Recovering the Classics: Manuscripts, Florence, and Curriculum

Behind the humanists' textual program stood a wave of "book hunters" who scoured monastic libraries across Europe for neglected Latin and Greek codices. Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to several popes, was the most celebrated of them: in 1416, at the monastery of St. Gall, he recovered the complete text of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, and the following year, at an unnamed German monastery, he rediscovered Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, a find whose Epicurean content would exert enormous influence on later European thought. Giovanni Aurispa brought some 238 Greek manuscripts from Constantinople to Italy in 1423, dramatically widening access to Greek literature, and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 accelerated the westward migration of Byzantine scholars and manuscripts, among them John Argyropoulos and Demetrios Chalkokondyles. Niccolò Niccoli's personal library, which later formed the core of the Medici collection, exemplified this new humanist bibliophilia, while the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1439), convened to reunify the Eastern and Western churches, also brought the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistos Plethon into direct contact with Italian humanists.