Renaissance Period Quotes

I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?" "Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers." "Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books." "You're fantastic." "I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge. The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.

The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthropos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.

although scholars have long called this period the Renaissance, this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance – a birth. For the first time in history, Europe lay at the heart of the world.

The witch-burnings did not take place during the “Dark Ages,” as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, “men’s” minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular “Enlightenment,” in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.

Idumea

There is a remarkable degree of consistency in the way mediaeval literature affirms humanity. With all its faults, humanity emerges as more realistic than heavenly ideals. ...... Because the mediaeval period is seen from our own times as historically distant, 'behind' the Renaissance with all the changes which that period brought, it has been undervalued for its own debates, developments and changes. The fact that mediaeval times have been revisited, re-imagined and rewritten, especially in the Romantic period, has tended to compound the ideas of difference and distance between this age and what came after. But in many ways the mediaeval period presages the issues and concerns of the Renaissance period and prepares the way for what was to come.

In fact, the age of the Tyrants is the scene of a religious renaissance which on all sides throws up new ecstatic confessions of faith, new secret cults and new sects; but at first these develop underground and do not as yet reach the light of art. Thus we no longer find art being commissioned and stimulated by religion, but, on the contrary, we find in this period religious zeal being inspired by the increased skill of the artist.

Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things.99 It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans.100 I have already101 stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.

No single English intellectual symbolises the idea of Renaissance man more than Bacon. He wrote on aspects of law, science, history, government, politics, ethics, religion and colonialism, as well as gardens, parents, children and health. The key work for appreciating the width of his interests is his Essays, originally published in 1597, and enlarged twice before his death. These meditations, often only a page long, give a remarkable insight into the thought of the period.

Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape. And neither poets nor artists were much interested in the strict illusionism of later periods. The relative size of objects in the visible arts is determined more by the emphasis the artist wishes to lay upon them than by their sizes in the real world or by their distance. Whatever details we are meant to see will be shown whether they would really be visible or not.

These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the "technical" proportions and the "objective;" the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those "eurhythmic" adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.

During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.

Two literary figures bridge the gap between the mediaeval age and the Renaissance. They are Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D'Arthur, and the first 'poet-laureate', John Skelton. In their entirely separate ways, they made distinctive contributions to the history of literature and to the growth of English as a literary language. ........ Le Morte D'Arthur is, in a way, the climax of a tradition of writing, bringing together myth and history, with an emphasis on chivalry as a kind of moral code of honour. The supernatural and fantastic aspects of the story, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are played down, and the more political aspects, of firm government and virtue, emphasised. It was a book for the times. The Wars of the Roses ended in the same year as Le Morte D'Arthur was published. Its values were to influence a wide readership for many years to come. There is sadness, rather than heroism, in Arthur's final battle.. ...... John Skelton is one of the unjustly neglected figures of literature. His reputation suffered at the hands of one of the earliest critics of poetry, George Puttenham, and he is not easily categorised in terms of historical period, since he falls between clearly identified periods like 'mediaeval' and 'Renaissance'. He does not fit in easily either because of the kinds of poetry he wrote. But he is one of the great experimenters, and one of the funniest poets in English.

There is no earlier period in the history of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately (we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence from classical Athens). It is not for more than a millennium, in the world of Renaissance Florence, that we find any

I’m late.” He blinked and glanced instinctively at his wrist, where he usually wore his watch. Despite her anxiety, Cali snickered. “Not late like that. My period is late.” He blinked again, but was otherwise frozen in place. His expression was unreadable and it made Cali’s heart sink a little.

A society that values order above all else will seek to suppress curiosity. But a society that believes in progress, innovation and creativity will cultivate it, recognising that the enquiring minds of its people constitute its most valuable asset. In medieval Europe, the enquiring mind – especially if it enquired too closely into the edicts of Church or state – was stigmatised. During the Renaissance and Reformation, received wisdoms began to be interrogated, and by the time of the Enlightenment, European societies started to see that their future lay with the curious, and encouraged probing questions rather than stamping on them. The result was the biggest explosion of new ideas and scientific advances in history. The great unlocking of curiosity translated into a cascade of prosperity for the nations that precipitated it. Today, we cannot know for sure if we are in the middle of this golden period or at the end of it. But we are, at the very least, in a lull. With the important exception of the internet, the innovations that catapulted Western societies ahead of the global pack are thin on the ground, while the rapid growth of Asian and South American economies has not yet been accompanied by a comparable run of indigenous innovation. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, has termed the current period ‘the great stagnation’.

Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift. If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor. Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names. As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world. And the present moment is perfectly transparent. It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .

For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus’, the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium.

Original sin is a self-initiating act because it evidences human free will. If humanity were devoid of free will, it would relegate humankind to living by instinct. A person who lives by instinct might survive for an enviable period, but they will never live a heroic existence. Every hero’s story commences with an unsatisfied and optimistic person venturing out from the comfortable confines of their common day world, facing forces of fabulous power, and fighting a magnificent personal battle. The greatest traditional heroes were warriors whom survived on the battlefield and learned valuable lessons of honor, love, loyalty, and courage. Heroic warriors and spiritual seekers undertook a rigorous quest, an enduring ordeal that enabled them to transcend their own personhood’s shallow desire merely to survive. By enduring hardships, experiencing breathtaking encounters with the physical world, and undergoing a spiritual renaissance, the hero gains a hard-won sense self-discovery, comprehends his or her place in society, and accepts their role as a teacher. A hero is a bearer of light, wisdom, and charity. The hero reenters society and shares their culmination of knowledge by devoting their life to teaching other people.

