Dictionary:

renaissance

  (rĕn'ĭ-sänssəns)

1. A rebirth or revival.
2. Renaissance
   1. The humanistic revival of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that originated in Italy in the 14th century and later spread throughout Europe.
   2. The period of this revival, roughly the 14th through the 16th century, marking the transition from medieval to modern times.
3. often Renaissance
   1. A revival of intellectual or artistic achievement and vigor: the Celtic Renaissance.
   2. The period of such a revival.

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Renaissance or its artistic and intellectual works and styles.
2. Of or being the style of architecture and decoration, based on classical models, that originated in Italy in the 15th century and continued throughout Europe up to the end of the 16th century.

[French, from Old French, from renaistre, to be born again, from Vulgar Latin *renāscere, from Latin renāscī : re-, re- + nāscī, to be born.]

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noun

The act of reviving or condition of being revived: reactivation, rebirth, renascence, renewal, resurgence, resurrection, resuscitation, revitalization, revival, revivification. See awareness/unawareness.

Term applied, in Western music history, to the era lasting from c1430 to the end of the 16th century. The word means ‘rebirth’, referring to the objective of intellectuals and artists of the time to repudiate the previous era (the Middle Ages) and to restore the philosophical and artistic ideals of classical antiquity.

The relationship between this movement and music is complex and it is not easy to cite musical features that reflect Renaissance ideals, at least until rather later. However, the Renaissance spirit is often felt to be reflected in such music as the chansons of Dufay and Binchois, with their smoother, more flowing lines, and particularly in Josquin's music, from the end of the 15th century, in which imitative counterpoint in four or more parts (replacing the predominant three-part writing of the previous generation) came to be the norm, with all parts alike in texture and frequent imitative writing. Josquin's music, in particular, is often paralleled with the beginnings of humanism, at much the same time. This was also the period when, with the European invention of printing, knowledge began to spread more readily and music came to be published instead of circulating only in manuscript.

The characteristic musical style of the Renaissance period is the smooth, homogeneous, imitative polyphonic style, used by Palestrina, Lassus and Byrd. It was used not only in sacred music (predominantly masses and motets) but also in secular madrigals and instrumental consort music. The favoured instrument was the lute, which during the 16th century became established as the standard instrument for domestic music-making.

The Renaissance period was succeeded by the Baroque. Elements of Baroque style are found early in the second half of the 16th century but Renaissance imitative polyphony remained in use, particularly in sacred music, during the 17th century and beyond, widely recognized as a fitting manner for church music.

Renaissance, the ‘rebirth’ of literature, art, and learning that progressively transformed European culture from the mid‐14th century in Italy to the mid‐17th century in England, strongly influenced by the rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin literature, and accelerated by the development of printing. The Renaissance is commonly held to mark the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern Western world, although the problems of dating this process have caused much debate: the existence of a significant renaissance of European learning inthe 12th century is now accepted, while the 18th‐century Enlightenment is a direct continuation of the Renaissance's intellectual tendencies. However, the term normally refers to the combined intellectual and artistic transformations of the 15th and 16thcenturies, including the emergence of humanism, Protestant individualism, Copernican astronomy, and the discovery of America. In literary terms, the Renaissance may be seen as a new tradition running from Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy to Jonson and Milton in England, embracing the work of the French Pléiade and of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare; it is marked by a new self‐confidence in vernacular literatures, a flourishing of lyric poetry, and a revival of such classical forms as epic and pastoral literature. The term ‘Renaissance’ has also been extended to various literary revivals in specific times and places: for examples, see American Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance.

For more information on Renaissance, visit Britannica.com.

Renaissance (rebirth) characterizes the impulse, initiated in Italy, towards improving the contemporary world by discovering and applying the achievement of classical antiquity. The movement was at its strongest from the time of Petrarch (1304-74) through the ‘long 16th cent.’ (1450-1625). ‘Renaissance’ is now generally used to describe the politics, beliefs, philosophy, science, scholarship, discourse, literature, handwriting, printing, painting, engraving, sculpture, architecture, and music of that period.

‘Renaissance’ was first used alone in the 19th cent., though Giorgio Vasari (1550) saw a ‘rinascità delle arti’ in his own time, and Voltaire two centuries later a ‘renaissance des lettres et des beaux-arts’ in Medicean Florence. The concept of an epoch marked by ‘the discovery of the world and of man’ was taken up in Jakob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). For Burckhardt the defining emphasis of the Renaissance was secular and individual; the new attitudes he detected in the Italy of that epoch to nature, morality, religion, affairs, art, and literature made him see it as inaugurating the modern era.

The English Renaissance was influenced by the Italian indirectly, through France, Burgundy, and the Netherlands, as well as directly. In its earliest phase, the patronage and book collections of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390-1447), were important; later, under Henry VII, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre won a reputation for Greek. From about 1500, however, the chief force in English humanism was the concept of pietas literata, or evangelical humanism, associated with Erasmus. The friendship of Erasmus with John Colet and with Thomas More was particularly significant; he and More translated Greek together.

England produced no humanist scholar of the first rank during the Renaissance, More's Utopia being the finest Latin achievement of its early Tudor phase. Many classical and humanist works were translated into the vernacular, however. A pattern of civility on the Italian model was offered by Sir Thomas Elyot (Book Named the Governor, 1531) and Sir Thomas Hoby(translation of Castiglione's Courtier, 1561). Greek studies were notable, from the 1520s especially in association with the Reformation. Erasmus' Greek New Testament with Latin translation (1516-19) was used by Martin Luther for his German New Testament (1521): William Tyndale used both for his English version (1526-34).

The visual arts and architecture of Renaissance England remained predominantly traditional, in spite of the presence of Italian sculptors and of north European painters such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Rubens, and Van Dyck. The first English architect and designer of international stature was Inigo Jones, the Palladian (1573-1652). Music similarly remained traditional until the flowering of the Italian fashion (1575-1625).

