was supposed to have been written. A sense of anachronism was a key to the development of a sense of the past; but that too was developing as scholars studying classical texts, as well as taking models from the past, saw with great clarity that contemporary Italy was not ancient Rome or Greece. Yet this also produced a great sense of self-consciousness among humanists, a sense that by returning to the classics, after a long period of poor transmission of classical values, they were making a break with the immediate past. The pioneers of the Renaissance knew that they were participating in a rebirth. As with Petrarch, their sense of their own importance and their excitement at what they were doing were to some extent a selffulfilling wish, and if we tend to think of the Renaissance as a break with the 'Middle' Ages this owes something to the way they saw themselves.
Humanist activity spread into many areas. In the universities it gradually began to influence the study of law with its philological principles. In the courts it was adapted to the requirements of the princes; Renaissance literature saw a new development of the chivalric epic, for example, based on classical models (as were the growth of comedy and tragedy). In the long term one of the most important areas of influence was in education. The humanist educational programme had initially been formulated largely as a defence against hostile clerics alarmed at the fashion of the classics and fearful of an outbreak of paganism. It was soon tried out, though, by teachers such as Vittorino da Feltre in Venice and Guarino da Verona at the court of Mantua. These schools were intended chiefly for the élite, and the effects of the humanist programme in actual classrooms of schoolchildren and students were arguably slow and gradual. But education was one of the first aspects of humanism to be exported beyond the Alps, and inasmuch as it ensured the transmission of the basic startingpoint of humanist values, the classics, it was vital.
Contemporaneous with this remarkable upsurge in activity among literati were similar and ultimately more celebrated developments in the visual arts, again focused for a time principally, though not exclusively, on Florence. The precise con-
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