"Renaissance humanism is the name for an intellectual movement that developed in Italy from the middle of the fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, and which had as its aim a new evaluation of man, of his place in nature and in history, and of the disciplines which concern him. The first characteristic feature of this movement is that it originated and was carried on not by professional philosophers but by men of letters, historians, moralists, and statesmen, in dispute with the philosophers of the time, to whom they opposed the aurea sapientia (“golden wisdom”) of the philosophers and writers of the classical period. The philosophers of that time who were teaching in the Italian universities, or in those of Paris or Oxford, were to all intents and purposes Ockhamists, followers of the logica moderna, that is of nominalistic or terministic logic. Very often they used this logic in treating physical and mathematical questions and especially in the solution of the difficulties inherent in the concept of infinite quantity; that is, of a quantity which can be made greater or smaller than any given quantity. The De sensu composito et diviso (“Of Compounded and Divided Meaning”) of Heytesbury (fl. 1340) and above all the Liber calculationum (“Book of Calculation”) of Swineshead (fl. 1340) (also called Suseth or Suiseth) found in the Italian schools of the second half of the fourteenth century numerous imitators and followers, and there was a proliferation of Sophismata, Insolubilia, and Obligationes which claimed to solve innumerable paradoxes; from the more ancient ones, characteristic of the Megarian-Stoic School (like that of the liar), to the later ones connected with the augmentation or diminution ad infinitum of size, intensity, motion, velocity, weight, etc."

http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv4-19

"Of all the practices of Renaissance Europe, nothing is used to distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages more than humanism as both a program and a philosophy.

Textbooks will tell you that the humanists of the Renaissance rediscovered the Latin and Greek classics (hence the "rebirth" or "renaissance" of the classical world), that humanist philosophy stressed the dignity of humanity, and that humanists shifted intellectual emphasis off of theology and logic to specifically human studies. In pursuing this program, the argument goes, the humanists literally created the European Renaissance and paved the way for the modern, secular world.

   Like all mythologies of origins, however, this account is both partially true and partially false. First, there really was no such thing as a "humanist movement" either in philosophical or other terms. The term "humanism" was coined in 1808 by a German educator, F. J. Niethammer, to describe a program of study distinct from scientific and engineering educational programs. In the fifteenth century, the term "umanista," or "humanist," was current and described a professional group of teachers whose subject matter consisted of those areas that were called studia humanitatis. The studia humanitatis originated in the mddle ages and were all those educational disciplines outside of theology and natural science. Humanism was not opposed to logic, as is commonly held, but opposed to the particular brand of logic known as Scholasticism. In point of fact, the humanists actively revised the science of logic. Humanism, then, really begins during the middle ages in Europe; while the humanist scholars of the Renaissance made great strides and discoveries in this field, humanistic studies were really a product of middle ages. Not only that, the "rediscovery" of the classical world which was the hallmark of Renaissance humanism in reality began much earlier in the middle ages; as Europeans began to see themselves as a single ethnic group with a common origin in the middle ages, the recovery of classical literature, both Latin and Greek, became a concern for all the medieval centers of learning.

   The studia humanitatis consisted of more or less five disciplines drawn from the classical educational curriculum, called the trivium ("the three part curriculum": grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (the "four part curriculum": geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music), all of which had been outlined in antiquity and bequeathed to Christian Europe by writers such as Cassiodorus in the fifth century and Martianus Capella in the sixth century AD. In antiquity, these disciplines were called the artes liberales, or "liberal arts," for they were the skills and knowledge necessary for a human being to be truly free."

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/REN/HUMANISM.HTM

"The Humanists, rather than focussing on what they considered futile questions of logic, semantics and proposition analysis, focussed on the relation of the human to the divine, seeing in human beings the summit and purpose of God's creation. Their concern was to define the human place in God's plan and the relation of the human to the divine; therefore, they centered all their thought on the "human" relation to the divine, and hence called themselves "humanists."

At no point do they ignore their religion; humanism is first and foremost a religious and educational movement, not a secular one (what we call "secular humanism" in modern political discourse is a world view that arises in part from "humanism" but is, nevertheless, initially conceived in opposition to "humanism").

Humanists were, as Pico demonstrates, syncretists; part of the philosophy of humanism was that religious truth was in part revealed to all, both Christian and non-Christian, so that part of their project was to conform non-Christian thinking, especially the thought of Plato and his followers, to Christian thinking, and to point out, through exhaustive textual scholarship, the similarities between non-Christian philosophies and religions and Christian philosophies and religion. The importance of Plato for Renaissance humanism cannot be understressed; among other things, it gives rise to a particular species of Renaissance magic which will, in turn, form the basis of what we call "science" as it is invented in the early Enlightenment (late seventeenth century)."

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/REN/PICO.HTM