Hence we may, with proper precautions, regard a certain humility as the overall characteristic of medieval art. Of the art; not always of the artists. Self-esteem may arise within any occupation at any period. A chef, a surgeon, or a scholar, may be proud, even to arrogance, of his skill; but his skill is confessedly the means to an end beyond itself, and the status of the skill depends wholly on the dignity or necessity of that end. I think it was then like that with all the arts. Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims. Perhaps they might not all have fully agreed with the statement that poetry is infima inter omnes doctrinas.17 But it awoke no such hurricane of protest as it would awake today. In this great change something has been won and something lost. I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation18 which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.

The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. I

they were the age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilisation.

The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no ‘value vacuums’ in human history, no ‘intermediary periods’, only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.

Within a few moments he was immersed in his work. The evening before, he had caught up with the routine of his classwork; papers had been graded and lectures prepared for the whole week that was to follow. He saw the evening before hm, and several evenings more, in which he would be free to work on his book. What he wanted to do in this new book was not yet precisely clear to him; in general, he wished to extend himself beyond his first study, in both time and scope. He wanted to work in the period of the English Renaissance and to extend his study of classical and medieval Latin influences into that area. He was in the stage of planning his study, and it was that stage which gave him the most pleasure—the selection among alternative approaches, the rejection of certain strategies, the mysteries and uncertainties that lay in unexplored possibilities, the consequences of choice…. The possibilities he could see so exhilarated him that he could not keep still.

The medieval period based its scriptural exegesis upon the Vulgate translation of the Bible. There was no authorized version of this text, despite the clear need for a standardized text that had been carefully checked against its Hebrew and Greek originals. A number of versions of the text were in circulation, their divergences generally being overlooked. It was not until 1592 than an 'official' version of the text was produced by the church authorities, sensitive to the challenges to the authority of the Vulgate by Renaissance humanist scholars and Protestant theologians.

In truth, France. Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and England had nothing to do with Athens and the history of Rome from its earliest days to its demise. This was glossed over as artists, writers and architects went to work, borrowing themes, ideas and texts from antiquity to provide a narrative that chose selectively from the past to create a story which over time became not only increasingly plausible but standard. So although scholars have long called this period the Renaissance, this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance - a birth. For the first time in history, Europe lay at the heart of the world.

During the period of the Renaissance, the English language changed very swiftly in keeping with rapid social, economic and political changes. However, writers in particular soon came to realise that the vocabulary of the English language did not always allow them to talk and write accurately about the new concepts, techniques and inventions which were emerging in Europe. At the same time a period of increasing exploration and trade across the whole world introduced new words, many of which had their origin in other languages. Historians of the language have suggested that between 1500 and 1650 around 12,000 new words were introduced into English.

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time. Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished. The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening - and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

Like Keats he may wander through the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the galley’s deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since passed away. But the drama is the meeting-place of art and life; it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social man, with man in his relation to God and to Humanity. It is the product of a period of great national united energy; it is impossible without a noble public, and belongs to such ages as the age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at Athens; it is part of such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek after the defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of the Armada of Spain.

Depending on which flavor of academic scholarship you prefer, that age had its roots in the Renaissance or Mannerist periods in Germany, England, and Italy. It first bloomed in France in the garden of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1780s. Others point to François-René de Chateaubriand’s château circa 1800 or Victor Hugo’s Paris apartments in the 1820s and ’30s. The time frame depends on who you ask. All agree Romanticism reached its apogee in Paris in the 1820s to 1840s before fading, according to some circa 1850 to make way for the anti-Romantic Napoléon III and the Second Empire, according to others in the 1880s when the late Romantic Decadents took over. Yet others say the period stretched until 1914—conveniently enduring through the debauched Belle Époque before expiring in time for World War I and the arrival of that other perennial of the pigeonhole specialists, modernism. There are those, however, who look beyond dates and tags and believe the Romantic spirit never died, that it overflowed, spread, fractured, came back together again like the Seine around its islands, morphed into other isms, changed its name and address dozens of times as Nadar and Balzac did and, like a phantom or vampire or other supernatural invention of the Romantic Age, it thrives today in billions of brains and hearts. The mother ship, the source, the living shrine of Romanticism remains the city of Paris.

In a conservative courtly culture an artist of his (Rembrandt's) kind would perhaps never made a name for himself at all, but, once recognized, he would probably have been able to hold his own better than in liberal middle-class Holland, where he was allowed to develop in freedom, but which broke him when he refused to submit any longer. The spiritual existence of the artist is always in danger; neither an authoritarian nor a liberal order of society is entirely free from peril for him; the one gives him less freedom, the other less security. There are artists who feel safe only when they are free, but there are also such as can breathe freely only when they are secure. The seventeenth century was, at any rate, one of the period furthest removed from the ideal of synthesis of freedom and security.

The Italian Renaissance was reflected in him as rarely a period has been expressed in the life-work of a single man. He represented its union of practice and theory, of thought placed in the service of action. He summed up its different aspects in his own individuality. Intellectually, he represented its many-sidedness attained through penetration of thought, and a keenness of observation, profiting from experience, extended into every sphere. As an artist he possessed a vigour of imagination from which sprang his power of creating beauty. But, in spite of his practical nature, he remained a dreamer in an age which had in it more of stern reality than of golden dreams. His very limitations, his excess of individualism, his want of long-continued concentration, his lack of patriotism, his feeling of the superiority of art to nationality, are all characteristic of Renaissance Italy.

