Renaissance humanism

A movement born in fourteenth-century Italy around Petrarch, which made the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, moral philosophy) the basis of a new culture. The humanists sought out ancient texts, edited and translated them: their method was the return to the sources, ad fontes. They often criticized scholasticism, the philosophy of the medieval universities, mocking its Latin and its subtleties, though some combined it with their reading, like Pico della Mirandola. In Florence, the civic humanism of the chancellors, from Leonardo Bruni to Machiavelli, made the study of the ancients a school for political life; another, more contemplative current, that of Ficino, blended Neoplatonism into it, and the two met in the same circles. In the North, Erasmus made it a philosophy of Christ, a piety grounded in the Gospel reread in its sources rather than in the theology of the schools. Montaigne reworked its legacy in a sceptical vein. The movement's unity lies in shared practices of reading and interpreting texts more than in a doctrine: Pico exalts human dignity where Montaigne deflates human presumption. The dates used (1341, Petrarch's coronation; 1592, Montaigne's death) are landmarks.