ABSTRACT
Few accounts of the Italian humanists provide a description of who they were and what they did. It is harder still to find a ready definition of their achievement. Modern scholars who are friendly call the humanists 'philosophers'. Others hold that they were rhetoricians and usually deny the name humanism to their work. The reasons for doing so are that this implies that theirs was a philosophical movement. In any case the same word has been appropriated by medievalists and applied to twelfth-century thought. In short, the humanists are commonly denied intellectual seriousness and their ground has been occupied.