The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with King Charles II, it replaced Cromwell's Commonwealth and its Puritan ethos with an almost powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed in France. It replaced the power of the monarchy with the power of a parliamentary system - which was to develop into the two parties, Whigs and Tories - with most of the executive power in the hands of the Prime Minister. Both parties benefited from a system which encouraged social stability rather than opposition. Above all, in systems of thought, the Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-taking intellectual values of the Renaissance. It relied on reason and on facts rather than on speculation. So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new kind of society. This society was Protestant (apart from the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, 1685-88), middle class, and unthreatened by any repetition of the huge and traumatic upheavals of the first part of the seventeenth century. It is symptomatic that the overthrow of James II in 1688 was called The 'Glorious' or 'Bloodless' Revolution. The 'fever in the blood' which the Renaissance had allowed was now to be contained, subject to reason, and kept under control. With only the brief outburst of Jacobin revolutionary sentiment at the time of the Romantic poets, this was to be the political context in the United Kingdom for two centuries or more. In this context, the concentration of society was on commerce, on respectability, and on institutions. The 'genius of the nation' led to the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 - 'for the improving of Natural Knowledge'. The Royal Society represents the trend towards the institutionalisation of scientific investigation and research in this period. The other highly significant institution, one which was to have considerably more importance in the future, was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.

The storm of revolution,’ as Andre Chenier said, ‘blows out the torch of poetry.’ It is not for some little time that the real influence of such a wild cataclysm of things is felt: at first the desire for equality seems to have produced personalities of more giant and Titan stature than the world had ever known before. Men heard the lyre of Byron and the legions of Napoleon; it was a period of measureless passions and of measureless despair; ambition, discontent, were the chords of life and art; the age was an age of revolt: a phase through which the human spirit must pass, but one in which it cannot rest. For the aim of culture is not rebellion but peace, the valley perilous where ignorant armies clash by night being no dwelling-place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear, untroubled air. And soon that desire for perfection, which lay at the base of the Revolution, found in a young English poet its most complete and flawless realisation.

Everything that capitalism and fascism and the rest were designed to balance or manage—supply, demand, production, capital, labor, debt, scarcity, logistics—isn’t so much contorting as evolving into forms we have literally never experienced as a species. We are entering a period of extreme transformation, with our strategic, political, economic, technological, demographic, and cultural norms all in flux at the same time. Of course we will shift to a different management system. Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been “more” on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings. Between the demographic inversion and the end of globalization, we are not simply ending our long experience with more, or even beginning a terrifying new world of less; we face economic free fall as everything that has underpinned humanity’s economic existence since the Renaissance unwinds all at once.

Furthermore, Kauffman felt that it might ultimately be possible to apply these ideas far beyond the economy. "I think these kinds of models are the place for contingency and law at the same time," he says. "The point is that the phase transitions may be lawful, but the specific details are not. So maybe we have the starts of models of historical, unfolding processes for such things as the Industrial Revolution, for example, or the Renaissance as a cultural transformation,a nd why it is that an isolated society, or ethos, can't stay isolated when you start plugging some new ideas into it." You can ask the same thing about the Cambrian explosion: the period some 570 million years ago when a world full of algae and pond scum suddenly burst forth with complex, multicellular creatures in immense profusion. "Why all of a sudden do you get all this diversity?" Kauffman asks. "Maybe you had to get to a critical diversity to then explode. Maybe it's because you've gone from algal mats to something that's a little more trophic and complex, so that there's an explosion of processes acting on processes to make new processes. It's the same thing as in an economy.

Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.

We saw that the period of the Middle Ages was dominated by Scholasticism, that is, the reason which becomes autonomous, reason which is placed above faith. And this reason, as Kireyevsky very well saw, in the nineteenth century when he was criticizing the West from the Orthodox point of view, very quickly turned against Christianity. First it was supposed to be the handmaiden of faith and serve Christianity and prove all the dogmas of faith and prove a great many other things also based upon authority, the authority both of Scripture, of some early Fathers, mostly Augustine, and Aristotle, since it was believed that Aristotle had the true view of nature. But in the age of the Renaissance, this reason turned against religion. Because if it’s [reason is] autonomous, it’s able to develop its own principles; there’s no reason why it should be bound to the religious content. And also we saw in the Middle Ages that the great movements — Francis and Joachim — were very monastically, ascetically oriented. But in the Renaissance, there was a complete reaction against that. And again, this simple matter of the context in which the new ideas arose changed; and therefore no longer were people interested in either monasticism or having reason serve theology. And so we find in this period that the idea of monasticism and asceticism is treated extremely negatively, because the interest in the world has now been awakened.

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.

Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the labourer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it;... And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way. The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy. Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the labourer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it;... And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way. The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy. Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

Chapter 1, “Esoteric Antiquarianism,” situates Egyptian Oedipus in its most important literary contexts: Renaissance Egyptology, including philosophical and archeological traditions, and early modern scholarship on paganism and mythology. It argues that Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies are better understood as an antiquarian rather than philosophical enterprise, and it shows how much he shared with other seventeenth-century scholars who used symbolism and allegory to explain ancient imagery. The next two chapters chronicle the evolution of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, including his pioneering publications on Coptic. Chapter 2, “How to Get Ahead in the Republic of Letters,” treats the period from 1632 until 1637 and tells the story of young Kircher’s decisive encounter with the arch-antiquary Peiresc, which revolved around the study of Arabic and Coptic manuscripts. Chapter 3, “Oedipus in Rome,” continues the narrative until 1655, emphasizing the networks and institutions, especially in Rome, that were essential to Kircher’s enterprise. Using correspondence and archival documents, this pair of chapters reconstructs the social world in which Kircher’s studies were conceived, executed, and consumed, showing how he forged his career by establishing a reputation as an Oriental philologist. The next four chapters examine Egyptian Oedipus and Pamphilian Obelisk through a series of thematic case studies. Chapter 4, “Ancient Theology and the Antiquarian,” shows in detail how Kircher turned Renaissance occult philosophy, especially the doctrine of the prisca theologia, into a historical framework for explaining antiquities. Chapter 5, “The Discovery of Oriental Antiquity,” looks at his use of Oriental sources, focusing on Arabic texts related to Egypt and Hebrew kabbalistic literature. It provides an in-depth look at the modus operandi behind Kircher’s imposing edifice of erudition, which combined bogus and genuine learning. Chapter 6, “Erudition and Censorship,” draws on archival evidence to document how the pressures of ecclesiastical censorship shaped Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies. Readers curious about how Kircher actually produced his astonishing translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions will find a detailed discussion in chapter 7, “Symbolic Wisdom in an Age of Criticism,” which also examines his desperate effort to defend their reliability. This chapter brings into sharp focus the central irony of Kircher’s project: his unyielding antiquarian passion to explain hieroglyphic inscriptions and discover new historical sources led him to disregard the critical standards that defined erudite scholarship at its best. The book’s final chapter, “Oedipus at Large,” examines the reception of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies through the eighteenth century in relation to changing ideas about the history of civilization.

