Renaissance (~1400 – 1650)
Europe turns back to antiquity, discovers a new continent, invents printing, and — almost as a side effect — invents the modern self.
What Defined It
Humanism is the keyword. Scholars started reading Greek and Roman texts directly rather than through medieval commentary. Petrarch climbs a mountain and writes about it like a modern person. Erasmus edits the Greek New Testament. Machiavelli writes The Prince as a political manual that assumes humans are exactly what they are. Montaigne invents the essay by asking, quite literally, “what do I know?” and finding the answer surprisingly thin.
The Reformation splits the Church. Luther’s vernacular Bible and the printing press democratize reading. Painting discovers perspective, anatomy, psychology. And at the tail end, the Scientific Revolution starts — Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler — preparing the ground for the Enlightenment.
Key Figures
Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Luther, Calvin; Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer; Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Francis Bacon.
Why It Matters
This is where the modern subject shows up — someone capable of ironic self-awareness, of arguing with tradition, of traveling mentally between antiquity and the present. Shakespeare’s soliloquies and Don Quixote’s mad lucidity are the same literary invention: a mind you can live inside.
Cervantes in particular does something no one had done before — he writes a book about a reader who has read too much, and in doing so invents the novel as a form that can contain its own critique.
Connections
- Cervantes — the first modern novelist
- Don Quixote — the founding novel; the template for every ironic, self-conscious narrative that follows
Lineage
- Predecessors: Medieval (scholasticism, late Gothic, pre-humanist scholars like Petrarch)
- Successors: Enlightenment (Descartes’ inward turn, the scientific method matures); the Baroque