ABSTRACT

The most fundamental achievement of Renaissance culture was the intellectual programme pursued in the eities, libraries and courts of Italy by thinkers such as Petrarch and Valla. The consequences of the Protestant Reformation were manifold. With the Reformation, a decisive change would take place in the relationship between the public and private facets of the human personality. The forces that produced the Protestant reformation had been gathering for many centuries before Luther precipitated their release. In many respects, the Catholic Reformation, while seeking a new darity in its dogma, laid greater emphasis on moral reform than on doctrinal innovation. In the Renaissance, where individuals lived increasingly in a world of international organizations - of Empires and of Churches with universal ambitions - and where censorship, Indexes and Inquisitions bore down upon the very words that fed the private conscience, dissension would itself become the way to truth.