Renaissance Discoveries: Quintilian

One of the greatest achievements of Italian scholars in the 1400s was their clever detective work: finding long-lost manuscripts containing the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans. At the first of the fifteenth century, very few lost texts were more sought-after than the most famous work on rhetoric written during the Roman Empire, Quintilian’s “On the Education of an Orator.” For centuries, only mutilated and incomplete copies were known. Then, in 1416, an intrepid Florentine manuscript hunter named Poggio Bracciolini found a consummate re-create in a monastery library in Switzerland.
In this video we look at the how and why manuscripts such as Quintilian’s disappeared, where they reappeared, and what their rediscovery meant to the scholars who created what we phone call up the Renaissance.