Research Article: Renaissance Europe 1300-1600: Literature

Two developments shaped literature in fourteenth-century Italy. First, the humanist revival of the classics encouraged writers to adopt a new cultivated style in their writings and to develop new literary genres. Second, the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the Tuscan dialect—the language used in and around the city of Florence—laid the foundations for early-modern Italian as a literary language. The masterpieces each of these three great literary figures wrote would provide models for later Renaissance writers.

By 1400, most Italian writers had come to favor the gracious and elegant Latin and Italian style of Boccaccio and Petrarch, rather than the now seemingly dated Dante. During the course of the fifteenth century, the fashion for classical rhetoric, grammar, and vocabulary would inspire new efforts to revive a pure classical Latin, and humanist writers would criticize with increasing vehemence the barbarity of the medieval Latin used by the scholastics. Knowledge...
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