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Historical
Background “Renaissance” means
“rebirth”. It usually denotes a wave of cultural changes that swept across
Europe, beginning in Florence and the surrounding Italian city-states in the
fourteenth century and lasting until the middle of the seventeenth century.
The rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature occurred across Europe that
finally led to the development of the humanist movement. Humanists believed
that each individual had significance within society. The growth of an
interest in humanism resulted in the changes in the arts and sciences that
form common idea of the “Renaissance”.
The Renaissance humanists believed that ancient Greece and Rome, where “man
was the measure of all things”, provided models for improving their world.
Although they were Christians, the humanists depended on human intelligence
rather than divine authority to reform and correct the corrupt practices
condemned by critics like
Dante.
In short, these humanists saw the world in increasingly secular terms. Their
reassessment of the power human beings had to shape their world is visible
in paintings of lifelike bodies that resemble the shapes of ancient Greek
and Roman sculpture. Renaissance buildings also indicated a concentration on
the human sphere of earthy activity.
Revolutionary works of art such as these were commissioned by the wealthy
patrons of the Italian city-states, where sophisticated techniques for
making and managing money created powerful secular political leaders. This
new class of entrepreneurs increasingly challenged the old aristocracy whose
inherited wealth was based primarily on land-owning. For instance, the
ruling family of
Florence, the Medici, controlled a great banking firm. The
development of far-flung commercial activity, of new methods of banking and
producing goods, was promoted by the profit motive. New markets and new
resources fostered the great age of exploration that began with the
expeditions of Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394-1460) and ultimately
brought
Columbus to America in 1492 and
Ferdinand Magellan’s ships around
the world in 1512. The profits of the “old world”, however, came at the
expense of the native populations of the “new”, whose ways of life, so
foreign to the European colonizers, seemed devoid of culture to the white
men who “discovered” them.
While explorers found a new world across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,
mathematicians and astronomers encountered a new universe in the skies. New
discoveries upset the traditional medieval picture of the cosmos, which
showed the fixed earth as the center of a finite system. Like the recovery
of the classical past, Islamic culture played an important role in
stimulating the development of Renaissance thought. The Polish astronomer
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), who probably was influenced by the
sophisticated astronomical calculations of Islamic scientists, theorized
that the planets revolved around the sun, not the earth. Later Copernicus’
theory was proved by
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). These scientists typify
Renaissance methodology, which has a mathematical and an empirical base.
The revolutionary changes also took place in the Christian world which was
split into the Catholics and the Protestants in the sixteenth century, when
the first Protestants rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German monk, gradually rejected monasticism and
many of the elements of Catholicism--like the papacy, the priesthood, and
the sacraments--for he believed that such institutions prevented Christians
from directly experiencing the word of God as revealed in the Bible. Because
the Bible was known in the Catholic Middle Ages in a Latin translation, the
work was unintelligible to ordinary churchgoers. Many were not literate at
all who knew only their own vernacular, not Latin, Hebrew, or Greek.
Protestantism was a profoundly literary phenomenon, founded upon an
individual’s reading. Luther’s translation of the Bible and the Mass into
German transformed the religious experience of his contemporaries by
inviting personal participation in church services and by enabling the study
of God’s word.
The Protestant Reformation changed the religious habits of Northern Europe.
The Scandinavian countries, Scotland, and England all broke with Rome. In
France, as in the German and Swiss states, persistent religious wars had
much to do with the establishment of national identity. The English
Renaissance provides an excellent example of how religious conflict
strengthened national identity and dynastic power.
Henry VIII started his
long reign as a conservative Catholic (the Pope even honored him in 1521 as
Defender of the Faith for writing an attack on Martin Luther). But Henry
fell in love with
Anne Boleyn and wanted to be rid of his Spanish queen,
Catherine of Aragon, whose only surviving child was a daughter (Mary Tudor)
and not a son and heir to the throne. For a number of reasons, Henry decided
to sever relations with Rome and found a national church—Anglican Church.
Henry married Anne as soon as his divorce was granted, and a few months
later, became a father again--of another girl. Her name was Elizabeth.
Finally, Henry did have a son, by the third of his six wives; but this boy,
who reigned as
Edward VI, died at the age of fifteen, leaving England in the
hands of his two older sisters. The elder,
Mary Tudor, daughter of a Spanish
Catholic, married a Spanish Catholic,
Philip II of Spain. When she ascended
to the throne of England, she returned the country to Catholicism. Those who
had professed the new Anglican religion were burnt as heretics. When Mary
died, Anne Boleyn's daughter was next in line. With the accession of
Elizabeth I, England became a Protestant country once again.
. In 1588, Philip II of Spain sent a large naval force,
the Spanish Armada,
to attack England in an effort to conquer the country of his deceased wife.
Aided by stormy weather, the English defeated the Spanish fleet and have
ever since regarded the succeeding era of relative stability as a Golden
Age. During the Elizabethan Age the arts, painting, music, and especially
literature, reached new heights; one critic has called the era “the
Shakespearean moment”.
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