![]() No one can now use the Renaissance to mean the recovery of Greek and the classicizing of Latin with any assurance that his hearers will understand him. Meanwhile, it has been ruined for its proper purpose. A word of such wide and fluctuating meaning is of no value. Francis of Assisi, become 'Renaissance' men. Instead of admitting that our definition has broken down, we adopt the desperate expedient of saying that 'the Renaissance' must have begun earlier than we had thought. Then, as every attempt to define this mysterious character or quality turns out to cover all sorts of things that were there before the chosen period, a curious procedure is adopted. Renaissance becomes the name for some character or quality supposed to be immanent in all the events, and collects very serious emotional overtones in the process. The word Renaissance helps to impose a factitious unity on all the untidy and heterogeneous events which were going on in those centuries as in any others. Where we have a noun we tend to imagine a thing. But words, said Bacon, shoot back upon the understandings of the mightiest. If it were merely a chronological label, like 'pre-Dynastic' or 'Caroline' it might be harmless. Unfortunately it has, for many years, been widening its meaning, till now 'the Renaissance' can hardly be defined except as 'an imaginary entity responsible for everything the speaker likes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries'. ![]() If it still bore that clear and useful sense, I should of course have employed it. ![]() The word has sometimes been used merely to mean the 'revival of learning', the recovery of Greek, and the 'classicizing' of Latin. I hope that this abstinence, which is forced on me by necessity, will not have been attributed to affectation. It may or may not have been noticed that the world Renaissance has not yet occurred in this book. Lewis made this same point rather forcefully back 50s, notably for us here in the book that formed his inaugural lecture series as he took up the newly formed chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge ( English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. The renaissance is centrally about a specific canon of literary figures and a semi-mythical notion of "modernity", which has seen strenuous criticism for decades. Petrarch died in 1374, Chaucer in 1400 the Avignon papacy ended in 1376, the Hundred Years War in 1453. The point is pretty much unambiguous once we move outside of Italy, any illusion of a chronological boundary disappears. 1430s) is usually considered medieval to my understanding. There is nothing inherently "renaissance" about studying, say, mendicant orders in 15th century Italy and Christine de Pizan (d. There's also pretty consistently a panel or two involving Petrarch at Kalamazoo.īut the notion that this is a chronological divide is belied by a range of other factors. Go have a look at the appointees at the Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies, you'll find no shortage of medievalists. And plenty of other medievalists do "renaissance" studies. But even for literary history, something like David Wallace's Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 very much covers Italy. Certainly among American Italianists the divide is something like what you suggest, with medievalists study Dante and Boccaccio, while Renaissance scholars study Boccaccio and Petrarch. It's thematic rather than chronological and this is all a lot fuzzier than you're suggesting. ![]() The medievalists still generally end before Petrarch
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