The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt.

Poggio did not like the monks.  He knew several impressive ones, men of great moral seriousness and learning.  But on the whole he found them superstitious, ignorant, and hopelessly lazy.  Monasteries, he thought, were the dumping grounds for those deemed unfit for life in the world. Noblemen fobbed off the sons they judged to be weaklings, misfits, or good-for-nothings; merchants sent their dim-witted or paralytic children there; peasants got rid of extra mouths they could not feed.  The hardiest of the inmates could at least do some productive labor in the monastery gardens and the adjacent fields, as monks in earlier, more austere times had done, but for the most part, Poggio thought, they were a pack of idlers.  Behind the thick walls of the cloistery, the parasites would mumble their prayers and live off the income generated by those who farmed the monastery’s extensive landholdings.

This is all Professor Greenblatt:  his likes, dislikes, hatreds. Professor Greenblatt expresses his views through the mind of Poggio Bracciolini. This is a technique that Greenblatt uses throughout the book.