Renaissance Humanism

The intellectual movement of the 14th through 16th centuries that recovered classical Greek and Roman learning after the medieval period and made human experience, civic life, and practical wisdom central to philosophical reflection. Renaissance humanists studied ancient texts directly, emphasized eloquence and rhetoric, and took political life seriously as a subject of analysis in its own right. Machiavelli is one of the most famous humanist political thinkers, and the tradition shaped early modern political thought through its insistence that politics should be analyzed in terms of what actually works rather than what theological or scholastic authority demanded.