Catastrophe and Creativity (1350-1500) - New Movements to Match the Times - Renaissance Italy

8 important questions on Catastrophe and Creativity (1350-1500) - New Movements to Match the Times - Renaissance Italy

What did Francis Petrarch observe about the cities of Italy in the late fourteenth century?

Francis Petrarch (1304-1374) remembered how the cities of Italy had flourished in his youth; now they were "shattered" by the effects of the plague, by internal discussion, by corruption and poverty.

What did Petrarch do for a living?

Petrarch was not a notary, but he had trained to be one. Supported by a small benefice provided to him as a man in minor orders, he was able to travel around Europe and collect the manuscripts of ancient writings that monks had copied out for their own pious ruminations.

What does humanitas mean? How did Petrarch call himself?

  • Humanitas is the cultivation of the qualities that makes a man a moral being, active, aware of himself, refined, his nature perfected to the highest degree.
  • In admiring imitation, men like Petrarch called themselves "humanists." For their morality, they wanted to depend not on God but rather on themselves, their observations of the world, and their own self-fashioning. 
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What did Pico della Mirandola do?

About a century after Petrarch's time, Pico della Mirandola - a polymath who studied the Hebrew cabala, Arabic writings, the philosophy of Plato, and many more ancient texts - gave the idea of self-fashioning a myth of its own when "rewrote" the book of Genesis in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486).

Why did Machiavelli write his Prince?

Machiavelli's Prince was a "job application." He wrote it so that he could work for the Medicis, the very rulers whose rise in Florence had brought about his unemployment.

Of what movement were the humanists a vanguard?

The humanists were in the vanguard of the Italian "Renaissance." The term itself - which means rebirth - came later and is borrowed from the French.
But even in their own day, the humanists saw themselves as signaling something new.

What did Lorenza Valla prove?

  • Disillusioned with the institutions handed down to them, they were willing to critique all, subjecting them to scrutiny.
  • Thus, through careful study of the evolution of the Latin language, Lorenza Valla (d.1457) proved that the Donation of Constantine, a major prop of papal claims to power, was a fake. 

What did the Renaissance offer?

  • The Renaissance offered to city communes and, wealthy princes alike new words, symbols, arguments, and styles that were drawn from a resonant and heroic past.
  • In the service of its own era, Renaissance writers, poets, artists and statesmen twisted, turned, and adjusted "classical" models to their own tastes and needs.

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