Renaissance

Rinascimento in Italian. A movement of cultural and intellectual innovation in Europe that spanned from the 14th to the 16th century. 16th-century Western historians held that literature and art were once highly prosperous in Greek and Roman times, but decayed and fell into oblivion in the medieval “Dark Ages”, and it was not until the 14th century that it achieved a “rebirth”, a “revival”. It was both an imitation of Greco-Roman culture and art and a revival of the capacity for observing and emulating the nature, hence the name “Renaissance”.

In Western Europe, especially in Britain and Italy, the historical process of primitive accumulation of capital began in the 14th-15th centuries and handicraft workshops run according to a capitalist mode appeared. By the 16th and 17th centuries, the capitalist mode of production has seen a more rapid development. With the rise of the economic status of the rising bourgeoisie, ideas, notions, cultures reflecting its interests and demands began to appear in the sphere of social thought and culture, forming the Renaissance movement. Under the banner of the revival of the ancient Greek and Roman culture, the rising bourgeoisie propagated humanism (humanitarianism), criticized the feudal social and political system, attacked the religious theological dogmas of the Middle Ages, swept away the traditions and ignorant notions of the feudal society, and produced the public opinion for the bourgeoisie to enter the arena of history. Therefore, the Renaissance movement, although characterized by learning from the classics, was in fact a nascent cultural movement of the rising bourgeoisie against feudalism and theology, a reflection of the ideas and culture of the bourgeoisie in the ideological sphere during the revolutionary historical change from feudal society to capitalist society in Western Europe.

The Renaissance movement rose up in Italy, expanded to various European countries in the 16th century and lasted for two to three centuries. Its influence spanned all aspects of literature, art, science, politics, religion, philosophy. The research of nature and the formation of modern natural science was one of the most positive achievements of the Renaissance. The “heliocentric theory” of the Polish astronomer and mathematician Copernicus (1473–1543) disproved thousands of years of religious legends about God’s creation of the world with scientific truth. The great geographical discoveries made by Columbus and Magellan provided irrefutable evidence for the theory of spherical earth. The new achievements of Galileo (1564–1642) of Italy in the field of mathematics and physics paved the way for a new understanding of the universe. Cause, Principle and Unity and On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds and other treatises by Bruno (1548–1600) supported Copernicus’ heliocentric theory and developed the “theory of the infinite universe”. Bruno was Bruno was convicted of “heresy” by the Inquisition and burned alive at the stake on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. In literature and art, Dante (1265–1321), Petrarch (1304–1374), and Boccaccio (1313–1375) were the pioneers of the Renaissance, and were called the “three crowns of literature”. Da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520) were praised as the “three crowns of art”. Rabelais of France, Cervantes of Spain and Shakespeare of England were called “three crowns of literature” of the late Renaissance. In France, freethought and skeptical thought, with their typical form in the works of the essayist Montaigne and novelist Rabelais, were quite developed. In England, drama and poetry flourished as never before, with Shakespeare as the pre-eminent representative. A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia (abbreviated as Utopia) published in 1516 by the British humanist More (1478–1535) marked the germs of the utopian socialist thought.

The Renaissance movement was the first upsurge against feudalism and against theology set off by the rising bourgeoisie. It shook whole Europe with devastating force, accelerating the dissolution of the European feudal system and the transition to the capitalist system. It has broken the fetters of medieval theology, has emancipated the natural science, literature, art, philosophy, history, politics and other disciplines from theology, initiated a broad movement of emancipation of the mind, heralded the rising of capitalist thoughts and culture and the advent of the bourgeois epoch, and advanced Europe from feudal to capitalist society and from the Middle Ages to modern times at the ideological level. It was also of great significance in furthering the awakening of the rising bourgeoisie in other countries and starting up the course of “world history”.