Renaissance Era Quotes

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it. How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages. ... The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.

This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.

We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era’s creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA.

I think it reflects the extent to which, although the Renaissance is often considered an era of logic and science, it was easily seduced by ancient practices that didn’t include geometry and anatomy, but rather a belief in oracles and mystical traditions. In some ways it was also very”—I paused—“ anti-science. Broad strokes, of course.

On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the new faith on their behalf in a summary manner, that it would be absurd to suppose that any, general acquiescence in the new gospel immediately took place. Indeed, the old beliefs lurked in many neighbourhoods, and even a renaissance of some of them occurred in more than one area. Little by little, however, the Church succeeded in rooting out the public worship of the old pagan deities, but it found it quite impossible to effect an entire reversion of pagan ways, and in the end compromised by exalting the ancient deities to the position of saints in its calendar, either officially, or by usage. In the popular mind, however, these remained as the fairies of woodland and stream, whose worship in a broken-down form still flourished at wayside wells and forest shrines. The Matres, or Mother gods, particularly those of Celtic France and Ireland, the former of which had come to be Romanized, became the bonnes dames of folklore, while the dusii and pilosi, or hairy house-sprites, were so commonly paid tribute that the Church introduced a special question concerning them into its catechism of persons suspected of pagan practice. Nevertheless, the Roman Church, at a somewhat later era, reversed its older and more catholic policy, and sternly set its face against the cultus of paganism in Europe, stigmatizing the several kinds of spirits and derelict gods who were the objects of its worship as demons and devils, whom mankind must eschew with the most pious care if it were to avoid damnation.

As William Bernstein describes in ‘A Splendid Exchange’, ‘The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova.

He thought that Merlin’s art was the last survival of something older and different—something brought to Western Europe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had been other than those we know. It had probably differed from Renaissance Magic profoundly

In his important work on the subject, Stephen Sizer has revealed how Christian Zionists have constructed a historical narrative that describes the Muslim attitude to Christianity throughout the ages as a kind of a genocidal campaign, first against the Jews and then against the Christians.12 Hence, what were once hailed as moments of human triumph in the Middle East—the Islamic renaissance of the Middle Ages, the golden era of the Ottomans, the emergence of Arab independence and the end of European colonialism—were recast as the satanic, anti-Christian acts of heathens. In the new historical view, the United States became St. George, Israel his shield and spear, and Islam their dragon.

Belle's mind populated the castle with royalty from all the eras she could imagine: Recent ones with great powdered wigs and hats in the shapes of fanciful things like ships, great skirts that billowed out, ugly garish makeup on the faces of those who gossiped behind embroidered silk fans. Renaissance rulers with thick curled collars and poison rings, intellect and conspiracy at every dinner. Ancient kings and queens in long, heavy dresses and cloaks, wise looks on their faces and solid gold crowns on their heads, innocents in a world they believed to possess unicorns and dragons, and maps whose seas ran off at the edges, beyond where the tygres were. Of course, maybe around here there were dragons and unicorns. Who knew? They had talking teacups.

[I]n one sense Coismo did represent such a new era — the uomo disarmato without ancestors and without claim to to war-like prowess, indeed even without overt claim to power, would make the poet cast about for some extraordinary formula. And was their feeling quite unjustified, in the face of such a person, that the age of iron had begun to yield to the age of gold — albeit in a slightly different sense? To quote Professor Jacob's relazione on that very point: "The Europe of chivalry had gone, the armies were paind and the risks of war calculated in financial terms." No wonder that Cosimo, in Giovanni Avogadro's eulogy, is made to say: "Si num vincunt, hercle est fas vincere nobis" — "If money can conquer, by jingo we shall". It is a thoroughly unheroic picture. But this is precisely the aspect of the Renaissance which Professor C. Backuis so aptly characterized as "civism".

People's imaginations have continued to work, right up to our own day; hence the incredible crop of fanciful allegations attributing to the Templars every kind of esoteric rite and belief, from the most ancient to the most vulgar, every variety of alchemical or magical knowledge, all kinds of initiation and affiliation rituals, those already in existence at the time and those yet to be conceived—in a word, all the "secrets" devised the slake the thirst for mystery inherent in human nature. This thirst, by a kind of instinctual reaction, seems never to be stronger than in those eras when people appear to reject all mysteries: let us recall that it was in Descartes' own day that trials for witchcraft were most numerous; that it was at the beginning of the rationalistic eighteenth century that Freemasonry was born; that our own scientific twentieth century is equally the century in which sects have proliferated, occultism has undergone a renaissance, and so on.

