Renaissance Literature Reveal Reawakeningof Human Mind

By the turn of fourteenth century, the Christendom was stimulated by the Arabic translations of the manuscripts of Greek and Roman writers such as Aristotle and Plato. Many lost works of ancient Greek writers flooded into Europe. Classical literature was an expression of a wider love for man and nature. It did not abhor nature as a prison or human flesh as evil. Classical literature came to be called as Humanities and the scholars who advanced the movement came to be called as Humanists. Humanism was the philosophical view emphasizing human worth and secular studies in contrast with religious belief. Humanists consciously rejected medieval religious authority, returned to classical ideals, and maintained that the ideal person embodies all human excellences, including music, art, poetry, science, and virtue. For humanists virtue did not lie in monastic life but in a free and natural environment in which human potentialities could unfold.