Origins. While scholasticism dominated northern Europe in the fourteenth century, humanism came to the fore among Italian intellectuals. Humanism is the term used for the literary side of the Renaissance. The word came from studia humanitatis, the Latin phrase for the liberal arts. The liberal arts the Italians emphasized were rhetoric, poetry, and history, not logic and metaphysics. These were subjects that placed mankind at the center of attention. The humanists were by no means irreligious, but theology had little place among their interests. Humanism developed out of the attitudes and prejudices of the Italian bourgeoisie, who looked to Rome as the ideal city-state. Italian humanists hoped the glory of Rome could be reestablished in the Italian city-states. Thus, they believed that Roman literature had a great deal to say on politics, the economy, and society to the secular, urbane merchants who governed the...