A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

56 Ch. 2 • The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of Classical Learning

The Tuscan poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) was among the
earliest and most influential of those who rediscovered and celebrated the

classics of Latin antiquity. Petrarch, the son of a Florentine notary, learned
Latin from a monk who inspired the boy to pursue his fascination with the
classical world, which he came to view as a lost age. As a young man,
Petrarch lived in Avignon, among an international community of lawyers and
churchmen at the papal court during the “Avignon Papacy” (1309-1378),
when the popes were subject to the influence of the kings of France. There
he copied ancient works from manuscripts and books. Petrarch and his
friends searched far and wide for more classical manuscripts. They uncov­
ered the Letters to Athens of the Roman orator and moralist Marcus Tullius
Cicero (106-43 b.c.), among other texts, stored in the cathedral of Verona.
The study of Cicero led Petrarch to see in classical philosophy a guide to life
based on experience.
Petrarch’s successors found and copied other classical manuscripts.
Among them were classical literary commentaries, which provided human­
ists with a body of information about the authors in whom they were inter­
ested. Scholars brought works of classical Greek authors, including the
playwright Sophocles, from Constantinople and from the libraries of
Mount Athos, an important center of learning in the Eastern Orthodox
Church. Knowledge of Greek texts (as well as certain Arabic and Hebrew
texts) spread slowly through Italy after the arrival of Greek teachers from
Constantinople.
The development of printing (see Chapter 1) permitted the diffusion of
a variety of histories, treatises, biographies, autobiographies, and poems.
Printing spread knowledge of classical texts and the development of tex­
tual criticism itself. Many Renaissance scholars considered Cicero to rep­
resent the model of the purest classical prose (although others considered
him too long-winded), and by 1500 more than 200 editions of his works
had been printed in Italy, including his influential On Oratory and his let­
ters. Libraries were established in many of the Italian city-states, including
Florence, Naples, and Venice, and provided scholars with common texts
for study.

From Scholasticism to Humanism

The Romans had used the concept of humanitas to describe the combina­

tion of wisdom and virtue that they revered. The term came to refer to stud­

ies that were intellectually liberating, the seven liberal arts of antiquity:

grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and rhetoric (the

art of expressive and persuasive speech or discourse). Medieval scholasti­

cism was a system of thought in which clerics applied reason to philosophi­

cal and theological questions. Those teachers and students who shifted their