This research examines the attributes of Renaissance humanism as it emerged in Europe after the 13th century. The research will discuss the historical and cultural context in which ideas associated with humanism began to resonate in intellectual discourse, and then discuss how the confluence of various legal, economic, social, religious, philosophical, and educational dynamics affected the structure of Western European thought from the Renaissance and into the modern period.
It is Protagoras (480-410 BC) who is credited with the declaration that "man is the measure of all things" (976). But Protagoras's declaration was an exercise in ontology and the legitimation of human reason; the whole of his statement reads thus: "Man is the measure of all things, of being things that they exist, and of nonentities that they do not exist" (Protagoras 976). By the time of the 15th century, the fact that man was the measure of all things had a different connotation, in that man as a reasoning individual was to be distinguished from what for more than 1,000 years had assumed measurement authority over things, from the real to the beautiful to the moral: the Church.
What Fremantle describes as the Age of Belief, in which the philosophical questions occupying the scholastics had to do with reconciling with faith and reason (x-xi). The key scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, was preoccupied with connecting theology with philosophy. In that regard, Herlihy explains scholasticism as an exercise in logic, "taking propositions initially from Christian dogma, then also from natural philosophy as expounded by Aristotle" (Herlihy 161).
Aquinas's work was undertaken in the service of faith. Intellectual inquiry in the Renaissance had increased concern about human reason and potentiality, even though many of the Renaissance thinkers and artists (e.g., Petrarch, b. 1304) had clerical careers. According to Barzun, the term humanism is "elastic," but its most prom...