Roman Academies

Roman academies includes a description of Papal academies in Rome including historical and bibliographical notes concerning the more important of these. Roman Academies were associations of learned individuals and not institutes for instruction.

These Roman Academies were always a part of a larger educational structure which existed both in Florence and Rome since the Italian Renaissance. At its apogee (from the close of the Western Schism in 1418 to the middle of the 16th century) found two intellectual centers, Florence and Rome. Scientific, literary, and artistic culture attained in them a development as intense as it was multiform, and the earlier Roman and Florentine academies were typical examples of this variety.

The Middle Ages did not bequeath to Rome any institutions that could be called scientific or literary academies. As a rule, there was slight inclination for such institutions. The Academy of Charlemagne and the Floral Academy at Toulouse were princely courts at which literary meetings were held. A special reason why literature did not get a stronger footing at Rome is to be found in the constant politico-religious disturbances of the Middle Ages. Owing to the oppression of the papacy under the Hohenstaufen emperors, to the struggles for ecclesiastical liberty begun by Gregory VII, to the epic conflict between Guelph and Ghibelline, to the intrusion of a French domination which gave birth to papal Avignon and the Western Schism, medieval Rome was certainly no place for learned academies.

In Rome, as in Florence, Renaissance academies aimed to reproduce the traditions of the Academy of Plato, promoting the cultivation of philosophy in the Ancient Greek sense of "love of wisdom", especially characterized by Renaissance Platonism and its neoplatonic ideas. One of several meeting places for scholarly events and discussion was the house of the Cardinal and Byzantine Greek exile Basilios Bessarion, which itself has come to be referred to as an academia (academy). His extensive library (which he bequeathed to the city of Venice) was at the disposal of his many house guests for study of new humanistic learning. His visitors included learned Greek refugees, whom he supported by commissioning transcripts of Greek manuscripts and translations into Latin to help make a corpus of Greek scholarship available to Western Europeans.

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