Renaissance

Petrarch, Secretum, c. 1343: "When too many plants are sown in a narrow ground, namely that there growth is prevented by crowding, the same thing happens to you, so that no useful roots are put down in the soul that is too occupied and nothing fruitful grows."

Pierre Belon, Observation, 1553: "The minds of men… have begun to wake up and to leave the darkness where for so long they have remained dormant and in leaving have put forth and put in evidence all kinds of good disciplines, which to their so happy and desirable renaissance, all as the new plants after a season of winter regain their vigor in the heat of the Sun and are consoled by the mildness of the spring."

SOURCE: From Maryanne C. Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, pp. 115, 297, n. 96; pp. 156, 309, n. 7.