Seeing Historical Periods from a Different Angle

How Renaissance shaped European History The concept of Renaissance




This interdisciplinary approach to studying history is at the heart of the Arts and Humanities Through the Eras project. The act of dating an historical period is significant in that it often reveals the underlying assumptions of those who establish the dates. In this way dating or naming a period also functions as a kind of intellectual shorthand that allows us to identify key changes that occurred from one period to the next. The concept of the Renaissance as a broad cultural renewal in European history that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages has long been used to structure the larger narrative of Western history.


The date 1300 corresponds roughly to the birth of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), a figure long noted as vital to the formation of Renaissance philosophy and literature. The fourteenth century also witnessed the first glimmer of a new naturalism in sculpture and painting, and it saw key changes in fashion and style as well. Although much of the tenor of fourteenth century life seems traditional and medieval in nature, great economic and social changes were underway in Europe at this time that brought forth a new kind of society and intellectual life. These changes often appear in stark contrast to the relative peace and stability that had prevailed in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Instead it is best conceived as a broad,but sometimes diffuse, cultural renewal that affected the ideas, perceptions, and mentalities particularly of the upper classes and learned elite over a long stretch of European history. The choice of the dates 1300-1600 used in this volume has been largely one of convenience and tradition.Some historians have argued that the Renaissance's beginnings should be dated later, often around 1450; more recently, others have pushed back the rise of Renaissance values into the thirteenth century.


The darker side of Renaissance individualism led to the growth of a secular spirit and opened the door to intense egotism and even atheism, developments that Burckhardt saw as the root of problems in his own nineteenth-century Europe. Since Burckhardt's time, scholarship has often
assessed the validity of his model, and while certain features of his picture have survived, many have been rejected as projections of his discontent with his own age onto the very different circumstances of the Renaissance. Few scholars would now characterize the beliefs
of Renaissance intellectuals as secular, or as in any way connected to the growing atheism of the nineteenth century. Instead they recognize that the Renaissance represented a curious amalgam of medieval and innovative elements. While they agree with Burckhardt that the Renaissance was a period of outstanding artistic, literary, and intellectual creativity, they have also demonstrated that these forces were at work within the constraints of a society that was often conservative and highly traditional in nature.
The love of precedent and custom expressed itself in the Renaissance world in a deep and abiding affection for the culture of ancient Rome and Greece. During the fourteenth century, figures like Petrarch and Boccaccio reached out to the ancient world in search of values and philosophies that might help them negotiate the problems of living in an urban world. Ancient philosophy and literature had never disappeared from the Latin world of medieval Europe, but the scholars of the Middle Ages had often considered the writings of the ancients like a database of factual information and insights that might be applied to problems of Christian theology and the law. Renaissance humanism, by contrast, embraced antiquity as an inspiration for resolving ethical and moral dilemmas and for creating a philosophy that might foster virtuous living. The word "humanism" itself was a nineteenthcentury creation that described those Renaissance scholars who practiced the studia humanitatis or "humane studies," the origin of our modern notion of the humanities. While there was no creed or manifesto to which all these scholars subscribed, the humanists were united by a distaste for what they considered the logical and arid theorizing of scholasticism, the dominant intellectual movement of the medieval church.





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