From the French renaître (to be born again) and the Italian Rinascimento (rebirth), the term is given to the great revival of arts and letters under the influence of Classical precedents which began in Italy in C14 and continued during the following two centuries, spreading to virtually all parts of Europe. It is also a convenient label for the style of architecture that developed in, and was characteristic of, that period from the time of Brunelleschi in Florence (early C15) to the beginnings of Mannerism (c.1520), and which was based on the architecture of Roman Antiquity. Indeed, it was referred to as maniera all'antica, and the style was codified by Alberti in De re aedificatoria (begun around 1450), drawing on the exemplary work of Vitruvius. In architecture the Renaissance includes the High Renaissance (c.1500–c.1520) in which Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael flourished, but it does not include the Baroque. Elsewhere in Europe, Renaissance architecture tended to acquire Italian Renaissance motifs, either from printed sources or from the observations of travellers, but each country or region produced buildings that looked un-Italian: German, French, Flemish, Spanish, and English (the latter associated with Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture) Renaissance styles all had distinct flavours. English, Flemish, German, Polish, and Scandinavian Renaissance buildings of C16 and early C17 fall into the Northern Renaissance category, but the infusion of Mannerism gave French Renaissance architecture a different flavour. Only in the early C17 was uncorrupted Renaissance architecture, firmly based on Italian prototypes, introduced in England (see Paesschen) by Inigo Jones, an event that was enormously influential in C18, first in England, and then elsewhere. There were various national Renaissance Revivals in C19 once Neo-Classicism had become wearisome. There are some (e.g. the late John Harvey (1911–97) ) who held that the introduction of Renaissance architecture was a disaster, destroying the living, indigenous, and inventive Gothic tradition of England and Northern Europe.

Bibliography

• Chilvers, Osborne, & Farr (eds.) (1988)
• Lewis & Darley (1986)
• H.Osborne (1970)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Renaissance, The

1. The Idea of a Renaissance

The Renaissance was a movement in learned culture and the fine arts beginning in Italy in the 14th c.—Petrarch (1304-74) is often considered the first ‘Renaissance man’—and spreading through most of Western Europe. By the late 16th c. it was beginning to give way to other movements [see Baroque; Classicism] which may, however, also be seen as transformations of the Renaissance itself.

Writers of this period themselves spoke of a rebirth or renewal of culture (broadly, that of classical antiquity) after what they saw as the barbarism of the intervening centuries; Rabelais and Du Bellay provide famous versions of the theme. By the 18th c. historians had begun to characterize this cultural movement as a ‘Renaissance of arts and letters’. However, the notion of the Renaissance as a self-contained period in the history of Western civilization is largely the invention of 19th-c. historians such as Burckhardt and Michelet, who attributed to the period as a whole characteristics such as optimism, individualism, and an increasingly secular outlook. More recently, historians have shown that such generalizations are misleading, drawing attention to what ‘Renaissance’ writers and thinkers have in common with their ‘medieval’ predecessors, or to earlier ‘Renaissances’ such as that of the 12th c.

2. The Early Renaissance

In France, the sense of a cultural renewal begins to gather momentum in the last third of the 15th c. A printing press was established in Paris in 1470, and rhetoric and classical poetry were taught in extracurricular hours at the University of Paris. Lemaire de Belges, in his Concorde des deux langages of 1511, proposes a harmonious alliance of French and Italian culture, and the importance of Lyon as a cultural staging-post between France and Italy is already becoming clear as Neoplatonist ideas emerge in the writings of Symphorien Champier and others. During this period, too, the intermittent French military incursions into Italy certainly had some cultural consequences, although historians no longer attribute to this factor the importance it was once thought to have in the formation of the French Renaissance [see Italian Influences].

The evolution of French culture at this time is in fact by no means wholly dependent on Italy. Northern European humanism, ideally embodied in Erasmus, provides a model for the reconciliation of ancient Greek and Roman wisdom with Christian faith. In 1517 François I^er tried to persuade Erasmus to found a humanist college in Paris; this venture was unsuccessful, but in 1530 François established a group of lecteurs royaux in classical and biblical languages [see Collège De France]. The leading French humanist of François I^er's reign was Budé, who mastered Greek as well as Latin studies and corresponded extensively with Erasmus. It was at this time, too, that Rabelais acquired Greek: his knowledge of the ancient world is an essential element in his comic fiction.

The impact of Renaissance humanism on French vernacular writers had in fact been apparent from the 15th c. onwards: the Rhétoriqueurs, often regarded by literary historians as backward-looking, were in part influenced by the humanist interest in rhetoric. In the second quarter of the 16th c. the translation of Latin, Greek, and Italian texts into French was vigorously promoted by François I^er and his sister Marguerite de Navarre, and French poets made increasing use of classical forms: Clément Marot wrote eclogues, and Scève, in his love-cycle Délie, adapted the Latin epigram form which was especially fashionable among poets of the 1540s. The influence of Petrarchan love-poetry on French poets is another central feature of this period [see Petrarchism]. Délie is the first Petrarchan love-sequence in French, although it was written in dizains, not sonnets; the sonnet-form made its appearance in France at the end of the 1530s, but was not to be widely used until it was made fashionable by the Pléiade.

Meanwhile, prose style was also evolving. Latin was still the primary focus of interest, as in the acrimonious debate over the value of Cicero as a model: Étienne Dolet attacked Erasmus's flexible, eclectic approach in favour of a purist classical aesthetic, but it was Erasmus who was the more widely followed. However, translation of Cicero and other prose-writers into the vernacular ensured that the issue was not limited to learned culture. Translation of biblical texts also raised the question of style; and French was by now being more and more widely used in the public arena—in law, for example, where the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) specified the use of the French language in legal proceedings and court records. Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, of which the first version appeared in Latin in 1536, soon began to appear in French translation, thus becoming the first comprehensive work of theology in French. The medical writer Ambroise Paré also chose French rather than Latin.

