Case Study: Renaissance Literature
Medieval man may have lived a life of equal misery and equal joy, but he lived it in servitude to an infinitely superior God. Renaissance man made the agony and the ecstasy his own. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote, “I think the only immoral thing is for a being not to spend every instant of its life with the utmost intensity.”
The period of Renaissance Literature spans some 350 years – from 1300, the year Dante claimed he traveled through hell to understand the nature of sin to 1667 when John Milton tried to understand the nature of man. During that time Europe saw several changes in society, culture, and tradition. In this assignment you will define the main characteristics of Renaissance thought and analyze the portrayal of those characteristics in the literature of the time period.
The period of Renaissance Literature spans some 350 years – from 1300, the year Dante claimed he traveled through hell to understand the nature of sin to 1667 when John Milton tried to understand the nature of man. During that time Europe saw several changes in society, culture, and tradition. In this assignment you will define the main characteristics of Renaissance thought and analyze the portrayal of those characteristics in the literature of the time period.
Guiding Question:
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Philosophies of the Renaissance
Define the four philosophies of the Renaissance →
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Humanism
This term is given to describe the first philosopher-scholars of early Renaissance Florence, underwritten by the Medici family, who reintroduced Plato,Aristotle, Plotinus, and other classical Greek thinkers by importing translators from Byzantium_ For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire Europeans had direct access to the full scope of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, which had been carefully contained throughout the Middle Ages by expurgated "authorized versions" in the hands of Latin monks. At the same time that the writings of the Greeks were rediscovered by western thinkers, archaeologists were digging up original Greek art and its Roman imitations in the neglected ruins of Italy, providing a powerful impetus for a new secularism.
Naturalism and secularism
Although the sacred is never far from consideration in the Renaissance, if only as a stylistic model, reviewing nature with open eyes led to increasing secularism. Abandoning the flat and stylized iconography of the Middle Ages—by which ecclesiastical doctrine so dominated artistic expression that the greatest artworks of medieval times, the cathedrals, are by and large anonymous—artists, following Greek models, celebrated the natural lines of the human body and stamped their private vision, from the sublime to the tortured, on their paintings, drawings, architecture, and sculptures. Because time had erased the color from Greek statuary, serendipitously a paradigm of sublimity and purity was conveyed to the Renaissance discoverers.The vibrant white marble figures of gods and goddesses, men and women. fed into the Renaissance penchant for idealism.
Idealism
The grace achieved by the Middle Ages at its most harmonious is transformed by the Renaissance into humanistic idealism. Propelled by Marsilio Ficino's 1482 translation of Plato's dialogues into Latin, the belief in human perfectibility dominates major expressions, from Pico della Mirandola's "On the Dignity of Man" and Baldassare Castiglione's Courtier to Sir Thomas Elyot's Governour and Sir Thomas More's utopia. Man is capable of defining his own nature, and of fulfilling that nature's noblest potential.The primary tenets of Renaissance idealism included:
• the immortality of the human spirit against the corruptibility of the flesh;
• a vision of the ideal commonwealth presided over by the ideal ruler;
• the concept of intellectual, asexual "Platonic love" as the highest form of bonding between two individuals.
Renaissance idealism often took expression in a literary genre that is the ancestor of motivational how-to books: the "institute" or "curriculum," a dialogue or treatise devoted to laying out the rules for an ideal prince, courtier, governor, teacher, housewife—or accountant.
