eved, “that the revival of antiquity was a necessary precondition of the Reformation” admits Dickens (Ch 3). The humanists did suffer a major defeat at the Council of Trent in 1563, where their translation of the bible from Greek to Hebrew was replaced by the Vulgate as the official translation. Also the Index of Prohibited Books held many important works by Italian humanists including Erasmus, known for his criticism of the church and thought to many as the most respected northern humanist of the 16th century. But even with all these things to overcome, Burke notes, “humanism did continue to appear in new books and to be taught in grammar schools from Rome to Geneva”(18). The Jesuit schools also embraced the importance of the classics in their curriculum. “They recognized that humanism had come to stay. So they mastered it, drained it of its dangerous content, and turned it into a decorative learning for the Roman Church and the Christian Prince,” writes Trevor-Roper (p.229). The Jesuit’s interest in the classics shows that humanism had finally made it through the negativity they faced with the same group earlier because they thought that some of their ideas were dangerous. Humanism and Italian culture continued to spread through the Low Countries (Netherlands, Switzerland), into France, Germany, and the Iberian Peninsula. And finally over into England, where the fascination for Italian culture can be shown in several of William Shakespeare’s plays set in Renaissance Italy, such as, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Romeo & Juliet. Finally, Renaissance humanists had reached the goals that they had established when Petrarch and Boccaccio first started getting noticed. They were to establish a literary scholarship as a form of studies, to train individuals apart from the religious aspect of studies, the stress of classical studies, and to give a sense of identity to their own ...
