Recovery of Ancient Knowledge.

Europe's intellectual agenda in the age of exploration and expansion was set largely by the thinkers and scholars of Renaissance Italy. Beginning with the fourteenth-century scholars Francesco Petrarca (better known by his Latinized penname "Petrarch") and Giovanni Boccaccio, Italian thinkers took a special interest in the literature, philosophy, and thought of the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. Fifteenth-century scholars such as Poggio Bracciolini scoured libraries and monasteries not only in Italy but also across Europe and the Mediterranean basin in search of long-forgotten Greek, Latin, and even translated Arabic manuscript copies of the works of such writers as Plato and Tacitus. It should be noted that many of these works had been "forgotten" only from the point of view of the western European intellectual tradition. Arabic and Byzantine scholars had continued throughout the Middle...