Living in a World of Words: Humanist Friendships and Book Culture in Quattrocento Rome, 1440-1480

This dissertation examines the friendships and social networks of some of the humanist scholars who lived and worked in Rome in the decades between 1440 and 1480. By studying their friendships and community formations as a social process, and how they interacted with each other through exchanging books as gifts, I show that the humanists in Rome relied upon their friendships and networks to support their academic works and lives. Their intellectual production, praised and analyzed for their contributions to many avenues of political, cultural, and philosophical history, was buttressed and supported not just by their patrons or their contributions to intellectual culture, but also by the many socio-cultural habits and behaviours of premodern friendships, rivalries, and networks. By narrating some of these friendships and taking a microhistorical lens to humanist life and behaviour, this dissertation argues for the importance of studying humanism as a lived practice and a performance in early modernity, rather than only as an intellectual movement that was obsessed with the transformation of classical antiquity in and for their world.

The first chapter grounds this dissertation within the long histories of both intellectual and social history of early modern Italy and highlights a path forward for the study of fifteenth-century humanism. The second chapter studies the humanist genre of the dedicatory letter from a social perspective, and using two examples, argues that this famous genre of humanist writing should also be studied for how it builds, shapes, and informs humanist communities, and not just for how humanists used prefaces to seek patronage. The third chapter studies the printed prefaces of the humanist bishop Giovanni Andrea Bussi, and how he brokered and negotiated the communities of scholars, elites, and humanism itself in mid-fifteenth-century Rome through his prefaces, his editing, and his work with the printers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. The last chapter looks at the creation of Pius II’s famous memoir, The Commentaries, as a humanist and political text, arguing that there were many authors involved in the creation of its manuscripts and planned circulation. Subsequently, the pope planned for its multiple authorship and coordinated its many hands and voices to create a singular image of himself that could be used and defended by his associates after his death.