Renaissance-rebirth-is the name tradionally bestowed upon the remarkable outpouring of intellectual and artistic energy and talent that accompanied the passage of Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern epoch. Yet “Renaissance” to a large extent was the creation of nineteenth –century scholars who ,looking back on the intense flowering of culture ,sought a name by which to designate it .The term is also often extended to politics and economics.
However applied,the Renaissance raises basic problems for the historian .Some difficulty even arises in deciding when and where the Renaissance began,how far it spread ,and for how long it continued ;that is,questions of chronology are not fully settled.Most scholars accept that the Renaissance startes in Italy around 1300 and continued for three centuries,during which the economic ,intellectual ,and cultural currents flowing from its homeland eventually reached France,the Low Countries,Germany, England ,and also,though with diminished force ,Spain and Portugal. By 1600,with Europe increasingly preoccupied by the great ProtestantCatholic antagonism issuing from the Reformation ,it had virtually ended,giving way to a less integrated culture called baroque and a new approach to classical art.
Few scholars would date the start of the Renaissance later than 1350 .Many argue for two “Renaissances”:one a period of revival based on the old learning and spread through traditional methods;the other a period od innovation in which much new knowledge was generated that would become the foundation of modern thought ,and spread by a new medium ,print—which meant that a far wider community could share in and debate the changes .Still other scholars find three distinct periods to the Renaissance, coinciding roughly with the “three ages of mankind”:youth,maturity, and decline. There was a Renaissance of the twelfth century as well as the greater flowering of the fifteenth century, however the term might be used.
Indeed,debate over what the Renaissance was and when it began is a good example of the entire problem of”periodization”: how the present generation looking back,relates earlier periods to the present through labels,through the notionthat there are watersheds between periods,and through the belief that certain events or inventions clearly distinguish one periodfrom another .The commen error of equating phases in the development of a culture to stages in human life —the use of biological metaphors about birth ,growth,maturity, and death—obscures the way in which most historical development is a tightly woven fabric, each thread carrying equal tension in relation to another,however distinct.
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