Renaissance Humanism in Italy and France

Renaissance humanism grew out of a renewed devotion to classical Greek and Latin texts, a project Petrarch had already begun and that later scholars pursued with new energy: Poggio Bracciolini recovered a lost manuscript of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura in 1417, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent Greek-speaking scholars and manuscripts westward into Italy. Figures such as Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola built a curriculum, the studia humanitatis, centered on grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy drawn from antiquity. The spread of the printing press from around 1450 let this humanist culture reach a vernacular readership on an unprecedented scale, and humanist scholars increasingly defended the vernacular's own literary dignity, as in Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525), which helped standardize literary Italian around Tuscan models.