The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 2, Winter 2019 | Page 47

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that all changed around 1300 in Florence,
when humanism attempted to
reform Aristotelianism with Platonism.
Florence was the birthplace of
the Italian Renaissance after intellectuals
rediscovered ancient and classical
texts in 1300. Its main cultural movement
was humanism, which reinforced
the principles from classical antiquity
and emphasized an anthropocentric
worldview, rather than the theocentric
one that dominated the Middle Ages.
Humanism influenced many aspects of
Italian culture, from education to art
and literature. It also redefined familial
roles, court and public life, and reexamined
Aristotle’s misogynist perceptions
of women, which had been embedded
in the Italian culture for centuries.
Achievements by women were celebrated
for the first time as a result of that reexamination,
such as in Giovanni Boccaccio’s
(1313–1375) Corbaccio (1365).
The “woman question,” which asked
if women could be virtuous, if women
could perform noble deeds, and if
women were the same as men, was also
heavily debated. 37 This also resulted in
an increase in knowledge about Plato
and his philosophies on life. Kenneth
R. Bartlett posits that with that increase
of knowledge “came an incentive to replace
the now despised Aristotelianism
of the scholastics with another, more
humanistically-oriented philosophical
system” and Platonism did that well. 38
Although Plato and Aristotle
were equally respected as classicists
during the early Renaissance, according
to Bartlett, Platonism proved to be
a good replacement for Aristotelianism
because there was no hostility to-