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.

We mean to say that Symbolism and Decadence — the negative attitude to which is indisputable to everyone except the "participants" — are genetically connected with everything brilliant and sublime created by the "unbound personality" during this period of time, from the Renaissance up to the development of electrical engineering; contrariwise, the border which they cannot cross is laid down where man understood that he was always "bound." The great continent of history, the continent of real deeds, practical needs, and more than all that, of received religion and the established Church - that is whose shore this stinking monster can never crawl into, that is where we are fleeing to from it, that is where man can always save himself. Where the monastery wall rises this surge of the faithless waves of history — no matter how strong it may become and how far it may spread around — will stop and fall back. ("On Symbolists & Decadence")

Properly speaking, the Renaissance is not a period but a people, moreover, a people without a boundary, and therefore without an enemy. The Renaissance is not against anyone. Whoever is not of the Renaissance cannot go out to oppose it, for they will find only an invitation to join the people it is.

According to you, ‘a functional society is one which is dominated by external mediation’10 Is contemporary Western society functional, given that it is dominated by internal mediation? A functional society is one whose institutions work without being constantly disrupted by violence. For instance, in traditional Indian society, this is defined through the concept of dharma, which basically means the strict separation of castes, and as a result a society in which everybody does what they are ordained to do.11 Therefore, a functional society according to external mediation is a hierarchical, traditional one. In the West, we have something special: we have outgrown the dharma definition of social order and we have a society that can be stable without strict internal hierarchical structure. Of course one must see this from the point of view of the mimetic theory and as the result of a historical process. A type of external mediation still ruled in the Western Middle Ages, and in terms of dharma, namely, the social and religious order, the hierarchical order, it could be defined as a functional society. The dissolution of this dharma probably took place in the period that extends from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. As a matter of fact, the Middle Ages cannot be said to be entirely ‘traditional’ either, since on the one hand, they were chaotic (in a pre-Christian way); and on the other, there was the disintegration of a certain type of order, which probably dominates up to a point in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then breaks down. Above all, there was the constant threat of scarcity of goods, a decisive factor in bringing about mimetic crises. Nowadays there is a stability which is no longer based on dharma, and which must inevitably be based on the Judaeo-Christian principle of the individual who dominates his/her own violent impulses.

Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.

In short, the period during which the main conditions of life for the vast majority of men have been subject to repeated and revolutionary changes had not even begun until the Renaissance and the great voyages, and did not assume anything like the accelerated pace which we now take for granted until well into the nineteenth century. Under these circumstances, there is no use in looking anywhere in earlier history for parallels to the successful inventions of the steam engine, the steamboat, the locomotive, the modern smelting of metals, the telegraph, the transoceanic cable, the introduction of electric power, dynamite and the modern high explosive missile, the airplane, the electric valve, and the atomic bomb. The inventions in metallurgy which heralded the origin of the Bronze Age are neither so concentrated in time nor so manifold as to offer a good counter-example.

Self directed scholarship has an aesthetic dimension. For a long time I had on the wall of my study the following quote by Jacques Le Goff, the great French medievalist, who believes that the Renaissance came out of independent humanists, not professional scholars. He examined the striking contrast in period paintings, drawings and renditions that compare Medieval university members and humanists: “One is a professor surrounded and besieged by huddled students. The other is a solitary scholar, sitting in the tranquility and privacy of his chambers, at ease in the spacious and comfy room where his thoughts can move freely. Here we encounter the tumult of schools, the dust of classrooms, the indifference to beauty in collective workplaces,There, it is all order and beauty,Luxe, calme et volupté

Isabella did not lack for occupation, and had plenty of projects between the embellishment of her art collection and, during Francesca’s absences, the running of Mantua. The worsening situation as Cesare Borgia greedily took the weaker Romagnal states, as well as there being two French invasions, had left Isabella as regent of her husband’s small but important state for much of her married life. During that critical period, which required supreme diplomacy, she feared that her husband, a creature not gifted with the necessary slippery talents, could cause real harm to the couple and their state with one of his ill-tempered and overly frank outbursts.

A caricature of this result,” Butterfield adds, “is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion.”14

Printing Revolution,” and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.

At the same time, the new riches provoked in them a desire for luxury, parties, and immoral behavior. This lifestyle is a forerunner of the Renaissance and of the Baroque period.

Periodic revivals of Plato's and Aristotle's ideas made a great impact on the church and pagan societies in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and on much of today's culture. These ideas have been mass marketed. Many have eaten of these men's fruit, not realizing the roots of what they were taught. The ideas of these men have insidiously clouded the clear understanding of the Bible for many, setting us up to view women as an inferior, subordinate "other".

