And with Sidney the Aristotelianism of the Italian renaissance makes its first appearance in English criticism.

But during the intervening years the scholars of Holland had supplanted those of Italy; and whereas Sidney derived his Aristotelianism from Scaliger and Minturno, Jonson derived his even more from Pontanus, Heinsius, and Lipsius and from the Latin rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian.

Reason, however, gradually became an independent power: orthodoxy did not reject reason when it coincided with tradition, but under the influence of Aristotelianism, especially as developed by Averroës, reason became a power opposed to faith.

But while Platonism, with its real universals, was celebrating its ascetic, unearthly triumphs in the West, Aristotelianism, which maintains that the individual is the real, was making its way in the East.

In Abélard's time Arab Aristotelianism, with its consequences for thought and life, was filtering into Europe and forcing Christian thinkers to defend the bases of their faith.