Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and I'm listening to The History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department of King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online in HistoryofLosody.net.

Today's episode, right till your ink be dry, humanism in Britain.

I have a friend from England who once spent a miserable week at his in-laws, suffering through an unbroken succession of ready-made meals prepared in the microwave.

My friend isn't much of a cook, but in desperation he resorted to making a meal for the whole family, a simple pasta with meat sauce.

To his surprise, his homemade food was greeted with little enthusiasm.

His father-in-law game-leaped picked away at his plate of spaghetti bouillon aise for a while, but then pushed it away, saying,

I'm sorry, we just don't like foreign food.

I love this story because it illustrates so nicely something I've already mentioned a few episodes ago, the literally insular attitude of the British towards all things European.

Paradoxically though, when the British do welcome foreign fare onto their island, they enthusiastically make it their own.

In the modern day, a politician made headlines by saying that the national dish of the United Kingdom is chicken tikka masala,

while the meal my friend made is in fact not so common, that it is known simply as spag bowl.

As we've been seeing, this is how the British handled the reformation, first resisting it and then domesticating it.

And the same approach was taken with humanism.

In this case, the foreign import came not from Germany, in Switzerland, but from Italy, the Netherlands, and France,

as British scholars took up the ideas and educational program of such figures as Guadrino Venonese, Masidio Fichino, Erasmus, and Peter Ramos.

Naturally, that list of places and figures is pretty well the itinerary will follow in this episode.

We're first going to talk about the initial stirrings of humanism in 15th century England, which centered on the travel of books and people back and forth to Italy.

Then we'll move on to humanism in the Tudor period, and especially in the early 16th century, when English humanism became more of a homegrown phenomenon under the influence of Erasmus.

I'll also touch on developments under Queen Elizabeth, though we'll have the chance to learn much more about that incoming episodes devoted to Elizabethan literature and science.

And finally, we'll head back to Scotland and talk about Andrew Melville, who studied in Paris and then drew on Rhamism to reform the educational institutions of Glasgow and St. Andrews.

In both England and Scotland, that sort of restructuring would be attempted only in the 16th century.

...