One of the most distinctive philosophical emphases of the European Renaissance was an interest in the dialogues of Plato as opposed to the more systematic, logic-based philosophy of Aristotle which had underpinned the thinking of the scholastics. Originating in Florence in the late 15th c., the Neoplatonist movement soon began to find disciples in France. It was transmitted above all by the handbooks of courtly behaviour (Castiglione's The Courtier is the best-known example) which were fashionable in Italy and France in the first half of the 16th c. [see Courtoisie]. These placed woman at the centre of courtly life and proposed a metaphysic and an ethic according to which human love was valued as the first phase of a spiritual ascent towards knowledge of the supreme good. Poets such as Héroët exploited Neoplatonist arguments and images; Marguerite de Navarre, in her Heptaméron, drew rather more cautiously on such ideas in order to explore the problems and potentialities of human relationships. Counter-arguments were also vigorously defended, both by court poets and by some of the characters in the Heptaméron (itself, characteristically, a dialogue). Yet Neoplatonism continued to be an important element in the 16th-c. imagination, at least at the higher social levels, and provided one of the means by which the status of women and their cultural activities could be enhanced. Marguerite de Navarre was only one of several prominent woman writers of the mid-16th c.: the poets Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé, both from Lyon, rivalled the production of male contemporaries such as Scève.

The story of the French Renaissance in the reign of François I^er is closely bound up with religious developments. The Erasmian emphasis on understanding of the biblical texts as well as of the classics was taken up in France from the very beginning of the 16th c. by scholars such as Lefèvre d'Étaples, and the opposition of the Sorbonne to humanist learning was largely conditioned by the theological implications of new readings of scripture. The inter-weaving of these two currents—humanism and Evangelism—is particularly well illustrated by the works of Rabelais, whereas in the circle of Marguerite de Navarre a more ambivalent attitude to the classics is apparent.

The most distinctive artistic achievement of the earlier 16th c. in France was the construction of a number of châteaux. The most ambitious of these was Fontainebleau, but the châteaux of the Loire valley (Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, Chambord, and others) are equally celebrated and better preserved. Unlike the imposing fortified castles of the later Middle Ages, they were designed as elegant pleasure-palaces for the king himself and for members of the court, who enjoyed country pursuits such as hunting; at the same time they were manifestations of royal power and prosperity. Many of their architectural features—such as the staircases at Blois and Azay-le-Rideau—were borrowed from Italy, but these were blended with earlier native structures to form an independent and distinctive style. The châteaux were not only architectural achievements: they were decorated with paintings, sculptures, and tapestries which also exhibit the influence of Italian styles. France also has fine Renaissance churches: Saint-Étienne du Mont, in Paris, has an elegant François I^er interior within a late Gothic structure; particularly striking is the jubé, one of the very few choir screens to have survived in French churches.

3. High Renaissance and Late Renaissance

The accession of Henri II (1547) and the death of Marguerite (1549) represent a major cultural water-shed. The generation of the Evangelicals is all but over; so too is a period in which new literary forms, drafted in from classical antiquity and Italy, cohabited more or less comfortably with native French forms and genres inherited from the later Middle Ages. In the late 1540s a group of younger poets acquired from the humanist scholar Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret a thorough grounding in the poetry of Greece and Rome; in 1552 they joined forces with a similar group studying at the Collège de Boncourt, thus forming what came to be known as the Pléiade. Du Bellay's Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) proclaimed a programme of systematic imitation of ancient and Italian poetry, famously rejecting as ‘vieilles épiceries’ virtually the entire native French tradition. The poetry of Du Bellay, Ronsard, and others thus represents a ‘High Renaissance’ in French literature, naturalizing classical themes and myths and, in the process, forging some of the central tools of French poets for centuries to come (the sonnet, the alexandrine). This is also the period when classicizing tragedy begins to appear on the French scene with Jodelle's Cléopâtre captive (1552-3). These developments were vigorously opposed by Calvinist writers such as Bèze, who saw them as a manifestation of paganism (although there is no reason to take this charge literally).

Neoplatonism continued to be an important element in the literature and thought of this period: the poets of the new generation exploited it in particular for a theory of divine inspiration that assigned dignity and seriousness to their writings. With the coming of the Wars of Religion in the 1560s the mood changes, however, and writers turn to ancient philosophies designed to provide defences against adversity (Neostoicism) or to give scope to metaphysical and epistemological uncertainty (Pyrrhonism); elements of these modes of thought had been known and used by earlier generations, but they now begin to predominate. The Essais of Michel de Montaigne exhibit both trends.

Montaigne, in fact, illustrates with great clarity the character of what may be called the ‘Late Renaissance’ in France. He too had received a humanist education: he was thoroughly familiar with classical Latin literature, quoting it on almost every page he wrote, and he read Greek works in translation (Amyot's translation of the Lives and moral essays of Plutarch profoundly influenced the composition of the Essais). The transposition of this learning into a vernacular medium was also not in itself an innovation. Yet Montaigne takes one aspect of the humanist programme to unprecedented lengths. Both Erasmus and Du Bellay had stressed that the writer should make use of the whole range of classical materials, reworking them and ‘digesting’ them so that they re-emerged in a new and individual form: the first-person singular thus becomes a central organizing principle (Erasmus's letters and Du Bellay's Regrets, many of which are letter-poems, are key examples). In Montaigne's Essais, the perspective of the individual writer becomes so dominant that, especially in its later versions, the book becomes a ‘self-portrait’, anticipating a tradition of secular autobiography which, four centuries later, we still recognize as distinctively modern. It is, no doubt, not an accident that painters cultivated the art of lifelike portraiture in this period: Jean Clouet and his son François are the best-known French examples.

4. Later Developments and Historical Significance

Classical scholarship will continue to be a major aspect of European education and culture until the 20th c. [see Latinity], but, in France at least, the culture of the court and of the higher levels of society increasingly moves, in the 17th c., towards the evolution of forms of expression which avoid the pedantic and the technical. Montaigne is a forerunner of this development; in poetry, a shift away from high-flown rhetoric and from the more arcane forms of classical allusion and mythology will eventually lead poets and theorists (Malherbe, Boileau) to reject out of hand the achievements of the Pléiade.

