Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning

This study charts the continuing influence of medieval scholastic thought in Renaissance civilization. In the three essays, Paul Oskar Kristellar illustrates the way medieval ideas and issues remained active in Renaissance philosophy, theology, literature and in education, both secular and religious. In his first essay, Kristeller explains the conflicts in various Renaissance literatures - between rigorous scholastic writings and eloquent humanist ones, between texts written in Latin and those in the vernacular - by appealing to a notion of literary genre which aligns different types of text with distinct audiences.