ABSTRACT

This educational and cultural movement developed in the urban centers of Italy and northern Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Humanists often served as secretaries, notaries, and diplomats for princes and republics. They devoted themselves to what they called the studia humanitatis, comprising history, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy. They greatly admired the ancients and realized with a newly developed sense of history that antiquity was an era profoundly different from their own. They attempted to reinstate ancient, usually Ciceronian, Latin in place of what they considered the barbarisms of medieval Latin. From the early fifteenth century, they also began to learn Greek. Avidly searching for the writings of the ancients, they found many manuscript copies of known works, as well as works that had been unknown to medieval scholars. They edited, translated, and retranslated many of these ancient texts.