This style of Latin is regarded as the first phase of the standardised and grammatically "Classical" Neo-Latin which continued through the 16th–19th centuries,[1][2][3] and was used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international (i.e., pan-European) audience.

They abandoned the use of the sequence and other accentual forms of metre, and sought instead to revive the Greek formats that were used in Latin poetry during the Roman period.

This sort of writing was particularly vigilant in edited works, so that international colleagues could read them more easily, while in their own handwritten documents the Latin is usually written as it is pronounced in the vernacular.

Therefore, the first generations of humanists did not dedicate much care to the orthography till the late sixteenth and seventeenth century.

Scholar Jürgen Leonhardt noted how these high standards changed speakers' relationship with the language: "Whereas during the Middle Ages, Latin had an instrumental function in human communications and in peoples' understanding of the world, for the humanists, the act of mastering the language became a measure of human self-perfection.