what happen during the Renaissance?

Answer 1

"The Italian Renaissance of the 15th century represented a reconnection of the west with classical antiquity, the absorption of knowledge (particularly mathematics), a focus on the importance of living well in the present (Renaissance humanism), and an explosion of the dissemination of knowledge brought on by the advent of printing. In addition, the creation of new techniques in art, poetry, and architecture led in turn to a radical change in the style and substance of the arts and letters. The Italian Renaissance was often labeled as the beginning of the Modern Age, or the Early Modern."

Answer 2

medieval times or dark ages faded, people gave more importance to art, music, literature....

people began to get more educated and got more ideas about life

the idea that you could move from your classes by working hard was founded

many great artists came from this period...michelangelo

Answer 3

Renaissance was a revival or rebirth of cultural awareness and learning that took place during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly in Italy, but also in Germany and other European countries. The period was characterized by a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman art and design and included an emphasis on human beings, their environment, science, and philosophy.


Historical categories are always fictions in some sense or another. Many historical categories, such as "Ming China" are purely descriptive and essentially say little, taking their name from an accident in history, such as the rise and duration of the Ming dynasty in China. Others, such as "the classical world," are not descriptive terms but interpretations and value judgements designed to make the historical period somehow meaningful as a whole. These categories are always placed on the period in hindsight: they are given not so much to explain the past as they are to explain the relationship of the present with the past. Historical categories, then, are ideas that express a culture's own sense of itself and its position in history; they often have little to do with the real historical experience of the period they pretend to explain.

In European historiography ("the writing of history"), perhaps the most value-laden and contested historical category is the "Renaissance." First coined in 1867 by Jakob Burckhardt in his book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the term has come to dominate our consciousness of what the historical experience of this period was. The Renaissance, as far as this book is concerned, is conceived as a departure from the Middle Ages, a fracture point where European culture suddenly changed into a new and different culture. There are two important aspects to this change, according to Burckhardt: the revival of classical learning, character, and life (hence the "rebirth" or "renaissance" of the classical world) and the beginning of the modern age. For in reviving classical learning, the Italians of the Renaissance created the prototype of modern culture. It's important to realize that this idea of the Renaissance was formulated to stress the uniqueness of modern European culture, as something new on the face of human culture. In formulating a beginning for modern culture, Burckhardt was also arguing that modern culture wass not: anything that occurred between the decline of the classical world and the Renaissance—hence, the idea of the Renaissance also created the idea of the "middle ages," a period between the classical period and the Renaissance.

While the term "Renaissance" has remained glued to this period, after Burckhardt many scholars rebelled against the ideas that were represented by this term. For these scholars, of whom the most important is Paul Oskar Kristeller, the Renaissance has more in common with the Middle Ages than it is different. The Renaissance continues and develops cultural and historical patterns begun several centuries earlier. These rebellious scholars like to date the Renaissance further and further back, from the mid-fourteenth century to the thirteenth to the twelfth to the eleventh and so on.

In recent decades, the advent of New Historicism among cultural historians such as Stephen Greenblatt has unwittingly revived the Burckhardt position. For New Historicists, the term Renaissance is an invalid term for which they substitute "The Early Modern," a historical period that encompasses all of European history from the Italian Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Like Burckhardt, they see the meaning and value of this period in relation to what follows, that is, modernity. At some point European culture broke with the past and emerged into the modern world; like Burckhardt, the New Historicists place this beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Again, the primary task of this category is to explain the present. New Historicists focus on issues of gender, ethnicity, nationaliaty, race, and subjectivity (the experience of being an individual); the unique configuration of power, gender, race, and subjectivity in the modern world owes its origins to new practices, rather than reborn practices, in the Early Modern period.

These ideas, however, don't very accurately reproduce the historical experience of the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern period. The continuities with the medieval world are so pervasive that separating the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern from the medieval world is an impossible task. The origins of the modern world are as fully rooted in the medieval world as they are in the Italian Renaissance.

One other alternative is to take a multicultural view of European history. The history of the European Middle Ages is, you might say, the history of the discovery of Europe. All during the classical period, Europe is a heterogenous, multicultural society with all the trappings of that multiculturalism: conflicting cultural notions of power, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, and so on; negative definitions of other cultures; ethnic rather than regional self-definition, and many more. This was the situation at the beginning of the medieval period, what you might call the "multicultural middle ages." The middle ages, however, circumscribes a larger historical process in which an idea of a common ethnicity or cultural identity begins to emerge from out of this multiculturalism—this is an idea of Europe and European culture. Ethnicity begins to include self-definition against non-Europeans, such as Muslims, Byzantines, and North Africans, many of them cultures that the classical world saw itself as continuous with. This process, "the discovery of Europe," or better yet, "the monocultural middle ages," roughly corresponds to the last centuries of the middle ages. If you are to think of the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern as having a distinct historical character, that historical character seems to be the final construction of an idea of Europe. For the culture, literature, and arts of the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern gave Europe a set of practices that it could identify as uniquely its own. Here's a kind of radically new idea: if the later Middle Ages is largely about the "discovery of Europe," you might think of the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern and its aftermath as the "colonizing of Europe." The two processes, of course, are not distinct and separate processes.

