Late Middle Ages

The Renaissance and Humanism: The Rebirth of European Culture

The Renaissance is one of the most famous and most disputed cultural movements in Western history. The word itself means “rebirth,” and it was first used by fifteenth-century Italian humanists to describe the recovery of the culture of classical antiquity, the rebirth of learning, and the transformation of European art, literature, and thought. The term was later extended by historians — most influentially the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) — to describe an entire epoch, the bridge between the medieval and the modern worlds. Whether the Renaissance is best understood as an idea, a movement, or a period is one of the questions the articles that follow try to answer.

The Renaissance began in Italy, in the great commercial cities of Florence, Venice, Milan, and Rome, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and the painter Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337) are usually treated as the harbingers of the new movement, but it was the generation of Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) that really launched it. Petrarca, often called the “father of humanism,” devoted his life to the recovery of the classical past, and his example inspired a generation of scholars and poets who came to be known as the humanists. Boccaccio, the author of the Decameron, was a master of the new Italian prose, and his work helped to establish the Tuscan dialect as the literary language of Italy.

In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the new learning spread to the rest of Europe, and it produced a series of brilliant national cultures — the French, the English, the German, the Spanish, the Dutch. The Northern Renaissance, centred in the Low Countries, Germany, and France, had its own distinctive character, with a strong emphasis on Christian humanism, the study of the Bible in its original languages, and the reform of the church. The printing press, developed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz in the 1450s, made possible the wide dissemination of the new learning, and it helped to lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

This guide is organised in four sections:

What was the Renaissance?

The Renaissance was, in essence, a recovery of the culture of classical antiquity, and a new way of looking at the world. The humanists of the Italian Renaissance believed that the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans was superior to anything that had been produced in the centuries after the fall of Rome, and they devoted their lives to the recovery, the study, and the imitation of the classical past. The humanists were the first modern scholars in something close to the modern sense, and they laid the institutional groundwork for the new learning of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was not only a scholarly movement. It was also a movement in art, in literature, in architecture, in science, in philosophy, and in religion. The artists of the Renaissance — Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael — developed new techniques of painting, sculpture, and architecture that transformed the visual arts. The writers of the Renaissance — Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Thomas More — produced a new literature that was both classical in its inspiration and original in its expression. The philosophers — Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli — developed new ways of thinking about the world, the human being, and the state. The scientists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo — laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution that would transform European knowledge in the two centuries after the Renaissance proper had ended.

The Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance began in the great commercial cities of northern and central Italy, and especially in Florence, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Florence was, in the conventional telling, the cradle of the Renaissance, and the city produced a long line of artists, scholars, poets, and philosophers who shaped the new movement. The great Florentine families — the Medici, the Strozzi, the Albizzi, the Pitti — were the patrons of the new learning, and they commissioned the great works of art and architecture that are still the glory of the city. The Italian Renaissance was characterised by a new interest in the classical past, a new confidence in the abilities of the human being, and a new emphasis on the visual and the empirical.

The Northern Renaissance

The Renaissance spread to the rest of Europe in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it produced a series of brilliant national cultures. The Northern Renaissance, centred in the Low Countries, Germany, and France, had its own distinctive character. The northern humanists — Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Johann Reuchlin — were deeply concerned with the reform of the church and the study of the Bible in its original languages, and they laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Northern Renaissance was also characterised by a strong interest in the visual arts: the painters of the period — Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein the Younger — produced a long series of masterpieces that combined Italian compositional principles with the detailed naturalism of the northern tradition. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s was one of the most important developments of the period, and it made possible the wide dissemination of the new learning.

Renaissance thought and discovery

The Renaissance was also a period of great intellectual achievement, in science, in philosophy, and in the study of the natural world. The scholars of the period — Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giannozzo Manetti — developed new ways of reading the classical past, and they laid the groundwork for the new learning of the modern world. The scientists of the period — Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, William Harvey — made discoveries that would eventually transform European knowledge of the universe. The great universities of Bologna, Padua, Paris, Oxford, and Heidelberg were the institutional centres of the new learning, and the recovery of classical texts from Byzantine and Arab sources was the precondition for much of it.

The Renaissance and the crisis of the late Middle Ages

The Renaissance was, in part, a response to the crisis of the late Middle Ages. The Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Western Schism, and the long crisis of the medieval church had all contributed to a profound sense of crisis, and the new learning of the Renaissance was, in the long view, an attempt to find a new foundation for European culture. The humanists of the Italian Renaissance looked to the classical past for inspiration, and they believed that the recovery of the classical past would help to renew European civilisation. The northern humanists, including Erasmus and More, looked to the Bible and to the early church fathers for inspiration, and they believed that the reform of the church would help to renew Christian civilisation.

The Renaissance was both a continuation of the medieval world and a break with it. The humanists drew on the medieval traditions of learning — the scholastic method, the writings of the church fathers, the institutional structure of the universities — even as they sought to go beyond them. The artists drew on the medieval traditions of art and architecture, including the great cathedrals of the High Gothic, even as they sought to develop new techniques and new forms. The Renaissance did not emerge in a vacuum. It was the product of a long process of economic, social, and cultural change that had been building up in Europe for centuries. The great commercial cities of northern Italy, the rise of a wealthy merchant class, the development of new forms of government, the growth of universities, and the recovery of classical texts from Byzantine and Arab sources were all part of the process. The Renaissance was, in that sense, the culmination of a long historical development, and it could not have happened without the social and economic changes of the preceding centuries.

Themes of the Renaissance

Historians of the Renaissance have argued about which themes are essential and which are marginal. The themes that most treatments agree on include:

The recovery of the classical past. The central project of the Renaissance, in the humanist understanding, was the recovery, the study, and the imitation of the Greek and Roman classics. Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Poggio Bracciolini, and their successors hunted the libraries of Europe for forgotten manuscripts, emended the texts they found, and tried to write in a Ciceronian Latin that they believed had been lost since the fall of Rome.

The dignity and freedom of the human being. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), the most famous manifesto of the Italian humanist movement, argued that the human being had no fixed nature and could choose to become what he wished. The new emphasis on the dignity of the human being was, in part, a recovery of the classical past, but it was also a new development that laid the groundwork for the modern idea of human rights.

The empirical investigation of nature. The artists of the period, including Leonardo, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein, made careful studies of the human body, of plants, of animals, and of the landscape, and they developed new techniques of representation that captured the natural world in unprecedented detail. The scientists of the later Renaissance — Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, William Harvey — extended the same empirical method to the heavens, the body, and the circulation of the blood.

The revival of classical forms. The artists of the period, including Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Bramante, developed new forms of architecture that imitated the buildings of ancient Rome. The writers of the period, including Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Erasmus, developed new forms of literature that imitated the styles of classical antiquity. The revival of classical forms was the most visible feature of the Renaissance, and it has come to define the period in the popular imagination.

A note on what this guide does not do

The Renaissance treated in this guide is the Renaissance of Italy and of the northern European courts. It is not the Renaissance of Eastern Europe, the Byzantine world, or the Islamic Mediterranean, all of which have their own classical-revival traditions and their own continuities with the Italian and Northern movements. The articles that follow do not treat, except in passing, the cultural life of the Orthodox world, of the Jews of the Iberian peninsula, or of the Byzantine refugees who brought Greek manuscripts to Italy after 1453 — all of them important for the larger history of the period.

Further reading

Chapters in this guide