Renaissance Humanism (often designated simply as humanism), a European intellectual movement beginning in Florence in the last decades of the fourteenh century, develops from the rediscovery by European scholars of many Latin and Greek texts.

Initially, a humanist is simply a teacher of Latin literature.

By the mid-fifteenth century humanism describes a curriculum — the studia humanitatis — comprising grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry and history as studied via classical authors.

The early beliefs of humanism are that, although humanists know that God created the universe, it is humans that have developed and industrialized it.It will only be later, in the twentieth century, that humanism will be interpreted as a new philosophical outlook -- one which encompasses human dignity and potential and the place of mankind in nature.

The overriding goal of humanists -- who value reason and the evidence of the senses as ways of reaching the truth, over the Christian values of humility, introspection, and passivity or "meekness" which had dominated European thought in the previous centuries -- is to become eloquent in rhetoric.Beauty, a popular topic, is held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God.The humanists are opposed to the philosophers of the day, the "schoolmen," or scholastics, of the Italian universities and later Oxford and Paris.

The scholastics' methodology is derived from Thomas Aquinas, and this opposition revives a classical debate which refers back to Plato and the Platonic dialogues.