Renaissance vs. Medieval Period?

Question

In contrast to the medieval period, how did the Renaissance reassess the worth of the individual?

Answer 1

I think we're talking about humanism here.

Humanism was the philosophical backbone of the Renaissance, emphasizing the potential for individual achievement and stipulating that humans were rational beings capable of truth and goodness. In keeping with the principles of humanism, Renaissance scholars celebrated the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans for their own sake, rather than for their relevance to Church doctrine.


Renaissance humanism was a European intellectual movement beginning in Florence in the last decades of the 14th century. Its focus was on human dignity and potential and the place of mankind in nature; it valued the witnesses of reason and the evidence of the senses in reaching the truth over the Christian values of humility, introspection, and passivity, or "meekness" that had dominated European thought in the previous centuries. Beauty was held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God. The movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of many Latin and Greek texts.

The humanists were in opposition to the philosophers of the day, the "schoolmen" of the Italian universities, or Oxford or Paris, whose methodology was derived from Thomas Aquinas.

In the 1480s, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote a preface to nine hundred theses that he submitted for public debate entitled An Oration on the Dignity of Man. The debate never took place, but the work became a seminal text in the development of humanism. In it, he talked about how God created man and that man's greatness comes from God. He said that man was like a chameleon and could become whatever he wanted to be.

Humanists placed a heavy emphasis on the study of primary sources rather than the study of the interpretations of others. This is reflected in their motto of ad fontes, or "to the sources" which informed the search for texts in the monastery libraries of Europe. Humanist education, called the studia humanista or studia humanitatis (study of humanity), concentrated on the study of the liberal arts: Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history.

Early 15th-century humanists were interested in classical Latin and not in medieval Latin, which was a different and simpler language with many neologisms. Petrarch, sometimes called the father of Renaissance humanism in Italy, called the Latin of the Middle Ages "barbarous,"; when he collected his "Familiar Letters" his model was Cicero and his model for Latin was that used by Virgil, who was emerging from the persona as a magus that had accrued in the Middle Ages. This new interest in the classical literature led to the scouring of monastic libraries across Europe for lost texts. One such hunt by Poggio Bracciolini, who was credited with the discovery of the complete works of fifteen different authors, turned up Vitruvius' work on art and architecture, allowing for the completion of the Duomo of Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi.

The central feature of humanism in this period was the commitment to the idea that the ancient world (defined effectively as ancient Greece and Rome, which included the entire Mediterranean basin) was the pinnacle of human achievement, especially intellectual achievement, and should be taken as a model by contemporary Europeans. According to this view of history, the fall of Rome to Germanic invaders, in the fifth century, had led to the dissolution and decline of this remarkable culture; the intellectual heritage of the ancient world had been lost—many if its most important books had been destroyed and dispersed—and a thousand years later, Europeans were still living in the ruins. The only way in which Europeans could expect to pull themselves out of this intellectual catastrophe was to attempt to recover, edit, and make available these lost texts, which included, among others, almost all the works of Plato. (In the process, Greek texts had to be translated into Latin, the language of intellectuals and the learned.) This enterprise generated enormous enthusiasm, and the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were devoted to this project.

Humanism offered the necessary intellectual and philological tools for the first dispassionate analysis of texts. An early triumph of textual criticism by Lorenzo Valla revealed the Donation of Constantine to be an early medieval forgery produced in the Curia. This textual criticism began to create real political controversy when Erasmus began to apply it to biblical texts, in his Novum Instrumentum.

The crisis of Renaissance humanism came with the trial of Galileo which was centered on the choice between basing the authority of one's beliefs on one's observations, or upon religious teaching. The trial made the contradictions between humanism and traditional religion visibly apparent to all, and humanism was branded a "dangerous doctrine."[citation needed]


[edit] Social or civic humanism
Social or civic humanism rose out of the republican ideology of Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It sought to create citizens capable of participating in the civic life of their community by placing central emphasis on human autonomy. Leonardo Bruni's Panegyric is one expression of this philosophy. The emancipated and literate upper bourgeoisie of the independent Italian communes adapted 14th-century Burgundian aristocratic culture and manners to an intensely patriotic civic life centered on extended families. Humanism was a pervasive cultural mode, not merely the product of a handful of geniuses, like Giotto or Leon Battista Alberti.


[edit] Beliefs
Renaissance humanists believed that the liberal arts (art, music, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, poetry, using classical texts, and the studies of all of the above) should be practiced by all levels of "richness". They also approved of self, human worth and individual dignity.

This worth is found in the humanist belief that everything in life has a determinate nature, but man's privilege is to be able to choose his own nature. Pico wrote the following concerning the creation of the universe and man's place in it:

But when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. Therefore, when everything was done... He finally took thought concerning the creation of man... He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: "Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgement thou mayest have and posses what abode, what form and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world's center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe what is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgement, to be born into the higher forms, which are divine." (Pico 224-225)

Humanists believe that such possibilities lead to the diverse ways of human development. Value is given to this uniqueness and encourages individualism.


[edit] Relationship to Christianity
As Neo-Platonism replaced the Aristotelianism of Saint Thomas Aquinas, attempts were made to join the great works of Antiquity with Christian values in a syncretic Christian humanism, such as those by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Ethics was taught independent of theology, and the authority of the Church was tacitly transferred to the reasoning logic of the educated individual. Thus humanists constantly skirted the dangers of being branded as heretics.

