the Renaissance man

I left off on Wednesday with the universal man moving into the “Renaissance man.”

But we should remember that, even though there was much talk about the universal man, i.e., the fully developed personality, during and after the Renaissance, the idea of universality in the Renaissance was restricted to the upper class.

The working class were not exactly studying Greek philosophy or astronomy during breaks from brick laying or manure shoveling. They lacked the time, the energy, or the money. Indeed, Renaissance historian Sir John Rigby Hale noted that the leisured upper class was attracted to the idea of universalism because it allowed them to distinguish themselves from people who had to work for a living.

The OED defines a Renaissance man simply as “one who exhibits the virtues of an idealized man of the Renaissance.” This is a surprisingly new term. It did not even appear in the 1933 first edition of the OED; it was not added until a later supplement.

While the OED does not list any uses of the phrase Renaissance man prior to 1906, when English historian William Harrison Woodward used it in his book Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, it definitely missed a few early uses.

With the advantages of modern technology, a Google book search located a use of the phrase as far back as 1874, when scholar and writer Rev. Richard St. John Tyrwhitt used it in an article for the magazine Old and New.

However, the concept of the Renaissance man did not enter into popular usage for some time. The term did not appear in an American newspaper until 1907, and not in the New York Times until 1923.