Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/648

 592 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Italy at this time produced noted educators who empha- sized physical exercise and training in manners and morals The classics as well as intellectual schooling. The ancient in education Greeks had laid as great stress upon the first two as upon the last. But the main enduring educational effect of the humanistic movement was to make Latin and Greek the staple subjects in schools for several centuries. These two languages and literatures came to be regarded as the basis of a liberal education and as essential to a cultured existence. Hitherto in medieval schools every one had been supposed to read and write and speak Latin easily; but teachers and students had not minded much whether they wrote like the ancients, so long as they understood one an- other. The other fundamental medieval subject had been logic. It was now supplanted by Greek, and much time was devoted to reading the two classical literatures and to the acquisition of a correct literary style in the ancient lan- guages. During the Renaissance, Latin and Greek were not thought of as "dead languages"; the old-fashioned and ob- solete subjects then were those of scholasticism, medieval theology, Aristotelean science and metaphysics. The fields which then seemed "up-to-date" and full of present human interest were not economics and sociology, domestic and political science, chemistry and engineering, psychology and "education." The "Humanities" then were Latin and Greek; these were the subjects that aroused youthful en- thusiasm and that seemed to open up new vistas of life. The views of life found in classical literature so attracted some of the humanists that they abandoned or slighted The pagan many Christian ideals and became almost pagan Christian or irreligious in their conduct. Especially they Renaissance had scant sympathy for monasticism. In Italy, however, they seldom attacked the Church or the Papacy, since they were often enabled to devote themselves to hu- manistic pursuits by holding ecclesiastical benefices which paid well and required little religious work, and since the popes themselves became such patrons of the Renaissance. Pope Nicholas V even gave a position at his court to the