Renaissance

Summary of the Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural and scholarly movement which stressed the rediscovery and application of texts and thought from classical antiquity, occurring in Europe c.1400 – c. 1600. The Renaissance can also refer to the period of European history spanning roughly the same dates.
What was the Renaissance?
There remains debate about what exactly constituted theRenaissance. Essentially, it was a cultural and intellectual movement, intimately tied to society and politics, of the late fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, although it is commonly restrictedto just the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is considered to have originated in Italy. Traditionally people have claimed it was stimulated, in part, by Petrarch, who had a passion forrediscovering lost manuscripts and a fierce belief in the civilizing power of ancient thought, and in part by conditions in Florence.

At its core, the Renaissance was a movement dedicated to the rediscoveryand use of classical learning, that is to say knowledge and attitudes from the Ancient Greek and Roman eras. Renaissance literally means ‘rebirth’, and Renaissance thinkers believed the period betweenthemselves and the fall of Rome, which they labelled the Middle Ages, had seen a decline in cultural achievement compared with the earlier eras. Participants intended, through the study of classicaltexts, textual criticism and classical techniques, to both reintroduce the heights of those ancient days and improve the situation of their contemporaries. Some of these classical texts survived onlyamongst Islamic scholars and were brought back into Europe at this time.
The Renaissance Age
“Renaissance” can also refer to the period, c. 1400 – c. 1600. “High Renaissance” generally refers to c.1480 – c. 1520. The era was dynamic, with European explorers “finding” new continents, the transformation of trading methods and patterns, the decline of feudalism, scientific developments such as...