The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society - Paperbackby Benjamin G. Kohl (Editor), Ronald G. Witt (Editor) The gradual secularization of European society and culture is often said to characterize the development of the modern world, and the early Italian humanists played a pioneering role in this process. Here Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles, have edited and translated seven primary texts that shed important light on the subject of "civic humanism" in the Renaissance.