Although the Renaissance (14th-17th centuries) came before the Enlightenment (17th-18th centuries), I wanted to include it as our last topic in our Age of Enlightenment saga because it had a big influence on the thought revolution of the Enlightenment (and I had to include it somewhere).
The Renaissance, which first flowered in Florence, Italy and spread to the rest of Western Europe, was centred around a resurfacing of the ideas of the Antiquity: classical philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences, and added to this an interest in aesthetics, art, architecture, and coincided with a boom in trade, marriage, exploration, conquest, and war.
Italy became the new home to "lost" classics from the ancient Greek and Roman traditions and artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Donatello (The Ninja Turtles, precisely) became their conduits.
Advances in science, philosophy, religion, technology, and navigation boomed and new ideas flooded the continent. Among them, humanism rose with help from thinkers like Protestant Luther King and humanist Erasmus, which arguably paved the way for much of the thinking of the Enlightenment – a moving away from the Catholic Church and monarchs as all-knowing leaders and leaning towards the capabilities of the human mind.
The Western Schism and Protestant Reformation had huge influences on the shift towards secularism, individualism, skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism, ideas central to the Enlightenment (which we have discussed in detail in the last few weeks).
From what I've seen (and can only imagine), there are so many more links between the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and contemporary societies. Although big topics like this can be very complicated to understand, a great approach to have to craft your knowledge into useful Section 2 examples is to focus on how these ideas shape modern ones.
If anything, history is always interesting to study in order to learn things of the past that might help us solve problems of the present – a dilemma common in GAMSAT essays.
Next week we'll start our Communism saga. Hope you enjoyed this Enlightenment series and happy researching!
