ABSTRACT
The basis of the revival was a movement in education to which the name humanism is commonly given. It has already been explained that humanism was not the coming of light after darkness; it was, however, a break with the over-formal, over-abstracted dialectics of the later middle ages. The inspiration came from such diverse sources as the Italian passion for the classics, Erasmus' intellectual attack on scholasticism, the introduction of Greek into England by William Grocyn (14461-1519) and Thomas Lineacre (146o?-1524), and the religious doubts which drove people like Tyndale to the Greek text of the Bible. The ideal of education changed from the theological to the rhetorical, from the training of priests and scholars to the training of accomplished gentlemen serving the state. Cicero dominated sixteenth-century education -they were for ever citing 'Tully' for the example of his oratory and the wisdom of his De Officiis-until a reaction against verbosity towards the end of Elizabeth's reign replaced him by the models of the Jacobeans, Seneca and Tacitus. This Ciceronian tradition was far from dead through most of the middle ages; the movement was really new only in that it demanded intellectual attainments in the lay leaders of society. By combining classical learning with medieval knighthood it created the ideal of the gentleman, that powerful civilising influence of the next 400 years: of that ideal, Sir Philip Sidney, who fused knightly 'courtesy' with humanistic learning and the Elizabethan courtier's love of poetry, stands as the first English embodiment.
