To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or Mayfair.
Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naive soul of this Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things.

You shall infer something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his tempestuous mirth, his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naivete, his inquisitiveness, his cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of sunshine and bright gewgaws.
To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano afforded reading-matter to both sexes.

This was the age in which the learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla--of whom more anon--wrote his famous indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments of a most insidious logic.

This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop of Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which, coming from a churchman's pen, will leave you cold with horror should you chance to turn its pages.

This was the age of the Discovery of Man; the pagan age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before an image of the Greek by whose teachings--in common with so many scholars of his day--he sought to inform himself.
It was an age that had become unable to discriminate between the merits of the Saints of the Church and the Harlots of the Town.