Understood in terms of a dialogue with classical antiquity, the French Renaissance may thus be charted both as a coherent phenomenon in its own right and as part of a wider cultural complex that includes the baroque and classicism. It should be stressed, however, that it is primarily a phenomenon of learning and of high culture, and that it cannot be safely extended to characterize the history of the period as a whole. Certainly, it is closely linked to—indeed enabled by—wider historical factors such as the economic expansion of the later 15th and the 16th c. and increased travel and trade (not least with the New World); writers like Montaigne help to foster greater cultural relativity and a more secular world-view. But it is now clear that Renaissance humanism was not primarily responsible for the rise in science and technology which was to play such a central role in the centuries that followed, and that pre-Renaissance modes of thought continued throughout the 16th c., not always in unenlightened ways. Renaissance humanists mounted a formidable and highly effective propaganda campaign which it is all too easy to accept as historical fact. Over-simplification may be avoided by treating the Renaissance as part of that broader historical phase now commonly referred to as the ‘early modern period’.

— TC

Bibliography

• W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (1948)
• F. Simone, The French Renaissance (1961; trans. H. G. Hall, 1969)
• P. Burke, The Renaissance (1964)
• A. J. Krailsheimer (ed.), The Continental Renaissance (1971)

The Renaissance is one of the most interesting and disputed periods of European history. Many scholars see it as a unique time with characteristics all its own. A second group views the Renaissance as the first two to three centuries of a larger era in European history usually called early modern Europe, which began in the late fifteenth century and ended on the eve of the French Revolution (1789) or with the close of the Napoleonic era (1815). Some social historians reject the concept of the Renaissance altogether. Historians also argue over how much the Renaissance differed from the Middle Ages and whether it was the beginning of the modern world, however defined.

The approach here is that the Renaissance began in Italy about 1350 and in the rest of Europe after 1450 and that it lasted until about 1620. It was a historical era with distinctive themes in learning, politics, literature, art, religion, social life, and music. The changes from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance were significant, but not as great as historians once thought. Renaissance developments influenced subsequent centuries, but not so much that the Renaissance as a whole can be called "modern."

The Renaissance View of the Renaissance

The term "Renaissance" comes from the Renaissance. Several Italian intellectuals of the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries used the term rinascità ('rebirth or renaissance') to describe their own age as one in which learning, literature, and the arts were reborn after a long, dark Middle Ages. They saw the ancient world of Rome and Greece, whose literature, learning, and politics they admired, as an age of high achievement. But in their view, hundreds of years of cultural darkness followed because much of the learning and literature of the ancient world had been lost. Indeed, Italian humanists invented the concept of the "Middle Ages" to describe the years between about 400 and 1400. Scholastic philosophy, which the Italian humanists rejected, and a different style of Latin writing, which the humanists viewed as uncouth and barbarous, prevailed in the Middle Ages. But Italian humanists believed that a new age was dawning. In the view of the humanists, the painter Giotto (d. 1337) and the vernacular writer and early humanist Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) led the rebirth or Renaissance. Most Italian intellectuals from the mid-fifteenth century on held these views.

Northern Europeans of the sixteenth century also reached the conclusion that a new age had dawned. They accepted the historical periodization of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance and added a religious dimension. Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), the great Dutch humanist, and his followers looked back to two ancient sources for inspiration: the secular learning of ancient Greece and Rome, and Christianity of the first four centuries. The former offered models of literature, culture, and good morality, while the New Testament and the church fathers, such as Sts. Augustine (354–430) and Jerome (c. 347–419/420), combined pristine Christianity with ancient eloquence. But then barbarous medieval culture replaced ancient eloquence, and, in their view, the theological confusion of medieval Scholasticism obscured the message of the New Testament. Erasmus and his followers dedicated themselves to restoring good literature, meaning classical Greek and Latin, and good religion, meaning Christianity purged of Scholastic irrelevance and clerical abuses. They believed that Christians could best live moral lives and attain salvation in the next life by following both Cicero and the New Testament. They believed that there were no real differences between the moral precepts found in the pagans of ancient Greece and Rome and the Bible.

Chronology

A cluster of dates marks the beginning of the Renaissance era. The majority of scholars view the early humanist and vernacular writer Petrarch as the first important figure. He strongly criticized medieval habits of thought as inadequate and elevated ancient ideals and literature as models to emulate. By the period 1400 to 1450 numerous Italian intellectuals agreed with Petrarch's criticism of the Middle Ages and support for a classical revival. The result was the intellectual movement called humanism, which came to dominate Italian Latin schooling, scholarship, ethical ideas, and public discourse and spread to the rest of Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Both contemporaries and modern historians also see the Great Plague of 1348 to 1350, with its huge demographic losses (30 to 50 percent in affected areas) and psychological impact as another dividing point between Middle Ages and Renaissance. Next, a series of major political changes between 1450 and 1500 marked a new political era that was uniquely Renaissance. Spain, France, and England emerged as powerful territorial monarchies in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Their quarrels with each other and interventions in the affairs of smaller states through the next 150 years dominated European politics. Finally, the invention of movable type in the 1450s by Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468) created a break with the medieval past in the production and dissemination of books that was so great that it is difficult to measure. By the end of the year 1470, some nineteen towns had printing presses; by 1500 some 255 towns had presses, and the spread of printing was far greater in the sixteenth century. An efficient system of distribution and marketing spread printed books to every corner of Europe. The greater availability of books had an impact on practically every area of life, especially intellectual and religious life, so immense as to be beyond measurement.

Humanism

Humanism was the defining intellectual movement of the Renaissance. It was based on the belief that the literary, scientific, and philosophical works of ancient Greece and Rome provided the best guides for learning and living. And humanists believed that the New Testament and early Christian authors offered the best spiritual advice.

