Metaphysica paupera: New insights into the history of metaphysics between the middle ages and early modern philosophy

First, there was a strange misunderstanding. On the one hand, Francesco Petrarca considered that the magistri artium had impoverished philosophy, reducing it to a formal, above all logical, activity that failed to answer the questions specific to human beings about their nature, moral orientation, and destiny. On the other hand, a longstanding historiographical tradition has emphasized the unphilosophical, and even less metaphysical, nature of thought during the Renaissance, which is seen above all as a pedagogical and artistic culture, or the ultimate projection of aspects, contents, and methods of medieval philosophy, destined to be surpassed only after the so-called ‘revolutions’ of the 17th century.