ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a general and comparative account of one of the most famous episodes, or movements, in the intellectual history of Western Europe the discovery, by scholars and writers, of Italian humanism, and the rediscovery, thanks in large part to the Italian humanists, of the culture of the classical Greek and Roman world. The ideas of Tuscan humanists were subject to similar processes of adaptation as they spread through Italy, from Venice to Palermo, but this problem will not be considered here, any more than the equally important problem of Italian responses to ideas, books and individuals from other parts of Europe. The traditional picture of the European universities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is not one of the spread of Italian humanism, but of resistance to it. Process of domestication explains the need felt by many historians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to coin various compound terms such as legal, medical, pragmatic and even chivalric humanism.
