ABSTRACT
The term ‘Renaissance’ applied to the Italian and Italianate culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a misnomer stamped upon current notions by the traditions of that culture itself. The greater splendour of European culture at that epoch was the outspreading of overblown blossoms which the previous centuries had called to life and unfolded. ‘Renaissance’ humanism was in its form representative of that paramount fact. The humanism of the Renaissance gave a new impetus to the perusal of the only secular literature then existing, and thus helped to establish the dominion of secular thought in the modern world. The Greeks had been concerned with ideas, the Arabs and Arabists with facts, the pedants of the Renaissance were concerned with words. Renaissance humanism was fiercely opposed to science, and academic humanism has consistently remained the bulwark of authority and reaction.
