The new criticism that emerged at the end of the fourteenth century in Italy had its roots in the movement to revive classical studies known as humanism. The humanists, however, sowed the seeds of an ambiguous legacy; they wrote critical essays on liberty, the ideal state, and the quest for the good, but they also produced propaganda for their states that ignored injustice at home and rationalized – in the name of peace and security – a policy of terror and aggression abroad. But this humanism – whatever its long-term force – could not have flourished either in its civic or more contemplative forms without the innovations of Petrarch. He was the first to couch modern concerns in the classical Latin of Cicero and Livy. Embracing civic, literary, philosophical, and religious themes, his writings include criticism in the form of letters, a Latin epic poem after Virgil's Aeneid, and lyric poetry in Italian.

There was a gulf nevertheless between the fifteenth-century humanists and Petrarch. They had access to a tradition Petrarch never knew: the Greek philosophers, orators, historians, tragedians, and poets. After the invention of the printing-press, the humanists of the later fifteenth century had at their disposal a variety and volume of classical and modern texts that would have amazed Petrarch: the new technology of movable type allowed more books to be produced in the last fifty years of the fifteenth century than all the scribes in Europe had written prior to that time.

Other features distinguish this first century of humanism from the periods before and after it: the dominance of Latin over the vernacular as the lingua franca of serious criticism; the enormous mobility of leading writers of the period, who moved typically between cities and courts; the related importance (for a mobile literary culture) of the epistolary genre as the essential medium of expression for the humanists; the rise of a number of distinct and different regional humanisms in the Italian city-states, each with its own local character; and lastly, yet most importantly, the disdain inherent in the ideology of Renaissance humanism for social justice.