Quintilian in the Italian Renaissance

The century that followed Poggio Bracciolini’s discovery of a complete manuscript of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria at the Swiss monastery of St Gall in 1416 represents a vital stage within the text’s transmission and reception. The new text fell on fertile soil, at a time when the classicizing movement known as humanism was rapidly reshaping Italian elite education and literary and intellectual culture, and when the introduction of printing would soon begin to transform practices of editing and dissemination. This chapter traces the editorial and transmission history of the Institutio from 1416 to the early sixteenth century, with some consideration of Petrarch’s earlier, enthusiastic reception of the text. After an initial, general overview of the text’s fortunes in manuscript and print, and its gradual, increasing adoption in educational contexts, more detailed discussions follow of Quintilian’s reception by, and influence on, two of the great humanist thinkers of the period, Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) and Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529). The chapter argues that, in Valla, Quintilian’s rhetoric became a model for a modern practice of Christian eloquence, capable of rivalling scholastic theology, while, in Castiglione, Quintilian’s human ideal of the orator was recast as a template for the modern court intellectual.