When we think of "the Renaissance," we might be more apt to think of great art and literature than of significant advances in statecraft or social life. But the great nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt argued that the city-states of Renaissance Italy gave birth to the modern state and the modern individual. Other historians since Burckhardt's day have tended to dispute either the whole or some feature or other of his argument, or to have conceded that, at least in broad outlines or in certain respects, Burckhardt was correct to "date" the birth of "modernity" to the Italian Renaissance. The documents in this module are intended to provide students with a taste of the political narrative and social structures of the Renaissance city-states, in order that each student might form their own opinion of Burckhardt's classic analysis of the Italian Renaissance.

Between 1300 and 1600, numerous Italians wrote that they and their contemporaries had revived the arts and rediscovered ancient authors. Dismissive of the cultural achievements that had transpired during the centuries after the fall of Rome, fourteenth- and fifteenth- century Italians believed that they lived in a new golden age, one that rivaled that of Rome. This period of artistic achievement in Italy is known as the Renaissance, a word meaning rebirth. One of the distinguishing features of the Italian Renaissance was its commitment to studia humanitatis, or what is called humanism. Renaissance Italians stressed the importance of rhetoric, literature, poetry, letter writing, and oratory, and based these forms of expression on similar ones from ancient Greece and Rome. Humanists also studied history, and stressed the necessity of a liberal education. At the same time humanism developed in Italy, however, other writers began to adapt traditional Christian moral and ethical themes in literature that used the Italian, and not Latin, language. Vernacular writers such as Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), along with humanists such as Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) helped to reform and renew artistic life in fourteenth-century Italy, and initiated a period of remarkable cultural activities.

Fresco painting involves the direct application of water-based paint to a freshly plastered wall. Fresco buon is done in stages, applying a small amount of plaster to one section of a wall, and painting on it before the plaster dries, adhering the molecules of paint to the wall's surface. This technique, employed by the Egyptians, Minoans, and Romans, became wildly popular in Italy during the Renaissance. It is particularly suited to warm, dry climates like the Mediterranean, and artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo produced vibrantly colored and remarkably textured images using this technique between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Unfortunately, frescoes do not withstand the test of time and many of them have suffered great damage, or even worn away completely. Most of the frescoes remaining from the Renaissance were commissioned by the Pope and other patrons for decoration of a church or monastery. Many of these patrons had made a lot of money in trade and commerce, and were donating portions of their fortunes to churches. Therefore, most of the content is religious, and the works generally show a high degree of religious sensitivity on the part of the artists. At the same time, each of the artists mentioned above held some commitment to humanism and scientific achievement (characteristics generally associated with more secular pursuits during this period). As a result of this combination, Renaissance frescoes are remarkable for their naturalism and exact mathematical perspective (especially after Masaccio), while also inspiring religious worship in such famous locales as the Sistine Chapel.

The Northern Renaissance is the term often employed to denote the extension of humanist ideas and values to the European world beyond Italy, forming an influential intellectual community that extended over much of Europe on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. In Germany, this renaissance produced painters such as Dürer; in the Netherlands, minds like that of Erasmus. The new values in scholarship were represented by Copernicus in Poland, by Thomas More in England, by Ulrich von Hutten in Germany, and by Mátyás Corvinus in Hungary. And the new emphasis on vernacular literature, or literature composed in local languages rather than in the lingua franca of Latin, was in evidence in the work of Chaucer, François Rabelais, Marguerite of Navarre, Cervantes, and in William Langland’s Piers the Plowman. Perhaps most importantly of all, Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press made possible the production of inexpensive books, which would eventually precipitate a revolutionary expansion of the printed word, enabling greater and greater numbers of people access to the world of ideas.