School of thought
Renaissance Humanism
Movement
Classification
- Period
- c. 1350-1600 CE
- Regions
- Europe (origin)
- Domains
- Aesthetics, Ethics
Overview
Renaissance Humanism revived the study of Greek and Latin classics (studia humanitatis) and shifted intellectual focus from purely theological questions to human nature, dignity, and creative potential. Pico della Mirandola declared that humans are uniquely self-creating beings, free to shape their own nature — a revolutionary celebration of human agency and potential.
Key ideas
- Dignity of Man: Pico's vision: God placed humans at the center of creation with no fixed nature, free to ascend to the divine or descend to the bestial. We are the sculptors of ourselves.
- Studia Humanitatis: The core humanist curriculum — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy — drawn from classical sources. Education forms the complete, virtuous human being.
- Critical Philology: Valla and Erasmus applied rigorous textual criticism to classical and biblical texts, demonstrating that careful reading of sources can overturn centuries of received opinion.
Key figures
Petrarch · Erasmus · Pico della Mirandola · Lorenzo Valla · Michel de Montaigne
Influenced by
Reacts to
- Scholasticism
The humanists defined their programme of eloquence and classical learning against scholastic dialectic and its Latin, from Petrarch's attack on the schoolmen to Valla's assault on scholastic logic, though, as Kristeller showed, the two remained parallel strains with different subjects.
Later connections
- Machiavelli's Political Thought Influenced by this tradition
References
- Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (Harper, 1961)
- The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (2007), Introduction; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (1961) — Formation: a classical educational and intellectual movement in the north Italian city-states of the fourteenth century.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Marsilio Ficino
- Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others (1367); Lorenzo Valla, Dialecticae disputationes (c. 1439)
- Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (Harper, 1961), ch. 4 (humanism and scholasticism as distinct, coexisting strains)
- Oration on the Dignity of Man — Pico della Mirandola
- The Essays — Michel de Montaigne
- In Praise of Folly — Erasmus