After the revival of learning Plautus was reinstated, and took rank as one of the great dramatists of antiquity; cf.
The revival of learning was at hand, and William Turner, a Northumbrian, while residing abroad to avoid persecution at home, printed at Cologne in 1544 the first commentary on the birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern naturalists.'
The revival of learning had led many away from Christ; intellectual culture must be used as a means of bringing them back.
These poor compilations, together with Latin translations of certain works of Galen and Hippocrates, formed a medical literature, meagre and unprogressive indeed, but of which a great part survived through the middle ages till the discovery of printing and revival of learning.
It is pretty clear that the common accounts of the Renaissance and of the revival of learning grossly exaggerate the influence of the writers of Greece and Rome, for they produced no obvious rationalistic movement, as would have been the case had Plato and Cicero, Lucretius and Lucian, been taken really seriously.
