This chapter traces the history of Renaissance Italy’s long and passionate love affair with the textual and material remnants of classical antiquity, exploring classical influences within literary and intellectual history, art history, and material culture. The classicizing movement known as humanism is charted here from its origins in the early 1300s to the moment sometimes called the High Renaissance in early sixteenth-century Rome. The chapter argues that past paradigms have often over-emphasized the secular leaning of Renaissance humanism or posited a sharp transition from a medieval, other-worldly to an earthly, human-focused world-view. Countering this, the chapter examines the ways in which a society and culture still deeply invested in Christianity responded to the philosophical challenges posed by pagan antiquity and the strategies it developed to reconcile the two.

The case studies analysed in this book show that the ‘vernacular readings’ of Aristotle between the age of Dante and the late fifteenth century are better understood when looked at through the interplay of translation, reception and concurrent debates about language. In the conclusion I discuss the Dialogo delle lingue (‘Dialogue on Languages’, 1542) by Paduan philosopher Sperone Speroni, which bears witness to the early canonisation of the questions examined in the previous chapters of the book. In particular, I look at Speroni’s fictional account of a dispute between the Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi and the Greek humanist Janus Lascaris about the use of the vernacular in the academic study of Aristotle. By contrasting the two interlocutors’ views on the matter, Speroni unveils the cultural issues at stake in the debate, namely the seminal role of translation in the dissemination of knowledge and the very notion of ‘vernacular language’ as a communicative tool able to perform such dissemination.