Renaissance Humanism

Humanism is the ideological and literary movement of the Renaissance (14th–16th centuries) that placed the human being — his dignity, reason, earthly life, and creative capacities — at the center of its worldview, opposing anthropocentrism to medieval theocentrism. The humanists revived the ancient heritage and cultivated the classical languages, philology, and free inquiry. The literature of humanism is represented by Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy, by Erasmus of Rotterdam, François Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), and Michel de Montaigne in France, and by William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. In Ukraine, Renaissance-humanist ideas developed in the work of the sixteenth-century Latin-language poets — Pavlo Rusyn of Krosno, Sebastian Klenovych, Stanislav Orikhovsky — and in the activity of the Ostroh Academy and the brotherhood schools, which laid the foundations of a new learning.