The Renaissance

The renaissance does not start but it develops in a period. It entered England much later than in Italy. In this period people look for something new. While in the Middle-ages the most important value was the religion, in the Renaissance the most important value that was at the centre of everything was God. In Humanism, they understood that body was really important. Human beings became important. Religion wasn't enough, they followed body needs. They also searched to create a relationship between God and human body. They took inspiration by the classical antiquity of Greece. Sculpture became important because it represented men. They had a Manichean vision of things. Renaissance literally means rebirth. The vision of the world in the middle ages was influenced by the Chain of Being: vision of the world according to which every existing things had their own order. People were afraid of caos and instability and this hierarchical structure gave an order so was important. There was a contradiction between soul and body. People was afraid of darkness because it was something that you can't sick and you're stuck because you can't know how you have to move. Renaissance implied an important time of transition between religious values and human values. The relationship between soul and body was put at the centre of investigation.

In the Medieval period there was a struggle between the Pope and the Imperor because both of them wanted power.

While the religious power became weaker, because there were Religious reformation influnced by Martin Luter in Germany and Henry VIII in England; the temporal power was growing and at the same time the body started to be considered most important that the soul.
In renaissance people were not satisfied with what they had, they needed something else. God was not the only and most important need. There was a desire to discover something completely new in every subject. They wanted to investigate the points of human beings.
God and religious values were not enough to make a sense to their lives.
In the middle-ages people had their sense of life and salvation and at the centre there was God. Literature in this period was mainly religious. One of the most important literary works was ‘The Canterbury Tales', a book in which it was narrated a story of pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. In this poem, every pilgrim told some stories. Chaucer was the author of this poem and he was considered the poet's poet because he was the first who used the English language for the literature. With his potboiler he wanted to underline the difference of the classes in his period. The stories indeed were told by people coming from different classes. Chaucer wanted to criticize some aspects of his period and to make clear the mentality of the time. An example is the wife of Bath, she was not like the others women and like the vision of women that was knew at the time. She was attached to her body needs and not to religious values.
The Renaissance searched body needs and tried to add those needs with religious needs. Every renaissance works had man at the centre. There were both geographical and scientific discoveries that had revolutionized the attitudes of people.