Theme 5: Renaissance in world literature

Renaissance in world literature
Plan:
1.The Renaissance period in Italian literature
2. Petrarch is the 1^st Italian nationalist
3.The Renaissance period in French literature
Key words and expressions:
vernacular literature, manuscripts, patronage, political reprisals, scholasticism, aesthetic aspects, philosophy, humanism
The Renaissance  was a cultural movement from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Renaissance in Italy was a period of expanding economic, political, and cultural activity. The towns and cities emerged from feudal conditions to become centers of commerce and industry. The period was marked by a rebirth of culture based on the discovery of ancient manuscripts and the re-evaluation of classical literature and philosophy, which spread eventually throughout Europe. Many of the great of early Renaissance were scholars with philological research into and the translation of the Greek and Latin classics. They were called humanists because of their interest in human rather than other worldly ideals. Though availability of paper and the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man". There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, Italy, in the 14th century. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization— historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science— but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art. Some have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age, while social and economic historians, especially have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, linked , as Panofsky himself observed, "by a thousand ties”
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art. During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists depended totally on patrons while the patrons needed money to sustain geniuses. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia and Europe. Silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa and Venice.
Michelet defined the 16th-century Renaissance in France as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The Renaissance in Italy was a period of expanding economic, political, and cultural activity. The towns and cities emerged from feudal conditions to become centers of commerce and industry. City leaders struggled constantly to increase their power by conquest and by establishing spheres of influence. Some city-states, such as Venice and Genoa, won control of Mediterranean empires. The period was marked by a rebirth of culture based on the discovery of ancient manuscripts and the reevaluation of classical literature and philosophy, which spread eventually throughout Europe. Many of the great figures of early Renaissance literature were scholars concerned with philological research into and the translation of the Greek and Latin classics. They were called humanists because of their interest in human rather than other word ideals, as opposed to the scholars and thinkers of the Middle Ages. Many humanists turned for inspiration to the works of Plato in preference to those of his pupil Aristotle, who was the dominant influence in medieval scholarship.
One of the most important figures of the early Renaissance was the humanist scholar and poet Petrarch. With him a new feeling entered Western culture. Unlike Dante and other medieval thinkers such as the Italian Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas and the French philosopher Peter Abelard, Petrarch was not concerned so much with using the material of the ancient classical writers for his own purposes as with acting in the classical spirit. A great Latinist, he helped to restore classical Latin as a literary and scholarly language and to discredit the use of medieval Latin, which had served as an international medium of communication. After this period Latin lost currency as a spoken tongue.
Petrarch is often referred to as the "modern man" because of his interest in individuality; his Vita Solitaria (1480; Solitary Life, 1924) and his De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (1468; Physicke Against Fortune, 1579) are considered the first essays to express this new attitude. He has been called also the first Italian nationalist, as contrasted with Dante, who was a universalist and for whom Italy was a part to be fitted into an imperial whole. To Petrarch, Italy was the heir and successor of ancient Rome, the civilizing mission of which he glorified in his Latin epic Africa (critical edition, 1926), dealing with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. He believed that the various states of Italy should be united to resume the mission of ancient Rome.
Impressive as were Petrarch's contributions to classical scholarship, his greatness rests on his Italian lyrics. His Canzoniere (after 1327; trans. 1777)a collection of sonnets addressed to Laura, probably the Frenchwoman Laure de Noves, the counterpart of Dante's Beatrice departs from the idealized approach of the dolce stil nuovo. It introduced an intensity and inwardness of feeling and perception heretofore unknown in European poetry. Boccaccio, like Petrarch, was conscious of belonging to a new age. He was strongly influenced by Petrarch, and the two men became close friends. Boccaccio had a strong narrative bent, as evidenced by his prose romances Il Filocolo (circa 1336) and L'amorosa Fiammetta (Amorous Fiammetta, c. 1343). Boccaccio's greatest work is his Decamerone (1353; The Decameron, 1620), a masterpiece in which he drew directly from life instead of from literary models. It is a collection of 100 short stories presumed to have been told during a period of ten days by seven gentlemen and three ladies of Florence living in a remote country villa in which they had taken refuge from an epidemic of the plague. Unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio valued Dante highly; his last work was a biography and a series of lectures on the work of the great poet. Boccaccio's writings gained an international public and were drawn upon for plots and characters by writers in other countries. For example, his epic poem La Teseida (c. 1341) was used by the 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer as the basis for his "Knight's Tale" and by the 17th-century English poet John Dryden in his poem "Palamon and Arcite."
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the first Italian writers to make literary use of the Tuscan dialect spoken in Florence, Siena, and other towns of north-central Italy, and they won for it general acceptance as the language of culture.
French Renaissance literature is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in French (Middle French) from the French invasion of Italy in 1494 to 1600, or roughly the period from the reign of Charles VIII of France to the ascension of Henry IV of France to the throne. The reigns of Francis I (from 1515 to 1547) and his son Henry II (from 1547 to 1559) are generally considered the apex of the French Renaissance. After Henry II's unfortunate death in a joust, the country was ruled by his widow Catherine de' Medici and her sons Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, and although the Renaissance continued to flourish, the French Wars of Religion between Huguenots and Catholics ravaged the country. This period saw: a proliferation of pamphlets, tracts, satires and memoirs; the success of short-story collections (“nouvelles”) as well as collections of oral tales and anecdotes (“propos and devis”); a public fascination with tragic tales from Italy (most notably those of Bandello); a considerable increase in the translating and publishing of contemporary European authors (especially Italians and Spaniards) compared to authors from the Middle Ages and classical antiquity; an important increase in the number of religious works sold (devotional books would beat out the “belles-lettres” as the most sold genre in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century); and finally, the publication of important works of moral and philosophical reflection.
François Rabelais (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃.swa ʁa.blɛ]) (c. 1494 – 9 April 1553) was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known work is Gargantua and Pantagruel. Although the place or date of his birth is not reliably documented, and some scholars put it as early as 1483, it is probably that François Rabelais was born in November 1494 near Chinon, Indre-et-Loire, where his father worked as a lawyer. La Devinière in Seuilly, Indre-et-Loire, is the name of the estate that claims to be the writer's birthplace and houses a Rabelais museum. Rabelais was first a novice of the Franciscan order, and later a friar at Fontenay-le-Comte, where he studied Greek and Latin, as well as science, philology, and law, already becoming known and respected by the humanists of his era, including Guillaume Budé. Harassed due to the directions of his studies, Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII and was granted permission to leave the Franciscans and enter the Benedictine order at Maillezais, where he was more warmly received.
Questions:
1. What is the Renaissance and why is it referred as a bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern Era?
2. What do you know about Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch?
3. Explain this phrase: “During the Renaissance money and art went hand in hand?
4. Since when had Ancient Greek works been studied?
5. What was the main factor of the Renaissance spread?
6.What was a remarkable period of French Renaissance?
7. What genre of literature is referred as ‘propos and devis’ in French?
8. Who is the author of The Heptameron?
9. What is the main matter of the Heptameron’s stories?