The Culture of the Renaissance

3 units

The scholars, artists, and assorted adventurers who self-consciously broke with the medieval past and called for new methods of communication, the rethinking of human affairs, and the exploration of the wide world created a vast and influential culture. Once thought to herald the start of the modern era, the Renaissance has been revealed as contradictory, complex, and cross-cultural; a subject worthy of examination in its own right. In this course we will analyze key primary sources and use recent scholarly works to consider the social, political, and intellectual contexts that produced and promoted this cultural transformation. As historians, we will always be concerned with the purpose(s) culture serves and who culture is for.