ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Renaissance of learning conventionally credited to Petrarch and his followers came what one early modern historian of philosophy called the 'light of Philosophy reborn'. Philosophy and its history were pursued over an ever-expanding network of teachers and authors, students and readers, in which criticism was promoted and institutionalized. The legacy of western learning was the common property of scholars belonging to that international community, which since the fifteenth century has been called the 'Republic of Letters'. Renaissance 'art of history', like its classical model, referred to actions accomplished, things done; but from at least the sixteenth century it also reached out for words recorded, things written, and especially works printed; and the upshot was a new discipline of literary history. This inversion of the old topos subordinating words to things was linked directly to what was called the 'renaissance of letters'.