For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.

It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection. Though human dissection was an accepted practice in the Renaissance-era anatomy class, most professors shied away from personally undertaking it, preferring to deliver their lectures while seated in raised chairs a safe and tidy remove from the corpse and pointing out structures with a wooden stick while a hired hand did the slicing. Vesalius disapproved of this practice, and wasn’t shy about his feelings. In C. D. O’Malley’s biography of the man, Vesalius likens the lecturers to “jackdaws aloft in their high chair, with egregious arrogance croaking things they have never investigated but merely committed to memory from the books of others. Thus everything is wrongly taught,…and days are wasted in ridiculous questions.

After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.

Terry Jones' Barbarians is about all those peoples whom the Romans wrote off as uncivilized, but it's also a chance to take a look at the Romans themselves from an alternative point of view – from the point of view of the people they trashed. And as such it fits into a thesis we've been banging on about in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives and in Terry's radio series The Anti-Renaissance Show. That thesis is that we've all been sold a false history of Rome that has twisted our entire understanding of our own history – glorifying (and glossing over) a long era of ruthless imperial power, celebrating it for the benefit of Renaissance tyrants and more modern empires, and wildly distorting our view of the so-called 'Middle Ages

We must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty. The long patience, the strength, the secret cunning such service calls for are the virtues that establish the very renaissance we need. One word more. This undertaking, I know, cannot be accomplished without dangers and bitterness. We must accept the dangers: the era of chairbound artists is over. But we must reject the bitterness. One of the temptations of the artist is to believe himself solitary, and in truth he hears this shouted at him with a certain base delight. But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all. This is where art, against its enemies, justifies itself by proving precisely that it is no one’s enemy.

The word caste, which has become synonymous with India, did not, it turns out, originate in India. It comes fro mthe Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for 'race' or 'breed,' The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions. Thus, a word we now ascribe to India actually arose from Europeans' interpretations of what they saw; it sprang from the Western culture that created America.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim.

And spend they did. Money circulated faster and spread wider through its communities of use than at any other time in economic history.8 Workers labored fewer days and at higher wages than before or since; people ate four meals a day; women were taller in Europe than at any time until the 1970s; and the highest percentage on record of business profits went to preventative maintenance on equipment. It was a period of tremendous growth and wealth. Meanwhile, with no way of storing or growing value with this form of money over the long term, people made massive investments in architecture, particularly cathedrals, which they knew would attract pilgrims and tourists for years to come. This was their way of investing in the future, and the pre-Renaissance era of affluence became known as the Age of Cathedrals. The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place. Peasants all worked the land in return for enough of their own harvest on which to subsist. Feudal lords did not participate in the peer-to-peer economy facilitated by local currencies, and by 1100 or so, most or the aristocracy’s wealth and power was receding. They were threatened by the rise of the merchant middle class and the growing bourgeois population, and had little way of participating in all the sideways trade. The wealthy needed a way to make money simply by having money. So, one by one, each of the early monarchies of Europe outlawed the kingdom’s local currencies and replaced them with a single central currency. Instead of growing their money in the fields, people would have to borrow money from the king’s treasury—at interest. If they wanted a medium through which to transact at the local marketplace, it meant becoming indebted to the aristocracy.

Se eu estiver certo, o homem de gênio de então se encontrava em uma situação muito diferente daquela do seu sucessor moderno. Hoje, um homem assim, muitas vezes, ou até usualmente, sente-se confrontado com uma realidade, cuja significância ele não pode conhecer; ou com uma realidade que não tenha significância alguma; ou até com uma realidade tal que a própria questão, se tiver um sentido, é, em si, uma questão sem sentido. O objetivo para ele é, por sua própria sensibilidade, descobrir o sentido; ou com base em sua própria subjetividade, atribuir sentido ou ao menos uma forma para aquilo que, por si mesmo, não possui alguma dessas características. Mas o Modelo de universo de nossos ancestrais tinha uma significância embutida. E isso em dois sentidos: como tendo uma "forma significativa" (trata-se de um projeto admirável) e como manifestação da sabedoria e bondade de quem o criou. Não havia necessidade de despertá-lo para a beleza ou a vida. Para sermos mais enfáticos, o nosso problema não era o vestido de noiva, nem a mortalha. A perfeição alcançada já estava lá. A única dificuldade era de lhe dar uma resposta adequada.