Individualism
The breakdown of the Church's authority, accelerated by the decadence into which the papacy had fallen, left a vacuum in behavioral standards that was immediately occupied by individual genius as the fulcrum for human definition. Beginning with Dante's autobiographical epic quest and Petrarca's self-defining "Letter to Posterity:" Renaissance thought is characterized by the thinker's awareness, and celebration, of his own importance—until we reach the ultimate philosophical extension of this trend in Rene Descartes' -I think; therefore, I am:' Michelangelo, when told that someone was laying claim to the Pieta, rushed into St. Peter's and carved his name in the marble. But individualism, multiplied, leads to anarchy.The "downside" of the phenomenon is seen in the self-defeating imagination of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the machiavellian cynicism of Shakespeare's Iago, who remarks, while his playacting is destroying his overly trustful master Othello: "I am not what I am" (on a bad day, because we inherited the "modular self from the Renaissance, we might say: "I can relate to that! ). The rise of the middle class, of merchants and shopkeepers and artisans, is the economic manifestation of this tidal wave of individualism,
This term is given to describe the first philosopher-scholars of early Renaissance Florence, underwritten by the Medici family, who reintroduced Plato,Aristotle, Plotinus, and other classical Greek thinkers by importing translators from Byzantium_ For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire Europeans had direct access to the full scope of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, which had been carefully contained throughout the Middle Ages by expurgated "authorized versions" in the hands of Latin monks. At the same time that the writings of the Greeks were rediscovered by western thinkers, archaeologists were digging up original Greek art and its Roman imitations in the neglected ruins of Italy, providing a powerful impetus for a new secularism.
Naturalism and secularism
Although the sacred is never far from consideration in the Renaissance, if only as a stylistic model, reviewing nature with open eyes led to increasing secularism. Abandoning the flat and stylized iconography of the Middle Ages—by which ecclesiastical doctrine so dominated artistic expression that the greatest artworks of medieval times, the cathedrals, are by and large anonymous—artists, following Greek models, celebrated the natural lines of the human body and stamped their private vision, from the sublime to the tortured, on their paintings, drawings, architecture, and sculptures. Because time had erased the color from Greek statuary, serendipitously a paradigm of sublimity and purity was conveyed to the Renaissance discoverers.The vibrant white marble figures of gods and goddesses, men and women. fed into the Renaissance penchant for idealism.
Idealism
The grace achieved by the Middle Ages at its most harmonious is transformed by the Renaissance into humanistic idealism. Propelled by Marsilio Ficino's 1482 translation of Plato's dialogues into Latin, the belief in human perfectibility dominates major expressions, from Pico della Mirandola's "On the Dignity of Man" and Baldassare Castiglione's Courtier to Sir Thomas Elyot's Governour and Sir Thomas More's utopia. Man is capable of defining his own nature, and of fulfilling that nature's noblest potential.The primary tenets of Renaissance idealism included:
• the immortality of the human spirit against the corruptibility of the flesh;
• a vision of the ideal commonwealth presided over by the ideal ruler;
• the concept of intellectual, asexual "Platonic love" as the highest form of bonding between two individuals.
Renaissance idealism often took expression in a literary genre that is the ancestor of motivational how-to books: the "institute" or "curriculum," a dialogue or treatise devoted to laying out the rules for an ideal prince, courtier, governor, teacher, housewife—or accountant.
Individualism
The breakdown of the Church's authority, accelerated by the decadence into which the papacy had fallen, left a vacuum in behavioral standards that was immediately occupied by individual genius as the fulcrum for human definition. Beginning with Dante's autobiographical epic quest and Petrarca's self-defining "Letter to Posterity:" Renaissance thought is characterized by the thinker's awareness, and celebration, of his own importance—until we reach the ultimate philosophical extension of this trend in Rene Descartes' -I think; therefore, I am:' Michelangelo, when told that someone was laying claim to the Pieta, rushed into St. Peter's and carved his name in the marble. But individualism, multiplied, leads to anarchy.The "downside" of the phenomenon is seen in the self-defeating imagination of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the machiavellian cynicism of Shakespeare's Iago, who remarks, while his playacting is destroying his overly trustful master Othello: "I am not what I am" (on a bad day, because we inherited the "modular self from the Renaissance, we might say: "I can relate to that! ). The rise of the middle class, of merchants and shopkeepers and artisans, is the economic manifestation of this tidal wave of individualism,
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