Chapter 13

Renaissance

A period in European history, from the 14th to the 17th century, regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history.

Printing Press

A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. This allowed mass production of books and made it easier to spread new ideas.

Vernacular

A vernacular or vernacular language is the native language or native dialect of a specific population. You could start translating the bible which allowed people to take their own interpretations of religion.

Baldassare Castiglione

Baldassare Castiglione, count of Casatico, was an Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and a prominent Renaissance author, who is probably most famous for his authorship of The Book of the Courtier.

Cesare Borgia

Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, was an Italian condottiere, nobleman, politician, and cardinal, whose fight for power was a major inspiration for The Prince by Machiavelli.

Christian Humanism

Christian Humanism was a Renaissance movement that combined a revived interest in the nature of humanity with the Christian faith. It impacted art, changed the focus of religious scholarship, shaped personal spirituality, and helped encourage the Protestant Reformation.

Civic Humanism

Civic humanism is a form of republicanism inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity, especially such classical writers as Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. This sparked change in the social aspect of life as to changing the goverment

Desiderius Eramus

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, known as Erasmus or Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, a Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian. Erasmus was a classical scholar and wrote in a pure Latin style.

Donatello

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence.

Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi was an Italian designer and a key figure in architecture, recognised to be the first modern engineer, planner and sole construction supervisor. He was one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance.

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca, commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, who was one of the earliest humanists. His rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with initiating the 14th-century Renaissance.

Pico Della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic Reformation".

Humanism

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings. The "new" humanist idea suggested that the church shouldn't govern civic matters but only guide spiritual matters. The church promoted a strong but limited education whereas humanists promoted a well-rounded education.

Individualism

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Allowed to peasents to move up in life and take charge of their life.

Jan Van Eyck

Jan van Eyck was a Flemish/Netherlandish painter active in Bruges. He is often considered one of the founders of Early Netherlandish painting school and one of the most significant representatives of Northern Renaissance art.

Leon Battista Alberti

Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer; he epitomised the Renaissance Man.

Leonardo Bruni

Leonardo Bruni was an Italian humanist, historian, and statesman, often recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. He has been called the first modern historian.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo, was an Italian Renaissance polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of paleontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter, and tank, he epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

New Christians

New Christian was a law-effective and social category developed from the 15th century onwards and used in what is today Spain and Portugal as well as their New World colonies, to refer to Sephardi Jews and Muslims who had converted to the Catholic Church, often by force or coercion. It was developed and employed after the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic Monarchs.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer of the Renaissance period. He is often called the father of modern political science. Wrote the book The Prince.

Patronage

Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings, popes, and the wealthy have provided to artists such as musicians, painters, and sculptors. This let people do things that are unpopular with others and could not be afforded by a single person.

Peter Brueghel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter, and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting); he was a pioneer in making both types of the subject the focus in large paintings.

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.

Rogier van der Weyden

Rogier van der Weyden or Roger de la Pasture was an Early Netherlandish painter whose surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces and commissioned single and diptych portraits.

Thomas More

Sir Thomas More, venerated by Roman Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He wrote Utopia.

Ferdinand and Isabella

The Catholic Monarchs is the joint title used in history for Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon. When they married the began and a cooperative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power.

Concordat of Bologna

The Concordat of Bologna (1516), marking a stage in the evolution of the Gallican Church, was an agreement between King Francis I of France and Pope Leo X that Francis negotiated in the wake of his victory at Marignano in September 1515. The groundwork was laid in a series of personal meetings of king and pope in Bologna, 11-15 December 1515. The concordat was signed in Rome on 18 August 1516.

Habsburg-Valois Wars

The Italian Wars, often referred to as the Great Italian Wars or the Great Wars of Italy and sometimes as the Habsburg-Valois Wars or the Renaissance Wars, were a series of conflicts from 1494 to 1559 that involved, at various times, most of the city-states of Italy, the Papal States, the Republic of Venice, most of the major states of Western Europe as well as the Ottoman Empire. Originally arising from dynastic disputes over the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples, the wars rapidly became a general struggle for power and territory among their various participants and were marked with an increasing number of alliances, counter-alliances, and betrayals.

Northern Renaissance

The Northern Renaissance was the Renaissance that occurred in Europe north of the Alps. This influenced the German Renaissance, French Renaissance, English Renaissance, Renaissance in the Low Countries, Polish Renaissance and other national and localized movements, each with different characteristics and strengths.

Star Chamber

The Star Chamber was an English court of law which sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from the late 15th century to the mid-17th century (c. 1641), and was composed of Privy Councillors and common-law judges, to supplement the judicial activities of the common-law and equity courts in civil and criminal matters. The Star Chamber was originally established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against socially and politically prominent people so powerful that ordinary courts would probably hesitate to convict them of their crimes. However, it became synonymous with social and political oppression through the arbitrary use and abuse of the power it wielded.

Spanish Inquisition

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control.

Secularism

The separation of church and state. This allowed the humanism and for the church to not govern every aspect of human life.

Virtu

Virtù is a concept theorized by Niccolò Machiavelli, centered on the martial spirit and ability of a population or leader, but also encompassing a broader collection of traits necessary for maintenance of the state and "the achievement of great things."