How can one sum up a movement that was so pervasive and so multifaceted? Perhaps best by starting with what was at its centre, the interest in the classics. This took many forms. In the first place, it involved the literal search for physical remains. Scholars such as Flavio Biondo, with his treatises on Roman and Italian topography and history, and Cyriac of Ancona, with his collection of classical inscriptions, pursued this aim in the first half of the fifteenth century. The search was also on for texts; monastic culture might have preserved these through the dark ages, but had by no means yielded up all its treasures. Another part of the process of recovery was the translation of texts from Greek, for which knowledge of Greek was obviously an indispensable preliminary. The arrival of Manuel Chrysoloras to teach at the University of Florence in 1396 heralded the beginning of this process; it continued throughout the fifteenth century, accelerating with the dispersal or exile of scholars from Byzantium. Translation unlocked for the west the hitherto unknown or imperfectly translated among the works of Aristotle, and later in the fifteenth century Plato, in their turn both profound influences on humanist culture. The digestion of all these texts required philological skills, brought to new heights with the translations, and the 'theory of translation', of Leonardo Bruni, another Florentine chancellor, and then of Lorenzo Valla, who is often called the father of modern philology.

Specific interest was aroused by the rhetorical texts of the ancients. Poggio Bracciolini's rediscovery of Quintilian and of the full text of Cicero's De oratore was decisive. In them humanists found the full theoretical basis for classical Latin rhetoric, which led to an understanding of the use of the classical periodic sentence, a powerful tool of analysis as well as of advocacy. The Latin 'purism' that followed has aroused mixed judgements; the humanists have been accused of turning Latin into a dead language by their insistence on high standards and their scorn for anything less. But the importance of classical rhetoric goes far beyond this. At its root are principles of balance, appropriateness (decorum) and harmony (concinnitas)--the principles of aesthetics, in fact. By applying these so widely across disciplines humanist scholars helped to

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