Precursors
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) the Divine Comedy
Francesco Petrarch. (1304-1374) “Father” of Humanism

Important moments in the Renaissance
Rule of the de’Medicis in Florence: Giovanni, the papal banker (1397-1429), his son Cosimo (1443-1464), Piero (1464-1469), and Lorenzo (1469-1492)
1400 death of Chaucer
1453 The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks
1455 Gutenberg bible
1470 Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
1475 William Caxton produces the first printed book in England
1479 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile rule Spain
1486. Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)
1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope for Portugal
1490 Aldus Manutius founds the Aldine Press in Venice (dedicated to printing the works of Antiquity)
1492 Rodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI
1492 Christopher Columbus sails to the New World
1497 John Cabot sails to Newfoundland
1498 Vasco da Gama reaches the Malabar coast of India
1509 Henry VIII becomes king of England (until 1547)
1513 Niccolò Machiavelli publishes The Prince
1517 Luther publishes his 95 Theses at Wittenberg and the Reformation begins
1522 Luther publishes his German translation of the New Testament at Wittenberg
1526 publication of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament (to become the King James’ version)
1527 The sack of Rome (End of the Italian Renaissance)
1531 Henry VIII breaks with Catholic church and declares himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England
1535 First Bible printed in English (Coverdale’s Bible)
1536 Publication of Paracelsus’s Great Book of Surgery
1539 Henry VIII orders the dissolution of the monasteries
1542 The Inquisition begins
1543 Publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s Revolution of the Celestial Orbits
1543 Publication of Andreas Vesalius’s On the Human Body
1558 Elizabeth I becomes queen of England

Astronomy: Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo (1564-1642), Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

 Art
Jan van Eyck (c. 1395 – 1441)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Sandro Botticelli (1445- 1510)
Aldus Manutius (1449-1515)
Raffaello de’Santi (Raphael) (1483-1520)
Gerard David (1460-1523)
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Michaelangelo (1475-1564)
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)

The Renaissance was an “age when tradition and innovation flourished alongside each other in every sphere of life from architecture to economics” (Grafton, preface to the second ed., Rice & Grafton x).

Overview: “Beginning in Italy in the fourteenth century, the Renaissance became a European and English movement that reclaimed Greek and Latin culture, revitalized Western art and architecture, established early modern political and economic practices, and drew a heroic, secular picture of man that dominates us still, particularly in the Humanities” (Foreword, King ix).

“In a famous passage, the English historian Macaulay once spoke of red men scalping one another on the shores of the Great Lakes so that a European king could rob his neighbour of a province he coveted.” This was one striking side of the story we must now embark upon – the gradual entanglement of struggles with one another the world over in greater and greater wars – but politics, empire-building and military expansion were only a tiny part of the process; more important still was the spreading of common assumptions and ideas. The result was to be, in one of our cant phrases, ‘One World’ – of sorts. The age of independent or nearly independent civilizations has come to a close (Roberts 547).

“Driven by scholarly rather than military, religious, or economic priorities, it was a time of intellectual reflection, reconstruction, and invention. The focus centered on the studia humanitatis, or the study of human works–history, the classics, literature, philosophy, and various art media–which effectively shifted societal interests and priorities toward secular pursuits and away from Church control” (Farthing n. p.).

The educated classes “reinvented their relationship with not only history, science, and religion but with art and most importantly, education. As part of this rebirth, artists and patrons began to explore new subject matter and new ways of ‘picturing,’ and thus experiencing the word. One very important aspect of this cultural revolution was the realization that enhanced realism had the ability to convey and trigger human emotions more reliably.” (Farthing n.p.).

“The new Humanist approach didn’t reject the past; it simply encouraged open-minded inquiry. It viewed mathematics as a primary source of elegance and purity and a bridge between art and science” (Farthing n. p.).

“Although Renaissance man was born with the same religious instincts as other medieval-era Europeans, his sense of individuality gave him a subjectivity and sense of empowerment that did not emerge in the rest of Europe until much later” (Farthing n. p.).

