reforms that many early Protestant followers had hoped for.
Humanism is difficult to define. While it is sometimes thought of primarily as the fifteenth-century renewal of classical learning, it can also be shown that "medieval man had been permanently in touch with classical literature since the days of Charlemagne." The difference between Medieval scholarship and Humanism lay in the uses for which classical learning was employed. In the Middle Ages, Roman law, Aristotelian physics, and other subjects were studied for their practical value. Nothing taken from antiquity was allowed to challenge the primacy of the Church as the guarantor of social order and the only possible means of human salvation. In fifteenth-century Italy, however, with its uniquely independent city-states, scholars developed an "enthusiasm for the entire body of classical literature" and an appreciation of "the moral, social and aesthetic standards it contained." The standards of feudal social arrangements and ecclesiastical power did not hold in the Italian cities as they did elsewhere in Europe. A new scale of values was gradually adopted by the Humanists in which the value of religion remained paramount but the approach to it was considerably altered.
Man was at the center of the new scale of values developed by the Italian Humanists. As Pico della Mirandola, one of the leading thinkers, put it in his Oratorio de hominis dignitate, "I have read in Arabian books that nothing in the world can be found that is more worthy of admiration than man." Pico went on to support this claim with the authority of a mixture of Biblical and classical figures -- from Moses and St. Paul to Plato and Pythagoras. In Pico's view, and that of most Italian Humanists, God had created the world and it ran by the laws he had made. Only man had the freedom to change and to choose what he would become. Man's only real choice, Pico argued, was to aspire to "attain pu...