[Illustration: FIG. 71. BOOKCASE AND DESK IN THE MEDICEAN LIBRARY AT FLORENCE (Drawn from a photograph) This library was founded in 1444. It contains to-day about 10,000 Greek and Latin manuscripts, many of them very rare, and of a few the only copies known. The building was designed by Michael Angelo, and its construction was begun in 1525. The bookcases are of about this date. It shows the early method of chaining books to the shelves, and cataloguing the volumes on the end of each stack.]
Under Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, who died in 1492, two expeditions were sent to Greece to obtain manuscripts for the Florentine library. Vespasiano also describes for us the books collected (c. 1475-80) for the great ducal library at Urbino (R. 131), the greatest library in the Christian world at the time of its completion, and the work of Pope Nicholas V [17] (1447-1455) in laying the foundations (1450) for the great Vatican Library at Rome (R. 132). Nicholas was an enthusiast in the new movement, and formed a plan for the translation of all the Greek writers into Latin. A later Pope, Leo X (1513-1521), planned to make Rome the international center for Greek learning.
THE MOVEMENT EXTENDS TO OTHER COUNTRIES. Petrarch made his first great find in 1333, and up to 1450 the Revival of Learning, often termed the Renaissance, was entirely an Italian movement. By that date the great work in Italy had been done, and the Italians were once more in possession of the literature and history of the past. With them the movement was literary, historical, and patriotic in purpose and spirit. With them the movement was known as humanism, from an old Roman word (humanitas) meaning culture, and this term came to be applied to the new studies in all other lands. In their work with the literatures, inscriptions, coins, and archaeological remains of the Greeks and Romans, their own literature, history, mythology, and political and social life was reconstructed. The methods employed were the methods used in modern science, and the result was to develop in Italy a new type of scholar, possessed of a literary, artistic, and historical appreciation unknown since the days of ancient Rome, and with the greatest enthusiasm for Latin as a living language.
By the time the revival had culminated in Italy it began to be heard of north of the Alps. France was the first country to take up the study of Greek, a professorship being established at Paris in 1458. There was but little interest in the subject, however, or in any of the new studies, until two events of political importance, forty years later, brought Frenchmen in close touch with what had been done in northern Italy. In 1494 Charles VIII, of France, claiming Naples as his possession, took an army into Italy, and forcibly occupied Rome and Florence. Four years later his successor, Louis XII, claimed Milan also and seized it and Naples, maintaining a French court at Milan from 1498 to 1512. Though both these expeditions were unsuccessful, from a political point of view, the effect of the direct contact with humanism in its home was lasting. New ideas in architecture, art, and learning were carried back to France, French scholars traveled to Italy, and early in the sixteenth century Paris became a center for the new humanistic studies. In Greek, France completely superseded Italy as the interpreter of Greek life and literature to the modern world.
In 1473 a Spanish scholar, Mebrissensis (1444-1522), returned home after twenty years in Italy and introduced Greek at Seville, Salamanca, and Alcalà.
[Illustration: FIG. 72. TWO EARLY NORTHERN HUMANISTS
RUDOLPH AGRICOLA (1443-85) Early Dutch Humanist.
Lectured at Heidelberg (From a contemporary engraving)
THOMAS LINACRE (c. 1460-1524) English Professor of Medicine and Lecturer on Greek (From a portrait in the British Museum)]
About 1488 Thomas Linacre (c. 1460-1524) and William Grocyn (1446-1514), two Oxford graduates, went to Florence from England, studying Greek under Demetrius Chalcondyles, and, returning, introduced the new learning at Oxford. [18] Linacre, as professor of medicine, translated much of Galen (p. 198) from the Greek, and he and Grocyn lectured on Greek at the University. From Oxford the new learning was transmitted to Cambridge, and, over a century afterward, to Harvard in America. A third Oxford man to study Greek in Italy was John Colet (1467-1519), who studied in Florence from 1493 to 1496, and returned home an enthusiastic humanist. He was the first Englishman to attract much attention to the new studies, and to him is chiefly due their introduction into the English secondary school.
The first German of whom we have any record as having studied in Italy was Peter Luder (c. 1415-74), who returned in 1456, and lectured on the new learning at the Universities of Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Leipzig, but awakened no response. In 1470 Johann Wessel (1420-89) and in 1476 Rodolph Agricola (1443-85), two noted Dutch scholars, studied in Italy. On returning, Agricola, [19] who has been called "the Petrarch of German lands," did much "to spread the great inheritance of antiquity and the new civilization to which it had given birth among his uncouth countrymen" (barbari, he calls them). He made Heidelberg, for a time, a center of humanistic appreciation. Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), a German by birth, studied in Florence and elsewhere in Italy in 1481 to 1490, and there learned Hebrew. Returning, he became a professor at Heidelberg and the father of modern Hebrew studies. In 1506 he published the first Hebrew grammar. In 1493 the University of Erfurt established a professorship of Poetry and Eloquence, this being the first German university to countenance the new learning. In 1523 the first chair of Greek was established at Vienna. Thus slowly did the revival of learning spread to northern lands.