How Was the Renaissance a major turning point in history?

Answer 1

AnswerThe Renaissance (13th-16th centuries) is considered a turning point in history because of how much the world changed. Art changed. Science changed. Medicine changed. People's views on life, government, and politics changed. Education changed. Religion changed. I could go on and on about this.

Also, many important people were born during this time and they made several contributions in the fields listed above.

When you put it all together, the Renaissance was about a thousand years of advances jam packed into about 300 years. Because the people in the Renaissance did what they did, people for hundreds of years later could make the advances that THEY did.

Another point of viewI would agree that the Renaissance was a turning point, and that there were new ideas introduced during the Renaissance, but I would not agree that it was more creative or had more advancements than the Middle Ages. I believe the idea that it did is a matter of perception.

People of the Middle Ages tended to work anonymously and deal with practical issues more than people of the Renaissance. The result is that they were more likely to be forgotten. People of the Renaissance tended to promote themselves and deal with issues of cosmological significance, which created controversy, especially with the Church. The result is that we tend to remember them.

There is a link below to a related question. It deals with a comparison of medieval technology with that of the Renaissance. It compares lists of inventions and other advancements of the two periods. Viewed together, it can be seen that the Middle Ages were not as backward as one might imagine, based on history.

In some ways, the Renaissance represented a decline in science and increase in superstition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the question of witch hunts, which provide an excellent example. Most people think of witch hunts as medieval. They were not. While some medieval countries had laws against the practice of witchcraft, the Carolingian Empire and the Kingdom of the Lombards both defined the belief in witchcraft as legally a superstition, and drew the conclusion that execution of an accused witch was murder and a capital crime. The first inquisitions dealing with witchcraft happened just as the Renaissance was beginning, and the first witch hunts, in which there was a proactive attempt to seek out witches for trial and execution, happened after the Middle Ages ended. There is a link below to an article on witch hunts that deals with this in more detail.

The people of the Renaissance seem also to have been guilty of losing knowledge that was available in the Middle Ages, possibly because they were so interested in promoting themselves by devaluing what had gone before. Among the important advances of the Middle Ages were developments in science that happened in the Muslim world, and the further development of those same ideas in Europe. The Wikipedia article on Islamic Medicine says,

"Like in other fields of Islamic science, Muslim physicians and doctors developed the first scientific methods for the field of medicine. This included the introduction of mathematization, quantification, experimentation, experimental medicine, evidence-based medicine, clinical trials, dissection, animal testing, human experimentation and postmortem autopsy by Muslim physicians, whilst hospitals in the Islamic world featured the first drug tests, drug purity regulations, and competency tests for doctors." (link below)

This medical practice was medieval, and mostly developed in Persia, Egypt, and Spain. It was, however, very influential in the Byzantine Empire, and to a somewhat lesser extent in Western Europe, where the scientific method was further developed by people like Roger Bacon. Somehow, however, the more scientific practice was lost with coming of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, with the result that medicine of the 16th through early 19th centuries medicine seems to be comparatively backward.

I believe the turning point was not in science or understanding, but in the perception of one's own place in the world, decreasing the importance of humility, and increasing the importance of personal reputation. The result is that the history of the Renaissance is easier to study without doing a lot of research to find out how things really happened and who people were.

Answer 2

The Renaissance (13th-16th centuries) is considered a turning point in history because of how much the world changed. Art changed. Science changed. Medicine changed. People's views on life, government, and politics changed. Education changed. Religion changed. I could go on and on about this.

Also, many important people were born during this time and they made several contributions in the fields listed above.

When you put it all together, the Renaissance was about a thousand years of advances jam packed into about 300 years. Because the people in the Renaissance did what they did, people for hundreds of years later could make the advances that THEY did.

by shadab /qais