The Long-Desired and Promised Chemical-Philosophical Touchstone

and through his own character and life, as well as those of his most distinguished students, he imparted a prestige to the sciences he taught and the authors he interpreted—a prestige that the supporters of the "old darkness" original: alten Finsterniß. This refers to the Scholastic traditions of the Middle Ages that the Humanists viewed as intellectually stagnant. could no longer suppress. Without him, the light kindled by Petrarch would likely have been dimmed, if not extinguished entirely. Furthermore, without the men whom John had introduced to the treasures of Roman literature and filled with an unquenchable thirst for Greek wisdom, Manuel Chrysoloras A Byzantine scholar (c. 1355–1415) whose arrival in Italy marked a turning point in the West's recovery of the Greek language. would surely not have been summoned to Italy, and the Greek language and its literature would not have been revived so early.

John of Ravenna was the primary link in the chain that, toward the end of the fourteenth century, bound together the study of Roman and Greek literature. Providence sent him as a forerunner to Chrysoloras, destined to clear the path for him. For this reason, it was so arranged that these two great and remarkably similar men would not only live in the same era but also meet in the same city and share the same students.

However, because John of Ravenna was a teacher rather than a writer, and his memory lived on only in the works of his mentor, his patrons, and his grateful students, his fame began to fade shortly after his death. Eventually, it vanished to such an extent that his name was either entirely omitted by learned historians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries or mentioned only briefly in a manner that did not do justice to his greatness. Mehus Lorenzo Mehus (1717–1791), an Italian scholar who recovered many details about the early Humanists from ancient archives. was the first to rediscover, as it were, the nearly forgotten name of John of Ravenna among the monuments of the past, and