‘See, what you have to remember in thinking about the Renaissance is that they were always looking back. All their scholarship, all their learning, was bent toward re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age.