It has been the thesis of this book that freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an “individual,” but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual’s potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously. Freedom has reached a critical point where, driven by the logic of its own dynamism, it threatens to change into its opposite. The future of democracy depends on the realization of the individualism that has been the ideological aim of modern thought since the Renaissance. The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The problem of production is solved—in principle at least—and we can visualize a future of abundance, in which the fight for economic privileges is no longer necessitated by economic scarcity. The problem we are confronted with today is that of the organization of social and economic forces, so that man—as a member of organized society—may become the master of these forces and cease to be their slave.

To his audience at John Flaxman’s home Taylor spoke of Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster and the ‘perennial philosophy’, the ‘primal wisdom’ of the ancients which Plato had imbibed from the sages who preceded him. Taylor was a one-man Platonic Academy, doing for the esoteric intelligentsia of late eighteenth century London what Marsilio Ficino did for the artists and poets of Renaissance Florence, with his Latin translations of the lost books of Plato and the Hermetica.55 Taylor believed that this primal wisdom was ‘coeval with the universe itself; and however its continuity may be broken by opposing systems, it will make its appearance at different periods of time, as long as the sun himself shall continue to illumine the world’.

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

we may observe several things in the early church that we have forgotten, distorted or misunderstood to our loss—supremely the position and power of the Holy Spirit—and we should always be quick to learn from them and gain from such rediscoveries. But as a period neither that age, nor any other age before our own, is the decisive model or standard for us. The only perfect model and the sole decisive standard is Jesus himself—his character, his teaching, his commands and his endorsement of the authority of the Scriptures to his followers.

In October, Louise showed several new paintings at the Panoras Gallery on Fifty-Sixth Street. During this period, she painted nudes, interiors, several versions of MacDuff, many portraits, at least two paintings set in public buses, and other New York street-life subjects. Her stylized figures were often inspired by random encounters and eavesdropping. Observing underdogs and outsiders in action, she was drawn to faces and to cityscapes and to a style that incorporated storytelling and allegory. Louise’s new work was influenced by the scene painting of the Works Progress Administration and Mexican muralists; by Käthe Kollwitz and German expressionists like Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele; by Alice Neel, Francis Bacon, and other portraitists—and, to an increasing extent, by medieval tapestries and frescoes by Bolognese Renaissance artists such as Pellegrino Tibaldi. Louise kept working to reveal the lives behind the faces she portrayed—their backstory—and began to introduce some southern imagery from her own memories. She was fascinated by the story beneath the surface and whatever metaphysical qualities she could draw from the depths of her subject.

I realize that not every day will be a great day, but every day is an opportunity to get closer to where I want to be, whether I’m motivated or not,

In our context, this means that the practicing complex of the early bios theoretikós constantly has to be examined together with the formation of mental attitudes through the new conquest of reality by the written word. The primary mode of “looking” is unmistakably co-conditioned by the European mode of reading. For Europeans, the world and the book began to be mutually analogous early on. This configuration held fast over a period of more than two thousand years and first changed with Renaissance painting, when the world and panel painting revealed a new equivalence. The cartography of the modern age also played its part in abolishing the book-world analogy by elevating globes and maps to being the main media of the pragmatic worldview.

The term “Renaissance man” is something we use today to describe a polymath, a person whose expertise is not limited only to one area but who knows many subjects. This polymath would use his vast knowledge to solve elaborate and complex problems. A Renaissance man never limited himself just to poetry, science, or architecture. Instead, he would gather many abilities and use them to serve humanity.

In fact, the conception of a brutal medieval period was an invention of the Renaissance, whose proponents were at pains to emphasize a new spirit, even at the expense of the facts. If a benighted medieval world has proven a durable misconception, it may be because it confirms a cherished contemporary belief—that our species always moves forward to ever better and more enlightened ways of life. This belief is utter fantasy, but it dies hard. It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

Within the time span of a single generation surrounding the year 1500, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their many masterworks of the High Renaissance, revealing the birth of the new human as much in da Vinci's multiform genius and the godlike incarnations of the David and the Sistine Creation of Adam as in the new perspectival objectivity and poietic empowerment of the Renaissance artist; Columbus sailed west and reached America, Vasco da Gama sailed east and reached India, and the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe, opening the world forever to itself; Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg castle church and began the enormous convulsion of Europe and the Western psyche called the Reformation; and Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory and began the even more momentous Scientific Revolution. From this instant, the human self, the known world, the cosmos, heaven and earth were all radically and irrevocably transformed. All this happened within a period of time briefer than that which has passed since Woodstock and the Moon landing. (p. 4)

The Renaissance (1300s–1600s) A new way of thinking, in many respects modeled after the ancient Greeks and Romans, started in Italian city-states around 1300 and passed through Europe until the 1600s, in a period known as the Renaissance.

Historians now agree that, relatively speaking, the years 1000 to 1300 in Europe—the period traditionally called the “High Middle Ages”—were prosperous and productive.

Science became important in this period because man, being set free from Orthodox tradition, turned his attention to the outer world. This attention to the outer world sometimes took forms which were notoriously pagan and immoral. But this worldly interest was also expressed in the rise of industry and capitalism and in the movement of exploration — discovery of America and so forth — these movements which were to change the face of the earth in future centuries. This one might speak of as the kind of leaven of worldliness which would penetrate the whole world and give the tone to today’s world which totally lacks the traditional Orthodox sense of the fear of God, and in fact is possessed by triviality. Protestantism is full of this tone which can be observed by looking at the behaviour of any Protestant minister to compare it with the behaviour of an Orthodox priest. The Catholic priest also has this same worldly tone, worldly spirit; and Orthodox priests who are losing the savour of Orthodoxy enter into this very same light-minded, jazzy, up-to-date feeling which is the influence of worldliness, which makes possible such a thing as Disneyland and those things which any sane person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and, above all, in traditional Christian civilization, would have regarded as some kind of madness.

