RENAISSANCE, or RENASCENCE, is a term given to the period of transition from the Middle Ages to modern times, and to the movement of thought which characterized that period. Etymologically the French Renaissance — Italian Rinascimmto— means rebirth. A rebirth of classical forms in literature and art is supposed to have dominated this transition. The metaphor must not he insisted on. There was no rebirth of antiquity in the Renaissance. The change from the mediaeval to the modern mind was gradual. One phage of this change was a more general harking back to classical models. This phase, in its bearing on litera ture, is loosely designated the Revival of Learning. The classical scholars, who re the refinement of Greek and Roman literature, humaniores, are called human ists.
I. Italy.— The Renaissance began in Italy. Here the memory of classical antiquity had never fully died out. North of the Alps the sway of scholastic philosophy was mightier than in the peninsula. Saint Thomas of Aquin (1225-74) taught at Paris; Albert the Great (1206-80) was a German; Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) and Occam (1280-1349) were Britons ; Duns Scotus (d. 1308) was a Scotchman or a Briton, who taught at Oxford. In Italy the medieval mind of the Florentine Dante (1265 1321), though thoroughly scholastic and Catholic, was at the same time steeped in the culture of ancient Rome. From Dante to a natural transition that cannot be called a rebirth of ancient ideas and ideals.
.1. Petrarch (a.n. 1303-74).— The revival of learning in Italy is generally assigned to Petrarch. He is sometimes depicted as an out and out humanist who ignored a future life and made ever onward to a godless expression and gratification of self. Such a picture is false in coloring. Petrarch was ever devoted to' the Church and its doctrines, even in the days of wildest enthusiasm for the humanistic culture of Rome and Greece. Witness his letter to Giovanni Colonna: *The true wisdom of God is Christ. Him must we love and rever ence above' all things, so as to learn true ptfilosophy. We should first be Christians; then we may be what we wilts (Epistotet, ed.
Fracasetd, Florence, 1864, ii, 112 ff.) When he was publicly crowned as poet and historian (1341), at Rome, in the showed his loyalty to the authority of the Church by laying the highly prized laurel crown as a votive offering upon the main altar of the basilica of Saint Peter. The imaginary con versations, held by Saint and the author, (De Contemptu Mundi,) ring true in tone, and doom pragmatistic sensuality to the condemnatory judgment of personified truth. Monastic life is praised in (De Vita Solitaria' and (De Ocio Religiosorum.) The (Trionft,'
in terra rims, celebrate allegorically the triumph of chastity over love, and of divinity over all. Bad traits there were in the character of Petrarch. He took minor orders, so as to en joy ecclesiastical preferment, and never became a priest. Sensuality besmirched his life. He craved for fame and flauntingly scorned scholastic theology. Apart from his (Canzoniere) and Petrarch's greatest achievement in the cause of letters was the dis covery of many a precious manuscript of the Latin classics. Lost works of Cicero and miss ing parts of the of Quintilian, by means of his travels and researches, were again made accessible to the learned.
2. Boccaccio (1313-75).— There were in all Italy only very few men who knew anything at all of Greek when Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio put themselves under the tutelage of Leo Pilatus and undertook to gain an en trance into the literature of the Hellenes. Boccaccio was a thoroughgoing humanist. His (1338) i3 wanton. (Ameto) (1340), a novel, tells with utter abandon the story of his mother's free love, and is fetid with the "reek of the rotten fens." The 50 cantos in terrine, that make up the (Amorosa Vision' (1342) in praise of love, are befouled with filth. The (1341) gives the tale of Palemon and Arcite in ottava rima; it was annotated by Tasso and used by Chaucer for his' Tale.' The (1353) is a collection of an hundred tales, often begrimed with inde cency, Boccaccio gathered from various literatures and set forth in his own manifold and multiform style. The (1354) is a rank lampoon and cynical satire against woman. Boccaccio runs the gamut of the emotions, but plays chiefly and with free fling on lust. His humanism is a riotous revel of the pas sions. Monks and nuns to him are hypocrites whose ethics is that of the pig-sty. And yet Boccaccio remained loyal to the Church; he died in the faith, bequeathed his library to friar and set the condition that the legatce pray for his soul. The humanism of Boccaccio was not directly anti-Catholic. He was three times Ambassador of Florence to Rome, re ceived many favors from the Popes and was financially aided by Clement VI. While Boc caccio wallowed in the mire of the erotic myths and legends of paganism, the study of an tiquity in a Christian spirit was ever encouraged by the papacy. Superstition and immorality were opposed by the Church, but the intellectual culture of the Greeks and Romans was ac cepted by her as a means of fulfilling her divine purpose. Saint Paul tried to gain the Stoics of Athens through the medium of their poets Aratus and Clearithes (Acts xvii, 28).