Renaissance/ നവോത്ഥാനം
The Renaissance from French: Renaissance "re-birth", Italian: "to be reborn" was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th
century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. 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.
As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative
flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century
resurgence of learning based on classical sources,
which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and
other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform.
In politics, the Renaissance contributed the development
of the conventions of diplomacy, and in science an increased reliance on
observation. Historians often argue this intellectual transformation was a
bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern history. 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.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations,
there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century
glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as
"Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical
delineation. The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of Renaissance:
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 classical antiquity, while
social and economic historians of the longue durée especially have instead focused on the continuity between
the two eras, linked, as Panofsky
himself observed, "by a thousand ties".
The word Renaissance,
whose literal translation from French into English is "Rebirth",
appears in English writing from the 1830s. The
word occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire
de France. The word Renaissance has also been extended to other
historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and
the Renaissance of the 12th century.