As sete artes liberais Atribuir a um currículo educacional um lugar no modelo do Universo pode parecer um absurdo à primeira vista; e seria um absurdo se os medievais tivessem tido o mesmo sentimento, a esse respeito, que temos quanto às matérias dos programas de ensino de hoje. Acontece que esse programa era tido como imutável; o número sete é numinoso; as Artes Liberais, por uma prescrição longa, haviam alcançado um status semelhante ao da própria natureza. As Artes, e também as Virtudes e os Vícios, eram personificados. A Gramática, com sua palmatória, está assentada com olhar altivo nos claustros de Magdalen. Dante no Convivia faz um entalhe cuidadoso das artes na estrutura do cosmo. A Retórica, por exemplo, corresponde a Vênus, pelo único motivo de que ela é "a mais amável de todas as disciplinas", soavissima di tutte le altre scienze. A Aritmética é como o Sol, pois, na medida em que este fornece luz para todas as demais estrelas, ela também fornece luz a todas as outras ciências, e como nossa visão fica turvada pela ação de sua luz intensa, da mesma forma nossa inteligência fica perplexa com a infinidade de números. E assim ocorre com as outras [matérias] (li, xiii),

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

The year 1944 was the year of the greatest burdens in this mighty struggle. It was a year that again proved conclusively that the bourgeois social order is no longer capable of braving the storms of the present or of the coming age. State after state that does not find its way to a truly social reorganization will go down the path to chaos. The liberal age is a thing of the past. The belief that you can counter this invasion of the people by parliamentary-democratic half-measures is childish and just as naive as Metternich’s methods when the national drives for unification were making their way through the nineteenth century. The lack of a truly social, new form of life results in the lack of the mental will to resist not only in the nations but also in the lack of the moral power of resistance of their leaders. In all countries we see that the attempted renaissance of a democracy has proved fruitless. The confused tangle of political dilettantes and military politicians of a bygone bourgeois world who order each other around is, with deadly certainty, preparing for a plunge into chaos and, insofar as Europe is concerned, into an economic and ethnic catastrophe. And, after all, one thing has already been proved: this most densely populated continent in the world will either have to live with an order that gives the greatest consideration to individual abilities, guarantees the greatest accomplishments, and, by taming all egotistical drives, prevents their excesses, or states such as we have in central and western Europe will prove unfit for life, which means that their nations are thereby doomed to perish! In this manner-following the example of royal Italy-Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary collapsed during this year. This collapse is primarily the result of the cowardice and lack of resolve of their leaders. They and their actions can be understood only in light of the corrupt and socially amoral atmosphere of the bourgeois world. The hatred which many statesmen, especially in these countries, express for the present German Reich is nothing other than the voice of a guilty conscience, an expression of an inferiority complex in view of our organization of a human community that is suspicious to them because we successfully pursue goals that again do not correspond to their own narrow economic egotism and their resulting political shortsightedness. For us, my German Volksgenossen, this, however, represents a new obligation to recognize ever more clearly that the existence or nonexistence of a German future depends on the uncompromising organization of our Volksstaat, that all the sacrifices which our Volk must make are conceivable only under the condition of a social order which clears away all privileges and thereby makes the entire Volk not only bear the same duties but also possess the same vital rights. Above all, it must mercilessly destroy the social phantoms of a bygone era. In their stead, it must place the most valuable reality there is, namely the Volk, the masses which, tied together by the same blood, essence, and experiences of a long history, owe their origin as an individual existence not to an earthly arbitrariness but to the inscrutable will of the Almighty. The insight into the moral value of our conviction and the resulting objectives of our struggle for life give us and, above all, give me the strength to continue to wage this fight in the most difficult hours with the strongest faith and with an unshakable confidence. In such hours, this conviction also ties the Volk to its leadership. It assured the unanimous approval of the appeal that I was forced to direct to the German Volk in a particularly urgent way this year. New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades Fuhrer Headquarters, January 1, 1945

