The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the advancing study
of languages and antiquity belongs as little to the subject of this
book as the history of scholarship in general. We are here occupied,
not with the learning of the Italians in itself, but with the
reproduction of antiquity in literature and life. One word more on the
studies themselves may still be permissible.
Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to the fifteenth
and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. The impulse which had
proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio, superficial as was their own
acquaintance with Greek, was powerful, but did not tell immediately on
their contemporaries, except a few; on the other hand, the study of
Greek literature died out about the year 1520 with the last of the
colony of learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of fortune
that northerners like Erasmus, the Stephani, and Budaeus had meanwhile
made themselves masters of the language. That colony had begun with
Manuel Chrysoloras and his relation John, and with George of Trebizond.
Then followed, about and after the time of the conquest of
Constantinople, John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios
Chalcondylas, who brought up his sons Theophilos and Basilios to be
excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros and the
family of Lascaris, not to mention others.
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