The humanist movement started in Italy, where the four early figures Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Giorgio Vasari, and Lorenzo Valla contributed greatly to the discovery and preservation of classical works. Petrarch, a Latin scholar, dedicated his life in studying “golden wisdom” of the ancients. “Golden wisdom” pertained to proper conduct of one’s private life, rational go

Humanistic literature encouraged greater care of classical antiquity and reformed education to make literary expression of overriding importance for the cultured person. This style modeled parts of the ancients and later became a self-conscious preoccupation of English poets and prose writers. As a result, the richness and metaphorical profusion of style at the end of the century indirectly owed much to the educational force of this movement. The most immediate effect of humanism lay, however, in the dissemination of the cultivated, clear, and sensible attitude of its classically educated advocates, who rejected medieval theological misteaching and superstition. Of these writers, Sir Thomas More is the most remarkable. His Latin prose narrative Utopia satirizes the irrationality of inherited assumptions about private property and money and follows Plato in deploring the failure of kings to make use of the wisdom of philosophers. In a Utopia practically everything is held in common. More's book describes a distant nation organized on purely reasonable principles and named Utopia which in Greek means “nowhere”.

In music, similar interest in experimentation and a desire to meet the needs of the secular world applies during the Renaissance. French composers such as Guillame de Machaut in the 14th century and Josquin des Prez in the late 15th and early 16th centuries established the principles of polyphonic and contrapuntal music and in the Early Renaissance, musicians continued to explore polyphony. Flemish composer Orlando de Lassus applied these principles to a wide range of musical forms in the 16th century, one being “Matona mia cara,” an Italian madrigal. As these innovations were taking place, music also grew increasingly secular and was enjoyed in many settings outside of the church. Both men and women of the upper classes were expected to understand music and to perform it. They regularly amused themselves by singing poetic musical compositions or by playing a variety of instruments, including lutes, viol

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