The Rebirth of Humanism in the West
A Milestone Documents E-text
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Abstract

From the fourteenth century, Western culture was deeply shaped by a revival of interest in the classical Greek and Latin authors, a movement known as “humanism” for its interest in human authors rather than the Bible and other sacred writings. In the Middle Ages, the knowledge of Greek had been nearly entirely lost in the West. Interest in Latin authors and in those Greek writings that had been translated into Latin remained, but humanists read ancient authors in a different way from their medieval predecessors.

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