The transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

    In order to understand the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it is important to remember that in the medieval period the most important value was religion because people were afraid of life after death. The soul was therefore considered more relevant than the human body and life on earth.

    People’s efforts were directed to reach salvation and Paradise (Haven). It followed that religion played a role of supremacy in political, social and economic fields.

    Therefore on top of the hierarchy in society was the Pope, the representative of God on earth. At the same time one must remember that Feudalism had been introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066 and as the result he had distributed English lands to his knights and of course the organization of society showed a pyramidal structure:

1. There was the Pope
2. then came the Emperor (William the Conqueror)
3. with his landed gentry (aristocracy and its knights) [the knights served the Emperor during wars and in exchange lead their lands]
4. then came the merchants and
5. last there were the serfs.

Serfs worked for the landed gentry who were attached to the land and defended stronger from their master who was the land owner.

As a consequence there were two important positions in society and in politics: the Pope and the Emperor.

    Soon an open conflict between the religious or regular power and the temporal power of the Emperor broke out and during the whole Middle Ages there was a continuous fight between the two went on.

    A clear example of such struggle was the death of Thomas Becket who was killed by some knights and whose body was buried in Canterbury Cathedral. Religion gradually became weaker since the temporal power was growing steadily. It followed that, if during the Middle Ages the soul was considered more important than the body generally considered a source of sin and damnation, with the growing power of the king, active life and all that men could do, started to be considered more important or at least as important as contemplative life. It goes without saying then that life on earth was now taken into much more consideration than life after death.

    An intelligent thinker may well understand that the first result of such situation opened and paved the way to a gradual transformation of values.

    At the same time people were afraid of chaos and instability and all that explains for the importance of the philosophy of the Chain of Being which clearly established the position of everything.

    There was therefore a period when both Chain of Being and the new trends of thought coexisted and people tried to find a lesson in the Classical culture of Greece to find a possible answer to the questions connected to the human being , sense of life. The period was called Humanism.