That's the idea animating this module's presentation of the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern. Much of the revival of classical learning, so important to Burckhardt, has this larger object of creating a standard for European culture. Standards are also sought, however, in medieval traditions; it's not always so easy to separate the revival of classical learning from a concomitant revival in medieval learning. In line with the New Historicist rewriting the period, the Italian Renaissance / Early Modern is largely concerned with forging a cultural identity against other cultures, such as Africans, Muslims, Turks, Asians, and later, Americans. Ethnicity, which at the beginnning of the middle ages was initimately tied to cultural practices and so a very plastic notion, begins to take on rigid formations. The Italian Renaissance / Early Modern also sees growing standardization in individual experience, gender relations, domestic power, and class relationships. The larger pattern, however, narrated in these next few chapters is the solidification of the monocultural Europe, a process beginning in the dimmest recesses of medieval history and finalized both triumphantly and shamefully in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.



Of all the practices of Renaissance Europe, nothing is used to distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages more than humanism as both a program and a philosophy. Textbooks will tell you that the humanists of the Renaissance rediscovered the Latin and Greek classics (hence the "rebirth" or "renaissance" of the classical world), that humanist philosophy stressed the dignity of humanity, and that humanists shifted intellectual emphasis off of theology and logic to specifically human studies. In pursuing this program, the argument goes, the humanists literally created the European Renaissance and paved the way for the modern, secular world.

Like all mythologies of origins, however, this account is both partially true and partially false. First, there really was no such thing as a "humanist movement" either in philosophical or other terms. The term "humanism" was coined in 1808 by a German educator, F. J. Niethammer, to describe a program of study distinct from scientific and engineering educational programs. In the fifteenth century, the term "umanista," or "humanist," was current and described a professional group of teachers whose subject matter consisted of those areas that were called studia humanitatis. The studia humanitatis originated in the mddle ages and were all those educational disciplines outside of theology and natural science. Humanism was not opposed to logic, as is commonly held, but opposed to the particular brand of logic known as Scholasticism. In point of fact, the humanists actively revised the science of logic. Humanism, then, really begins during the middle ages in Europe; while the humanist scholars of the Renaissance made great strides and discoveries in this field, humanistic studies were really a product of middle ages. Not only that, the "rediscovery" of the classical world which was the hallmark of Renaissance humanism in reality began much earlier in the middle ages; as Europeans began to see themselves as a single ethnic group with a common origin in the middle ages, the recovery of classical literature, both Latin and Greek, became a concern for all the medieval centers of learning.

The studia humanitatis consisted of more or less five disciplines drawn from the classical educational curriculum, called the trivium ("the three part curriculum": grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (the "four part curriculum": geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music), all of which had been outlined in antiquity and bequeathed to Christian Europe by writers such as Cassiodorus in the fifth century and Martianus Capella in the sixth century AD. In antiquity, these disciplines were called the artes liberales, or "liberal arts," for they were the skills and knowledge necessary for a human being to be truly free. The Renaissance studia humanitatis generally correspond to what we would call grammar, rhetoric, history, literary studies and moral philosophy, though in the middle ages and Renaissance both history and literary studies were a part of grammar.

In classical Rome, higher education consisted almost entirely of the quadrivium and the trivium; all the major patriarchs of the Christian religion were raised in this tradition, including Augustine and Boethius. The perpetuation of the quadrivium and the trivium throughout the early and high middle ages was naturally a continuation of the educational background of the early Christian authors. The central difference between the Roman and the medieval trivium and quadrivium is that the medievals had pretty much lost the Greek language and the classical Greek authors. While the emphasis in Roman education was on Greek authors, the emphasis in the medieval quadrivium and trivium was Latin authors, especially Christian authors, which students read in anthologies more than in the original.


Ancient Greece
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Aristotle
The trivium, the center of medieval and classical education, was made up of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Grammar was the study of not only the proper use of language, but how authors used language to make meaning, especially poets and historians. A great deal of what we consider literary criticism, literary studies, and history was in the middle ages the province of grammar. Dialectic was the science of disputation, proof, and propositions. In the high middle ages, dialectic was dominated by the Aristotelean or Averroistic tradition (named after Aristotle, the Greek philospoher, and the medieval Arabic commentator on Aristotle, Averroes); this was called the Scholastic tradition in logic because its advocates were the university teachers, or "schoolmen." Scholastic dialectic aimed at using language to produce certainty; as such, it focussed on syllogism, which is the construction of a truthful conclusion from truthful premises. The third art of the trivium, rhetoric, was the art of persuasion and included all those techniques with language, including syllogism, whereby a speaker could convince an audience of the truth or correctness of what he was saying. It was in these arts, the arts of language, that the humanists centered their attention.

Yet for all that, the very first humanists were not educators, but rather private men of independent means or lawyers. The most famous in the former group, and the person often acknowledged as a founding figure of humanism, was Petrarch (1304-1374), and the most famous representative of the latter group was Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).

Here are some Renaissance links

http://pages.unibas.ch/shine/linksrenaissancewf.htm