The Middle Ages was certainly not the era that definitively created that temporal gap between classical and modern times.
As we all know, the greatest classical works by Latin authors were collected and copied in this era, thanks to scriptorium , the places of the monasteries where the amanuensis monks dedicated themselves to hand-copying the classical texts, to avoid them being lost.
Well, actually to say that the classical works were really lost is not correct on the one hand.
In the Middle Ages only the ecclesiastical class knew Latin, and consequently the copied works were preserved without being disseminated, and became accessible to a few.
Most of the classical works were preserved, possibly, in German monasteries, and would have remained there if they weren't arrived Poggio Bracciolini, Italian humanist and historian, born in Guccio and lived between 1380 and 1459, carrying out the activity of copyist and secretary in Rome before the Antipope John XXIII, and after the Council of Constance (1414 - 1418) , in which he took part, after a period of exile in England, hosted by the bishop of Winchester, Enrico Beaufort, was reinstated in the Curia by Pope Martin V.
He also worked for his two successors Eugene IV and Nicolò V until 1453, when he moved to Florence to work as secretary of the De Medici family, the Lords of Florence.
Just during the period of the Council of Constance, following his travels to Germany and France, he was able to shoot for various scriptoria, especially of the monasteries near Constance (San Gallo, Reichenau, Cluny), rediscovering the classical works of those authors considered unknown, including Quintilian, Vitruvius, Lucretius and Marcellin and some fragments of the various works of Cicero, which until now no one had copied and widespread, as reported in his work "The liberation of the classics from the life sentences of the Germans"
Thanks to the spread of these classic works, Poggio was one of those who revolutionized the culture of the time. In particular, the work of Vitruvius, "De Architettura" was taken as a reference for Renaissance architecture, while with the rediscovery of Cicero rhetoric was rediscovered, of which Poggio tried to imitate the style.
As a good copyist and man of letters, he revolutionized the field of writing, reintroducing the "tiny caroline", now no longer in use, replaced from the heavy and complicated "Gothic" writing and the introduction of the capital letter in the Caroline style, taking inspiration from the Roman epigraphs.
Once again, thanks to humanism, culture becomes universal.
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