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 Historyofilosophy.net.

Today's episode, Word Perfect, Logic and Language in Renaissance France.

The clash between humanism and scholasticism, which looked like it would be the defining battle of intellectual life in the 16th century until the Reformation came along, is often seen in institutional terms.

The schoolmen worked at universities, the humanists outside them.

This impression is supported by humanists complaining about the pedophagory offered up as philosophical instruction at Paris and elsewhere, and it seems to be confirmed by the fact that scholastics accused humanists of lacking proper credentials.

Thus, we find Noel Beta, executive officer of the Theology faculty at Paris, and a determined defender of scholasticism and Catholicism, accusing Erasmus of lacking the proper expertise to interpret scripture.

In fact, though, many of the humanists did study at the universities. As I mentioned, when we looked at Erasmus, he, in fact, studied theology at Paris for a time, though he dropped out.

We also saw how the impact of Malangthun transformed teaching at Wittenberg, Tuvingon, and ultimately across Protestant Europe, precisely by modifying the traditional curriculum in light of humanist values.

In France, there was no better example of a humanist schoolman than Jacques Leferre Tétapie. Beta complained about him, too.

In 1526, he attacked Leferre by name for his production in offering a new Latin version of the Psalms and New Testament, translating the Bible into French, and daring to comment on scripture as if he were a properly trained theologian.

Though Leferre never officially broke with the church, Beta depicted Leferre as being at least a Lutheran sympathizer.

As a modern scholar has put it, it was the heaviest stick with which to beat him and the one that lay nearest to hand.

Beta himself put the point as follows. Since Leferre, Erasmus, and certain others have presumed in our day to discuss fully scripture itself and the writings of the early doctors on their own, without teachers rejecting and neglecting scholastic theology, the same method that by its strength alone,

confuted and condemned the perverse teachings of the now famous heretics, is it any wonder that they have slipped recently into the same impiates of the aforementioned heretics and have fallen into the same dangers as those whose example they have chosen to follow.

The heretical forbearers he had in mind included such familiar names as Abelard of Marsilius of Patria, John Wycliffe, and Jan Huss.

But while Beta was right that Leferre was not a professor of theology, neither was he an outsider to the world of the schoolmen, he taught at Paris himself for almost two decades spanning the 15th and 16th centuries.

He composed influential textbooks on Aristotelian philosophy, for instance his 1496 introduction to logic which became a bestseller.

He was eclectic and creative in his use of pedagogical techniques such as tables offering an overview of the treatise that he would then go on to summarise, catechistic dialogues to help the student remember the main points and more traditional full commentaries.

It's been remarked that this range of epitomizing formats or genres defined a Renaissance philosophical style which Leferre's works remodeled for northern universities.

His methods were inspired by Italian humanist scholars whom Leferre contacted during several trips across the Alps.

In Italy he met among others Ficino, Quizziano and Pico.

The humanist Johannes Reutland thus said Marcelo Ficino gave Plato to Italy, Leferre restored Aristotle to France, elsewhere he was lauded as the one glory of all France.

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