Renaissance
rebirth of ancient literature, culture

• Italy: 1350-1560
• Northern Europe: 1450-1650

Seven Liberal Arts

Scholasticism

• disputation
• harmony in opposing authorities

commentaries
Aristotle < Arabic, trans. Latin
Peter Lombard, Sentences
Peter Abelard, Sic et non

Humanism - ad fontes!
education for moral improvement

• humaniora - grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy
• studia humanitatis
• eloquence: ars dicendi et scribendi bene
• to make antiquity live again

Italian communes
bureaucracy: chancellor, notary
dictatores, ars dictaminis
Francesco Petrarcha (1304-77)
Avignon
Cicero, Letters to Atticus (1c B.C.)

ad fontes! - back to the sources
Carolingian "renaissance"
1415 - Council of Constance
book hunters - Poggio Bracciolini
S. Greenblatt, The Swerve (2011)

1453 - Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul
Greek refugees

Renaissance

• centering of the human condition (body + soul & the problem of evil)
• humanist educational ideology (humanities)
• perspective in art
• recovery of ancient texts (to make antiquity live again)
• republicanism in urban communes
• Fall of Byzantium (1453) - Greek
• Printing Press (ca. 1460) - J. Gutenberg/Mainz