As dimensões do universo medieval não são tão facilmente percebidas, ainda hoje, quanto a sua estrutura; em meu próprio tempo de vida, um cientista distinto ajudou a disseminar um erro. 14 O leitor deste livro já deve estar sabendo que a Terra era, a julgar por padrões cósmicos, um pontinho - de nenhuma magnitude significativa. E como o Somnium Scipionis nos ensinou, as estrelas eram maiores do que ela. Isidoro já sabia no século VI que o Sol é maior, e a Lua, menor do que a Terra. (Etymologies, III, xlvii-xl- viii); Maimônides,15 no século XII, sustenta que cada estrela é noventa vezes maior; Roger Bacon, no século XIII, declara que a menor estrela é "maior" do que ela. 16 Quanto às estimativas da distância, contamos com a sorte de ter o testemunho de uma obra completamente popular, Lendas do Sul da Inglaterra, uma prova melhor do que qualquer produção pesquisada, em favor do Modelo, como ele existia no imaginário de pessoas comuns. Diz-se ali que se um homem fosse capaz de viajar para o alto, numa velocidade de quarenta milhas17 e um pouco mais por dia, ele ainda assim não conseguiria alcançar o Stellatum ("o mais alto céu que jamais se viu") em oito mil anos. 18 Esses fatos são em si curiosidades de interesse medíocre. Eles se tornam acessíveis, apenas à medida que nos permitem penetrar mais fundo na consciência dos nossos ancestrais, dando-nos conta de como um universo assim deve ter afetado aqueles que acreditavam nele. A receita para tal compreensão não é o estudo de livros. Você terá de sair numa noite estrelada e caminhar por aproximadamente meia hora, tentando examinar o céu em termos da velha cosmologia. Lembre-se de que agora você tem um "para cima" e um "para baixo" absolutos. A Terra é, de fato, o centro, o lugar mais baixo; o movimento para chegar a ela, de qualquer direção que seja, é um movimento para baixo. Como homem moderno, você localizava as estrelas a uma grande distância. Agora terá de substituir essa distância por um tipo de distância muito especial e muito menos abstrata chamada altura; Os Céus 1 103 que fala imediatamente aos nossos músculos e nervos. O Modelo Medieval é vertiginoso. E o fato de que a altura das estrelas na astronomia medieval é muito pequena comparada às distâncias modernas acabará se manifestando como não tendo o tipo de importância que você supunha. Para o pensamento e a imaginação, dez milhões de milhas e um bilhão são a mesma coisa. Ambas podem ser concebidas (isto é, podemos fazer contas com ambas) e nenhuma delas pode ser imaginada; e quanto mais imaginação tivermos, melhor deveríamos saber disso. A diferença realmente importante é que o universo medieval, ao mesmo tempo que era inimaginavelmente grande, também era indubitavelmente finito. E um resultado inesperado disso foi o de fazer com que a pequenez da Terra fosse sentida com mais vivacidade. Em nosso Universo ela é pequena, sem dúvida; mas as galáxias e tudo o mais também são - e daí? Mas para eles havia um padrão finito de comparação. A esfera celeste mais alta, o maggior corpo de Dante, era tão simples e finalmente o maior objeto existente. A palavra "pequeno" aplicada à Terra assume, então, uma significância bem mais absoluta. Repito, pelo fato de o universo medieval ser finito, ele adquire uma forma, a forma perfeitamente esférica, que contém em si uma diversidade ordenada. Consequentemente, olhar para fora numa noite escura com olhos modernos é como olhar para o mar, que vai minguando num dia de nevoeiro; ou olhar para uma floresta virgem - infindáveis árvores sem nenhum horizonte. Vislumbrar o universo medieval altaneiro é mais como visualizar um prédio bem alto. O "espaço" da astronomia moderna pode infligir terror, espanto ou um vago devaneio; as esferas celestes dos medievais nos apresentam um objeto no qual a mente pode repousar, impressionando por sua grandeza, mas satisfazendo por sua harmonia. Esse é o sentido pelo qual o nosso universo é romântico, e o deles era clássico.

What caused the cultural shifts of the ’60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.

and Mrs. William Hayes Fogg. New gifts from Forbes and others were so numerous by 1912 that plans were made for a new museum adjacent to Harvard Yard on Quincy Street. As director, Forbes conceived of the new Fogg as a laboratory of learning, accommodating galleries, lecture halls, curatorial offices, conservation, and a research library all under the same roof. He closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to-day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then-extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was

She had difficulty accepting adultery despite its prevalence among high-born men of the era.

