scholarship, history of classical
scholarship, history of classical(from the Renaissance) Classical texts formed the core of the arts curriculum in medieval schools and universities and were central to two of the three higher faculties, law and medicine, as well. But modern classical scholarship—the systematic effort to collect and study the written and material remains of the ancient world as a whole—came into being in 14th-cent. northern Italy. Here teachers of rhetoric began to teach from Cicero rather than the ‘modern’—i.e. medieval—texts they had previously used. Formal imitation of the classics became systematic. Scholars began to see classical Latin texts as distinctively better than later ones: they copied, read, and studied a wide range of literary and historical texts that had generally not been read in the Middle Ages. Access to new material created new questions: problems of attribution and dating that had not interested medieval scholars cropped...
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