Like just as scholars were reviving translations of Plato and integrating knowledge from the Islamic world, the bubonic plague went on killing people and in Petrarch’s hometown, ordinary people like the Ciompi were vigorously protesting living conditions. According to Renaissance author Leonardo Bruni in the early fifteenth century, “Francesco Petrarch was the first with a talent sufficient to recognize and call back to light the ancient elegance of the lost and extinguished style.” The Renaissance, meaning revival or renewal, hearkened back to what was seen as the bright light of classical antiquity, which had then been obscured in the dark and ignorant Middle Ages.īut in some ways, the Middle Ages existed simultaneously with the Renaissance. In fact, Petrarch gave the era in which he lived its name-calling them the “middle ages” just as his writing and research helped usher in a New Age that we now call the Renaissance. At any rate, not happy with the state of things in Europe, he turned to Plato, Cicero, and other ancient writers, whom he thought of as residents of the Old Age. It’s almost like people always feel like they live in the worst possible time. “Living,” he lamented, “I despise what melancholy fate/ has brought us wretches in these evil years.” Oh, Petrarch, are you sure you weren’t writing about now? Amid all this upheaval, and to some extent because of it, the Florentine author Francesco Petrarca, aka Petrarch, was unleashing his critique of 14th century life. So, as you’ll recall from our previous episode, a declining European population due to disease and war in the 14th century meant that labor had become much more valuable, which shifted long-held beliefs about how society should be organized.
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The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, 6th ed. Today you'll learn about how the Renaissance came to be, and what impact it had on Europe and the world. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci, Sandro Boticelli, and many others were associated with the city, and the money of patrons like the Medici family made a lot of the art possible.
Florence, or as Italians might say, Firenze, was the home to a seemingly inordinate amount of the art, architecture, literature, and cultural output of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a cultural revitalization that spread across Europe, and had repercussions across the globe, but one smallish city-state in Italy was in many ways the epicenter of the thing.