The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift, and the English Battle of the Books

Abstract

It was argued some years ago that English of Books of late seventeenth century was just another phase in a long Renaissance humanist querelle des anciens et des modernes.1 The English Battle was thus another, and essentially repetitive, reworking of a theme that had become a commonplace. More recently, however, Joseph M. Levine has argued that an essential ingredient in English Battle was the bitter contest that resulted between 'wits' and scholars, rhetoric and philology, 'polite' learning and erudition.... It was, therefore, argument between literature and learning that alone could be said to be new. 2 Levine's essay completely reorients terms of English Battle and locates it in a potentially more revealing and significant humanist controversy. Anthony Grafton has argued of Renaissance that there were two tendencies in humanism: One set of humanists seeks to make

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