Ebook The Earlier Renaissance

Still, one of those exercises of the communis Serums, which are generally right, has regarded the Renais sance of Literature in Europe as not practically be ginning till the fifteenth century was far advanced, nay, till the various but converging in?uences of the capture of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the final uprising against the ecclesiastical tyranny of Rome had been successively brought to bear. And without further argument on the point of right, we may say that for the purposes of this book The Earlier Renaissance means the closing years of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth — the time when, the study of Greek having previously come to support and correct that of Latin in Italy, the full classical culture was transmitted from Italy herself to France and England, and so helped to install, in forms which cannot even to this day be said to have been wholly antiquated, the two greatest literatures of Europe. It is this process — the Italianation, as the Eliza bethaus called it, of France and of England — which forms for History the central interest of the period.