What follows has been excerpted from the introductory lecture for a course I have taught at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies on the literature and philosophy of the Renaissance…
For the next few minutes, I am obliged to address the question of the defining nature of the Renaissance, on which historians of every subsequent generation down to our own have spilled seas of ink. Of course, there is an antecedent question–whether there was a Renaissance–, which is surely more than merely academic.
About the only thing that historians agree on is that the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteen centuries was neither unique nor unprecedented. That is, there have been innumerable efflorescences of civilizational and cultural brilliance throughout human history, and almost every one of them can be (and has been) conceived as a revival or rebirth of some antecedent “golden age”. Indeed, the remarkable fact about civilization–at least until relatively recently–is its more or less unbroken continuity.
Continue reading “The Renaissance, Renaissances, and the Unkillable Myth of a Medieval “Dark Age””