ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses briefly renaissance humanism, stoicism and epicureanism. Montaigne is not Rabelais. He comes at the end of the Renaissance and is severely critical of certain aspects of it. The world of the Renaissance was eager to possess classical texts. During the 1550s and until the outbreak of civil war in 1562, Paris experienced the heyday of such Latin scholars as Turnebus, Muret, Dorat, Scaliger, Denys Lambin, and others. The Stoic theory of indifference is argued by Cicero and Seneca with certain things of a high degree and certain things of a low degree. Throughout the Middle Ages, Lucretius was neglected, and it was only in the Renaissance that he was discovered both as a poet and as a philosopher.