Wouldn't it be nice to return to some of the old theories? Soul and body? The four humours?' 'Oh, they never worked.' 'Of course they did. Everything works in its own period. Don't you think that people were cured by medieval doctors, soaking up black melancholy bile with white salpetre? We could no more use their remedies than they could use ours, but they did work once. That's what you have to remember. Of course some people say that they might work again.

For well over a thousand years, from about A.D. 500 to 1700, the civilizations of western Africa flourished. Most of us know nothing about them. During the same period, Europe suffered from constant warfare and only slowly recovered its lost glory. The history of the “Dark Ages” and the Renaissance is taught in every school. Most of Africa’s history, except for that of Egypt, remains unknown to general readers.

Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton—and, later, a young Marshall McLuhan—saw in distributism a definitive answer to the failures of both capitalism and state socialism.6, 7, 8 They looked to that same brief moment in the late Middle Ages we’ve been exploring, when the market was in ascendance and former peasants were making and trading things, as the best example of the ideal economic system. Wealth was relatively widely dispersed, and people had a great deal of control over their livelihoods. They had access to the commons, to a low-cost marketplace, and to their own currencies and credit systems. Craftspeople belonged to trade guilds that both bounded their investment of labor and allowed for the advancement of skills to successive generations. The former peasants of this period became so collectively wealthy that they used their surplus profits to build cathedrals and municipal projects as investments in the future. The centralization of power by the aristocracy and the great Renaissance that followed, according to all three popes, were less a pinnacle of human achievement than an undeserved celebration of dehumanizing technologies, economic injustice, colonial slavery, and an increasingly mechanized approach to life. In distributism, they saw a way to bring back what had been forcibly left behind by the industrial age and the rise of Protestant values that were, not coincidentally, much more directed toward personal achievement, individual wealth, and progress. But

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards.

But it is the personal synthesis of elements taken from a wide variety of historical styles and periods that most strongly links the church music with Vaughan Williams’s output as a whole. This can be observed anywhere but is perhaps best illustrated by the Mass, a work whose neo-Tudor associations have obscured awareness of a wider eclecticism. Techniques favoured by sixteenth-century English church musicians – false relations, fauxbourdon-like textures, contrasts between soloist(s) and the full choir – are indeed present, but they are combined with others – canon and points of imitation, sectional division of the text (articulated by textural contrasts), emphasis on the church modes – that were the lingua franca of the period, common to English and continental music alike. Even these Renaissance techniques are but a ‘starting-point’32 for what is clearly a highly personal essay, however.

The Catholic Church’s policy of blaming women and sex for the ills of the world came to full fruition in the late Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. At minimum, hundreds of thousands of innocent women and men were hunted down, tortured horribly, reduced to physical, social, and economic wreckage, or burnt at the stake for being “witches”. The Catholic Church, so obsessed with it’s paranoid, irrational, illogical, and superstitious fantasies, deliberately tortured and executed human beings for a period of three hundred years. All this carnage, due to the Church's fear of learning, kept Europe in the throws of abysmal ignorance for a thousand years. What has been lacking in the world since the fall of the ancient world is a logical view of the godhead. To the Greek and Roman mind the gods were utilitarian; that is they offered convenient place to appreciate human archetypes. Sin and redemption from sin had nothing to do with the gods. The classic Greek and Roman gods did not offer recompense in life nor a heavenly afterlife as reward. Rather morality was determined by your service to humanity whether it was in the form of philosophy, science, art, architecture, engineering, leadership, or conquest. In this way humanity could live up to great potential instead of wasting their energy on worship, and false promises For almost a thousand years after the fall of Rome the Catholic Church’s control of society and law guaranteed that woman’s position was degraded to that of a second class citizen, far below the ancient Roman standard. Every literary reference depicts women as inferior, unworthy of inheritance, foolish, lustful and sinful. The Church ordained wife beating and encouraged total obedience to fathers and husbands. Women generally could not own land, join a guild, nor earn money like a man. Despite all this, a series of events unfolded; the crusades, rebirth of classical ideas, the printing press, the Reformation, and the Renaissance, all of which began to move womankind forward. VALENTINES DAY CARDS The Lupercalia festival of the New Year became an orgiastic carnival. A lottery ceremony ensued where men chose their sexual partners by choosing small bits of paper naming each woman present. Later the Christians, trying to incorporate and tame this sexual festival substituted the mythical saint Valentine; and ‘the cards of lust’ evolved into the valentine cards we exchange today.

Throughout the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance period, the word “Witchcraft” was liberally applied by the Christian church and its authorities to the native religious practices and customs that existed for thousands of years before Christianity.

Following the practice of the times, the grand princes and, later, the kings of Poland acquired the right of patronage; that is, they could appoint Orthodox bishops and even the metropolitan himself. Thus, the crucial issue of the leadership of the Orthodox faithful was left in the hands of secular rulers of another, increasingly antagonistic, church… The results were disastrous. With lay authorities capable of appointing bishops, the metropolitan's authority was undermined. And with every bishop acting as a law unto himself, the organizational discipline of the Orthodox church deteriorated rapidly. Even more deleterious was the corruption that lay patronage engendered… Under the circumstances, Orthodoxy's cultural contributions were limited. Schools, once one of the church's most attractive features, were neglected. Unqualified teachers barely succeeded in familiarizing their pupils with the rudiments of reading, writing, and Holy Scriptures. The curriculum of the schools had changed little since medieval times. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 added to the intellectual and cultural stagnation by depriving the Orthodox of their most advanced and inspiring model. Lacking both external and internal stimuli, Orthodox culture slipped into ritualism, parochialism, and decay. The Poles, meanwhile, were enjoying a period of cultural growth and vitality. Benefiting from the West's prodigious outbursts of creative energy, they experienced the Renaissance with its stimulating reorientation of thought.

