Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

Jim and I were in New York last fall. We saw a show (the divine Here We Are, Sondheim’s last work) at the Shed, which has a little bookstore in the lobby area. While we waited for the show to begin, we browsed the books and Jim noticed Humanly Possible and suggested it was a book I might like to read. I agreed. I made a mental note and when we got back to Los Angeles I ordered the book. It sat around for a few months before I got to it (I was reading the excruciating Under the Volcano).

Humanly Possible is a history of Humanism. After an introduction the chapters run chronologically from 1300 or so, with dips back to reference earlier times that influenced the thinking of the players in the main timeline, and is almost entirely set in western Europe, with a slight nod to Confucius and a few others. By the time we get to the final chapter, 300-plus pages later, we’ve reached the present day and managed to include some Americans.

With a seven hundred year span and a broad category (a lot of people and works could be called “humanist”) the book gives only a pretty quick introduction to the persons it lifts up. Beyond the summaries of the lives and works of the people I already knew, the main enjoyment for me was meeting folks I didn’t know. Bakewell introduces a man named Lorenzo Valla on page 87 and then refers back to him throughout the remainder of the book. Valla wrote a treatise on the Donation of Constantine, proving through literary analysis that the document that supposedly had Emperor Constantine giving the Catholic church dominion over all of Western Europe, including the Italian peninsula, was a forgery. Bakewell uses Valla as an example of her definition of what makes a humanist: learning, curiosity, bravery, optimism.

Each chapter begins with a short preview of the folks we’ll meet, interesting people and interesting stories. Chapter 3, where we meet Valla also includes Pico della Mirandola, the Vitruvians (as in Leonardo’s famous drawing), Savonarola, among others. We move from scholars, to scientists, to philosophers, to novelists. Each of the twelve chapters feature a half dozen or so persons. There is little about artists and few politicians.

Some of the folks I was already familiar with are Petrarch, Erasmus, Hume, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill. Montaigne. The final man mentioned is Arthur C. Clarke and his novel, Childhood’s End. Some of the folks I didn’t know are Wilhelm von Humboldt (an educational reformer); Ludwik L. Zamenhof (who invented Esperanto); and Leslie Stephens (father of Virginia Woolf who wrote a remarkable piece called “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps” where he recalls an episode where he nearly died and wondered what he could do profitably with the few minutes he had left to live).

Bakewell finds good stories to tell. I was always engaged. She regrets, but accepts with alacrity, that a history of the life of the mind is pretty much only going to include the life of the European male mind until well into the nineteenth century. But she does whenever possible include women like Mary Wollstonecraft, and non-white men like Frederick Douglass, and gay men like E. M. Forster.

The book includes numerous black and white inset illustrations: portraits and frontispieces of books and so on. Unfortunately they don’t come with captions so it’s not always clear what or who the illustration is actually of.