While the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns became a famous topic in the seventeenth century, debate about the relative merits of ancient and modern figures has been a feature of Western culture since the Greeks. Up through the Middle Ages the term "ancient" was ambiguous with respect to historical time. It was Petrarch, the great Humanist of the early Italian Renaissance, who gave the Greeks and Romans of the pre-Christian era their fixed and prestigious status as capitalized Ancients. In this wide-ranging work of extraordinary scholarship, historian of philosophy Neal Ward Gilbert explores the Renaissance pre-history of the Quarrel. He traces the ancient/modern contrast through poetry, oratory, philosophy, science, the fine arts and other fields of intellectual achievement. As Gilbert demonstrates, "The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns was much more than a mere scribblers' feud: what was at stake was not simply literary reputations and stylistic preferences but ways of looking at history, at the development of the arts and sciences, and at the prospects for their future contribution to man's welfare."