But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

To sum up: Western history consists of four major eras: 1) classical antiquity, then 2) the Dark Ages when the church dominated, followed by 3) the Renaissance-Enlightenment which led the way to 4) modern times. For several centuries that has been the fundamental organizing scheme for every textbook devoted to Western history,9 despite the fact that serious historians have known for decades that this scheme is a complete fraud—“an indestructible fossil of self-congratulatory Renaissance humanism.”10

Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over.

the Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for “race” or “breed.” The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions.

The interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003) has seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognize the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. Firstly, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never-ending civil wars. Secondly, the reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and fourth generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq War of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator in the Asia Times. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US Army conducted the campaign in accordance with the principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned.

He was attractive and he knew it, but he pretended he had no idea. Therefore he was both vain and disingenuous. Tall, or so he seemed to Jess, he looked Italian with his dark skin and dark eyes. Very old- again, from Jess's point of view- where anyone past thirty harked back to another era altogether. Despite his years, George had a powerful body, a broad chest, a face of light and shade, a glint of humor even in his frown. When he wasn't lobbing his sarcastic comments, he seemed scholarly and peaceful, like a Renaissance St. Jerome at work in his cave of books. All he needed was a skull on his desk and a lion at his sandaled feet. He wore T-shirts, jeans, rimless reading glasses, sometimes tweed jackets. He had the deep didactic voice of a man who had smoked for years and then suddenly quit and now hated smokers everywhere. He never watched television, and he never tired of telling people so. But the most pretentious thing about him was his long hair. With his chestnut locks of threaded gray, he was a fly caught in amber, the product and exemplar of a lost world.

Sofonisba, so that you can protect yourself and your reputation. First, never contradict your betters. Avoid possessing any unflattering information about them unless you can utilize it. And don’t explain yourself to your inferiors. When your image is secure, your freedom will be too.” In addition to the hospitality and the duchess’ advice on court behavior, Sofonisba devoured the court’s spectacular art collection. With Master Clovio she toured the palace collection, which contained works by the best artists of the era. She stopped in front of a portrait of

Now for the arresting part: by this measure, the golden age of the Egyptian pharaohs—an era that strikes most of us as impossibly remote from our own—took place a scant thirty-five lifetimes ago. Jesus was born about twenty lifetimes ago, and the Renaissance happened seven lifetimes back. A paltry five centenarian lifetimes ago, Henry VIII sat on the English throne. Five! As Magee observed, the number of lives you’d need in order to span the whole of civilization, sixty, was “the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party.” From this perspective, human history hasn’t unfolded glacially but in the blink of an eye. And it follows, of course, that your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either side.

Also known as the English Renaissance, the Elizabethan era was the golden age of English literature. This time period, which ran approximately from 1558 to 1603, was an unparalleled era of growth and quality of the written word, characterized by the development of the novel, new and lasting innovations in poetry, and new styles of theater

Unlike central Europe Muscovy had little exposure to the influence of the Renaissance or the Reformation. It took no part in the maritime discoveries or the scientific revolutions of the early modern era.

You are never descendants of an event You are not descendants of an era or a renaissance You are not descendants of Holocaust You are not descendants Slavery or Slavocaust You are not descendants of Wars

You are never descendants of an event You are not descendants of an era or a renaissance You are not descendants of Holocaust You are not descendants of Slavery or Slavocaust You are not descendants of Wars

The sumptuary laws of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance eras were attempts to define the social meaning of attire. These laws were a response to new social mobility and instability that came with economic prosperity.

Did the girls know, the guide asked, that the Mona Lisa was a real woman, one who had lived and breathed and smiled at Leonardo da Vinci himself? That Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, would become an icon, an embodiment of ideal beauty, a symbol of the Italian Renaissance itself? That the man who painted her would become one of the most famous names in history? That the painter captured not just a woman sitting, hands quietly folded, but an entire era in one portrait?

The Scientific Revolution (1500s–1600s) The Scientific Revolution was an extension of the Renaissance-era shift from finding truth in religion to finding truth in logical reasoning and the Reformation’s drive to question authority and think for oneself. These factors led to the development of the scientific method, which improved humanity’s understanding of the world, establishing protocols by which scientific discoveries could be investigated and proven and ushering in many discoveries that raised living standards.

