It wasnt until the 19th century and the post-enlightenment proliferation of scholarly acedemic and reductionist study of varying topics that we find the “renaissance” being defined and described.

To this day if one were to conduct a ‘vox pops’ survey on the streets quite probably the majority of people when asked about what the Renaissance was, would (if they had any knowledge of it) refer to some vague notion of it being European, humanist, and progressive.  And those with perhaps a greater awareness of socio-cultural history would probably be able to put a place and time to the term - saying probably Italy + 15th Century = Renaissance.

Indeed the term ‘Renaissance’ generally evokes the image of Italian culture. architecture and characters of that period, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gallileo etc. For me personally I always have visions of the Italian City-states, and the flowering of republican democracy.

But of course the Renaissance was much more than just that. It was a time of political and religious upheaval, it saw the rebirth of humanistic philosophy. The dawn of the modern scientific age took place alongside the birth of modern european imperialism, capitalism and all its ‘darker’ relations such as slavery, colonialism, the exploitation of resources.

But funnily enough the Renaissance is a myth, insofar as it wasnt a single cultural, or geographical (or for that matter historically) specific event. Of course we could describe culture (particularly european) as undergoing a seismic shift in capability and ambition, that is not deniable. But what is questionable is the story of what the Renaissance was, the myth and interestingly enough as I referred to at the beginning, the idea of the Renaissance as a period of european cultural, political and scientific flourishing was only conceived of in the 19th century.

Changes in perspective means that we are now questioning the recieved knowledge of the renaissance (or its own account of itself). An example of postmodern historical deconstruction (that has in my opinion been valuable).

There are two things that interest me and perhaps prompted me to post on this. The first was the view that a culture has of itself (and how this fluctuates according to variations in accepted values). The second was the two-way global scale of the renaissance, obviously the European domination of the world, but also the non-european catalysts for this change in capablity and ambition.

I was prompted to muse on the first of these themes by the 19th century Swiss academic Jacob Burckhardt who in 1860 published The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. In this seminal work he argued that the peculiarities of the Italian political environment in the late 1500’s led to the creation of a specifically modern individuality. “Man became a spiritual individual” with the revival of classical antiquity, the greater range of explorers and an increasing unease with organised religion. This was compared critically with the lack of individual awareness that Burckhardt defined as characteristic of the middle ages where:-

Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation.

In other words pre-15th century man was a tribal and herd-like animal without any powerful sense of personal identity.

What is interesting from the postmodern perspective is that a deeper study of Burckhardt or his French contemporary Jules Michelet (who drew similar conclusions) is that they were ideologically motivated individuals. Their respective historical metanarratives were written as both an affirmation of enlightenment ideals and as a defence against the collapse of certain of its principles (for example the re-establishment of the monarchy in France and the collapse of the republic). In other words, their account of the Renaissance (of what it was) and their account of its importance relied more upon their interpretation of historical facts presented as a justification for their political, philosophical and religious ideals for the 19th century. Consequently until comparitively recently their “version” of the Renaissance has been the iconic one familiar to us all, but it would seem is also less than accurate.

An interesting aside, as an existentialist reading the above quote of Berckhardts describing Medieval culture, one wonders whether anything much has changed? How many people in the present day define themselves in accordance with the expectations or demands of others? (Refer to AC-1’s post on advertising for some examples of modern herd mentality).

Finally the second point raises some interesting musings. The Renaissance as a non-specific period of cultural flourishing was indebted to external non-modern and non-european influences. There are too many to list them all, so just two shall suffice for now.

Schools and the idea that education should be available for all had their origins in renaissance humanist thinking. But the motivation wasn’t (as we would suppose) to broaden the mind of the individual in order to question themselves and society around them - although this was a desired aim. The reality was learning by rote and vocational based education preparing students for employment - little more than worker-mould factories!

A different example (and one that endlessly fascinates me) that had widespread ramifications for the development of science and economics was the introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals, the discovery or appropriation of the “zero” and the rise of modern mathematics.

In brief, it was a Pisan merchant Leonardo Pisan, who is known to the world as Fibonacci who in the 13th century used his experience of the Arabic method of reckoning profit and loss in the marketplace, who introduced numerals as we know them. Fibonacci explained the use of the numerals from 0 to 9, the use of the decomal point and their application to practical commercial problems. He also can be credited (bizarre as it may seem to us now) with the introduction of various calculating functions such as + addition, - subtraction and x multiplication into the european arithmetic vocabulary (functions previously unknown).

The arabic commercial practise that Fibonacci borrowed from itself came from a cultural flowering and “Renaissance” that took place in the Islamic east. Indeed the mathematical term “algebra” and its constituent principles are directly taken from Arabic al-jabru (meaning restoration). Furthermore in and around 825AD a Persian astronomer known as Abu Ja’far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarismi wrote a book which included the rules of arithemtic for the decimal positional number system, called ‘Kitab al jabr w’al-muqabala‘ (’Rules of Restoration and Reduction’). This astronomers name, when Latinized is given to the basis for the further study of one of modern maths cornerstones: the algorithm.