Decolonizing Renaissance Humanism

This article traces the origins of the Eurocentric vision of Renaissance humanism and shows that in fact the revival of letters in thirteenth-century Italy had a much wider impact than traditionally thought. This "decolonized " vision of Renaissance humanism is centered on three trends: imperial humanism (humanist ideas of empire, both within and beyond the metropole), Indo-humanism (syncretic humanisms, especially in Asia and the Americas), and post-humanism (the movement's long shadow into the eighteenth century). When placed in this new light, Renaissance humanism emerges as neither purely graciously cosmopolitan and proto-liberal, nor chauvinistically imperialist and statist, although it was very frequently embedded in imperial and evangelization projects. Rather, at a fundamental level it represented a toolbox of ideas and scholarly techniques that could be put to differing ends depending on the circumstances, while retaining certain common features that endured well into the age of "Enlightenment. " In making its argument about the past, present, and future of the scholarship on Renaissance humanism, this article also relies on a large corpus of little-known texts in various languages by a host of non- and extra-European humanists