The exact point in time when the term Humanist was first adopted escapes our knowledge. It is, however, quite certain that Italy and the readoption of Latin letters as the staple of human culture were responsible for the name of Humanists. Literae humaniores was an expression coined in conscious contrast, at the beginning of the movement into current medieval learning, to the end that these "letters," i.e., substantially the classic literature of Rome and the imitation and reproduction of its literary forms in the new learning, might stand by themselves as over against the Literae sacrae of scholasticism. In the time of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Luther's beginnings, the term umanista was in effect an equivalent to the terms " classicist " or " classical scholar."
Dante, an earnest son of the Roman Catholic Church, was at the same time, as to his cultural valuations and aspirations, filled with a certain awe and admiration for ancient Italian letters. He at first seriously intended to compose his great epic in Latin verse. Petrarch considered his Africa a fair effort to reproduce Vergil; the choice of Scipio Africanus as the central hero reveals the new desire to consider the worthies of classic Italy as spiritual and cultural progenitors in the pursuits and concern of the new learning. In the exordium of his chief work Petrarch appeals to the Heliconian Sisters as well as to Jesus Christ, Savior of the world; also he reviews the epics of Homer (he never learned Greek), Statius, and Lucan. He was overwhelmed with the friendships of the most highly placed men of his day, among whom Cardinal Stephen Colonna was prominent. Petrarch is the pathfinder as well as the exemplar of the new movement. He idealized the classical world, he read into such Latin letters as he had, or extracted as he could, profound and surpassing verities. His classicist consciousness and his Christian consciousness are revealed in his writings like two streams that do not intermingle though they flow in the same bed. The experiences of life constantly evoke in him classic parallels, reminiscences, associations. Julius Caesar, Papirius Cursor, are nostri, "our people"; Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Massinissa are externi, "foreigners." His epistles afford the best revelation of his soul. Of course, the craving for pure Latinity and the elevation of such practical power of imitation and reproduction involved an artificiality of which neither Petrarch nor his successors were aware. Boccaccio was not only a humanist, but he, with appaling directness, revealed the emancipation of the flesh as one of the unmistakable trends of the new movement. Both he and Poggio, Valla, Beccadelli, Enea Silvio dei Piccolomini (in his youth) show that the hatred of the clerical class was a spur to literary composition. At the same time in the caricatures of foulness which these leaders of the new learning loved to draw, there is no moral indignation, but clearly like satyrs they themselves relish these things. For this reason the Humanists of Italy, as such, were not at all concerned in the efforts for a reformation of the church as attempted in the councils of Constance or of Basel (qq.v.). Poggio, apostolic secretary, came to Constance with the corrupt pope John XXIII., but spent most of his time in ransacking the libraries of Swiss monasteries for Latin codices. The defense of Jerome of Prague before the Council reminded him of Cato of Utica; his correspondent Lionardo Bruni at Florence warns him to be more circumspect in his praise of a heretic. In the Curia itself a semipagan spirit was bred by
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