9780593751831: What Was the Renaissance?
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593751833 ISBN 13: 9780593751831
Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Discover all there is to know about the Renaissance, the period in history that took Europe from the Middle Ages to modern times!

Beginning in Italy, the Renaissance was a cultural movement that spread throughout Europe and affected art, science, technology, politics, and thought. From the 1300s to the beginning of the 1600s, scholars started to question what they knew and looked to literature and historical texts to develop new ideas for why things were the way they were. In just a short amount of time, the foundations for European life were uprooted and examined, leading people, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to explore new ways of thinking and being. Readers will learn why the Reinassance was such a pivotal time in European history and how it still influences us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roberta Edwards has written several books for young readers, including a number in the Who Was? series. She lives in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

What Was the Renaissance?
 
In early January 1506, a farmer was working in his vineyard on a hillside near the city of Rome. (A vineyard is an area of land where grapes for winemaking are grown.) Suddenly, he felt something hard in the ground. It wasn’t a rock or a boulder but something much, much bigger.

He dug deeper and deeper. What was there? A marble statue that was more than eight feet tall. The farmer did not know it, but the statue had been made about fifteen hundred years earlier during the period in history known as classical antiquity.

The statue was of a bearded man and his two sons struggling against giant sea serpents. Their faces showed terror, agony, desperation.

Their bodies twisted and turned attempting to get free. Everything looked real. It was possible to imagine actual muscles and bones underneath the marble skin.

A famous sculptor heard about the farmer’s discovery and went to see it. His name was Michelangelo. He wanted his own statues to look as lifelike as the one found at the vineyard. So did many other artists at the time.

In fact, all over Europe, there was renewed interest in ancient European cultures. It brought forth an explosion of creativity and new ideas—not only in art but in science, math, astronomy, and architecture. This period lasted from about 1400 to 1600. It became known as the Renaissance. In French that means “rebirth.”

Yet the Renaissance didn’t start in France. It started in Italy. The farmer’s accidental discovery of an eight-foot-tall sculpture helps explain the reason why.

In ancient times, Rome was the center of a vast empire that for a time included Greece, the Middle East, northern Africa, and parts of Europe.

Even after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE, reminders of its greatness were everywhere in the city of Rome. Sometimes they were still in plain sight, like the giant arena known as the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, a temple to the Roman gods. Sometimes they lay buried right under people’s feet. This is why a farmer working on his land as he did every day could stumble upon something extraordinary.

Chapter 1
A New Way of Thinking
 
During the Renaissance, there arose a new way to look at life and its meaning. It was called humanism. Its followers believed that people were basically good and could do great things.

Followers of humanism got many of their ideas from studying the written works of ancient Greek philosophers. (A philosopher is someone who seeks wisdom and the meaning of life.) The philosophers from the classical past, ancient Greece and Rome from about 800 BCE to 400 CE, believed people should strive to live a happy life and that they could judge for themselves what was right and wrong.

Until the dawn of the Renaissance around 1400, works by these philosophers had largely been forgotten. No one was reading them anymore. Still, scholars knew of their existence and so they began searching for them. Sometimes they found copies on the dusty shelves of old libraries. Sometimes travelers brought back copies from Constantinople. (Constantinople was the name for the city now known as Istanbul in Turkey.) It had remained a center of learning throughout the Middle Ages.
 
Art Before the Renaissance

The Middle Ages was a period that lasted from about 400 to 1400. During that time, the Catholic Church held tremendous power over almost everyone living in Western Europe. Paintings were meant to send a religious message. Seeing the figure of Jesus on the cross, for example, reminded Christians of their faith.

The names of artists from the Middle Ages are rarely known to us. They didn’t sign their work because they weren’t considered important enough to do so. They were merely craftsmen.

But during the Renaissance, artists were appreciated for their creativity. Some, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were recognized as geniuses.
 
Who were some of the most famous Greek philosophers?

One was Socrates (c. 469–­399 BCE). He lived in Athens, the capital of ancient Greece. He could usually be found in the marketplace, talking to people. He didn’t give lectures. He liked to ask questions that made people think about truth, bravery, and justice. Socrates never wrote down anything. What is known about him comes from others. In 399 BCE, Socrates was sentenced to death for challenging beliefs about the Roman gods. Surrounded by friends, he was forced to drink a cup of poison called hemlock.

Plato (c. 427–­347 BCE) was one of Socrates’s students. Plato started a school that met outdoors in Athens. He had many ideas about what made good government. His most famous work,  Republic, is still taught in college classes today.

Aristotle (384–­322 BCE) was a student of Plato’s. He wrote that happiness was the meaning and purpose of life. He thought that doing good deeds made people happy. He is known as the first scientist. The son of a doctor, Aristotle was very interested in anatomy (studying the human body).

As for the humanists, Francesco Petrarca (1304–­1374) was the first. In English he is called Petrarch. He was born in Arezzo, Italy, and encouraged scholars to read the works of ancient Greek philosophers. His father was a lawyer and wanted Petrarch to become one, too. Instead, he wrote poetry. Petrarch looked for and found many classical works, including volumes of letters written by a Roman philosopher named Cicero. Petrarch was such an admirer  of Cicero’s that he wrote letters to him as if they were friends. (By then, Cicero had been dead for way more than a thousand years.)

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–­1472) was another humanist from northern Italy. He became famous as an author, artist, and architect. (He also liked inventing secret codes!) Alberti wanted the designs of new buildings to have columns, arches, and domes so they’d resemble ones from antiquity. His ideas influenced many of the artists and architects of the Renaissance.

The humanist Thomas More (1478–­1535) was from London, England. He wrote a famous novel called Utopia about an imaginary island. No one there owned private property; all the food was shared. According to More, Utopia was the ideal place to live. In fact, today, the word utopia means “an earthly paradise.”

For a time, Thomas More was the most important and valued adviser to King Henry VIII. More also remained a faithful Catholic throughout his life. This eventually caused a terrible rift between himself and the king. Henry had decided that England would break away from the Catholic Church. Why? The pope (the head of the Church) would not allow the king to get a divorce.

So Henry started his own church—­the Church of England—­with himself as head of it. Thomas More, however, would not go along with the king. For angering the king, he paid a heavy price. The king had Thomas More beheaded in 1535.

From its beginnings in Italy, humanism spread quickly across Western Europe. Why did the movement catch on so rapidly? It was because of one invention: the printing press.

Chapter 2
The Miracle of Printing
 
It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of the invention of the printing press. Beginning in the Renaissance, information could reach masses of people quickly. Like the internet in the late ­twentieth century, the printing press was a total game changer.

In the Middle Ages, there hadn’t been many books. Every single one had to be copied out by hand. Word for word, sentence by...

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Verlag
Penguin Young Readers Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593751833
ISBN 13 
9780593751831
Einband
Taschenbuch
Zeichner
Copeland Gregory
Anzahl der Seiten
129
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