Renaissance

Renaissance (rebirth) characterizes the impulse, initiated in Italy, towards improving the contemporary world by discovering and applying the achievement of classical antiquity. The movement was at its strongest from the time of Petrarch (1304–74) through the ‘long 16th cent.’ (1450–1625). ‘Renaissance’ is now generally used to describe the politics, beliefs, philosophy, science, scholarship, discourse, literature, handwriting, printing, painting, engraving, sculpture, architecture, and music of that period. The 20th cent. identified stages of this renaissance (pre- or proto-, early, high, and late), as well as earlier revivals of classical studies (Carolingian, Byzantine, 12th-cent.), and unrelated other ‘renaissances’ (American, Bengal, black).

‘Renaissance’ was first used alone in the 19th cent., though Giorgio Vasari (1550) saw a ‘rinascità delle arti’ in his own time, and Voltaire two centuries later a ‘renaissance des lettres et des beaux-arts’ in Medicean Florence. ‘Renaissance’ tout court, current French in the 1830s and employed in 1842 by Queen Victoria to define a style, was influentially used by Jules Michelet as title for a volume of his Histoire de France (1855). The concept of an epoch marked by ‘the discovery of the world and of man’ was taken up in Jakob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). For Burckhardt the defining emphasis of the Renaissance was secular and individual; the new attitudes he detected in the Italy of that epoch to nature, morality, religion, affairs, art, and literature made him see it as inaugurating the modern era. Some later historians intensified Burckhardt's stress on paganism. Others reacted against it both by indicating continuities with medieval Christianity and by positing earlier renaissances. Post-Burckhardtian valuation of social, economic, and political factors has led to stress on difference in continuity, with classical learning, defence of the active life and of the virtue of possessions seen as coexistent with earlier knowledge and ideals.

The Renaissance discovery of classical antiquity was essentially a revival of learning, which Petrarch believed had dispelled the ignorance which had prevailed since late antiquity. Petrarch's mode of studying and transmitting the Latin classics became the province of the 15th-cent. (h)umanista, or teacher of Latin and Greek (hence ‘humanist’ and, but not until the 19th cent. ‘humanism’). From the 15th cent. onwards, humanist activity spread to other countries. At the turn of the 15th–16th cents. German imperial scholarship claimed a translatio studii parallel with the Carolingian translatio imperii. Later German humanists such as Melanchthon were usually advocates of the Reformation. Greek studies flourished especially in 16th-cent. France.

The English Renaissance was influenced by the Italian indirectly, through France, Burgundy, and the Netherlands, as well as directly. In its earliest phase, the patronage of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), was important; later, under Henry VII, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, after Italian experience, won a reputation for Greek. From about 1500, however, the chief force in English humanism was the concept of pietas literata, or evangelical humanism, associated with Erasmus. The friendship of Erasmus with John Colet and with Thomas More was particularly significant. Colet's St Paul's School was influenced by Erasmus; he and More translated Greek together; his Praise of Folly (1511) was dedicated to More.

England produced no humanist scholar of the first rank, More's Utopia being the finest Latin achievement of its early Tudor phase. Many classical and humanist works were translated into the vernacular, however. A pattern of civility on the Italian model was offered by Sir Thomas Elyot (Book Named the Governor, 1531) and Sir Thomas Hoby (translation of Castiglione's Courtier, 1561). Machiavelli's Prince, known in the 1530s, was printed in Italian at London in the 1580s, as were works by the philosopher Giordano Bruno. Greek studies were notable, from the 1520s especially in association with the Reformation. Erasmus' Greek New Testament with Latin translation (1516–19) was used by Martin Luther for his German New Testament (1521): William Tyndale used both for his English version (1526–34); later reformed English versions, including the Authorized (1611), kept much of Tyndale's language.

A protestant Renaissance poetic tradition embodied by Edmund Spenser, who was also, like John Donne, influenced by Italian Renaissance poetry, poetics, and Neoplatonism, extends to Andrew Marvell and John Milton. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, had earlier introduced Italian lyric forms. In drama, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson were much indebted to the Italo-classic tradition.

The visual arts and architecture of Renaissance England remained predominantly

traditional, in spite of the presence of Italian sculptors and of north European painters such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Rubens, and Van Dyck. The first English architect and designer of international stature was Inigo Jones, the Palladian (1573–1652). Music similarly remained traditional until the flowering of the Italian fashion (1575–1625).

The Renaissance in Scotland was notable for logical and theological studies, and for its connections with French humanism. Its earlier stages produced three of the finest poets of their time in Robert Henryson (d. 1490), William Dunbar (d. c.1515), and Gavin Douglas (d. 1522); Douglas was also the first translator of the whole of Virgil's Aeneid into any British vernacular. George Buchanan (1506–82) won a lasting European reputation as humanist, poet, and historian; he was also tutor to the young James VI and I.

J. B. Trapp

Bibliography

Hale, J. R. , The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 1450–1620 (1993);
Kraye, J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996);
Panofsky, E. , Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1960);
Rice, E. F., Jr., and and Grafton, A. , The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559 (2nd edn. New York, 1994);
Skinner, Q. , The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, i: The Renaissance;
ii: The Reformation (Cambridge, 1978).