The nineteenth century invented the term "humanism." But humanism is based on three Renaissance terms. Studia humanitatis meant humanistic studies, which were grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy based on study of the standard ancient authors of Rome and, to a lesser extent, Greece. This is the famous definition presented in 1945 by the eminent historian Paul Oscar Kristeller (1905–1999) and now widely accepted. The Renaissance also used and praised humanitas, an ancient Latin term meaning the good qualities that make men and women human. And the Renaissance invented a new term, humanista. It first appeared in Italian in a University of Pisa document of 1490. By the end of the sixteenth century it had spread to several European vernacular languages and was occasionally used in Latin. A humanista was a student, teacher, or scholar of the humanities.

Humanism became institutionalized in society as a new form of education. Around 1400 a number of Italian pedagogical leaders decided that the traditional medieval curriculum for Latin schools, consisting of studying medieval authors and a few ancient poetic classics, or portions of them, and learning to write formal letters in Latin according to nonclassical rules, was inadequate. They proposed a new curriculum and approach. Pier Paolo Vergerio (c. 1368–1444) wrote the first and most important humanist pedagogical treatise, called De Ingenuis Moribus et Liberalibus Studiis Adulescentiae (On noble customs and liberal studies of adolescents) in 1402 or 1403. He argued that the best way to foster good character, learning, and an eloquent Latin style in speech and writing was to teach humanistic studies. He gave pride of place to history, moral philosophy, and eloquence, a novel emphasis. Boys trained in humanistic studies would be ready to become honorable leaders in society as adults. Vergerio's treatise had enormous resonance: More than one hundred manuscripts can be found in Italian libraries, and Italian presses produced more than thirty incunabular (printed before 1501) editions. It enjoyed similar diffusion in northern Europe.

Humanism was more than skill in Latin. It tried to teach the principles of living a moral, responsible, and successful life on this earth. Parents came to believe that a humanistic education would best prepare their sons, and a few daughters, for leadership positions, such as head of a family, member of a city council, judge, administrator, or teacher. Humanistic studies provided the fundamental education. Training in the specialized disciplines of law, medicine, philosophy, or theology came later for those needing them. By about 1550 the English clergyman, the French lawyer, the German knight, the Italian merchant, and the Spanish courtier shared a common intellectual heritage. They could communicate across national frontiers and despite linguistic differences. They shared a common fund of examples, principles, and knowledge derived from the classics. Humanism brought intellectual unity to Europe.

Humanism also included a sharply critical attitude toward received values, individuals, and institutions, especially those that did not live up to their own principles. The humanists' study of ancient Rome and Greece gave them the chronological perspective and intellectual tools to analyze, criticize, and change their own world. Humanists especially questioned the institutions and values inherited from the Middle Ages. They found fault with medieval art, government, philosophy, and approaches to religion. Once the humanist habit of critical appraisal developed, many turned sharp eyes on their own times. And eventually they turned their critical gaze on the learning of the ancient world and rejected parts of it.

Scientific and Philosophical Learning

Renaissance scholars inherited from the Middle Ages intellectual views and approaches in philosophy, medicine, and science, and challenged almost all of them. In astronomy they inherited a conception of the universe originating in Ptolemy (c. 100 C.E.–c. 170 C.E.) of the ancient world that the sun revolved around the Earth. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) in his De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium (1543; On the revolutions of the heavenly orbs) argued the reverse, that the Earth and other planets revolved around the sun. Despite bitter opposition from both Catholic and Protestant religious authorities, his views prevailed with most astronomers by the early seventeenth century. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) absorbed Aristotelian science and then rejected it in favor of a mathematically based analysis of physical reality, the modern science of mechanics. And along the way he offered evidence that Copernicus's daring view was not just mathematical hypothesis but physical reality. Another mathematical achievement affecting Europe and the rest of the world in future centuries was calendar reform. Renaissance Europe inherited the Julian calendar of ancient Rome, which was ten days in arrears by the sixteenth century. Pope Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–1585) appointed a team of scholars to prepare a new calendar and in 1582 promulgated the Gregorian calendar still used today.

Renaissance medical scholars inherited an understanding of the human body and an approach to healing based on the ancient Greek physician Galen (c. 129–c. 199 C.E.), Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), and medieval Arab medical scholars. But a group of medical scholars called "medical humanists" by modern scholars challenged and altered received medical knowledge. Led by Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524), who taught at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, they applied humanistic philological techniques and ideological criticism to both medieval and ancient medical texts, found them wanting, and proceeded to investigate the human body anew. As a result, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) through his anatomical studies, William Harvey (1578–1657) through his study of the circulation of the blood, and other scholars revolutionized medical research and instruction. Several Renaissance medical scholars gave their names to parts of the body; for example, the eustachian tube between the ear and the nose is named for Bartolomeo Eustachi (1500/10–1574), and the fallopian or uterine tubes are named for Gabriele Falloppia (1523–1562).

Most of the innovative research in science, medicine, philosophy, and law came from universities. The Renaissance saw a great expansion in the number and quality of universities. It inherited twentynine functioning universities from the Middle Ages in 1400, then created forty-six new ones by 1601, losing only two by closure in between. This left Europe with sixty-three universities, more than double the medieval number. Demand for new universities came from several directions. Most important, increasing numbers of men wanted to learn. Society also needed more trained professionals. Monarchs, princes, and cities required civil servants, preferably with law degrees. A medical degree enabled the recipient to become a private physician, a court physician, or one employed by the town. The Protestant and Catholic Reformations stimulated the demand for theology degrees.

Universities provided stipends and other support for scholars. Since the universal language of learning was Latin and the printing press could publish new information, scientific communication was rapid and overcame the religious division of sixteenth-century Europe. University students to a lesser extent also crossed religious frontiers. The adoption of Roman law in central Europe created a demand for lawyers and judges trained in this field, which meant that both Catholic and Protestant Germans continued to study in Italian universities, the centers for the study of Roman law.

