, were
rediscovered.]
[Sidenote: Humanism and Christianity]
At first, humanism met with some opposition from ardent churchmen who
feared that the revival of pagan literature might exert an unwholesome
influence upon Christianity. But gradually the humanists came to be
tolerated and even encourage, until several popes, notably Julius II
and Leo X at the opening of the sixteenth century, themselves espoused
the cause of humanism. The father of Leo X was the celebrated Lorenzo
de' Medici, who subsidized humanists and established the great
Florentine library of Greek and Latin classics; and the pope proved
himself at once the patron and exemplar of the new learning: he enjoyed
music and the theater, art and poetry, the masterpieces of the ancients
and the creations of his humanistic contemporaries, the spiritual and
the witty--life in every form.
[Sidenote: Spread of Humanism]
The zeal for humanism reached its highest pitch in Italy in the
fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth, but it gradually
gained entrance into other countries and at length became the
intellectual spirit of sixteenth-century Europe.
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