Beginning of Essay
Renaissance is a French word meaning “rebirth.” It came from those who thought of the Middle Ages as a dark time from which the human spirit had to be awakened. The Renaissance marked a new era in thought and feeling, by which Europe and its institutions wer ....

Middle of Essay
.... with the “pagan” humanism of Italy. In the north, humanists studied the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible and read the Church Fathers so that they could further understand Christianity and restore its moral vitality. They generally regarded universities as centers of pedantic, monkish, and “scholastic” learning. These universities gave little interest to experimental science or even literary studies. The Italian humanists wrote in Latin, but often complained that it had become monkish, “scholastic”, and in some ways useless. The schools in Italy preferred the more classical style of Cicero or Livy. Francesco Petrarca, or ....