Renaissance Politics

Renaissance states had three basic forms of government: princedoms, monarchies, and oligarchies, which the Renaissance called republics.

Princedoms. A prince was an individual, whether called duke, count, marquis, or just signore (lord), who ruled a state, usually with the support of his family. The term "prince" meant the authority to make decisions concerning all inhabitants without check by representative body, constitution, or court. But the source of the prince's power and the nature of his rule varied greatly. He often had displaced another ruler or city council by force, war, assassination, bribery, diplomacy, purchase, marriage, or occasionally because the city invited him in to quell factionalism. Most often a prince came to power through an adroit combination of several of these. Once in control, he promulgated laws of succession to give himself a cloak of legitimacy so that his son or another family member might succeed him. Indeed, some inhabitants of the state would see him as legitimate and be content to be ruled by him.

Princely power was seldom absolute. Most princes depended on some accommodation with powerful forces within the state, typically the nobility or the merchant community. Many small princedoms depended on the good will of more powerful states beyond their borders to survive, and this limited options in foreign policy. And the prince's rule was always uneasy, which was one reason he relied on hired mercenary troops in war, instead of a militia created from his subjects. However achieved, what mattered most was that the prince possessed effective power to promulgate and enforce laws, to collect taxes, to defeat foreign invaders, and to quell rebellion. If the prince commanded the affection and loyalty of his subjects, this made his task easier. Italy and central Europe had an abundance of princedoms, including the states of Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, Parma, Piedmont-Savoy, and Urbino in northern Italy, and Bavaria, Brandenburg, Burgundy, Brunswick-Lüneberg, Luxembourg, the Palatinate, Albertine and Ernestine Saxony, and Württemberg in central Europe.

Monarchies. A monarchy was a princedom sanctioned by a much longer tradition, stronger institutions, and greater claims of legitimacy for its rulers. The majority of monarchies (for example, England, France, Portugal, Scotland, and Spain) were hereditary, while Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Empire were elective. Monarchies typically were larger than princedoms and ruled subjects speaking multiple languages and dialects. Monarchies usually had developed laws and rules that determined the succession in advance. Only when the succession was broken through the lack of a legitimate heir, a bitter dispute within the ruling family, or overthrow by a foreign power was a monarch displaced by another.

Monarchies grew in power and size in the Renaissance. The creation of the dual monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabella of Castile between 1474 and 1479 created a powerful Spain that ruled the entire Spanish peninsula except Portugal, and Portugal as well from 1580 to 1640. The Tudor monarchy of England (three kings and two queens from 1485 to 1603) made England, previously a small, strife-torn, and remote part of Europe, into a major force. After the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War with England (1337–1453), France under the Valois dynasty (ruled 1328 to 1589) became a powerful and rich state. Conflicts between territorial monarchies dominated international politics and war in the Renaissance.

Republics. The smallest and most unusual political unit was the city-state consisting of a major town or city and its surrounding territory of farms and villages. Oligarchies, usually drawn from the merchant elite of the town, ruled republics. Flanked by the professional classes, the merchant community first dominated the commerce of the city. Then in the Middle Ages they threw off the authority of prince, king, or emperor. In their place the merchants created a system of government through interlocking and balanced councils. Large deliberative assemblies, comprising of one hundred, two hundred, or more adult males, elected or chosen by lot, debated and created laws. Executive committees, often six, eight, or a dozen men elected for two to six months, put the laws into action. Short terms of office and rules against self-succession made it possible for several hundred or more adult males to participate in government in a few years. The system of balanced and diffused power ensured that no individual or family could control the city. It was a government of balanced power and mutual suspicion.

Borrowing terminology and legal principles from ancient Roman law and local tradition, the men who formed oligarchies called their governments "republican" and their states "republics." They believed that their rule was based on the consent of the people who mattered. But they were still oligarchies, because only 5 to 20 percent of the adult males of the city could vote or hold office. Members of government almost always came from the leading merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and lawyers. Some republics permitted shopkeepers and master craftsmen to participate as well. But workers, the propertyless, clergymen, and other middle and low groups in society were excluded. Occasionally the laws conceded to them extraordinary powers in times of emergency. Those living in the countryside and villages outside the city walls had neither a role in government nor the right to choose their rulers. Indeed, the city often exploited them financially and in other ways. Venice, Genoa, Lucca, Florence, Pisa, and Siena in Italy, and Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and the Swiss cantons were republics. Some city-state republics were small in comparison with monarchies and princedoms. But the Republic of Venice commanded an overseas empire of considerable size and commercial importance, while Florence's merchants and bankers played a large role in international trade, and the city participated forcefully in Italian politics.

Renaissance Europe presented a constantly shifting political scene. No government escaped external threats and very few avoided internal challenge. The numerous weak small states tempted powerful rulers and states. Despite their eloquent proclamations in defense of the liberty of states and citizens, republics were just as aggressive in conquering their weaker neighbors as were princedoms, while monarchies were always on the watch for another princedom, landed noble estate, or republic to absorb. It was the same within the state. Some powerful group or individual within the state would attempt through force or stealth to take control and change its nature. Many succeeded. The maneuvering for advantage, the shifting diplomatic alliances, plots, threats of war, and military actions made Renaissance politics extremely complex.

Two broad political developments prevailed. Princedoms grew in number and strength, and more powerful states, especially monarchies, absorbed smaller states. Republican city-states became princedoms, as a powerful individual or family within the city took control while maintaining a facade of republican institutions and councils. The gradual transformation of the Republic of Florence into a princedom ruled by members of the Medici family is the classic example. Meanwhile, princedoms fell into the hands of monarchies through military action or dynastic marriages. Three examples will suffice. France and the Habsburgs divided the Duchy of Burgundy between them when its duke, Charles the Bold, was killed in battle in 1477, leaving no male heir; Spain took control of the Kingdom of Naples by military force in 1504; and Spain absorbed the Duchy of Milan as the result of an alliance when the Duke Francesco II Sforza died without an heir in 1535. Strong republics also grew at the expense of their neighbors. The Republic of Venice conquered almost all the independent towns and small princedoms in northeastern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century in its successful drive to create a mainland state. Small states survived at the price of careful neutrality, which avoided giving offense to more powerful neighbors, or by aligning themselves with larger powers. Such alliances came at a price. The small state lacked an independent foreign policy and might itself become a victim if the larger state fell.

