The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns | Sarah Stever Gravelle (essay date 1981)
Sarah Stever Gravelle (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: “Humanist Attitudes to Convention and Innovation in the Fifteenth Century” in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall 1981, pp. 193-207.
[In following essay, Gravelle discusses the arguments of several fifteenth-century humanists on the subject of ancients versus moderns, particularly regarding questions of language.]
Several scholars have shown that humanist study of language contributed to the development of historical consciousness.1 The present essay presents several philological discussions about convention and innovation that further illustrate the humanists' acute sense of historical change, a subject that has not been directly addressed in previous studies.2 There was no unanimity among the humanists on innovation, and the topic inspired some lively disagreements. Still, there is evidence that many humanists placed a positive...
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