Universities and humanism

Universities. The earliest universities in Europe were in Italy. Padua and Bologna had been centres of legal studies from the eleventh century; with growing trade, lawyers and notaries (who wrote and copied legal documents) were much in demand.

The poet Francesco Petrarch (1304 to 1378) gave this learning a new direction. He believed the ancient world had been a high point of civilisation, and stressed the close reading of ancient Greek and Roman authors. Law was now studied in the context of earlier Roman culture, and the past became something to be understood, not just copied.

Humanism. From the early fifteenth century, 'humanist' was the name for teachers of grammar, rhetoric (persuasive speaking), poetry, history and moral philosophy. These subjects did not depend on religion; they aimed to develop a person's skills and character. The word comes from the Latin humanitas, which the Roman lawyer and writer Cicero had used centuries earlier to mean culture; today's word 'humanities' comes from it. Humanists valued debate: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola of Florence wrote, in On the Dignity of Man, that people should learn by exchanging ideas freely.

Florence, once unimportant, became the most exciting intellectual city of Italy by the fifteenth century, through writers like Dante Alighieri and artists like Giotto. The ideal of the age was the 'Renaissance Man', a person with many interests and skills: a scholar, diplomat, theologian and artist all at once.

A new view of history. Humanists divided the past in a new way:

• They called the thousand years after the fall of Rome the 'Middle Ages', a time when, they argued, the Church had so tightly controlled thought that the learning of Greece and Rome was forgotten.
• They called their own age 'modern', beginning in the fifteenth century.
• Historians today question this picture. They no longer readily call the fifth to ninth centuries the 'Dark Ages', because much learning and change happened then too.

What Europe learnt from the Arabs. Much of the Greek learning that Italian scholars wanted had been preserved and translated by Arab scholars. Arab writers had translated Greek works on philosophy, mathematics and medicine, and added to them. Plato and Aristotle were known in Arabic as Aflatun and Aristu. From the fourteenth century, European scholars read these Arabic translations and the Arab and Persian scholars' own works on mathematics, natural science, astronomy, medicine and chemistry:

• Ibn Sina, an Arab physician and philosopher of Bukhara, was known in Latin as Avicenna.
• al-Razi, author of a medical encyclopaedia, became Rhazes.
• Ibn Rushd of Spain, a philosopher who tried to show how philosophical knowledge and religious faith could exist together, became Averroes.