Diplomacy and Political Thought

The very complex and ever-shifting political reality stimulated the rapid development of diplomacy. The resident ambassador, that is, a permanent representative of one government to another, was a Renaissance innovation. He went to live in the capital city or court of another state where he conveyed messages between his government and the host government. Or to use the words that Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), the English ambassador to Venice, supposedly wrote in 1604, "a resident ambassador is a good man sent to tell lies abroad for his country's good." Perhaps more important than the messages, or lies, was the information that the resident ambassador and his staff gathered about the host country. Ambassadorial reports full of every kind of information are invaluable sources for modern scholars studying the Renaissance. The reports of papal nuncios and Venetian ambassadors are particularly useful.

The instability of forms of government, the many wars, and the fluidity of international politics stimulated an enormous amount of discussion about politics, including several masterpieces of political philosophy. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), having observed both, wrote about princedoms in his Il principe (The Prince, written in 1513), and on republics in Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the first ten books of Titus Livy, written 1514–1520). Numerous humanists wrote treatises advising a prince or king how he might be a good prince, work for the good of his people, and, as a result, see his state and himself prosper. Erasmus wrote the most famous one, Institutio Principis Christiani (1516; Education of a Christian prince). Jean Bodin (1530–1596) argued that state and society needed the stability that only a sovereign and absolute power can provide, and that this must be the monarchy, in his Six livres de la république (1576; Six Books on the commonwealth; in Latin, 1586).

Vernacular Literature

Vernacular literatures flourished in the Renaissance even though humanists preferred Latin. In 1400 standard English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and other vernaculars did not exist. People spoke and sometimes wrote a variety of regional dialects with haphazard spelling and multiple vocabularies. Nevertheless, thanks to the adoption of the vernacular by some governments, the printing press, and the creation of literary masterpieces, significant progress toward elegant and standard forms of modern vernaculars occurred.

German was typical. German-speaking lands inherited many varieties of German from the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century some state chanceries began to use German instead of Latin. Hence, versions of German associated with the chanceries of more important states, including the East Middle Saxon dialect used in the chancery of the electorate of Saxony, became more influential. Next, printing encouraged writers and editors to standardize orthography and usage in order to reach a wider range of readers. Most important, Martin Luther (1483–1546) published a German translation of the Bible (New Testament in 1522; complete Bible in 1534), which may have had three hundred editions and over half a million printed copies by 1600, an enormous number at a time of limited literacy. And many began to imitate his style. Since he wrote in East Middle Saxon, this version of German eventually became standard German. Literary academies concerned about correct usage, vocabulary, and orthography rose in the seventeenth century to create dictionaries. A reasonably standardized German literary language had developed, though the uneducated continued to speak regional dialects.

Similar changes took place in other parts of Europe, with the aid of Renaissance authors and their creations. In Italy three Tuscan authors, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)—medieval in thought but using Tuscan brilliantly—Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) began the process. Literary arbiters, such as Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) insisted on a standard Italian based on the fourteenth-century Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Major sixteenth-century writers, including Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), and Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), agreed. None of the three was Tuscan, but each tried to write, and sometimes rewrote, their masterpieces in a more Tuscan Italian. Then the Accademia della Crusca (founded in Florence in the 1580s) published a dictionary. Tuscan became modern Italian. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and three English translations of the Bible, that of William Tyndale (printed 1526 and 1537), the Geneva Bible of 1560, and the King James Bible of 1611, had an enormous influence on English. The writers and dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age, particularly Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), did the same for the Castilian version of Spanish.

Art

Art is undoubtedly the best-loved and -known part of the Renaissance. The Renaissance produced an extraordinary amount of art, and the role of the artist differed from that in the Middle Ages.

The Renaissance had a passion for art. Commissions came from kings, popes, princes, nobles, and lowborn mercenary captains. Leaders commissioned portraits of themselves, of scenes of their accomplishments, such as successful battles, and of illustrious ancestors. Cities wanted their council halls decorated with huge murals, frescoes, and tapestries depicting great civic moments. Monasteries commissioned artists to paint frescoes in cells and refectories that would inspire monks to greater devotion. And civic, dynastic, and religious leaders hired architects to erect buildings at enormous expense to beautify the city or to serve as semipublic residences for leaders. Such art was designed to celebrate and impress.

A remarkable feature of Renaissance art was the heightened interaction between patron and artist. Patrons such as Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492) of Florence and popes Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) and Leo X (reigned 1513–1521) were active and enlightened patrons. They proposed programs, or instructed humanists to do it for them, for the artists to follow. At the same time, the results show that they did not stifle the artists' originality. Men and women of many social levels had an appetite for art. The wealthy merchant wanted a painting of Jesus, Mary, or saints, with small portraits of members of his family praying to them, for his home. A noble might provide funding to decorate a chapel in his parish church honoring the saint for whom he was named. Members of the middle classes and probably the working classes wanted small devotional paintings. To meet the demand, enterprising merchants organized the mass production of devotional images, specifying the image (typically Mary, Jesus crucified, or patron saint), design, color, and size. It is impossible to know how many small devotional paintings and illustrated prints were produced, because most have disappeared. Major art forms, such as paintings, sculptures, and buildings, have attracted the most attention, but works in the minor arts, including furniture, silver and gold objects, small metal works, table decorations, household objects, colorful ceramics, candlesticks, chalices, and priestly vestments were also produced in great abundance.

The new styles came from Italy, and Italy produced more art than any other part of Europe. Art objects of every sort were among the luxury goods that Italy produced and exported. It also exported artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who died at the French court.

