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That Renaissance humanism was a broad intellectual and cultural movement toward a new outlook on human dignity and capacity reaching over the dominating Christian values should not blind us to the fact that the Renaissance was in effect a strongly aristocratic age. While the over-riding goal of humanists was to pursue learning with a view to rediscovering the place of mankind in nature, there was no room of learning for ordinary people. The humanists took pride in their difficult achievement and were loath to open their learning to anyone who could speak only his native language. Their 'mother tongue,' as it were, was the object of contempt, what they saw as Classical Latin carrying the weight of their great authority. It takes a feat of the historical imagination to realize how much they scorned the people who were ignorant of the classical language, and how much, for that matter, they hated the people themselves. The hatred was raised almost to the state of aesthetics in their proclamation, Odi profanum Vulgus 'I hate the profane mob.' They spoke of 'vulgar Latin' and 'vernacular languages' without ever doubting whether the spoken language of Cicero differed any more from his written expressions than in our own days a dialectal form of a language does from its standardized version—without ever giving a thought to why before them Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had chosen to write in the vernacular. From the fourteenth to well into the seventeenth century, those who wanted the glory of being read by posterity would not fail to reserve a high place for Latin over and above their own native tongue. The present paper centers around the distorted nature of the linguistic philosophy that characterized Renaissance humanism.