Excellent! I do so enjoy Sarah Bakewell and now I’ve read three of her five books.  She brings a good measure of fun to her books along with delightful anecdotes.  I so very much appreciated this book.   

Humanly Possible:
Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope
by Sarah Bakewell 
2023 / 454 pages
Read by Antonia Beamish 14h 27m 
Rating;  10 / Philosophy 
(Both read and listened)

This book is more history than philosophy, but there’s considerable philosophy in it, too.  It might make an excellent text for a class on the intellectual history of Europe from the Renaissance to the 20th century for non-philosophy majors. And I suppose it’s as much philosophy as Jena 1800 by Peter Neubaum (the Romanticists)  or The Time of the Magicians (by Wolfram Eilenberger) or even Magnificent Rebels (by Andrea Wulf) and Fatal Discord (by Michael Massing)  all of which I read this year. 

Bakewell starts the tale with the birth of Petrarch in 1304 in Arezzo, Italy. This was about 1000 years after the sack of Rome (1410) and 700 years prior to today’s time (loosely).   Petrarch studied the letters of Cicero and and others and then wrote his own letters for posterity.  

Then she moves through the Italian peninsula as it was in those days, decades, centuries, including the Christians and pagans and not least of all Michelangelo’s Vitruvian. Of course there were the Papal encyclicals to be translated, but the treatment of syphilis had  become important making the translation of Greek texts invaluable – unless someone accused the translator of error.  So then they did their own cutting research on very old corpses or criminals of the day. And some artists (Michelangelo +) followed suit to make sure their own work was correct. The historians of Rome like Levy and Tacitus, were highly sought after as were the Christian texts – and they all had to be translated.  

This was the dawning of the Renaissance which spread all over Europe and many scholars were thirsty for new knowledge as well as uncovering what remained of the old material, locked away in monasteries and barns. So between Agricola (1450s in Northern Europe) and Erasmus on his travels (1500s), Montaigne (from birth, 1550s)  and others picked it up and wrote diaries and letters, traveled some and more, then spread humanism via others, especially to Thomas More in England. These men influenced the Protestant Reformation in that humanism encouraged both independent thinking as well as reading the Bible in a native languages. 

From Dante to E.M. Forster thinkers of these ages spoke of progress, of enlightenment, of reason, Bakewell covers so much material in so few pages it’s almost breath taking and I would have to go back and reread paragraphs or pages to really get it more completely.  

I may read this again because there are so many details and it’s so beautifully written.