Culture And Civilization

Renaissance, period of European history that saw a renewed interest in the arts and in the classical past. The Renaissance began in 14th-century Italy and had spread to the rest of Europe by the 16th and 17th centuries. In this period, the fragmented feudal society of the Middle Ages, with its agricultural economy and Church-dominated intellectual and cultural life, was transformed into a society increasingly dominated by central political institutions, with an urban, commercial economy and lay patronage of education, the arts, and music.

The term renaissance, meaning literally rebirth, was first employed in 1855 by the French historian Jules Michelet to refer to the discovery of the world and of man in the 16th century. The great Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, in his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), expanded on Michelet s conception. Defining the Renaissance as the period between the Italian painters Giotto and Michelangelo, Burckhardt characterized the epoch as nothing less than the birth of modern humanity and consciousness after a long period of decay.

Modern scholars have exploded the myth that the Middle Ages were dark and dormant. The thousand years preceding the Renaissance were filled with achievement. Because of the scriptoria (writing rooms) of medieval monasteries, copies of the work of Latin writers such as Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and Seneca survived. The legal system of modern continental Europe had its origin in the development of civil and canon law in the 12th and 13th centuries. Renaissance thinkers continued the medieval tradition of grammatical and rhetorical studies. In theology, the medieval traditions of Scholasticism, Thomism, Scotism, and Ockhamism were continued in the Renaissance. Medieval Platonism and Aristotelianism were crucial to Renaissance philosophical thought. The advances of mathematical disciplines, including astronomy, were indebted to medieval precedents. The schools of Salerno in Italy, and Montpellier in France, were noted centres of medical studies in the Middle Ages. See also Astronomy; Medicine; Philosophy.

Characteristics The Italian Renaissance was above all an urban phenomenon, a product of cities that flourished in central and northern Italy, such as Florence, Ferrara, Milan, and Venice. It was the wealth of these cities that financed Renaissance cultural achievements. The cities themselves, however, were not creations of the Renaissance, but of the period of great economic expansion and population growth during the 12th and 13th centuries. Medieval Italian merchants developed commercial and financial techniques, such as bookkeeping and bills of exchange. The creation of the public debt, a concept unknown in ancient times, allowed these cities to finance their territorial expansion through military conquest. Their merchants controlled commerce and finance across Europe.

This fluid mercantile society contrasted sharply with the rural, tradition-bound ...