Impact of Renaissance on Italy

The chapter "European Society in the Age of the Renaissance" examines the primarily positive aspects of the Renaissance and its impact on Italy and ultimately on the rest of Europe. It is the thesis of the chapter that there occurred in Europe in the 14th through the 16th centuries a revolution in economics, culture, religion and politics which entirely transformed the continent.

Just as the European Renaissance was rooted in the Italian Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance was rooted in an economic factors:

The Italian Renaissance rested on the phenomenal economic growth of the High Middle Ages. In the period from 1050 to 1300, a new economy emerged based on Venetian and Genoese shipping and long-distance trade and on Florentine banking and cloth manufacture (432-433).

This economic growth created a "wealthy aristocratic class" which were at the heart of the cultural and intellectual development and expansion which commenced in the 14th century and which served as the essence of the Italian and European Renaissance.

Another important aspect of the foundation of the Renaissance was the political evolution which accompanied the economic transformation. However, this political evolution hardly echoed the kind of freedom and humanism which marked the intellectual efforts of the era:

In the city-states of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, oligarchic or despotic powers governed; Renaissance culture was manipulated to enhance the power of those rulers (433).

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h sixteenth centuries; those achievements rest on the economic and political developments of earlier centuries" (403-404). Without the economic growth and political stability thus previously established, the nations of Europe would not have had the time or the opportunity to develop culturally and intellectually as they did. The author covers the political and economic structures at work before and during the emergence of the Renaissance, especially in Italy, including communes and republics, and the balance of power among city-states. Examining the main intellectual developments of the Renaissance, the author of the chapter covers individualism (discouraged previously during the Middle Ages because of the Christian negation of self-concern), humanism and secularism (similarly abhorred during the Christian Middle Ages). However, these three hallmarks of the intellectual development of the Renaissance did not mean that Christianity was rejected. In fact, most Renaissance leaders remained Christian, although the role of the human being in society and in religion was elevated above the level of the Middle Ages. In the realm of art the Renaissance, we read, found its most lasting and admirable expression. Here the wealth and po

Category: History - I