Dalla scoperta di quella necessità che fatalmente riduceva l'uomo a niente, si è passati alla contemplazione sprezzante di questo nulla che è l'esistenza stessa. Il terrore di fronte a questo limite assoluto della morte si interiorizza in una continua ironia; lo si disarma in anticipo; lo si rende esso stesso derisorio, dandogli una forma quotidiana dominata, rinnovandolo ad ogni istante nello spettacolo della vita, disseminandolo nei vizi, le stranezze e il ridicolo di ognuno. L'annientamento della morte non è più niente perché era già tutto, poiché la vita non è essa stessa che fatuità, vane parole, strepito di sonagli e di scettri della follia. La testa che sarà cranio è già vuota. La follia è l'anticipo della morte. Ma è anche la sua presenza sconfitta, schivata in questi indizi di ogni giorno, che, annunziando che essa regna già, indicano che la sua preda sarà un ben magro bottino. Ciò che la morte smaschera non è nient'altro che maschera; per scoprire il ghigno dello scheletro, è bastato sollevare qualcosa che non era né verità né bellezza, ma soltanto volto di gesso e d'orpello. Lo stesso sorriso si è trasmesso dalla maschera vana al cadavere. Ma quello che troviamo nel riso del folle è che egli ride in anticipo del riso della morte; e l'insensato, presagendo il macabro, l'ha disarmato. Le grida di Margot la Folle trionfano, in piena Renaissance, di quel Trionfo della Morte cantato alla fine del Medioevo sulle mura del Camposanto pisano. La sostituzione del tema della follia a quello della morte non segna una rottura ma piuttosto una torsione all'interno della stessa inquietudine. E' sempre in causa il nulla dell'esistenza, ma questo nulla non è più considerato come termine esterno e finale, allo stesso tempo una minaccia e una conclusione; è sentito dall'interno, come la forma continua e costante dell'esistenza. E mentre un tempo la follia degli uomini consisteva nel non vedere la che la morte si avvicinava e bisognava richiamarli alla saggezza attraverso lo spettacolo della morte, ora la saggezza consisterà nel denunciare dappertutto la follia, nell'insegnare agli uomini che essi non sono già niente di più che dei morti, e che se il termine è vicino, lo è nella misura in cui la follia, diventata universale, non sarà più che una sola cosa con la morte stessa.

The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.

Having been a Ship’s Captain, a Naval Officer a Mathematics & Science Teacher, most people would believe that my primary interests would be directed towards the sciences. On the other hand, those that know me to be an author interested in history, may believe me to be interested in the arts. University degrees usually fall into the general category of Art or Science. It’s as if we have to pick sides and back one or the other team…. With my degree in Marine Science I am often divided and pigeon holed into this specific discipline or area of interest. One way or the other, this holds true for most of us but is this really true for any of us. As a father I can certainly do other things. Being a navigator doesn’t preclude me from driving a car. Hopefully this article does more than just introduce Cuban Art and in addition gives us all good reason to be accepted as more than a “Johnny One Note.“ My quote that “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage” hopefully opens doors allowing that we be defined as a sum of all our parts, not just a solitary or prominent one. As it happens, I believe that “Just as science feeds our intellect, art feeds our soul.” For the years that Cuba was under Spanish rule, the island was a direct reflection of Spanish culture. Cuba was thought of as an extension of Spain's empire in the Americas, with Havana and Santiago de Cuba being as Spanish as any city in Spain. Although the early Renaissance concentrated on the arts of Ancient Greece and Rome, it spread to Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries. The new interest in literature and art that Europe experienced quickly spread to Cuba in the years following the colonization of the island. Following their counterparts in Europe, Cuban Professionals, Government Administrators and Merchants demonstrated an interest in supporting the arts. In the 16th century painters and sculptors from Spain painted and decorated the Catholic churches and public buildings in Cuba and by the mid-18th century locally born artists continued this work. During the early part of the 20th century Cuban artists such as Salvador Dali, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso introduced modern classicism and surrealism to Europe. Cuban artist Wilfred Lam can be credited for bringing this artistic style to Cuba. Another Cuban born painter of that era, Federico Beltran Masses, known to be a master of colorization as well as a painter of seductive images of women, sometimes made obvious artistic references to the tropical settings of his childhood. As Cuban art evolved it encompassed the cultural blend of African, European and American features, thereby producing its own unique character. One of the best known works of Cuban art, of this period, is La Gitana Tropical, painted in 1929, by Víctor Manuel. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, during the early 1960’s, government agencies such as the Commission of Revolutionary Orientation had posters produced for propaganda purposes. Although many of them showed Soviet design features, some still contained hints of the earlier Cuban style for more colorful designs. Towards the end of the 1960’s, a new Cuban art style came into its own. A generation of artists including Félix Beltran, Raul Martinez, Rene Mederos and Alfredo Rostgaard created vibrantly powerful and intense works which remained distinctively Cuban. Though still commissioned by the State to produce propaganda posters, these artists were accepted on the world stage for their individualistic artistic flair and graphic design. After bringing the various and distinct symbols of the island into their work, present day Cuban artists presented their work at the Volumen Uno Exhibit in Havana. Some of these artists were Jose Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso, Lucy Lippard, Ana Mendieta and Tomas Sanchezare. Their intention was to make a nationalistic statement as to who they were without being concerned over the possibility of government rep

