The trivium, the center of medieval and classical education, was made up of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Grammar was the study of not only the proper use of language, but how authors used language to make meaning, especially poets and historians. A great deal of what we consider literary criticism, literary studies, and history was in the middle ages the province of grammar. Dialectic was the science of disputation, proof, and propositions. In the high middle ages, dialectic was dominated by the Aristotelean or Averroistic tradition (named after Aristotle, the Greek philospoher, and the medieval Arabic commentator on Aristotle, Averroes); this was called the Scholastic tradition in logic because its advocates were the university teachers, or "schoolmen." Scholastic dialectic aimed at using language to produce certainty; as such, it focussed on syllogism, which is the construction of a truthful conclusion from truthful premises. The third art of the trivium, rhetoric, was the art of persuasion and included all those techniques with language, including syllogism, whereby a speaker could convince an audience of the truth or correctness of what he was saying. It was in these arts, the arts of language, that the humanists centered their attention.   The medieval and early Christian heritage is largely downplayed in summary histories of humanism, but it's helpful to focus on what Petrarch learned from Augustine. The Augustinian tradition was a strong and vital tradition all throughout the European middle ages; however, it was eclipsed in the schools by Scholasticism. From Augustine, Petrarch learned that the only proper study for a human being to engage in was to study oneself, to look within oneself and work within oneself to guarantee one's salvation. This idea would eventually develop into the hallmark of humanist belief, the dignity of humanity. For the humanists, humanity is something special in creation and has a special relationship to God. This relationship is expressed in salvation and the principle concern of every human being should be precisely this salvation. The humanists saw such studies as Scholastic logic, arithmetic, theology (the study of divinity) and natural science as completely unrelated to this most important mission of one's life; of all the studies, the highest studies involved moral philosophy and its application in the real world.   It has been stressed over and over again that humanism was neither a philosophy nor a movement, but an educational curriculum. In its earliest stages, the groundwork for this curriculum was laid down by private individuals such as Petrarch and public officials, such as Salutati. Humanism as an educational curriculum began in the early years of the fourteenth century in Italy. The two foundational figures in humanist education were Guarino Veronese (1374-1406) in Ferrara and Vittorino da Feltre (1373-1446) at Mantua. They each independently designed an entire curriculum for their young students consisting of physical and intellectual eduation. They used the newly rediscovered texts of Quintilian as the model of their educational program; students had to master both Latin and Greek as well as acquire a thorough grounding in the works of Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle. This would become the model of Renaissance education in the century to follow. Before the humanist program in education, logic (ir dialectic) was taught in the Scholastic tradition which was largely concerned with using language to produce statements that were absolutely true. One produced certainty by using the syllogism which produced certain conclusions from truthfull premises. Here's an example of a syllogism: "All humans are animals. Socrates is human. Therefore, Socrates is an animal." Part of this process involved learning fallacioius reasoning, how to spot it and how to avoid it. The humanists changed this program entirely; by the first decades of the sixteenth century, Scholastic logic had almost disappeared from education. The humanists stressed invention over syllogism, that is, discovering arguments that would persuade people of the truth of what they were saying rather than convincing them of the certainty of that truth. So logic began to look a lot more like rhetoric; not only that, the humanists taught argumentative strategies in their courses that the strict logicians had always regarded as fallacious. So even bad arguments were good if they could persuade your audience!    The humanist movement energetically recovered much of the literature of antiquity. While the recovery of Greek texts began literally at the start of the middle ages in Europe, Renaissance humanism is accurately regarded as the movement which introduced Europeans to he whole panoply of classical Greek texts, especially literary texts. Even more important than the recovery of massive amounts of Greek texts was the development of new modes of literary analysis that focussed on the use of language by classical authors. Although this may seem trivial, it was employed to verify or falsify important documents in European history, such as the Donation of Constantine. It was not long, however, until the humanistic literary scholars turned their attention to Christian scriptures, especially the New Testament. Armed with their new skills in the Greek language and Greek composition, they set about trying to recover the original spirit and meaning of foundational Christianity by reading the original Greek texts. They argued that the Latin translation of the New Testament had deeply corrupted the sense of the original; they, through the study of Greek, would arrive at the original meaning. This work laid the foundation of the European Reformation. "Humanism" is not anti-Christian as it has come to mean in some quarters of modern discourse; in fact, late medieval and early modern humanism is just the opposite. Late medieval and Renaissance humanism was a response to the standard educational program that focussed on logic and linguistics and that animated the other great late medieval Christian philosophy, Scholasticism. The Humanists, rather than focussing on what they considered futile questions of logic, semantics and proposition analysis, focussed on the relation of the human to the divine, seeing in human beings the summit and purpose of God's creation. Their concern was to define the human place in God's plan and the relation of the human to the divine; therefore, they centered all their thought on the "human" relation to the divine, and hence called themselves "humanists." At no point do they ignore their religion; humanism is first and foremost a religious and educational movement, not a secular one (what we call "secular humanism" in modern political discourse is a world view that arises in part from "humanism" but is, nevertheless, initially conceived in opposition to "humanism"). Humanists were, as Pico demonstrates, syncretists; part of the philosophy of humanism was that religious truth was in part revealed to all, both Christian and non-Christian, so that part of their project was to conform non-Christian thinking, especially the thought of Plato and his followers, to Christian thinking, and to point out, through exhaustive textual scholarship, the similarities between non-Christian philosophies and religions and Christian philosophies and religion. The importance of Plato for Renaissance humanism cannot be understressed; among other things, it gives rise to a particular species of Renaissance magic which will, in turn, form the basis of what we call "science" as it is invented in the early Enlightenment (late seventeenth century).  Erasmus

Scholasticism to Humanism