From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance

Having all but disappeared from western literacy during the Middle Ages, classical Greek would recover a position of importance--eventually equal to that of classical Latin--only after a series of surprising failures, chance encounters, and false starts. Continuing the story he began in his acclaimed study Scholars of Byzantium, N. G. Wilson describes how the classical heritage preserved by the Byzantines was transmitted to a vigorous culture, first in fourteenth-century Florence and then throughout Italy.