High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Renaissance Humanism was a European intellectual movement that was a crucial component of the Renaissance, beginning in Florence in the latter half of the 14th century. The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of Latin literary and Greek literary texts. Initially, a humanist was simply a scholar or teacher of Latin literature. By the mid-15th century humanism described a curriculum the studia humanitatis comprising of grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry and history as studied via Latin and Greek literary authors. The humanists were often opposed to philosophers of the preceding movement of Scholasticism, the "schoolmen" of the universities of Italy, Paris, Oxford and elsewhere. The scholastics' methodology had developed out of their engagement with the science and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and medieval Arabs. The foremost example of the scholastic approach was Thomas Aquinas, who attemptedto synthesize the thought of Aristotle with Catholicism.