New Learning

In the history of ideas the New Learning in Europe is the Renaissance humanism, developed in the later fifteenth century. Newly retrieved classical texts sparked philological study of a refined and classical Latin style in prose and poetry.

Contemporaries noticed this: Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk lamented "It was merry in England afore the new learning came up", in relation to reading the Bible.[1]

An earlier 'new learning' had a similar cause, two centuries earlier. In that case it was new texts of Aristotle that were discovered, with a major impact on scholasticism.[2] A later phase of the New Learning of the Renaissance concerned the beginnings of modern scientific thought. Here Francis Bacon is pointed to as an important reference point and catalyst.[3]

  1. ^ W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (1999), p. 11.
  2. ^ The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100-1600 (1988), p. 521.
  3. ^ Joyce Appleby, Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective (1996), p. 3.