THE RENAISSANCE 101 



The Renaissance was very far from being an ex- 

 clusively literary movement. Many other influences 

 conspired to produce an unprecedented intellectual 

 ferment. But one of the most important elements 

 was literary, and with that we may begin our survey. 



The harbinger of the literary Renaissance was 

 Petrarch (1304-1374), in whom we see a spirit quite 

 different from the scholastic medievalism which 

 underlay the poetry of Dante. Petrarch was the 

 first scholar who tried to restore a taste for good 

 classical Latin in place of the dog-Latin of the school- 

 men, and, an even more important fact, to recover the 

 true spirit of classical thought, with its claim of 

 absolute liberty for the reason. 



Petrarch sang before his time, but, by the opening 

 years of the fifteenth century, a growing interest in 

 classical, and especially in Greek, literature attracted 

 many Greeks from the East, who, from their know- 

 ledge of the modern tongue, were able to teach its 

 ancient prototype. The capture of Constantinople 

 by the Turks in 1453 hastened this process, and led to 

 the arrival of many competent teachers, who brought 

 manuscripts with them to their new homes. The 

 search for manuscripts became a keen delight. The 

 monastic and cathedral libraries of Italy and then of 

 Northern Europe were ransacked, while merchant 

 princes with agencies in the Levant used all their 

 resources to procure the copies of Greek writers 

 which had remained for centuries hidden in the East 

 or had been scattered on the fall of Constantinople. 

 In this way, the language of ancient philosophy and 

 science became familiar to Western scholars after a 

 lapse of some eight or nine hundred years. 



