Going back to the original source material turned out to be its own kind of revolution.
The Renaissance’s defining intellectual move wasn’t inventing something new so much as insisting on going back — to the original Greek and Latin texts themselves, read in their own terms, rather than through the layers of medieval scholastic commentary that had built up around them. That recovery effort, the studia humanitatis, brought grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy back to the centre of education, and depended heavily on classical manuscripts that had been preserved and, in places, extended during the Islamic Golden Age before making their way back into European hands.
Historians treat this period as a genuine intellectual turning point rather than simply a stylistic one: the shift toward direct textual engagement over inherited commentary changed what counted as legitimate scholarly method, with consequences that ran well past art and literature into the emerging methods of early modern science.
Source: Kristeller, P.O. (1988). “Renaissance Humanism and Classical Antiquity.” In Renaissance Humanism, Volume 1. University of Pennsylvania Press.