Revival of Letters, revival in Europe in the 15th century of the study of classical, especially Greek, literature, chiefly by the arrival in Italy of certain learned Greeks, fugitives from Constantinople on its capture by the Turks in 1453, and promoted, by the invention of printing, to the gradual extinction of the dry, barren scholasticism previously in vogue. See Renaissance.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Réville, Albert * Revival of Religion