Humanism

Abstract

Early in the fifteenth century, long before 1453, the westward exodus of scholars, from the Byzantine Empire to Italy, had already started. This was to give a decisive impetus to the renewed interest in Classical Antiquity, which had been manifesting itself in Italy since the fourteenth century. It led to the spectacular growth of humanist libraries1. In a mediæval library, one would typically find only Euclid and Archimedes, usually in their Latin translations, whereas in a humanist library, one would encounter not only Euclid and Archimedes in both Latin and Greek, but also numerous mathematical texts by other authors.