Renaissance

• Meaning:

  • literally: rebirth

  • sense: rebirth of learning

• Setting:

  • space: Italy

  • time: 1300-1650

• Characteristics:

  • enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity

  • age of new discoveries

  • classical values

  • division of the Church

    • Martin Luther

  • Five issues:

1. Renaissance thinkers often tried to associate themselves with classical antiquity and to dissociate themselves from the Middle Ages

2. significant political changes were taking place

3. some of the noblest ideals of the period were best expressed by the movement known as Humanism

4. literary doctrine of "imitation"

5. religious movement known as the Reformation

• The Great Chain of Being:

  • every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended

  • an object's "place" depended on the relative proportion of "spirit" and "matter" it contained

    • the less "spirit" and the more "matter," the lower down it stood.

    • form the bottom: inanimate objects and the four elements, vegetables, animals, humans, angels and, at the very top, God.

  • doctrine of "correspondences"

    • human being is a microcosm (literally, a "little world") that reflected the structure of the world, the macrocosm; just as the world was composed of four "elements" (earth, water, air, fire), so too was the human body composed of four substances called "humours," with characteristics corresponding to the four elements

    • illness occurred when there was an imbalance or "disorder" among the humours, that is, when they did not exist in proper proportion to each other.

  • growing discomfort with traditional hierarchy

• Political Implications of the Chain of Being

  • rulers claimed to rule by "Divine Right"

  • end for the most part to feudalism

  • effective central government

• Humanism

  • represents a shift from the "contemplative life" to the "active life"

  • the highest cultural values were associated with active involvement in public life, in moral, political, and military action, and in service to the state.

  • the traditional religious values coexisted with the new secular values

• "Imitation"

  • "following predecessors": the goal was not to create something entirely new.

  • theoretically it was the task of the writer to translate for present readers the moral vision of the past, and they were to do this by "imitating" great works, adapting them to a Christian perspective

  • writers were to capture the spirit of the originals, mastering the best models, learning from them, then using them for their own purposes

• The Protestant Reformation

  • rejection of the Pope as spiritual leader: the Church cannot save the human being

  • humans therefore are incapable of contributing to their salvation, for instance through good deeds; it could only be achieved through faith in God's grace