The Renaissance

The period of history known as the Renaissance literally, "rebirth" is frequently presented as the reemergence of Western Civilization out of the Dark Ages; a time when ignorance and superstition were cast aside and the people of Europe rediscovered ancient learning, when the fetters of feudal manoralism were broken, and freedom, civil and intellectual, shone bright.

This simple but popular image is, however, is at best a gross oversimplification of a much more complex reality. While the chaotic period from roughly AD 5001000 does deserve in many ways to be called the Dark Ages, the later medieval period saw a civilization fully as brilliant as that of the Renaissance. In some ways, medieval civilization was more advanced and closer to ouur values than that of the Renaissance. For example, free institutions spread among the republican citystates of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; by the highRenaissance fifteenth century, these instututions had declined into the despotism that produced the age of the Medicis and Machiavelli.

The argument of this report will be that the civilization of the Renaissance was not a rebirth from darkness, but a natural development of the civilization, already advanced in many ways, of the later Middle Ages. This is not to say that the Renaissance did not embody much that was new. A glance at a history of art shows us that the fourteenthcentury Italian painter Giotto often regarded as the first Ren

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centuries. It was essentially an attempt to recapture their lost medieval liberty that impelled the greatest of Renaissance political thinkers, Machiavelli, to make his great analyses of the nature of autocratic and republican institutions, ________ 3Daniel Waley, The Italian CityRepublics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969), 60. 4Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 90ff. respectively, in The Prince and the Discourses.5 Not the least of the reasons why the Renaissance later appeared as such a sudden blooming from a dark past was that Renaissance thinkers like Machiavelli were strikingly prone to ignore or denigrate the achievements of their medieval forebears. In his analysis of republicanism in the Discourses, Machiavelli draw examples from ancient Rome and from his own day and all but ignored the republican achievements of the Middle Ages, which still remain relatively littleknown. Apart from its political achievements, the Middle Ages contributed greatly to the technical and economic foundations of later Europe. By the twelfth century, the Italian cities dominated the Mediterranean. In the course of the thirteenth century they develop

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