The Renaissance is a period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. Associated with great social change in most fields and disciplines, including art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and science, the Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence, then spread to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe. The term rinascita ("rebirth") first appeared in Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, while the corresponding French word renaissance was adopted into English as the term for this period during the 1830s.
Rodolphus Agricola was a Dutch humanist of the Northern Low Countries, famous for his knowledge of Latin and Greek. He was an educator, musician, builder of church organs, a poet in Latin and the vernacular, a diplomat, a boxer and a Hebrew scholar towards the end of his life. Today, he is best known as the author of De inventione dialectica, the father of Northern European humanism and a zealous anti-scholastic in the late fifteenth century.
Western Christianity is one of two subdivisions of Christianity. Western Christianity is composed of the Latin Church and Western Protestantism, together with their offshoots such as the Old Catholic Church, Independent Catholicism and Restorationism.
Bessarion was a Byzantine Greek Renaissance humanist, theologian, Catholic cardinal and one of the famed Greek scholars who contributed to the so-called great revival of letters in the 15th century. He was educated by Gemistus Pletho in Neoplatonic philosophy and later served as the titular Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. He eventually was named a cardinal and was twice considered for the papacy.
The Donation of Constantine is a forged Roman imperial decree by which the 4th-century emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. Composed probably in the 9th century, it was used, especially in the 13th century, in support of claims of political authority by the papacy.
Translatio imperii is a historiographical concept that was prominent in the Middle Ages in the thinking and writing of elite groups of the population in Europe, but was the reception of a concept from antiquity. In this concept the process of decline and fall of an empire theoretically is being replaced by a natural succession from one empire to another. Translatio implies that an empire metahistorically can be transferred from hand to hand and place to place, from Troy to Romans and Greeks to Franks and further on to Spain, and has therefore survived.
Renaissance humanism is a worldview centered on the nature and importance of humanity that emerged from the study of Classical antiquity.
Lorenzo Valla was an Italian Renaissance humanist, rhetorician, educator and scholar. He is best known for his historical-critical textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, therefore attacking and undermining the presumption of temporal power claimed by the papacy. Lorenzo is sometimes seen as a precursor of the Reformation.
Theodorus Gaza, also called Theodore Gazis or by the epithet Thessalonicensis and Thessalonikeus, was a Greek humanist and translator of Aristotle, one of the Greek scholars who were the leaders of the revival of learning in the 15th century.
Demetrios Chalkokondyles, Latinized as Demetrius Chalcocondyles and found variously as Demetricocondyles, Chalcocondylas or Chalcondyles, was one of the most eminent Greek scholars in the West. He taught in Italy for over forty years; his colleagues included Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, and Theodorus Gaza in the revival of letters in the Western world, and Chalkokondyles was the last of the Greek humanists who taught Greek literature at the great universities of the Italian Renaissance. One of his pupils at Florence was the famous Johann Reuchlin. Chalkokondyles published the first printed publications of Homer, of Isocrates, and of the Suda lexicon.
Medieval Hebrew was a literary and liturgical language that existed between the 4th and 19th century. It was not commonly used as a spoken language, but mainly in written form by rabbis, scholars and poets. Medieval Hebrew had many features distinguishing it from older forms of Hebrew. These affected grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and also included a wide variety of new lexical items, which were either based on older forms or borrowed from other languages, especially Aramaic, Koine Greek and Latin.
Christian humanism regards classical humanist principles such as universal human dignity, individual freedom, and the importance of happiness as essential and principal or even exclusive components of the teachings of Jesus.
John Argyropoulos was a lecturer, philosopher and humanist, one of the émigré Greek scholars who pioneered the revival of classical Greek learning in 15th century Italy.
The transmission of the Greek Classics to Latin Western Europe during the Middle Ages was a key factor in the development of intellectual life in Western Europe. Interest in Greek texts and their availability was scarce in the Latin West during the Early Middle Ages, but as traffic to the East increased, so did Western scholarship.
The legacy of the Roman Empire has been varied and significant. The Roman Empire, built upon the legacy of other cultures, has had long-lasting influence with broad geographical reach on a great range of cultural aspects, including state institutions, law, values, religious beliefs, technological advances, engineering and language.
European science in the Middle Ages comprised the study of nature, mathematics and natural philosophy in medieval Europe. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the decline in knowledge of Greek, Christian Western Europe was cut off from an important source of ancient learning. Although a range of Christian clerics and scholars from Isidore and Bede to Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme maintained the spirit of rational inquiry, Western Europe would see a period of scientific decline during the Early Middle Ages. However, by the time of the High Middle Ages, the region had rallied and was on its way to once more taking the lead in scientific discovery. Scholarship and scientific discoveries of the Late Middle Ages laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution of the Early Modern Period.
The pignora imperii were objects that were supposed to guarantee the continued imperium of Ancient Rome. One late source lists seven. The sacred tokens most commonly regarded as such were:
Alexander of Roes was the dean of St. Maria im Kapitol, Cologne, canon law jurist, and author on history and prophecy. He was a member of a patrician Cologne family and was a member of the social group in Rome headed by Cardinal Jacobus de Columna, to whom he dedicated Memoriale...
La Défense et illustration de la langue française is a literary theory text written during the Renaissance in 1549 by the French poet Joachim du Bellay. It was a manifesto of the ideas of the group originally known as La Brigade, later as La Pléiade. Du Bellay called for "the enrichment of the French language by discreet imitation and borrowing from the language and literary forms of the classics and the works of the Italian Renaissance... In it he asserted that French (was) capable of producing a modern literature equal in quality and expressiveness to that of ancient Greece and Rome."
Icones Imperatorum Romanorum, originally published under the title Vivae omnium fere imperatorum imagines, is a 1557 originally Latin-language numismatic and historical work by the Dutch painter and engraver Hubert Goltzius. It was the first major work on the coins of the Roman emperors, featuring detailed portraits of each emperor from Julius Caesar to the then incumbent Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I based on their coins. The set of images, drawn by Goltzius himself and made into wood blocks by Joost Gietleugen van Kortrijk, is also accompanied by short biographies on each figure.
