Talk:Renaissance

MSCS

The dash brought about many changes to European society during the 15th 16th centuries ? 2A00:F29:249:8740:A4FF:C500:66C5:45E6 (talk) 13:00, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Edit request 4 February 2025

Hi,

I'd like to suggest a few edits to this article, related to the positioning of Italy as the 'birthplace' of the Renaissance. "The Renaissance" in the 19th century (in Britain, at least) was indeed thought of as an Italian thing, but this is a debatable idea that has lost currency in contemporary scholarship. I notice that the sources for such statements in the article (where given) are from the 1990s; a lot of work has been done since then to realise the significant contributions of other parts of Europe in the development of the Renaissance. As a result, I feel the credibility of the article is compromised by its embracing the 'fact' of Italy as the origin.

The first edit I'd suggest is to remove: " the Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence, then spread to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe." The first part of the sentence can stand alone without this (misleading) second part.

Then, I suggest an edit to, "the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century..." This could be tweaked to read: "the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: in Italy, the first traces appear as the late 13th century..." This would remove the suggestion in the sentence that "the Renaissance" started in Italy.

In the 'period' section, we find the paragraph, "The Renaissance began in Florence, one of the many states of Italy.[13] Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors, including Florence's social and civic peculiarities at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici,[14] and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire.[15][16][17] Other major centers were Venice, Genoa, Milan, Rome during the Renaissance Papacy, and Naples. From Italy, the Renaissance spread throughout Europe and also to American, African and Asian territories ruled by the European colonial powers of the time or where Christian missionaries were active."

I would suggest simply deleting this paragraph, since many ideas it covers are repeated in one of the following paragraphs. Many ideas it lists are actually not compatible with or needed in this 'period' section. For example, the Medici patronage of arts didn't start until the 15th century - long after the 'beginnings' of the Renaissance in the 13th century (as described in the opening section of the article). Similarly, the fall of Constantinople didn't happen until the 1430s, so can't be considered a contributing factor to argue that the Renaissance 'began' in Italy.

Sadie694 (talk) 15:02, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 16 November 2025

Change "some like Erasmus and Thomas More envisioned new reformed spiritual foundations, others. in the words of Machiavelli, una lunga sperienza delle cose moderne ed una continua lezione delle antiche (a long experience with modern life and a continuous learning from antiquity).[29]" to

"some like Erasmus and Thomas More envisioned new reformed spiritual foundations. In the words of Machiavelli, una lunga sperienza delle cose moderne ed una continua lezione delle antiche (a long experience with modern life and a continuous learning from antiquity).[29]"

The syntax in the original is incoherent. This is the closest I can get to making sense of it. Jake the big man 1789 (talk) 21:08, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Partly done: I did my best to fix the grammar but the sentence definitely needs some more work from someone who has access to the cited book. I don't understand why the Machiavelli quote is given in the original Italian. Day Creature (talk) 23:38, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

"Renaissnce" and post-colonial perspectives

When asked for the dates of "The Renaissnce", I often respond "1845-1960". Though this article repeats "in the 1830s", I've found no mention of the word until the mid-1840s, and then only in reference to the decorative arts. Earlier references (as cited in Vasari) are rare and not relevant to the later periodicity of the term as a movement. Its earliest applications were only to the plastic arts, especially painting. The primary avenue for its wider application, to a broad cultural movement, comes later, in Michelet and most notably in Burckhardt. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the dates of its growth correspond to the decades in which the conquest of the world by Western countries and cultures was secured-- the 19c. In that light, using a constructed "golden age" to background the apotheosis of the spread of its culture, as a way of grounding and thereby validating such an expansion, reveals the colonialist roots of "renaissance". My work on this, in a dissertation, has been anticipated, as I discovered after said dissertation was completed, by J.B. Bullen (aka J. Barrie Bullen). "The Renaissance" then becomes a vast cultural metaphor justifying the West's conquest of the globe. (One historian has posited that, by 1910, 90% of the world's surface and population was a colony of or controlled by a Western country.) If the West is, as British litterateurs and politicians noted frequently throughout the 19c, "bringing civilization to the savages", then a return from them of resources-- diamonds, gold, lumber, and the product of plantations-- was surely justified. What better proof that the civilization of the West was superior than to create a golden age? The "renaissance" idea caught first fire on the Continent. It was first widely presented in England in 1872 at a public forum at Oxford University by a student, John Addington Symonds, who later turned that student paper into a book, The Renaissance in Italy'; in the audience were such influential writers as Matthew Arnold, who later wrote to Symonds that he was deeply impressed by the idea. The notion of an "English Renaissance" was promulgated more by American academics that by English ones. The wholesale spread of college education in the U.S. gave the ideas and support of American academia great influence. Subsequently, others jumped on the renaissance bandwagon, including (as noted) Haskins, who resented all the attention to that later period than his treasured 12c, then the Irish, Harlem, and American (white) South. By the time, in the 1960s and after, that it was included in the names of hotels, casinos, and pest control companies, it had lost much of its luster. But in the first fifty decades of the 20c, no more prestigious academic department existed in American universities that that, in literary studies, of The Renaissance. Only with post-colonial studies have we achieved the sort of cultural, historical perspective necessary to realize that the construction of a "Renaissance" had vast ulterior motives. "Well, was there a Renaissance or not?" one academic, professor of Renaissance literature, asked me plaintively. I gave him the above dates and defended them; I also acknowledged the development of a large body of highly skilled and admirable art in the conventional dates of the 15c-17c. Dmmsj00 (talk) 20:14, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Health and Healing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2026 and 8 May 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Apauly01 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Talyajp18.

— Assignment last updated by Clear04 (talk) 20:13, 1 April 2026 (UTC)