Renaissance humanism recovered classical Greek and Roman learning between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and made human experience, civic life and practical wisdom subjects worth studying in their own right, not preliminaries to theology.
Its program was the studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, a curriculum designed to form capable public men and not to settle metaphysical questions. Petrarch began the recovery by hunting manuscripts and treating antiquity as a lost civilization to be reached, not a quarry of authorities to be cited. The insistence on reading texts in the original, in context, and against their own historical background produced the modern discipline of philology, and with it a genuinely dangerous tool. In 1440 Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine, on which papal claims to temporal authority partly rested, was a forgery: its Latin belonged to centuries after its supposed date. Textual scholarship had become a political act.
Civic humanism gave the movement its most direct political form in republican Florence, where Bruni and others argued from Roman sources that active participation in public life was superior to philosophical withdrawal, and that a free city produced better literature and better citizens than a principality. Erasmus carried the northern version toward reform of the church. More's Utopia (1516) used the recovered classical form to hold contemporary England up against an invented alternative.
Machiavelli belongs to the movement and marks its sharpest break. Working from the same Roman sources and the same conviction that ancient practice should instruct modern politics, he drew conclusions about how rulers actually keep power that no scholastic or theological authority would have sanctioned. The humanist method had been turned on the question of what works.