Defining Humanism: The Studia Humanitatis and Petrarch

The studia humanitatis was a curriculum centered on grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy — deliberately set apart from the logic-heavy natural philosophy of medieval scholasticism. It took shape in the Italian city-states of Florence, Padua, and Venice between roughly 1300 and 1500, growing out of urban commercial prosperity and a lay professional class of notaries and chancellors who needed persuasive Latin more than syllogistic disputation. The word "umanista" originally just meant a teacher of this classical curriculum in Italian universities; only later did it acquire the broader philosophical sense historians now attach to "humanism." At its core the movement was less a systematic philosophy than a cultural and educational program, a paideia aimed at forming the vir bonus dicendi peritus — the good man skilled in speaking — modeled on classical genres such as the dialogue, the familiar letter, the oration, and the biography, drawn from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch.