© Jeff Matthews
entry Jan 2015
Italian and Neapolitan
Academies of the Middle
Ages

here are at least two institutions in
Naples, the Italian Institute
for Historical Studies and the Institute
for Philosophical Studies that—although they,
themselves, are of relatively recent origin—go back to the
tradition of the Italian learned Academies of the late
Renaissance and early modern periods. Indeed, in a certain
sense, such institutions (in Italy and elsewhere) may even
be said to go back to Plato's original Grove of Academe)
in Athens. And if we accept an expanded sense of Academy,
such groups include even those who met at Cicero's villa
(he called it "our academy), or those who. much earlier,
sat with Pythagoras in Crotone
and laid the foundations for modern geometry and even
Western music. Beyond that, when Justinian closed Plato's
Academy in Athens, those scholars left Greece for parts
east where they founded a similar academy in Jundishapur
in Persia. (And you never know—those who figured out the
precession of the equinoxes lived even well before that:
“Hey, we're having a few drinks at my cave tonight.
BYOB—bring your own brain.”)
Beginning in the late 1400s and for centuries
afterwards, there came to be about six hundred such
academies in Italy. Their interests covered literature,
culture, and the sciences and ranged over many subjects,
from astronomy to theater, from poetry to politics, from
linguistics to music and the figurative arts. Academies
published in all these and many other fields. Membership
in the Academies included pioneering scientists, literary
polemicists and political thinkers. It would be unjust—and
dead wrong—to think that many of these institutions,
because we now view them as “pre-scientific” did not do
important work. Those were times in which, for example,
significant scientific work was often carried on by
individuals working within such groups or, indeed, even by
themselves. Important, also, is the fact that they spread
knowledge and intellectual curiosity to a large audience
drawn from a diverse social base and in so doing provided
an alternative to medieval universities, which remained
largely concerned with Scholastic philosophy—trying to
integrate Christian theology and the classical Greek
philosophy of Aristotle and Plato. Academies were, in that
respect, practical workshops for the new ideas of
Humanism; they worked in vernacular languages and showed
them to be just as effective as classical Latin for
scholarly discourse even as universities continued to use
Latin. (In Naples, Latin was the language of instruction
at the Frederick II university well into the 1700s.)
Recent
archaeology has revealed such items within the ruins of
della Porta's" academy of secrets" as
this fresco of the Egyptian
God, Set, and Isis (on the left)
nursing the infant Horus.
photo: Napoli Underground (NUg)
In the
"modern" sense of our own Middle Ages, the first "new"
academy in Italy may have been an institution in Florence
sponsored from about 1460 by Cosimo Medici. Although there
is some reference in the literature to an earlier
Neapolitan academy in the 1440s under King Alfonso, it is
not at all clear what that might have been. At best it may
been have an informal gathering of literati who sat around
in the presence of the king and chewed the fat. At worst,
it may not have existed at all and was a fiction conjured
up by Giovanni Pontano
(1426-1503) the founder of the first verifiable academy in
Naples in order to lend some intellectual ancestry to his
own academy, one that was widely respected throughout
Italy and that flourished throughout the French Angevin
dynasty and well into the Spanish Vice-Regency in the
Kingdom of Naples. Part of the premises are still intact.
(#37 on this map).
The academies in the 1400s and early 1500s were
concerned mainly with literature and general culture; they
produced theater and had social concerns about such things
as the education of women. Indeed, women were accepted
into some academies and in Naples formed the nucleus of
the engravers that actually printed academy journals. The
first "scientific" academy in Italy came a bit later;
it was the Academia Secretorum Naturae
in Naples (image, above right), founded around 1580 by the
amazing polymath, Giambattista
della Porta (see that link). The members met to
uncover the "secrets of nature" and nicknamed themselves
the Otiosi (Men of Leisure) in keeping with the
good-natured habit among such societies of adopting
whimsical names for the group. In order to join this
group, you had to have contributed a new discovery or fact
in natural science. Perhaps the best-known scientific
community in Italy was the Academy of the Lynxes (for the
“sharp-eyed” abilities of the lynx) in Rome. It was
founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi. Della Porta, himself,
became a member in the early 1600s after he was forced to
leave Naples by the Inquisition. If Della Porta was, by
today's criteria, “pre-scientific,” the most famous member
of the Lynxes was not; he was as lynx-eyed as they come
—Galileo. He was so honored to be a member that he took to
signing his name Galileo Galilei Linceo.
Academies, by and large, have been replaced by
universities, but at least a few of them have survived in
name and function, such as the Accademia della Crusca,
a society for scholars and Italian linguists and
philologists founded in 1583 in Florence. It is the most
important research institution on the Italian language as
well as the oldest linguistic academy in the world. Even
the Accademia della Crusca has a curious name;
crusca means 'bran'. Bran is nutritional and they
were making fun of the chaff turned out by those
insufferable pedants across town at the Florentine
Academy. The bran-boys & girls even held academic
contests that they termed cruscate, a pun on crociate
(crusades).
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