What is the central idea of this excerpt from British Literature & History: The English Renaissance (1485-1650)?
Living up to its name, humanism depended more on personal contact than on systematic instruction at schools and universities. The friendships formed by humanists—in private study with one another, in the royal courts where they served as political advisers, and in their personal correspondence—inspired many significant works in this period. Reading humanist works often seems like overhearing a conversation between friends. Sir Thomas More, lord chancellor of England, and Desiderius Erasmus of Holland shared one of the most remarkable of these friendships. Whenever he visited London, Erasmus lived in More’s home. There, he wrote his best-known work, The Praise of Folly, which he dedicated to his English friend. Erasmus considered More, with his cultivated intellect, sparkling wit, deep learning, and broad culture, to be the ideal humanist, calling him omnium horarum homo, which is usually translated “a man for all seasons.” More’s most celebrated work, his satire Utopia (1516), presents his vision of an ideal society, freed from convention and ruled by reason. More coined the title of this work from Greek words that mean “no place.”
Question options:
a) Sir Thomas More enjoyed spring, summer, fall and winter equally.
b) Most humanist works are long transcriptions of conversations between close friends.(wrong)
c) The intellectual explosion we call humanism was largely an intellectual, rather than academic, exchange between diverse individuals all over Europe.
d) Humanism was the product of a disciplined program of instruction that sprung up in universities across Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.