One example of such pagan philosophy and Christian doctrine melding is found in The Epicurean, by Erasmus, the "prince of humanists:"

If people who live agreeably are Epicureans, none are more truly Epicurean than the righteous and godly. And if it's names that bother us, no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of the Christian philosophy [Christ], for in Greek epikouros means "helper." He alone, when the law of Nature was all but blotted out by sins, when the law of Moses incited to lists rather than cured them, when Satan ruled in the world unchallenged, brought timely aid to perishing humanity. Complete mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish fashion about Christ's having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon us to follow a dismal mode of life. On the contrary, he alone shows the most enjoyable life of all and the one most full of true pleasure. (Erasmus 549)
This quote exemplifies the way in which the humanists saw pagan classical works such as the philosophy of Epicurus as being fundamentally in harmony with Christianity, rather than as a nemesis to be pitted against Christianity. Although Renaissance humanists were more accepting of pagan philosophy than their Scholastic contemporaries, they did not necessarily object to the idea that Christian understanding should be dominant over other modes of thought. Some humanists were even churchmen, most notably Pope Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pius II.


[edit] Humanists
The careers of individual humanists throw light on the movement as a whole. See:

Pietro Alcionio (Italian)
Ludovico Ariosto (Italian)
Johannes Goropius Becanus (Dutch)
Flavio Biondo (Italian)
Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian)
Herman Boerhaave (Dutch)
Sandro Botticelli (Italian)
Poggio Bracciolini (Italian)
Ignazio Cardini (Corsican/Italian)
Donatello (Italian)
Geert Groote (Dutch)
Desiderius Erasmus (Dutch)
Vittorino da Feltre (Italian)
Francesco Filelfo (Italian)
Stefano Infessura (Italian)
Macropedius (Dutch)
Philip Melanchthon (German)
Michelangelo (Italian)
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Italian)
Michel de Montaigne (French)
Thomas More (English)
Niccolò de' Niccoli (Italian)
Petrarch (Italian)
François Rabelais (French)
Francis Robortello (Italian)
Coluccio Salutati (Italian)
Jacopo Sannazaro (Italian)
Johannes Stöffler (German)
Leonardo da Vinci (Italian

Answer 2

In the traditional view, the Renaissance was understood as a historical age in Europe that followed the Middle Ages and preceded the Reformation, spanning roughly the 14th through the 16th century.

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 3

Medieval times were very bed with no increase in culture, compared to the Renaissance many new inventions were made and there was a high since of realism they realized the individual was worth a lot.

Answer 4

The Medieval Period ended, in the English speaking world in 1470, when Edward IVth of England imported the Renaissance to his country from the Italian peninsula where men had begun it. It's important that the "Renaissance" was not a doctrinal movement. What happened was that the pseudo-religious kings of the earlier centuries had misused their position to pretend to be holy--which as secular citizens they couldn't be; and to practice totalitarianism, using the excuse of their religiously-inspired infallibility to issue orders to everyone else; in other words they went about making a nation of "laws" and everyone else became a criminal under those coercive laws except the "leader". The Renaissance thinkers instead valued the individual, not the collective; they revived the arts of the ancient world whose thinkers had trusted individual men a good deal more than had the church-ridden kings; and they tried to create a wide range of arts, like those they had dug up from Greece and Rome, which had inspired them to live for thisworld, not some other, and to be happy on Earth, not enter monasteries and take part in dictatorships.
We owe the United States' creation to Enlightenment thinkers, renaissance supporters who tried to base a nation on individuals' rights and a marketplaces of lives lived by free men, specifically separating church and state and forbidding anyone to be king, noble class or anything else equally silly.
Until 1902, our government leaders were still trying to make America--a "renaissance society of free men"--happen.
That's why we honor our Founding Fathers.

Answer 5

The renaisance coincided with the Enlightenment.the basic tenets of the Enlightenment where the beleife the certain natural laws guide peoples actions. This gave rise to a concept of universal brotherhood, an abhorance of slavery and brute force to control the populace. This ment freedom to think as an individual untill the illuminati put a final stop to that crud with the American Revolution.

Answer 6

A peasant is an agricultural worker who subsists by working a small plot of ground. The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district (when the Roman Empire became Christian, these outlying districts were the last to christianise, and this gave rise to "pagan" as a religious term). The term peasant today is sometimes used in a pejorative sense for impoverished farmers. Peasants typically make up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a Pre-industrial society, dependent on the cultivation of their land: without stockpiles of provisions they thrive or starve according to the most recent harvest. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants. Pre-industrial societies have diminished with the advent of globalization and as such there are considerably fewer peasants to be found in rural areas throughout the world (as a proportion of the total world population). Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy has taken root the term peasant proprietors is frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where the land is chiefly held by smallholders. It is sometimes used by people who consider themselves of higher class as slang to refer pejoratively to those of poorer education who come from a lower income background. In many pre-industrial societies, peasants comprised the bulk of the population. Peasant societies often had well developed social support networks. Especially in harder climates, members of the community who had a poor harvest or suffered other hardships were taken care of by the rest of the community. Peasants usually only had one set of clothing, two at most. Peasant societies can often have very stratified social hierarchies within them. Rural people often have very different values and economic behavior from urbanites, and tend to be more conservative. Peasants are often very loyal to inherited power structures that define their rights and privileges and protect them from interlopers, despite their low status within those power structures. Fernand Braudel devoted the first volume–called The Structures of Everyday Life–of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy. Since it was the literate classes who left the most records, and these tended to dismiss peasants as figures of coarse appetite and rustic comedy, the term "peasant" may have a pejorative rather than descriptive connotation in historical memory. Society was theorized as being organized into three "estates": those who work, those who pray, and those who fight.