The Invention of the IDEA

 THE INVENTION OF THE IDEA 

 It is interesting to know that, prior to the 19th century, the major socio-cultural developments in Europe during the 13th- 15th centuries were not understood and codified as renaissance.

In 1860, Jakob Burckhardt formulated the influential concepts of ‘Renaissance’ and ‘humanism’, in his pioneering masterpiece of cultural history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. 

Burckhardt’s book was a “subtle synthesis of opinions about the Renaissance that had grown powerful during the Age of the Enlightenment”. 

He seemed to be confirming a story told by secular, liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the origins of their own beliefs and values that after the collapse of classical civilization a period of darkness and barbarism had set in, dominated by the church and the humdrum of rural life. 

Eventually, however, a revival of commerce and urban life laid the foundations for a secular and even anti-religious vision of life. 

Medievalists found renaissances in the sense of periods of classical revival in Carolingian France, Anglo-Saxon England and Ottonian Germany. 

One of these medieval revivals, the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’, became a subject of major historical enquiries, since the coinage of the term by Charles Homer Haskins in his the renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). 

Haskins maintained that the term ‘renaissance’, in the sense of an enthusiasm for classical literature, was an important feature of the twelfth century and that this cultural renewal was the ancestor of subsequent civilizational progress in early modern Europe. 

Yet historians have not discarded fully the concept and the term ‘Renaissance’ in the sense Burckhardt had used it. For historical realities, which Burckhardt had described, cannot be dismissed with quibbles about terminology. 

Burckhardt rightly saw the emergence of a new culture and also located one of its main sources in Italian humanism by linking it to a unique set of social, political, and economic conditions. 

This new culture might seem to be the product of the growth of commerce and cities in northern Italy from the late eleventh century. 

But urban growth and commercial expansion since the 11th century, does not explain why the new culture flowered almost at the end of the 14th century even as it is true that Italy during the 12th and 13th centuries had become the most highly developed, the wealthiest and the most urbanized region of Europe. 

The urban and commercial growth of Italy stands in contrast to other parts of Europe in the north of the Alps, where the scholastic philosophy, Gothic art, and vernacular literature of these centuries were clearly associated with the clergy and the feudal aristocracy of the medieval age.