Of all the varied strands woven into the cultural fabric of Renaissance Italy, the most vivid in the quattrocento was that associated with the study of ancient literature christened "humanism" by nineteenth-century scholars. Aristotle's analysis set the agenda for humanist debates about the role of music in elite education. The idea that the history of music could be represented as a narrative of progress from generation to generation is only one example of the ways in which rhetorical literature was to influence how humanists understood and analyzed music. The earliest humanist criticism arose in the mid-fifteenth century from efforts to establish moral criteria for distinguishing good and bad music. Johannes Tinctoris's impressive musical scholarship probably played some role in winning acceptance for famous composers and singers as artists worthy of respect. The music being sung in courts, whether monodic, homophonic, or polyphonic, was increasingly written by professional composers and sung from printed books.