Renaissance Thinkers offers concise and readable introductions to four of the most important philosophical writers of the European Renaissance. All were well-schooled in the literary classics of ancient Greece and Rome, and all assumed that the insights of pagan antiquity were still relevant to the Christian era in which they lived. Erasmus and More believed that the highest human good lay in a union of classical wisdom and Christian teaching; Montaigne displayed a more skeptical temper, while Bacon sketched out a scientific program which was intended to supersede the authority of classical antiquity and literary humanism altogether. This is an authoritative collection of introductions to the achievements and thought of leading intellectual figures of the past whose ideas still influence the way we think today.