This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Humanities study human culture, thought and expression through texts, languages, art and philosophy, using close reading, historical and philological analysis and reasoned argument rather than controlled experiment. The field's curriculum is generally dated to 1402, when Pier Paolo Vergerio's educational treatise set out the studia humanitatis, the classical course of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy, establishing the cluster of disciplines that still defines the humanities today.
For an atlas of religion and belief, the humanities are the broader field several of this atlas's own disciplines of religious language, text and thought sit inside. A tradition's scripture is read as a text through philology and close reading, its philosophy through reasoned argument, its history through the same source criticism the wider humanities apply to any documentary record, and each of those narrower disciplines inherits the humanities' basic method of interpreting a human product of culture on its own terms rather than reducing it to a measurable quantity.
That inheritance is why the field matters here specifically, as the shared ground beneath disciplines this atlas treats individually. Scripture, doctrine, ritual text and sacred art are all, before anything else, products of human thought and expression, and the humanities are the field that supplies the basic tools, reading, comparison and argument, for taking any one of them seriously as such.