Redpill me on the Renaissance, /his/.
Are the memes about nothing happening in the Middle Ages true?
Or was the Renaissance just a culmination of all the progress made in the High-to-Late Medieval Period?
The high middle ages had trade, but very little artistic or political development outside of the religious realm.
With the Renaissance, you start to get lay literacy and much wider political awareness.
Thank the printing press.
The Renaissance connotes a moment of blossoming art, genius and above all discovery. And indeed, from roughly 1450 to 1550,Genius flourished, as evidenced by the roll call of luminaries who left a permanent mark on civilisation: Copernicus, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and .Galileo. It shaped the early modern world.
>>1336903
The so-called dark ages are an invention of the Enlightenment. The middle ages had their own good-szied share of scientific and intellectual progress. This image is from /pol/ and I apologize for that, but the book it's about is quite well-referenced, and just about anyone who knows anything about the middle ages will agree with the great majority of its content especially as concerns the scientific progress made in the middle ages. (imo, the author shits a little too much on later period humanists, but taken with a grain of salt it's pretty good.)
Or, if you'd rather take the information in condensed edutainment format, this episode of Terry Jones' medieval lives has some nice tidbits about medieval science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTf2EzTd1TE
The Renaissance did see some very significant advances, especially in the fields of art and mathematics, but it wasn't exactly the transition from eating mud and sleeping and shit to enlightened humanism that some people bill it as. You've also gotta understand that a lot of modern ideas and attitudes about the middle ages come from the time of the French Revolution, when people played up the barbarism and ignorance of the middle ages to an absurd degree as a slur against the feudal aristocracy who would then be barbaric and ignorant by association. The right of the first night, for example, seen in movies such as Braveheart, was first described at that time, despite having no basis in the historical record.
>>1337634
I seem to recall reading somewhere about some medieval nun boasting she had never taken a bath. The Church decried bathing as a luxury and a sinful indulgence,This was a holdover from the early Church, where ascetics and eremites would refrain from bathing as a way of mortifying the flesh. The Benedictine Rule stated that the sick were allowed to take baths as often as they needed, but for those in good health baths would be tolerated only rarely.
>>1336903
>Are the memes about nothing happening in the Middle Ages true?
No. The High Middle Ages had allot going on in every sphere, intellectual, technological, political, religious, artistic, etc.
Now personally I think that the Renaissance ends with Copernicus and the start of the Early Modern period begins then. So I would identity the "Renaissance" with Italian art, and the role of private sponsors on art and the rise of the individual artist, where Medieval art was often made for communities, and often did not have the signature of its creator on it. Along with that I think that we should view the "Renaissance" in regards to the diminished role of logic and technical philosophical tracts in the university for the sake of a greater focus on rhetoric and the artistic merits of classical prose, aka humanism. Intellectually the progress made the high medieval period ( the beginnings of the mathematization of physics and the focus on empirical experimentation, the dethroning of Aristotle to some degree, advancements in systems of logic and philosophy of language, etc) was largely abandoned for a return to antiquity intellectually. Come the 16th century slowly reintroducing late scholasticism would lead to more and more figures like Copernicus and Gelileo, who were advancing fragments of what was left over by the Oxford Calculators and Nicole Oresme in the High Middles Ages. The "Renaissance" was marked by major fideism against rational apologetics, and a degree of skepticism about human reason carried on by figured like Ockahm.
Really the term "Renaissance" is misleading in the way most people are using it, because 1400-1525 and 1525-1650 are very different periods. The former was anti-intellectual and anti-medieval, where the latter was pro intellectual and pro-medieval.
Innovation is not backward-looking. An innovation is that the narrative sequence paintings of the medieval era have become obsolete during Renaissance, and became modern and centered because of humanistic ideologies.
Another was the linear perspective which helped artist and architects view things in perspective.
>>1336903
The Islamic Golden Age was to the High Middle Ages as the Gunpowder Empires was to the Renaissance.
>>1337684
That doesn't make any sense. Did you mean The Islamic golden age was to the gunpowder empires as the Middle Ages was to the Renaissance?
>>1337647
What sort of state did physics reach as an actual science during ghe middle ages? Who were some prominant scientists?
>>1337646
There's also the issue that medieval baths were often associated with prostitution. Whatever the Church thought, bathing was fairly popular with ordinary people for a good period of time, at least up until the 16th century when the whole thing fell out of fashion, probably for plague-related reasons.
>>1337777
Not that guy, but Roger Bacon is a big one. Richard Swineshead is another that I can recall. There were a bunch of others, but I can't remember their names off the top of my head.
>>1337777
You had guys like Roger Bacon and Robert Grossesteste emphasizing experimentation and coming to largely correct conclusions on things like colour, light, rainbows, etc. And you also had the emphasis on the mathematization of physics by the Merton School (Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Swineshead, William Heytesbury, Richard Kilvington, and Walter Burly) and Nicole Oresme, but it should be emphasized that they had little notation or experimental procedure.
What happened with the Merton School was that logico-linguistic texts meant for university students started having more and more mathematics and natural philosophy imported into them for a variety of reason. One reason being the Ockhamists' focus on adding in more "factual" considerations to their logical treatises, that set the stage for that being normal. The "calculations" would be a means to derive counterintuitive results about problems involving continuity, traversing space, the intention and remission of qualities, understanding the relationship of velocities and resistances to motion,rarity and density, and lots of other subjects that would be taken up in latter scientific works, often using these considerations as a launching point. One thing not so scientific was how often they were willing to spend large sections of the works just do calculations based on imagery cases. The deductive and proto-mathematical rigor involved in working on these cases was seen as more important than whether or not they actually corresponded to natural phenomena or not. As mentioned, these were first and foremost logical texts.
Oresme dismantled the arguments against the idea that the earth rotates, though he ultimately did not reject the position because he felt that he had nothing to totally disbar the theory and had no better theory of his own. He also argued for the possibility of a void and infinite space, something that acted as a major challenge to Aristotelean cosmology.
