John A. Wagner - Voices of the Renaissance

DOCUMENTS OF THE RENAISSANCE

Voices of the Renaissance: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life contains excerpts from over 40 different documents relating to the period of European history known as the Renaissance. In the 14th century, the rise of humanism, a philosophy based on the study of the languages, literature, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, led to a sense of revitalization and renewal among the city-states of Northern Italy. The political development and economic expansion of those cities provided the ideal conditions for humanist scholarship to flourish. This period of literary, artistic, architectural, and cultural flowering is today known as the Renaissance, a term taken from the French and meaning rebirth. The Italian Renaissance reached its height in the 15th and early 16th centuries. In the 1490s, the ideals of the Italian Renaissance spread north of the Alps and gave rise to a series of national cultural rebirths in various states. In many places, this Northern Renaissance extended into the 17th century, when war and religious discord, as they had done in Italy in the 1520s, put an end to the Renaissance era. The documents and the attendant commentary offered in this collection trace the beginning and course of the Renaissance in Italy and its extension into Northern Europe, telling the story of the emergence of a vibrant and varied intellectual and artistic culture in various states, cities, and kingdoms.

Primary documents offer a unique method of learning about the peoples of the past, allowing us to listen to those people speak in their own voices. The document excerpts reproduced in this volume provide all manner of readers with engaging and informational insights into the life, ideas, concerns, issues, events, and literature of Renaissance Europe. Offered here are the words of many key Italian Renaissance figures, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Pope Pius II, Baldassare Castiglione, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Niccol Machiavelli. Also included are key figures of the Northern Renaissance, such as Sir Thomas More, Albrecht Drer, Franois Rabelais, Ulrich von Hutten, and Michel de Montaigne.

From the documents included in Voices of the Renaissance one can begin to understand the humanist view of the world. Dante Alighieri advocates the use of the Tuscan dialect of Italian as a literary language; Leon Battista Alberti describes the best design for a gentlemans country house; and Paolo Toscanelli recommends sailing west to reach the Far East. In other documents, the Duchess of Milan describes a wedding, Sir Thomas More describes being on a diplomatic embassy, and Johann Burchard describes preparations for a papal funeral. High school students, college undergraduates, public library patrons, and anyone with an interest in Renaissance history will find these and the other documents in this volume highly useful in pursuing classroom or personal study of the period and its people.

The document excerpts in this volume are divided into 40 numbered sections, with some sections offering two or more related documents. These sections are divided into the following five topical categories of eight sections each:

1. Art and Literature
2. Economics and Society
3. Politics and War
4. Religion and the Papacy
5. Northern Renaissance

The document selections include a wide variety of document typesletters, journal entries, poems, sermons, treatises, polemics, satires, essays, notebooks, histories, and descriptive narratives of people and events. Some of these documents are well known and often excerpted, such as selections from the writings of Dante Alghieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Others are more obscure but often just as rewarding to modern readers, such as excerpts from the