The other word was Humanismus. Surprisingly, it was not until nineteenth-century German usage that this emerges as a noun describing a whole field of activity or philosophy of life. There had been umanisti aplenty in Italy in earlier centuries, but what they did was not yet summed up as umanesimo. Initially, the German term meant mainly an educational approach based heavily on Greek and Roman classics: that was the context for its first recorded use, by the pedagogue Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer in 1808. It later expanded to denote the whole area of history, language, the arts, and moral
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