find in 1333, and up to 1450 the Revival of Learning, often termed the
Renaissance, was entirely an Italian movement. By that date the great work
in Italy had been done, and the Italians were once more in possession of
the literature and history of the past. With them the movement was
literary, historical, and patriotic in purpose and spirit. With them the
movement was known as _humanism_, from an old Roman word (_humanitas_)
meaning culture, and this term came to be applied to the new studies in
all other lands. In their work with the literatures, inscriptions, coins,
and archaeological remains of the Greeks and Romans, their own literature,
history, mythology, and political and social life was reconstructed. The
methods employed were the methods used in modern science, and the result
was to develop in Italy a new type of scholar, possessed of a literary,
artistic, and historical appreciation unknown since the days of ancient
Rome, and with the greatest enthusiasm for Latin as a living language.

By the time the revival had culminated in Italy it began to be heard of
north of the Alps. France was the first country to take up the study of
Greek, a professorship being established at Paris in 1458. There was but
little interest in the subject, however, or in any of the new studies,
until two events of political importance, forty years later, brought
Frenchmen in close touch with what had been done in northern Italy. In
1494 Charles VIII, of France, claiming Naples as his possession, took an
army into Italy, and forcibly occupied Rome and Florence. Four years later
his successor, Louis XII, claimed Milan also and seized it and Naples,
maintaining a French court at Milan from 1498 to 1512. Though both these
expeditions were unsuccessful, from a political point of view, the effect
of the direct contact with humanism in its home was lasting. New ideas in
architecture, art, and learning were carried back to France, French
scholars traveled to Italy, and early in the sixteenth century Paris
became a center for the new humanistic studies. In Greek, France