As he rose in stature over the next forty years to become one of the most influential scientists of all time, Isaac Newton took it upon himself to substantiate Boyle’s color law: light is white is standard. In 1704, a year after he assumed the presidency of the Royal Society, Newton released one of the most eminent books of the modern era, Opticks. “Whiteness is produced by the Convention of all Colors,” he wrote. Newton created a color wheel to illustrate his thesis. “The center” was “white of the first order,” and all the other colors were positioned in relation to their “distance from Whiteness.” In one of the foundational books of the upcoming European intellectual renaissance, Newton imaged “perfect whiteness.”29

At the end of 1785, Mozart once again shifted his focus. He moved away from the rapid and voluminous composition of piano concertos and longed to return to writing operas. He had written Die Entführung aus dem Serail only three years prior, but despite its raging success throughout Europe, he had little motivation to return to operatic writing until he met Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte was a true Renaissance Man—not only was he a Roman Catholic priest, he was a successful poet, and most importantly, an opera librettist. Throughout Da Ponte’s life, he would write the libretti for 28 operas from 11 different composers, Mozart among them. Da Ponte was responsible for the libretti for three of Mozart’s most prolific opera in the modern era—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte.

But the most impressive Markov warriors and Siren Servers are not at Google or Amazon or Facebook. They reside at a little-known but astonishingly successful company transforming the world of finance. The real Markovian masters of the universe run a venture in Setauket, Long Island, called Renaissance Technologies. It is the Google-era titan of finance and investment.

Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.

hose watching Isabella process through the cold streets of Segovia could not know that they were witnessing the first steps of a queen destined to become the most powerful woman Europe had seen since Roman times. ‘This queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years,’ one awestruck visitor from northern Europe would eventually proclaim, admiring the fear and loyalty she provoked among the lowliest of Castilians and the mightiest of Grandees.4 This was not hyperbole. Europe had limited experience of queens regnant, and even less of successful ones. Few of those who followed Isabella have had such a lasting impact. Only Elizabeth I of England, Archduchess María Theresa of Austria, Russia’s Catherine the Great (outshining a formidable predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth) and Britain’s Queen Victoria can rival her, each in their own era. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving legacies that would be felt for centuries. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving Only Isabella did this by leading a country as it emerged from the troubled late middle ages, harnessing the ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to start transforming a fractious, ill-disciplined nation into a European powerhouse with a clear-minded and ambitious monarchy at its centre. She was, in other words, the first in that still-small club of great European queens. To some she remains the greatest.

This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.

By 1340, in other words, renaissance was so far advanced that it had become visible. Historical eras are never recognizable when they begin; they can only be seen in hindsight. The Renaissance, as the following chapters will show, was rooted in the twelfth century.

Pubic hair, on the other hand, was much admired during the Renaissance and among some, if not all Tudors. The slang words for pubic hair during the era included ‘feathers’, ‘fleece’, ‘flush’, ‘moss’, ‘plush’, ‘plume’, and, interestingly, ‘the admired abode’.

The three sisters would come of age in an era now known as the American Renaissance, when arts and ideas flourished in an environment of intellectual freedom made possible by the new Republic and its visionary Constitution. Boston,