Impact_of_the_Renaissance

The Renaissance was a period of great “realization”, or “rebirth.” Coming out of the middle ages, a time which had caused Europe and Italy to deviate from any form of intellectual or artistic progression; this was a reawakening of society in several areas. The social structure of the renaissance was inherited from that of the middle ages and was separated into three estates; the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate consisting of the peasants and the inhabitants of the towns and cities (p.341). The nobles, making up an average 2-3 percent of the population, experienced a great “reconstruction”; thus, causing only those solidly rooted in their wealth to maintain their place in the aristocracy. Those who remained were expected to adhere to a new set of expectations. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of Courtier expressed the three fundamental attributes of the “perfect courtier” (p.341). “In Castiglione’s hands, the Renaissance ideal of the well developed personality became a social ideal (p.341).” The real progress was pushed by the formation of the middle class. Peasants made up an overwhelming majority of the third estate; however, serfdom was coming rapidly to an end as a “money economy” was introduced. The Bourgeoisie, or the towns’ people, was the true source of change. The craftsmen and the merchants were the most willing to move towards change, because they experienced a great deal more than the nobility and peasantry, and the realized that the world was an ever-changing place. The middle class grew dramatically in numbers, wealth, and prestige; and their ideas, became widely influential. One reason for this is the expansion of trade. People began to take longer voyages and develop better maps; thus enabling them to expand their knowledge of the world beyond what they had already known. As far as the status of the middle class, they were originally despised or looked down upon by the nobility. However, as the need for the exchange between the Bourgeoisie and the nobles increased, so then did their tolerance of the middle class. This period of gestation also gave way to secularism and Individualism in Italy; with significant advances being made in the human mind, or humanism. This movement based its studies on the works of the Ancient Greek and Roman, and studied the humanities of education; thus being, the liberal arts subjects, which up to this point, had been pushed aside and never regarded as a necessity to learn. In Italy, Petrarch is regarded as the “father of humanism.” He was the first intellectual to characterize the middle ages of Europe, as a period of darkness. (p.349) People were now seeking out education and training, and were inspired to create works of their own in the fields of the arts, literature, and in music. And, another hugely important aspect of renaissance, which is pretty much why we are sitting here in this class, was this new “periodization” of history. It is the humanist who created the history writings as we see them today. By secularizing the writing of history, they exercised their newly developed critical reasoning skills to cut out the role of miraculous events in the history records and figure out the reasoning in a more logical fashion. “Medieval historical literature had often portrayed historical events as being caused by God’s active involvement in human affairs.(p.354)” Humanists destabilize the role of divine intervention in history. Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy and History of Florence represent the beginning of “modern analytical history.”(p. 354-355)