tov explains in his article in this volume, the early modern studia orientalia are not

equivalent to modern ‘Near Eastern studies’ since they usually also included North Africa and could even

extend into South-East Asia.

Constructing Hellenism 213

123



sanctuary’, Roling explains how Dickinson changed this picture by making

Hellenism look thoroughly Semitic. From today’s viewpoint, this might seem a

deconstruction of what we now commonly see as typically Hellenic, yet Dickinson’s
‘de-Hellenization’ of Delphi constitutes a shrewd and erudite attempt to construct

Hellenism alternatively on Semitic foundations in order to re-evaluate ancient
Greece as a venerable branch of the Elect Nation. ‘Delphi revealed’, Roling writes,

‘that the events of the history of salvation had been burned into the memory of the

Hellenes and that this knowledge, which saved the honour of the “pagan” Greeks,

had simply been waiting to be freed once again from obscurity.’

Throughout the early modern period, the use of Greek learning was not

necessarily oriented towards the scholarly ‘reconstruction’ of Greek antiquity. From

Pontani’s article, for instance, we learn that some Italian humanists used their Greek

learning to create a Greek literature of their own. The concern for ancient Greek

texts, as expressed by Italian humanists, was multifaceted and, at the same

time, often mainly Latin-oriented. They took special interest in the Greek historians,

above all, for what they had to say about Roman history; they studied Greek

grammar, style and rhetoric in order to improve their competence in Latin, from

matters of orthography to rhetorical issues of textual organization; they worked their

way through Greek literature and Byzantine commentaries to emend corrupt

passages in Latin authors (so that Greek learning appears as the handmaid of Latin

textual criticism); and they mined the ancient Greek philosophers and theologians

for solutions to the more theoretical problems which haunted their minds, for

example, the need to bring pagan ideas into harmony with Christian doctrine.

The use of Greek learning outside the direct context of Greek philology was not

restricted to Italian or Latin humanism, nor to the fifteenth century, though the

Italian context of Greek studies has been researched much more intensively than

have the Northern European uses of Greek learning. Especially for the study of

Oriental history, Greek authors such as Herodotus and Plutarch were indispensable

sources. As Roling’s article already showed, the increasing awareness of Oriental

cultures and languages also catalysed new questions about the cultural and historical

connections between ancient Greece and the Near East. In the final paper of the

collection, ‘Hellenism in the Context of Oriental Studies’, Asaph Ben-Tov

demonstrates how Greek learning was used in this way by Johann Gottfried

Lakemacher (1695–1736), professor of Greek (from 1724) and Oriental languages

(from 1727) in German Helmstedt. Ben-Tov shows how Lakemacher broke with the

notion of Oriental or Hebrew primacy exemplified by Dickinson’s Delphi
phoenizantes, discussed by Roling. Placing Lakemacher’s ideas on ancient Greece
and its role in Oriental history against the background of the controversial ideas of

his colleague Hermann von der Hardt (1660–1746), Ben-Tov argues that

Lakemacher ‘desacralized’ the ancient past by tracing biblical antiquity to ancient

Greece instead of vice versa. Specifically, he argues, Lakemacher attempted to

demonstrate that the Jews were not the origin of other religions, cultures and

languages but rather ‘were part of a network of ancient cultures, and were often the

imitators rather than the source of inspiration’. Although Lakemacher kept his

distance from the provocative ideas about the Greek origins of the Oriental

languages, voiced by von der Hardt, he did trace various other cultural phenomena

214 H. Lamers

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to ancient Greece and Greek literature. Ben-Tov demonstrates, for example, how

Lakemacher interpreted the traditional carrying of the lulav during Sukkot, against
the authority of Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), in terms of Josephus’s θυρσοφορία
(‘carrying of the thyrsus’). For Lakemacher, the carrying of the lulav was just one
example of how Bacchic rituals had entered post-biblical Jewish ceremonies. By

uncovering and contextualizing the specificities of Lakemacher’s argument, Ben-

Tov shows how he transferred his Greek learning beyond the limits of Greek

philology stricto sensu and merged traditional textual antiquarianism with his own
observations of a neighbouring Jewish community.

37

37
The papers published here resulted from the workshop ‘Constructing Hellenism in Renaissance Europe

and Classical Islam’, which took place at Humboldt University in Berlin on 21 and 22 November 2014.

The initial idea was worked out by Damien Janos and myself; the event was co-moderated by Lukas

Mülethaler. I am grateful to both for their help and also to Philip van der Eijk, as well as to the Berlin

Centre for the History of Knowledge, the Department of Classics of Humboldt University, for their

financial support and practical assistance. Thanks also to all participants in the workshop and especially to

the speakers. Apart from the contributors to this issue, speakers included Dimitri Gutas, Olga Lizzini,

Maria Mavroudi and Philippe Vallat. I am thankful to the contributors for their insightful comments on an

earlier draft of this text. Steven Bockhardt kindly assisted with the preparation of the complete

manuscript, and Jill Kraye meticulously went through the final text; I am indebted to both.

Constructing Hellenism 215

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	Constructing Hellenism: Studies on the History of Greek Learning in Early Modern Europe
	Introduction