A.P. Euro Chpter 12 Summary

CHAPTER 12 SUMMARY

Beginning in Italy, the Renaissance (or "rebirth") was an era that rediscovered the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. It was also a time of recovery from the fourteenth century. In comparison with medieval society, the Renaissance had a more secular and individualistic ethos, but might best been seen as evolutionary in its urban and commercial continuity from the High Middle Ages. In the North Sea, the Hanseatic League competed with merchants from the Mediterranean, where the Venetians had a commercial empire. In Florence, profits from the woolen industry were invested in banking.

The aristocracy remained the ruling class, its ideals explicated in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier. Peasants were still the vast majority, but serfdom and manorialism were dying out. An important minority were the inhabitants of towns and cities, with merchants and bankers at the apex and the unskilled workers at the bottom. The father or husband as a dictator dominated the extended family, and marriages were arranged for social and economic advantage. Wives were much younger than their husbands, with their primary function being to bear children; the mortality rate in childbirth and for infants and young children remained high.

Italy was dominated by five major states: the duchy of Milan, Florence, Venice, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples. There were also other city-states that were centers of culture and where women played vital roles. At the end of the fifteenth century, Spain and France invaded the divided peninsula. The exemplar of the new statecraft was Niccolo Machiavelli (d.527), whose The Prince described the methods of gaining and holding political power: moral concerns are irrelevant, for the ends justify the means.

There was an increased emphasis upon the human. Among the influential humanists was Petrarch (d.1374) in his advocacy of classical Latin writers. Civic humanism posited that the ideal citizen was not only an intellectual but also a patriot, actively serving the state, and humanist education was to produce individuals of virtue and wisdom. The printing press was perfected, multiplying the availability of books. In art, the aim was to imitate nature by the use of realistic perspective. Masaccio (d.1428), Donatello (d.1466) and Michelangelo (d.1564) made Florence a locus of the arts. The High Renaissance of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci (d.1519) and Raphael (d.1520) combined natural realism with Platonic idealism. The artisan might become a great artist, and thus transform his social and economic status.

It was the era of the "new monarchies." In France, Louis XI (d.1483), the Spider, established a centralized state. England's Henry VII (d.1509) limited the private armies of the aristocracy, raised taxes, and left a more powerful monarchy. In Spain, Isabella (d.1504) and Ferdinand