Rehumanizing the Humanities
- sofiapbaker
- Sep 10, 2024
- 1 min read
First Things, September 10, 2024
I have to admit to a tendency for my eyes to glaze over when people talk about a crisis in the humanities. I’ve been hearing about their imminent collapse my entire professional life. I was already being told forty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student in history at Columbia, that I was joining a dying profession.
Later, when I studied the history of the humanities, I discovered that the impending doom of the humanities was a topos that went back at least seven centuries. The Italian poet Petrarch, who effectively founded the studia humanitatis in the fourteenth century by adding poetry, history, and moral philosophy to the seven liberal arts, was himself a champion cultural pessimist. The Italians of his time, he thought, were hopeless barbarians, uniquely resistant to the voices of ancient virtue found in old books. His educated contemporaries couldn’t even speak decent Latin…