Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [0]
Title Page
Modern Library Chronicles
CHRONOLOGY
PART 1 - THE HISTORICAL AND ECONOMIC BACKGROUND
PART 2 - THE RENAISSANCE IN LITERATURE AND SCHOLARSHIP
PART 3 - THE ANATOMY OF RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE
PART 4 - THE BUILDINGS OF THE RENAISSANCE
PART 5 - THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSIONS OF RENAISSANCE PAINTING
PART 6 - THE SPREAD AND DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE
About the Author
ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Copyright Page
Modern Library Chronicles
ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON
Napoleon
The Civilization of Ancient Egypt
The Quest for God
A History of the English People
The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830
Ireland: A History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day
Intellectuals
A History of the Jews
A History of the American People
Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
A History of Christianity
CHRONOLOGY
Please note that some dates are approximate or speculative.
PART 1
THE HISTORICAL AND ECONOMIC BACKGROUND
The past is infinitely complicated, composed as it is of events, big and small, beyond computation. To make sense of it, the historian must select and simplify and shape. One way he shapes the past is to divide it into periods. Each period is made more memorable and easy to grasp if it can be labeled by a word that epitomizes its spirit. That is how such terms as “the Renaissance” came into being. Needless to say, it is not those who actually live through the period who coin the term, but later, often much later, writers. The periodization and labeling of history is largely the work of the nineteenth century. The term “Renaissance” was first prominently used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858, and it was set in bronze two years later by Jacob Burckhardt when he published his great book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The usage stuck because it turned out to be a convenient way of describing the period of transition between the medieval epoch, when Europe was “Christendom,” and the beginning of the modern age. It also had some historical justification because, although the Italian elites of the time never used the words “Renaissance” or “Rinascimento,” they were conscious that a cultural rebirth of a kind was taking place, and that some of the literary, philosophical and artistic grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome was being re-created. In 1550 the painter Vasari published an ambitious work, The Lives of the Artists, in which he sought to describe how this process had taken place, and was continuing, in painting, sculpture and architecture. In comparing the glories of antiquity with the achievements of the present and recent past in Italy, he referred to the degenerate period in between as “the middle ages.” This usage stuck too.
Thus a nineteenth-century term was used to mark the end of a period baptized in the sixteenth century. But when exactly, in real chronological terms, did this end of one epoch and beginning of another occur? Here we come to the first problem of the Renaissance. Historians have for long agreed that what they term the early modern period of European history began at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, though they date it differently in different countries. Thus, Spain entered the early modern age in 1492, when the conquest of Granada was completed with the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews, and Christopher Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere on the instructions of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. England entered the period in 1485, when the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, was killed at Bosworth and the Tudor dynasty acquired the throne in the person of Henry VII. France and Italy joined Spain and England by virtue of the same event, in 1494, when the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy. Finally, Germany entered the new epoch in 1519, when Charles V united the imperial throne of Germany with the crown of Spain and the Indies. However, by the time these events took place, the Renaissance