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Author : Hay Denis
Title : The age of the Renaissance
Year : 1967

Link download : Hay_Denis_-_The_age_of_the_Renaissance.zip

Introduction. The significance of Renaissance Europe. Denys Hay. European cultural history has gone through a number of transfigurations since the time in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. when the evolution of the continent became autonomous. These changes in public behaviour and in the assumptions about life and art shared by the dominant groups are often summarized by shorthand: Barbarian Europe, Gothic Europe, Renaissance Europe and so on. Such terms mislead of course if they suggest that historical periods are sharply distinguishable from one another. Contemporaries were usually oblivious of the breaks later ages have found it convenient to make in the past and, as we shall see, there was much that was 'Gothic' in the 'Renaissance'. This is a point worth insisting on at the outset. If by Renaissance we refer to a period of time, broadly speaking the 15th and 16th centuries, then everything that happens within the epoch is 'Renaissance', just as everything that happens in the 18th century is '18th-century'. But Renaissance or rebirth has for so long been applied to cultural history in a narrower sense, literature and learning, the fine arts, that the expression suggests not only a time span but problems arising within the time span. It is essential to bear this difficulty in mind. All men and all events belong to the Renaissance period; what we think of as characteristically Renaissance in style was far from being universal until towards the end of the age so described. ...