teaching, the birth of civic humanism supplied its immediate context, as Chrysoloras journeyed from besieged Constantinople to embattled Florence at the dawn of the quattrocento.
Chrysoloras’ New Teaching
Setting out from the Byzantine capital in late 1396, Cydones, Chrysoloras, and Angeli stopped over in Venice for several months. There the elderly Cydones remained, no doubt happily, as the other two friends continued on the overland leg of their trip, arriving in Florence on February 2, 1397. Welcomed enthusiastically by Salutati and his coterie of younger humanists, Chrysoloras assumed his teaching duties at the Florentine
studio
almost immediately.
For someone who played such a crucial and celebrated role in the history of Western civilization, Manuel Chrysoloras remains a curiously elusive figure. He wrote little. Just ahandful of letters and a few other brief writings survive. Though modern historians have characterized those few works as exceptionally important, they tell us next to nothing about Chrysoloras the man.
What little we know about Chrysoloras comes mostly from the writings of his students, some of whom quite simply idolized him. They describe a man of charm and magnetism, a warm and gifted communicator, widely cultivated if not an unusually learned scholar. He was physically impressive. Though only medium in size, he had a strikingly healthy complexion. Over a reddish beard worn long in the Byzantine style, his eyes suggested an outlook at once grave and lighthearted. In a modern American university, Chrysoloras would be the popular classroom performer rather than the scholarly researcher—but one whose graduate students turn out to be conspicuous for the brilliance of their later achievements, as well as the depth of their teacher's influence on them.
The roster of Chrysoloras’ pupils reads like a who's who of early Renaissance humanism. And because his pupils went on to teach their own students, and so on, Chrysoloras’ pedagogic legacy spread out and was still dominating the humanist landscape generations after his death.
Chrysoloras’ teaching methods were innovative, even revolutionary, yet what's more striking is the way they were so perfectly in tune with the needs and values of the humanist milieu he encountered in Florence.
On a basic level, Chrysoloras boiled down the mind-numbingly complex Greek-language textbooks used in Byzantine classrooms to a clear and concise form, producing an elementary, user-friendly primer of ancient Greek called
Questions.
The title was less original, being the traditional one for such books in Byzantium, but Chrysoloras’
Questions
would remain the Western student's standard introduction to ancient Greek for well over a century. Its radical streamlining of Greek grammar had a huge practical impact. Where one traditional version made just a few years earlier offered Byzantine students fifty-six types of noun to memorize, for example, Chrysoloras’ new one reduced it to just ten. A measure of the book's importance is that when printing came along later in the quattrocento, Chrysoloras’
Questions
was among the very first books printed.
That was innovation, and brought great advances in a hands-on, daily-grind kind of way. Revolution came in more profound realms of nuance and sensibility, and is best illustrated by Chrysoloras’ approach to the deceptively complex problem of translation. Medieval Scholastic scholars, when they had translated from Greek into Latin at all, had practiced a method called
verbum ad verbum
—literally, “word for word.” This is exactly what it sounds like: a mechanical, word-by-word substitution of one language for another. At its best, this resulted in clumsy, graceless Latin. At its worst, as Chrysoloras pointed out, it could change the meaning of the original completely. Chrysoloras abandoned the old method. Instead, he taught his students to stick as closely as possible to the sense of the Greek, but to convert it into
Chrysoloras’ New Teaching
Setting out from the Byzantine capital in late 1396, Cydones, Chrysoloras, and Angeli stopped over in Venice for several months. There the elderly Cydones remained, no doubt happily, as the other two friends continued on the overland leg of their trip, arriving in Florence on February 2, 1397. Welcomed enthusiastically by Salutati and his coterie of younger humanists, Chrysoloras assumed his teaching duties at the Florentine
studio
almost immediately.
For someone who played such a crucial and celebrated role in the history of Western civilization, Manuel Chrysoloras remains a curiously elusive figure. He wrote little. Just ahandful of letters and a few other brief writings survive. Though modern historians have characterized those few works as exceptionally important, they tell us next to nothing about Chrysoloras the man.
What little we know about Chrysoloras comes mostly from the writings of his students, some of whom quite simply idolized him. They describe a man of charm and magnetism, a warm and gifted communicator, widely cultivated if not an unusually learned scholar. He was physically impressive. Though only medium in size, he had a strikingly healthy complexion. Over a reddish beard worn long in the Byzantine style, his eyes suggested an outlook at once grave and lighthearted. In a modern American university, Chrysoloras would be the popular classroom performer rather than the scholarly researcher—but one whose graduate students turn out to be conspicuous for the brilliance of their later achievements, as well as the depth of their teacher's influence on them.
The roster of Chrysoloras’ pupils reads like a who's who of early Renaissance humanism. And because his pupils went on to teach their own students, and so on, Chrysoloras’ pedagogic legacy spread out and was still dominating the humanist landscape generations after his death.
Chrysoloras’ teaching methods were innovative, even revolutionary, yet what's more striking is the way they were so perfectly in tune with the needs and values of the humanist milieu he encountered in Florence.
On a basic level, Chrysoloras boiled down the mind-numbingly complex Greek-language textbooks used in Byzantine classrooms to a clear and concise form, producing an elementary, user-friendly primer of ancient Greek called
Questions.
The title was less original, being the traditional one for such books in Byzantium, but Chrysoloras’
Questions
would remain the Western student's standard introduction to ancient Greek for well over a century. Its radical streamlining of Greek grammar had a huge practical impact. Where one traditional version made just a few years earlier offered Byzantine students fifty-six types of noun to memorize, for example, Chrysoloras’ new one reduced it to just ten. A measure of the book's importance is that when printing came along later in the quattrocento, Chrysoloras’
Questions
was among the very first books printed.
That was innovation, and brought great advances in a hands-on, daily-grind kind of way. Revolution came in more profound realms of nuance and sensibility, and is best illustrated by Chrysoloras’ approach to the deceptively complex problem of translation. Medieval Scholastic scholars, when they had translated from Greek into Latin at all, had practiced a method called
verbum ad verbum
—literally, “word for word.” This is exactly what it sounds like: a mechanical, word-by-word substitution of one language for another. At its best, this resulted in clumsy, graceless Latin. At its worst, as Chrysoloras pointed out, it could change the meaning of the original completely. Chrysoloras abandoned the old method. Instead, he taught his students to stick as closely as possible to the sense of the Greek, but to convert it into
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