If you yearn for success, you must be ready to work, eager to work hard, and to see that work through to its completion

My practical choices amuse you?” “Sure, let’s go with that. To be honest, it feels like I’m watching an episode of Reign.” “I don’t know what that is.” That small confession seems to wound him as he turns his glare to a spot over my shoulder. “A dramatic Renaissance period show about the royal hierarchy in Europe. It’s beginning to form a connection with your story.

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The oldest district of Massa is Rocca, with very narrow streets (but few old houses) and the church of San Rocco, which has an interesting 16th-century Crucifix attributed to the local sculptor Felice Palma. It is at the foot of the hill crowned with Massa’s most important building, the Rocca or Castello Malaspina, first built in the 11th–12th centuries. The Renaissance palace of the Malaspina family was enlarged in the 16th–17th centuries, and is of the highest architectural interest (open summer every day except Mon 9.30–12.30 & 4.30–7.30, or until 11pm on summer weekends; other periods usually only at weekends; T: 0587 44774). The Renaissance rooms are shown on guided tours every hour, as well as the medieval and defensive portions, and the walkways on the battlements.

The Renaissance After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe began a period that is called the Middle Ages, or the medieval period. The Middle Ages were dominated by war, illness, and concerns about mortality. During this time, Rome lost much of its former grandeur and vitality. It had perhaps no more than thirteen thousand residents in the 1300s. Around this time, attitudes began to change. The wealthy began thinking more about human achievement and the world around them. Explorers such as Columbus wanted to find new routes to Asia. Italian churchmen and scholars saw ancient buildings all around them and took an interest in the classical world of Rome and Greece. They began to spend money on beautiful buildings, art, and scholarship. This period came to be called the Renaissance, which means “the Rebirth.” It was the rebirth of classical learning after more than a thousand years.

From the 13th century until 1737, Florence was ruled by the wealthy and powerful Medici family. The Medicis were successful in business and politics, and they were interested also in art and learning. They encouraged people who had skills in art, science, architecture, and philosophy, paying them for their works. Some of the world’s greatest painters, sculptors, and other artists came from this period in Italy’s history. Under the Medicis’ guidance, Florence became the cultural center of Europe. The period of new learning and cultural interest, from the 14th to the late 16th centuries, is known as the Renaissance. Its effects spread from Italy to the rest of Europe, and it became the basis of a new age in art and science.

Money Facts The Lira was the basic unit of Italian currency from 1861, when Ital was unified, to 2002. That year, Italy adopted the euro, the currency of the European Union (EU). Today, fifteen EU states use the euro. One euro is divided into 100 cents. Bills come in values of 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 euros. Coins come in values of 1 and 2 euros as well as 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cents. In 2008, US$1.00 equaled about 0.63 euros, and 1.00 euro equaled US$1.58. On the front of each euro note is an image of a window or a gateway. On the back is a picture of a bridge. These images do not represent any actual bridges or windows. Instead, they are examples from different historical periods. Each country designs its own euro coins. Italy chose to honor its greatest artists. Its 2-euro coin shows a portrait by the Renaissance artist Raphael. The 1-euro coin shows a drawing of the human body by Leonardo da Vinci. Other Italian coins show a statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Sandro Botticelli’s painting Birth of Venus. The 1-cent coin, the smallest, features Castel del Monte, a thirteenth-century castle near Bari.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that notions of self-fashioning were circulating in Renaissance Europe not only among members of the rising middle class but also in writings addressed to monarchs. Consider, for example, Machiavelli’s Prince or the various Mirrors for Princes of the early modern period, which advocate that monarchs carefully manipulate their image in order to solidify their authority and to mask the exercise of coercive power, for, as Machiavelli writes, the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on (2002) (for more on Putin and Machiavelli,

The United Nations is an imperfect reflection of its membership, the 195 nations of the world. Almost from the day of its founding, it had been paralyzed by the same conflict that froze the world: the cold war. Almost every nation belonged to one of three camps: the East, the West, or the nonaligned Third World. Each camp fell into conflict with the others over almost anything of importance. Most often the United Nations Security Council suffered the same paralysis. But then the cold war ended, and the shackles fell away. The UN found a new confidence; it took on more missions—more in the fiveyear period than in the previous four decades. UN leaders spoke fondly of the “new congeniality” among members of the Security Council. The UN, they said, was undergoing a “renaissance.” Where better to demonstrate this than Cambodia? Cold war divisions had prevented a solution through the 1980s. Now the United Nations had a chance to be a player, to make a difference. It would take over and administer an entire nation, something it had never done before, and give Cambodians a chance for redemption, a new life, membership in the modern age. With that, the United Nations would finally prove its worth. And could there be a better moment for this? The

The main intellectual effort of the patristic age was devoted to the development of the biblical tradition and its adaptation to the understanding and needs of Gentile culture. [...] In the later periods, the Fathers who were most Greek in culture, like Origen and St. John Chrysostom and Theodoret, were also the ones who did most for the study and exposition of the Bible. The essential achievement of the patristic age was the synthesis of Eastern religion and Western culture, or, to be ore precise, the uniting of the spiritual traditions of Israel and of the Christian Church with the intellectual and artistic tradition of Hellenism and the political and social traditions of Rome. This synthesis has remained the foundation of Western culture and has never been destroyed, in spite of the tendency of the Reformation to re-Hebraize Christianity and that of the Renaissance to re-Hellenize culture.

