ABSTRACT
Ancient wisdom combined with a change in the intellectuals' role to transform the idea of intellectual life during the Renaissance. These influences were first seen in fourteenth-century Italy; after 1500 they made their mark in northern Europe. The change was that laymen overran the cultural citadel of the Church. Learned culture had been monopolised by clerics from the days of Gregory the Great (d. A.D.604) to the life-time of Petrarch. During that epoch any advanced knowledge of the classics or progress in disciplines based upon them, had been almost completely in the hands of clerics; this began now to change.