The ancient world of Rome and Greece, as interpreted by the humanists, greatly influenced Renaissance art. Artists and humanists studied the surviving buildings and monuments, read ancient treatises available for the first time, and imbibed the humanist emphasis on man and his actions and perceptions, plus the habit of sharp criticism of medieval styles.

Stimulated by the ancients, Renaissance artists were the first in European history to write extensively about art and themselves. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) wrote treatises on painting (1435) and on architecture (1452); Raphael wrote a letter to Pope Leo X (c. 1519) concerning art. Giorgio Vasari's (1511–1574) Lives of the Artists (first edition 1550, revised edition 1568) was a series of biographies of Renaissance artists accompanied by his many comments about artistic styles. It was the first history of art. The silversmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) wrote about artistic practices and much more about himself, much of it probably fictitious, in his Autobiography, written between 1558 and 1566.

The social and intellectual position of the artist changed in the Renaissance. The artist began as a craftsman, occupying a relatively low social position and tied to his guild, someone who followed local traditions and produced paintings for local patrons. He became a self-conscious creator of original works of art with complex schemes, a person who conversed with humanists and negotiated with kings and popes. Successful artists enjoyed wealth and honors, such as the knighthood that Emperor Charles V conferred on Titian (Tiziano Vercelli, c. 1488–1576) in 1533.

Society

The Renaissance was a hierarchical age in which the social position of a child's parents largely determined his or her place in society. Yet it was a variegated society, with nobles, commoners, wealthy merchants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, workers, peasants, prelates, parish priests, monks in monasteries, nuns in convents, civil servants, men of the professional classes, and others. It was an age of conspicuous consumption and great imbalances of wealth. But Renaissance society also provided social services for the less fortunate. Ecclesiastical, lay, and civic charitable institutions provided for orphans, the sick, the hungry, and outcast groups, such as prostitutes and the syphilitic ill. Although social mobility was limited, a few humble individuals rose to the apex of society. Francesco Sforza (1401–1466), a mercenary soldier of uncertain origins, became duke of Milan in 1450 and founded his own dynasty. The shepherd boy Antonio Ghislieri (born 1504) became Pope Pius V (reigned 1566–1572).

Unity and Disintegration

Renaissance Europe had considerable cultural and intellectual unity, greater than it had in the centuries of the Middle Ages or would again until the European Economic Union of the late twentieth century. A common belief in humanism and humanistic education based on the classics created much of it. The preeminence of Italy also helped because Italians led the way in humanism, art, the techniques of diplomacy, and even the humble business skill of double-entry bookkeeping.

The prolonged Habsburg-Valois conflict, often called the Italian Wars (1494–1559) because much of the fighting occurred in Italy, and, above all, the Protestant Reformation began to crack that unity. Moreover, many typical Renaissance impulses had spent their force by the early seventeenth century. The great revival of the learning of ancient Greece and Rome had been assimilated, and humanism was no longer the driving force behind philosophical and scientific innovation. Italy no longer provided artistic, cultural, and scientific leadership, except in music, as a group of Florentine musicians created lyric opera around 1600.

Europe began a new age on the eve of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). More powerful monarchies with different policies ushered in a different era of politics and war. Exuberant baroque art and architecture of the seventeenth century were not the same as the restrained, classicizing art of the previous two centuries. Galileo Galilei and René Descartes (1596–1650) discarded Renaissance Aristotelian science in favor of mathematics and mechanics. The universities of Europe were no longer essential for training Europe's elite and hosting innovative research. France would be the military, literary, and stylistic leader of the different Europe of the seventeenth century.

Bibliography

Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile, eds. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1999. See articles on Renaissance authors and genres.

Burns, J. H., ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie. The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.

Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt. Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford and New York, 1992. Excellent one-volume survey.

Elton, G. R. England under the Tudors. 3rd ed. London, 1991. Standard study.

Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. New York, 1948. Classic study of the concept of the Renaissance from the fourteenth century to the twentieth.

Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore and London, 1989. Explains humanistic education.

——. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore and London, 2002. Survey of all sixteen universities and curriculum changes, 1400–1600.

Grendler, Paul F., et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. 6 vols. New York, 1999. Nearly 1,200 articles and 800 illustrations on every aspect of the Renaissance.

Hall, A. Rupert. The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750. 3rd ed. London and New York, 1983. Good survey.

Hardin, James, and Max Reinhart, eds. German Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, 1280–1580. Detroit, 1997.

Hays, Denys, and John E. Law. Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380–1530. London and New York, 1989.

Hirsch, Rudolf. Printing, Selling and Reading, 1450–1550. 2nd printing with a supplemental annotated bibliographical introduction. Wiesbaden, 1974. Excellent short account of the first century of printing.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961. Pioneering account of humanism by the most important twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance.

Lynch, John. Spain under the Habsburgs. Vol. 1, Empire and Absolutism, 1516–1598. Oxford, 1965.

Mattingly, Garrett. Renaissance Diplomacy. Boston, 1955, with many reprints. Classic study not yet superseded.

Mc Farlane, I. D. Renaissance France, 1470–1589. London and New York, 1974. Survey of French literature.

Paoletti, John, and Gary Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy. 2nd ed. New York, 2002.

Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1988. Articles on humanism everywhere in Europe.

Schmitt, Charles B., et al., eds. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., 1988. Comprehensive coverage.

Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. New York, 1985.

Stephens, John. The Italian Renaissance: The Origins of Intellectual and Artistic Change before the Reformation. London and New York, 1990.

Turner, Jane S., ed. Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance and Mannerist Art. 2 vols. New York, 2000. Part of the 34-volume Dictionary of Art (1996).

Wear, A., R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds. The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.

—PAUL F. GRENDLER

The cultural rebirth that occurred in Europe from roughly the fourteenth through the middle of the seventeenth centuries, based on the rediscovery of the literature of Greece and Rome. During the Renaissance, America was discovered, and the Reformation began; modern times are often considered to have begun with the Renaissance. Major figures of the Renaissance include Galileo, William Shakespeare,