One ought, really, never to speak of a uniform "style of the time" dominating a whole period, since there are at any given moment as many different styles as there are artistically productive social groups. Even in epochs in which the most influential work is found on a single class, and from which only the art of this class has come down to us, it ought to be asked whether the artistic products of other groups may have been buried or lost.

The Historical Setting of Genesis Mesopotamia: Sumer Through Old Babylonia Sumerians. It is not possible at this time to put Ge 1–11 into a specific place in the historical record. Our history of the ancient Near East begins in earnest after writing has been invented, and the earliest civilization known to us in the historical record is that of the Sumerians. This culture dominated southern Mesopotamia for over 500 years during the first half of the third millennium BC (2900–2350 BC), known as the Early Dynastic Period. The Sumerians have become known through the excavation of several of their principal cities, which include Eridu, Uruk and Ur. The Sumerians are credited with many of the important developments in civilization, including the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, law and medicine. Urbanization is also first witnessed among the Sumerians. By the time of Abraham, the Sumerians no longer dominate the ancient Near East politically, but their culture continues to influence the region. Other cultures replace them in the political arena but benefit from the advances they made. Dynasty of Akkad. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century BC, the Sumerian culture was overrun by the formation of an empire under the kingship of Sargon I, who established his capital at Akkad. He ruled all of southern Mesopotamia and ranged eastward into Elam and northwest to the Mediterranean on campaigns of a military and economic nature. The empire lasted for almost 150 years before being apparently overthrown by the Gutians (a barbaric people from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris), though other factors, including internal dissent, may have contributed to the downfall. Ur III. Of the next century little is known as more than 20 Gutian kings succeeded one another. Just before 2100 BC, the city of Ur took control of southern Mesopotamia under the kingship of Ur-Nammu, and for the next century there was a Sumerian renaissance in what has been called the Ur III period. It is difficult to ascertain the limits of territorial control of the Ur III kings, though the territory does not seem to have been as extensive as that of the dynasty of Akkad. Under Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi, the region enjoyed almost a half century of peace. Decline and fall came late in the twenty-first century BC through the infiltration of the Amorites and the increased aggression of the Elamites to the east. The Elamites finally overthrew the city. It is against this backdrop of history that the OT patriarchs emerge. Some have pictured Abraham as leaving the sophisticated Ur that was the center of the powerful Ur III period to settle in the unknown wilderness of Canaan, but that involves both chronological and geographic speculation. By the highest chronology (i.e., the earliest dates attributed to him), Abraham probably would have traveled from Ur to Harran during the reign of Ur-Nammu, but many scholars are inclined to place Abraham in the later Isin-Larsa period or even the Old Babylonian period. From a geographic standpoint it is difficult to be sure that the Ur mentioned in the Bible is the famous city in southern Mesopotamia (see note on 11:28). All this makes it impossible to give a precise background of Abraham. The Ur III period ended in southern Mesopotamia as the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, lost the support of one city after another and was finally overthrown by the Elamites, who lived just east of the Tigris. In the ensuing two centuries (c. 2000–1800 BC), power was again returned to city-states that controlled more local areas. Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna, Lagash, Mari, Assur and Babylon all served as major political centers.

The Anglo-Saxons had eight words for spear, twelve for battle, and thirty-six for hero, but before the Romans introduced them they had no concept of table, pillow, or street. The oldest words in the English language, dating from this period, include “tits” and “fart,” which suggest a society that must have had its moments, but was hardly on the verge of the renaissance. The language also had no future tense, which points to a certain lack of ambition.

Among the freest women were the singers and actresses of travelling companies, the most capable groups attached for long periods to one court or another, as in Mantua and Ferrara.

we must not forget the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance period in northern Europe

Although the work dates from the Early Renaissance, Gentile shows an affinity with these older traditions in his style and materials, which implies there are not such clear breaks between one artistic period and the next.

But what are theses "essentials"? They are the lasting, unchanging, inconrruptible things whose value lies, above all, in their remoteness from mere actuality and chance. On the other hand, the concrete and the direct, the accidental and the individual - whose things which the art of the Quattrocento considered the most interesting and substantial elements in reality - are regarded by this art as inessentials. The elite of the High Renaissance creates the fiction of a timeless valid, "eternally human" art because it wants to think of its own influence and position as timeless, imperishable, and immutable. In reality, of course, its art is just a time conditioned, just as limited and transitory, with its own standards of value and criteria of beauty, as the art of any other period. For even the idea of timelessness is the product of a particular time, and the validity of absolutism just as relative as that of relativism.

The shortness of High Renaissance is typical of the fate of all the periods of classical style in modern times; since the end of feudalism the epochs of stability have been nothing but short episodes. The rigorous formalism of the High Renaissance has certainly remained a constant temptation for later generations, but, apart from short, mostly sophisticated, and educationally inspired movements, it has never prevailed again. On the other hand, it has proved to be the most important undercurrent in modern art; for even though the strictly formalistic style, based on the typical and the normative, was unable to hold its own against the fundamental naturalism of the modern age, nevertheless, after the Renaissance, a return to the incoherent, cumulative, co-ordinating formal methods of the Middle Ages was no longer possible. Since the Renaissance we think of a work of painting or sculpture as a concentrated picture of reality seen from a single and uniform point of view - a formal structure that arises from the tension between the wide world and the undivided subject opposed to the world. This polarity between art and the world was mitigated from time to time, but never again abolished. It represents the real inheritance of Renaissance.

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.