Re: CHAT: (no subject)

In a message dated 6/23/04 1:23:20 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
trwier@UCHICAGO.EDU writes:

<< the broad attitude of learned peoples throughout most of that
 period was indeed that contemporaries could not hope to meet the
 standards of the ancients, and could only hope to transmit that
 knowledge to the future.   >>
The same was,however, equally true of the renaissance--in some ways, more
true, because there was a tendency to think that rediscovered ancient material
(e.g. the Hermetic texts) must be wonderful and true. Europe (outside the
Byzantine areas) did tend to know Greeek material only in translation from the fall
of Rome until the fifteenth century (aside from a handful of exceptions). The
16th century tended to be an era of reviving Greek traditional material as a
rival to the Latin traditional material which had been standard for the last
thousand years. But that did not make most scholars friendly to really new
ideas. It was not really until about the mid-seventeenth century that attitudes
seriously began to change among the educated elite,  and probably late eighteenth
century before attitudes changed among the broader population.
John Leland (currently preparing to teach 17th century again).