inent feature is that it de-linked human concerns from concerns with the hereafter, whereas the scholastics had emphasized the linkage (Barzun 43-4). Barzun's analysis of the term is that it was coined retrospectively in the 19th century "by German scholars . . . who [] rejected parts of the immediate past in favor of the culture they perceived in the classics of ancient Rome" (Barzun 44). The "Oration on the Dignity of Man" by Mirandola, a 15th-century cleric who skirted the edges of heresy, has been described as "an excellent reflection of the aspirations of Renaissance humanism" (Thompson 276):
But indeed not only the Mosaic and Christian mysteries but also the theology of the ancients show us the benefits and value of the liberal arts . . . for he who knows himself [not God!] in himself knows all things (Mirandola, in Thompson 283-5).
The point is this: The religious content of Middle Ages culture was interrogated by Renaissance thinkers and artists in unprecedented ways. The tendency was toward secularism. From the philosophical standpoint, instead of reason and religion, reason and nature were to be reconciled. It is another way of saying that man and not the Church was the measure of all things.
Why classical (Greek and Roman) models were so important to Renaissance humanists can be discerned partly from the squalid facts of history. The Black Death of 1348 drastically reduced the population of Europe and threw civil society into such chaos that existing institutions were deemed unable "to cope with the mounting problems of the age" (Herlihy 342). The Peasants' War in England, the Ciompi rebellion in Florence, the exile of the papacy from Rome to Avignon
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