Introduction the modern period of history is often considered to have begun with the Renaissance one of the rare periods of genius in the world’s history It immediately followed the period in Europe known as the Middle Ages The Renaissance began in Italy during the late 13th and early 14th centuries and reached its height in the 15th In the 16th and 17th centuries it spread to the rest of Europe The word renaissance means rebirth It refers to the rediscovery by scholars primarily grouped under the heading of humanists of the cultural cultural heritage of the ancient Greeks and Romans In fact however the Renaissance was a period of discovery in many fields of new scientific laws new forms of art and literature new religious and political ideas and new lands including America The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the 15th century 8
In his fresco The School of Philosophy the Renaissance painter Raphael depicts an imaginary meeting of Plato and Aristotle framed by the small arch centre with other philosophers from all periods of history 9
The ITalIan and norThern renaIssance to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century a revival in which they felt they were participating Indeed the notion of a long period of cultural darkness had been expressed by Petrarch even earlier Events at the end of the Middle Ages particularly beginning in the 12th century set in motion a series of social political and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance Renaissance These included the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire to provide a stable and unifying framework for the organization of spiritual spiritual and material life the rise in importance of city-states and national monarchies the development of national languages and the breakup of the old feudal structures While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic philosophy Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch and its chief protagonists included Gianozzo Manetti Leonardo Bruni Marsilio Ficino Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Lorenzo Valla and Coluccio Salutati The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost for many eastern scholars fled to Italy bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship 10
InTroducTIon Now few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist triumphalist and western Euro-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress The older view of the Renaissance centred too exclusively on Italy and within Italy on a few cities Florence Venice and Rome Nevertheless the term Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted period between the heyday of medieval universalism as embodied in the papacy and Holy Roman Empire and the convulsions and sweeping transformations of the 17th century In this period some important innovations of the Middle Ages came into their own including the revival of urban life commercial enterprise based on private capital banking the formation of states systematic investigation of the physical world Classical scholarship and vernacular literatures In religious life the Renaissance was a time of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms rather than of the abandonment of traditional beliefs In government city states and regional and national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and the papacy and obliterated obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that had covered covered Europe Within states though power continued to be monopolized by elites who drew their strength from both landed and mercantile wealth 11
