Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/649

 THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 593 humanist Lorenzo Valla, who earlier, when under the pa- tronage of King Alfonso of Naples, had written a treatise exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; and who also, by use of Greek texts of the Bible, pointed out errors in the Vulgate, or Latin version. Many humanists, more- over, remained sincerely devout ; and there was a Christian as well as a classical Renaissance. That is to say, the early church fathers, Greek and Latin, were studied; and the Greek versions of the Scriptures were compared with the Vulgate. Such study led in time to questioning of some of the customs and doctrines of the medieval Church and so had an important bearing upon the Reformation. A further development of Italian literature accompanied the Italian Renaissance. Together with Dante and Pe- trarch, Boccaccio (131 3-1 375) completes the trio Italian of great writers who initiated this movement. He llterature is known especially for his Decameron, a collection of stories of which Chaucer made much use later in the fourteenth cen- tury in England. Boccaccio himself, like Petrarch, thought his Latin works of more value, and for a time the humanists generally scorned to write in Italian. Lorenzo de' Medici, however, helped restore the vernacular to favor by inciting the writers under his patronage to literary composition in Italian and by setting the example himself. Among the favorite literary forms of the time were the sonnet and idyll and the novella or short story. The romantic epic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had continued to find favor among the Italians; and in the later fifteenth century Pulci (1431-1487) at Florence and Boiardo (1434-1494) at Ferrara were preparing the way for the greater poetry of Ariosto and Tasso in the sixteenth century. Pulci' s Morgante Mag- giore recounted partly in a serious and partly in a burlesque tone the adventures of the famous Roland and a giant named Morgante whom he conquers and converts. Boiardo, who was also a lyric and dramatic poet, told of Roland in love in his Orlando innamorato. Some attempt was made to de- velop the drama in Italian, following classical models, but without the success attained later in other lands. A series