“By the fifteenth century, there were several factors that lessened the Church’s strong hold on society. The popularity of Humanism, a growing awareness of corruption in the Church, the ready availability of paper, and Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 14440–which led to the easy distribution of the Classics–eventually handed a sense of control cultural and intellectual back to those individuals who wanted it” (Farthing n. p.).

Women in the Renaissance: “Martin Luther spoke with characteristic clarity of the issue [of childbearing]: ‘Even if they bear themselves weary, or bear themselves out… this is the purpose for which they exist’” (King 3).

The Printing Press
“By 1500 the presses had issued about six million books in approximately forty thousand editions, more books, probably, than had been produced in western Europe since the fall of Rome” (Rice & Grafton 7).

“Stationers, as they were called, provided custom-made books on demand. Using large amounts of capital, they hired scribes and illuminators and equipped them with texts and materials, and some of them produced large inventories of popular books on speculation, to be sold at retail, as well as individual items ordered in advance [….] Their shops, as well as the libraries they furnished, became lively centers of discussion for intellectuals and their patrons–centers not separated from the larger society, like the monasteries and universities of the Middle Ages, but fully integrated into its commercial life” (Rice & Grafton 6-7).

On Eisenstein’s fixity and trustworthiness:
“Printing is a mechanical process that allows for a quick and affordable production of multiple copies, but writing is not fixed, faithful, or true, unless the people involved in the process make it so. Multiple and identical does not mean reliable, and constant vigilance and awareness of the possible slip-ups, as well as close proofreading and (costly) editorial decisions, are required to keep the text faithful to the manuscript. Truth was achieved “by virtue of hard work, exercised over generations and across nations” (Johns 256).

“The fundamental contribution of printing to learning was that it halted this progressive corruption and made possible the long and continuing effort to restore the great texts of the past to something approaching their original integrity [….] Referring precisely to a particular word in a particular line on a particular page, a scholar in Basel could propose an emendation which could be rapidly checked by his colleagues in Rome or Florence. Or another scholar might discover, in a monastic library in Paris, a manuscript whose text would be judged, by increasingly precise and objective criteria, better than any known before. From such corrections and discoveries a critical edition would emerge, to be superseded by another and yet another until something approaching a standard test had been achieved, usually only in the nineteenth or even twentieth century. The past is sometimes a burden. That we know it as well as we do–and so much of it–we owe to printing” (Rice & Grafton 7-8).

“Printing turned intellectual work as a whole into a cooperative instead of a solitary human activity” (Rice & Grafton 8).

“The power of books is not just what strikes the eye, but what may be latent, to be disclosed in the future.” “[L]atent power is vastly magnified by the multiplicity of copies” (Adams & Barker 9).

The Reformation
“But it was the spread of Lutheranism that first made frighteningly and triumphantly clear the revolutionary significance of printing for the communication of ideas. The Reformation spread with the same astonishing rapidity as printing itself; it could not have done so without it. Indeed, the role of printing in the early sixteenth century already suggests its double role in the future: through its promise of enlightenment and popular education, potentially revolutionary and hostile to the status quo; but when controlled by the state, the most effective agent of manipulation until the invention of radio and television” (Rice & Grafton 10).

“That is why the systematic censorship of books, little practiced in the Middle Ages, appeared very soon after the invention of printing, and spread with it. By making reading more democratic, printing spawned the modern censor. Both secular and ecclesiastical authorities censored books, for the prohibition and burning of books were designed to maintain political as well as religious orthodoxy” (Rice & Grafton 10).

Bibliography
Farthing, Stephen. Renaissance Art: Pop-Up Book. Pop-up Engineering by David Hawcock. N.p.
Johns, Adrian. “The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book” (Reader 255-272)
King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Forward by Chatarine R. Stimpson. 1991.
Rice, Eugene F., Jr. and Anthony Grafton. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. Second ed.
Roberts, J.M. The New History of the World. 2003.