Question

Can someone help me find 10 important facts about this essay..

Answer 1

http://europeanhistory.boisestate.edu/latemiddleages/renaissance/historyren.shtml

Answer 2

please:) ugh its soo confusing

Answer 3

That's a little dense. I suspect you're either in an AP history class or in a college history class. The first bit of advice? Something like this won't make sense the first time. It's totally fine. Read it at least two or three times - I would, and I've been doing history for a long, long time.

But it's a little dense. You need some structure, and you came here. I'm there for you.

This will help you get your head around the topic. Remember, it's a BIG topic - so even though this is simply written, you may need to read this twice.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

Next: remember that in history, the act of writing history includes the act of making decisions about what was important, why something happened, and why that decision had long-term consequences. This is interpreting history, and to an advanced historian, why an event is presented in a specific way is as important as the event itself.

This essay isn't about the Renaissance - it's about understanding this period of time, why someone gave it a specific name "the Renaissance", what other historians thought of the events of this time, and why a big label like "Renaissance" is and is not helpful in understanding history.

You're probably transitioning from "good history student who learns facts & reasons why" to "scholar who attempts to discuss other interpretations for value (or shortcomings)" to "scholar who examines primary sources and adds new interpretations that advance human knowledge in this area."

That's big stuff for a Sunday afternoon!

Finally: one problem with the essay you were assigned is that the section headings don't stand out from the text. I've helped you with that here.

Good luck!

Introduction
Early Humanist Tradition in Italy
Early Humanist Themes
Humanist Writers
Other Renaissance Views of the Past
Inventing the Renaissance
Inventing the Middle Ages
The Philosophes
Romantics
Other Developments in the 19th Century
Jakob Burckhardt [hint: this guy is important]
Burckhardt's Continuators
The Northern Renaissance
Variations
Role of Religion
Role of Nationalism
Modern Interpretations

Here's the last paragraphs. Read them carefully before you start.

Yet the term persists. The art is so dramatically appealing to modern eyes that we instinctively want to believe something modern was afoot everywhere at the time. Burckhardt and his continuators drew such a compelling portrait of the times that we are drawn to it. I've written this essay so that you might see those assumptions at work when you read about the Renaissance outside this course. My hope is that you'll recognize a statement as belonging in the Burckhardtian tradition or belonging to one of the various revisions that came later.

It is notable that, however much we have rejected Burckhardt in detail, no one historian's interpretation has succeeded in replacing the Swiss. We have dismantled his vision, but we have not managed to construct another as compelling.

Answer 4

i am actually doing history honors and i am a freshman in high school.... I am terrible at summing up a huge essay

Answer 5

The humanists broke with theological world history, abandoned the idea of perpetual decline, and established a new periodization. In the histories, though, the process was incomplete. The boundaries of the Middle Ages were drawn most clearly in the realm of literature and art.
The writers on cultural matters wrote biographies, not histories. In the prefaces & elsewhere, the biographers inserted historical summaries. These normally fixed the end of culture at the end of Rome; they dealt not at all with the barbarian age, but skipped directly to the rebirth of culture which was usually in the recent past.
Giovanni Boccaccio was an early example of this, but the best example is the work of Filippo Villani. Biondo and Bruni also wrote on this theme. The most comprehensive was Paolo Cortese's Dialogue of Learned Men, which reviewed "learned men" by the single standard of their knowledge of correct Ciceronian Latin.
Whatever the field -- architecture, painting, literature -- the humanists judged the past in classical terms & universally concluded that an age of barbarism had existed from the 5thc to the 15thc. The idea of Renaissance was strictly limited to intellectual and esthetic culture.

Northern Europe showed a similar tendency, with some new wrinkles. The French followed the Italian lead, adding little. The Germans, though, did not like the Italian periodization. They turned universal history to patriotic ends, so that the German Empire appeared as the product and culmination of history. They admired and published a good deal of medieval Germanic literature. They often portrayed Germany as the protector of learning in the age of darkness.
Erasmus did not appeal to national history. His contribution was in the command to return to the sources, knowledge of classical language, the idea that classical literature and evangelical Christianity had declined at the same time and had later been revived together, and the idea that monks and scholastics were responsible for the intervening darkness.

Answer 6

i dont understand that part