Renaissance humanism was an activity of reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists, initially in Italy, and then across Europe. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of medeval scholastic education, emphasizing practical, pre-professional and scientific studies. Scholasticism focused on preparing men to be doctors, lawyers or professional theologians, and was taught from approved textbooks in logic, natural philosophy, medicine, law and theology. There were important centers of humanism at Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino.
Humanists reacted against this utilitarian approach and the narrow pedantry associated with it. They sought to create a citizenry (frequently including women) able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity and thus capable of engaging the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions. This was to be accomplished through the study of the studia humanitatis, today known as the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy. As a program to revive the cultural—and particularly the literary—legacy and moral philosophy of classical antiquity. Humanism was a pervasive cultural mode and not the program of a few isolated geniuses like Giotto or Leon Battista Alberti as is still sometimes popularly believed.
Read more about Renaissance Humanism: Origins, Paganism and Christianity in The Renaissance
Famous quotes containing the word renaissance:
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)