The term “humanism” has a number of very different meanings, perfectly intelligible to the scholars who work on the time periods for which it is used as an analytic framework even though its meaning for these different periods is noncongruent. For the twenty-first century, humanism is secularism as opposed to religiosity; for the Italian Renaissance, humanism is the study of classical literature and culture; and for those studying the twelfth century, the term is used for the period's assumption that humanity and the physical world, with their relationship to God, were intelligible to human understanding. Richard W. Southern first gave “humanism” this meaning for medieval intellectual history, a meaning here adopted by the Dutch scholar Willemien Otten. Otten, following Southern, resists the tendency of some modern scholars to draw an artificial distinction between twelfth-century humanism and scholasticism, with the assumption that the former was practiced only in the monasteries, the latter in the schools. Otten does, however, concentrate on philosophy rather than on the regularization of the study of theology and canon law in the emerging universities. The thinkers on whom he focuses, especially Peter Abelard, Alan of Lille, and William of Conches, were among the most influential twelfth-century philosophers. He uses the concept of twelfth-century humanism to address a broad range of topics, all of which he suggests were discussed in a context of rather optimistic rationalism.