What Was “Secularism” in the Fifteenth Century? Pocock's Machiavellian Moment Reconsidered

Was there at least an ideological space created in fifteenth-century Italy for thinking about a “state” that was not necessarily a unique part of a providential order (and thus aware of its own precariousness and historicity)?  In his The Machiavellian Moment, J.G.A. Pocock suggested that this was so, and that fifteenth-century Italy’s contribution was to be found in the “republican” theorists identified by Hans Baron as central to intellectual life, chief among them Leonardo Bruni.  Yet the more these theorists have been investigated (by Quentin Skinner among many others), the less they seem to have articulated any key principles consistently or uniquely. For fifteenth-century Italy’s specific place in this story to be rightly understood, historians need to look beyond texts identified as “political theory” and to at least three different evidentiary trajectories.  First, the proto-cosmopolitanism of the papal court in the middle of the fifteenth century contributed to a sense of cultural relativism, as we see a variety of authors, including Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger and Lorenzo Valla, comment on how international Christendom’s diverse peoples were drawn together at the papal court.  Second, if the Latin language was the one factor that drew people to the Court and seemed for some, such as Valla, to represent a key element of Christendom’s unity, the realization among other authors (for example Poggio Bracciolini) that Latin was a natural language, with its own cycle of birth, growth, and decline, sharpened the sense of historical precariousness often associated, if too exclusively, with republican political theory.  Finally, the archiving tendencies associated with the development of libraries in the mid-fifteenth century and the accelerating recovery, in Italy, of the full panoply of classical texts spurred a kind of “textual cosmopolitanism,” itself central to an eventual realization of the plurality of human cultures associated with secularism.