"Renaissance," French for "rebirth," perfectly describes the intellectual and economic

changes that occurred in Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.
During the era known by this name, Europe emerged from the economic stagnation
of the Middle Ages and experienced a time of financial growth. Also, and perhaps
most importantly, the Renaissance was an age in which artistic, social, scientific, and
political thought turned in new directions.

The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 was responsible for the spread
of learning through the writings that came to the Italians owing to the monks that
escaped the libraries that were being sacked by the Turks. The spread of humanism
has to be seen in the larger context of the growth of the printing press as well. In
1474 the printing press came to Italy, and in 1477 to England at Westminster by
William Caxton. Printed books helped enormously as they were much easier to read
than manuscripts, which had been copied by hand, and thus education ceased to be
the monopoly of the Church. Besides a rebirth of learning, the Renaissance also
resulted in a rebirth of art, which was now brought into closer touch with the ordinary
life of humanity. The invention of the mariner’s compass enabled long voyages to be
made. Various trade routes were discovered, especially that to the America by
Columbus in 1492, which changed the whole idea of the world.

The rebirth of classical studies contributed to the development of all forms of art
during the Renaissance. Literature was probably the first to show signs of classical
influence. Renaissance is generally regarded as having started in Italy at the
beginning of the fourteenth century with the publication of The Divine Comedy by the
Italian poet Dante. Its subject was certainly religious, showing that its author
belonged to the Middle Ages when religion was the chief mental interest. After Dante
came Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75). Petrarch was a great lover of
classical Latin, and did much to revive people’s interest in Roman writers like Virgil,
Cicero, etc. Cicero a Roman thinker who wrote The Orator
believed:
“And it is no mean manifestation of nature and reason that man is the only animal
that has a feeling for order, for propriety, for moderation in word and deed. And so no
other animal has a sense of beauty, loveliness, harmony in the visible world.”
He used the Latin word humanitas to denote the kind of cultural values that one
could imbibe from a liberal education. Boccaccio was chiefly noted for his
Decameron. The English poet Chaucer was inspired by this writer’s example to
compose his famous Canterbury Tales. Boccaccio also set an example by learning
Greek, which was consequential as Greek writers had singular originality and
boldness of intellect and endeavoured to probe deeply into the mysteries of the
universe apart from refusing to accept the traditional beliefs of their age without
qualification or question.

During the Middle Ages, religion had become a tyrannical force and man existed only
in the service of God. During the late fifteenth century, the focus shifted from being
theocentric to that of homocentric. Man was now seen not only at the service of God,
but also standing at the centre of the universe asserting his identity and
appropriating the universe and its bounties. Secular affairs were specified a place
separate from religion. The spirit of humanism refuted the belief that dominated the
Middle Ages about man’s life being painful and sinful. It did not challenge religion,
but defied the interpretation of the Bible. Reason was given importance over blind
faith. Renaissance humanism started as a movement based on the recovery,
interpretation and imitation of Roman and Greek texts, but gradually became a
dynamic cultural programme, influencing almost every aspect of Renaissance
intellectual life. Humanist scholars rejected the medieval problems of the
metaphysical nature of the universe and the problems of being. They concerned
themselves with the philosophy of man, and though they sought methods and
examples from ancient thinkers, their primary focus was on modern men and society.
They increased the secular content of thought and literature, and were responsible
for bringing learning out to the national mainstream. The encyclopaedic approach of
medieval writers was abandoned and instead short treatises on politics, war, history,
arts, education, manners, grammar and rhetoric were produced.

The humanist approach was largely historical so that the writers of antiquity were
seen in the social political contexts. Humanism thus came to be associated as much
with political discourses as with philosophical enquiry and different kinds of literary
enterprises. Humanist studies that came up during Renaissance were directed
towards the dignity of man’s existence and ranged in poetry, history, rhetoric,
grammar, moral philosophy, mathematics, theology and various sciences like
astronomy, geometry, etc resulting in tremendous scholarly learning. A scientific and
philosophical attitude developed and political awareness mushroomed. Man’s faith in
himself, his potential, energy and freewill proliferated under this ethos. The new
interest in secular life led to beliefs about education and society that came from
Greece and Rome. The secular, humanist idea held that the church should not rule
civic matters, but should guide only spiritual matters. The church disdained the
accumulation of wealth and worldly goods, supported a strong but limited education,
and believed that moral and ethical behaviour were dictated by scripture. Humanists,
however, believed that wealth enabled them to do fine, noble deeds, that good
citizens needed a good, well-rounded education (such as that advocated by the
Greeks and Romans), and that moral and ethical issues were related more to
secular society than to spiritual concerns.

The first spurt of humanism was in the form of religious humanism. Erasmus (1466-
1536) and Sir Thomas More (1478-1575), the very first of the humanists, affirmed
their belief in humanity through their belief in God. Erasmus a great Dutch scholar
whose influence extended beyond his own country to England, France, Germany
and Italy, in 1519 published a book called The Praise of Folly. He hoped that he
would be able to effect the reforms which he desired in the Church by a direct appeal
to the reason of humanity. He wrote:
“The first place must indeed be given to the authority of the scriptures; but
nevertheless, I sometimes find things said or written by the ancients, nay even by the
heathens, by the poets themselves so chastily, so divinely that I cannot persuade
myself but that when they wrote them, they were divinely inspired.”
He also stated:
“I affirm that as the instinct of the dog is to hunt, of the bird to fly, of the horse to
gallop, so the natural bent of man is to philosophy and right conduct.”

With the growing rate of literacy, a sudden burst of literary activity took place in the
1590s so that Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne, along with others, were
writing almost simultaneously. The expansion of grammar schools produced a body
of talented men who were well trained in classical learning. Their literary talent was
hybrid in nature bringing together borrowings from classical texts and traces of a
native, popular tradition. Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, Horace’s The Art of Poetry,
Cicero’s The Orator and On the Orator and Quintilian’s The Education of an Orator
were often referred to for guidelines on poetry, oratory, rhetoric and on the role of the
orator in poetic theory. Marlowe’s plays exhibit experimentation with the
heterogeneity of the form of theatre. He used its hybridity to broaden the horizon of
his own humanist training. Donne’s poetry captures the then shifting account of the
world and its reality for science, the epitome of Renaissance spirit, was in direct
conflict with the Church. In Philip Sidney’s prose romance Arcadia, certain
conventionalised situations and formats were reworked to accommodate social
tensions and ideological pressures. Milton quotes often from the Bible in
Areopagitica, and his use of the Bible is more a cultural appropriation of scripture
rather than a theological reading of it. In Paradise Lost, he fiercely defends freedom.