Religious Humanism: a mini-trace and a synthesis

Hello, everyone.

Here are the two activities we did not get to during Thursday's class discussion (9/24) on Vives and de la Cruz. I'd say, tackle them as if you would have tackled them while we were in class--focusedly, but briefly. You need not write a lengthy exposition in response to each question; just get yourself to a point of realization, and share that realization with us.

1) This is how Fantazzi--the editor of Vives' Education of a Christian Woman--generally characterizes this rhetorical treatise and some of Vives' other training manuals for women pupils (Fantazzi, "Introduction" 1-40):

--advocated education for all women regardless of social class and ability
--argued that women were intellectually equal if not superior to men
--promoted universal education of women, even those who showed no natural aptitude for learning
--argued that women's proper education was essential to the well-being of the state
--distinguished between real “learning” and superficial belletristic knowledge
--argued that ignorance (not knowledge) fostered evil

What evidence can you find for one or more of these arguments in the following? (Select only one option below for your mini-trace.) How consistently is it argued?

Chapters I-III
Chapter IV
Chapter V


2) Let's say we had only two ways to historicize and understand "religious humanism" as a movement:

--noting differences between Pizan and de la Cruz in terms of textual features, how writers establish authority, key claims and assumptions, and what counts as evidence
--taking Erasmus, Vives, and de la Cruz as a collective and explaining how they could represent the same tradition in terms of the above

Pick one of these two ways and offer a brief historicization of your own.

Good luck and have fun with this.

-Tarez