This is the second part (chapter one) of the summary of the book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope by Sarah Bakewell. Throughout the 1300s, new generations of writers emerged, infused with a spirit of recovery and revival. They aimed to reach beyond the present troubles and even Christianity to connect with the writers of the Roman world, whose works had been forgotten to varying degrees. The true new beginning, however, surfaced in the generation after his, with two writers who, like him, hailed from Tuscany: Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch in English, and Giovanni Boccaccio.