NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 124 of 150

Correct — D, It criticized material wealth, power and glory. That description belongs to the medieval monastic ideal the humanists were reacting against, not to humanism itself. Humanist culture was emphatically worldly: it valued achievement in this life, public service, eloquence, reputation and fame, and it saw no contradiction between a good life and a prosperous or celebrated one. Its patrons were merchant princes and its most influential handbook was a guide to succeeding at court. Since the question asks which statement is NOT true, this is the one to mark, and the other three are all accurate descriptions of the movement.

• (a)It slackened the control of religion over human life — True, and therefore not the answer. Humanists took as their programme the studia humanitatis — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy — studied for their own sake rather than as servants of theology, and they broke deliberately with the otherworldly cast of medieval thought. Most of them remained Christians; what loosened was the church's monopoly over learning and over what a life was for.
• (b)It believed that human nature was many-sided — True. The period's own ideal was the universal man, the uomo universale, who could paint, write, design a building and serve a prince — Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti are the standing examples, and the English phrase 'Renaissance man' preserves the idea to this day.
• (c)It was concerned with good manners — True, and more literally so than students expect. Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, is a long dialogue on what makes the ideal courtier and court lady, and it circulated in six languages across twenty European centres. Thomas Hoby's English translation of 1561 shaped the English upper class's very idea of a gentleman.

Renaissance humanism was a programme of study before it was anything else: a return to classical Greek and Latin texts, read in the original and for their own sake. Out of that came a set of attitudes — confidence in human capacity, interest in the world as it is, admiration for eloquence and accomplishment, and a taste for fame. It flourished first in the Italian city-states, where wealthy merchants and princely courts paid for it, and it spread north through printing.

Statement items on an intellectual movement are best answered by asking what the movement was reacting against. Humanism defined itself in opposition to a medieval outlook that treated this world as a rehearsal for the next and held poverty, obedience and withdrawal to be the higher path. Reverse each of those and you have the humanist temper — engagement with public life, delight in achievement, and no embarrassment about wealth or renown. Option (d) is simply the medieval ideal restated, which is why it is the odd one out. It also helps to remember that humanism was not anti-religious. Its scholars applied their new textual methods to the Bible and the Church Fathers as readily as to Cicero, and many of them meant to purify Christianity rather than to displace it. What option (a) says is the accurate, weaker claim — that religion's grip on the whole of life slackened — and not the stronger claim that humanists abandoned faith.

• The humanist curriculum, the studia humanitatis, covered grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy.
• The Renaissance ideal of the many-sided or universal man survives in the English phrase 'Renaissance man'.
• Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier appeared in 1528 and circulated in six languages across twenty European centres; Thomas Hoby's English translation of 1561 shaped the English idea of a gentleman.
• Humanists were mostly Christians who applied classical scholarship to sacred texts as well as to secular ones.

• Reading 'humanist' as 'anti-religious' — the movement loosened the church's grip on learning without rejecting faith.
• Answering a NOT-true item by picking the statement that sounds least familiar rather than the one that is false.
• Attributing the monastic ideal of poverty and withdrawal to the humanists who were rejecting it.

NDA sets one or two world-history statement items per paper on the Renaissance, the Reformation or the Industrial Revolution, usually in this which-is-not-true form.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Book of the Courtier, a famous Renaissance work on the manners and accomplishments of the ideal courtier, was written by

  • (a)Niccolo Machiavelli
  • (b)Baldassare Castiglione
  • (c)Erasmus
  • (d)Thomas More

  Answer(b) Baldassare Castiglione — published in 1528 and translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The group of subjects that formed the core of the humanist curriculum in the Renaissance was

  • (a)theology, canon law and scholastic logic
  • (b)grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy
  • (c)astronomy, alchemy and astrology
  • (d)medicine, surgery and anatomy alone

  Answer(b) grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy — the studia humanitatis.