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Distinctive Culture?

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Tobodai View Drop Down
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  Quote Tobodai Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Distinctive Culture?
    Posted: 01-Mar-2005 at 20:32
the renaisance, I have already made up my mind that it is NOT a distinctive culture from any other time period aside from a slightly higher amount of Greek art and Italian merchants, but could people post some relatively deep reasons for why htey think what they think? You see Im writing a paper and I want some ideas to add to what I have for telling a proffesor who loves the renaisance that I dont think its that special....
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  Quote hugoestr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09-Mar-2005 at 23:56
Tobodai,

Your plan is not the way to get good grades. I know. I did the same thing that you did. I went after a pet theory of a professor, and I got points taken because of that.

That said, here are a ideas that you can use.
First, the period only affected the wealthy and educated classes. For the great masses, life was no better as it had been in the dark ages, under the Roman empire, or before that. And there was plenty of intellectual activity among those people during the dark ages.

Another argument you can use is that name is a misnomer to describe a common culture becuase it covers a huge amount of time in different places and countries, making it necessary that it is not the same cultural phenomenon. The Italian renaisance happened a century or two before it happened in Northern Europe. The Northern European Renaisance has to be a reflection on the Italian one, so there is an amount of self-reference that the original culture did not have.

I will think more later.
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  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-Mar-2005 at 00:17
Rennasiance is just a generic name of convienience, coinded at the time so that people could feel special about themselves, good old epoch-centricism inother words.There was no dramac change in culture, just that certain socio-economic phenomenons were more common.
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-Mar-2005 at 07:37
Another point:
There were also renaissances in the Karolingian era and in the 12th century, so talking about THE renaissance is nonsense.
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  Quote Tobodai Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-Mar-2005 at 14:15

good points all but since you took your sweet time Im already done my paper

I mainly used the argument that all that really changed in northern Italy was a merchant class which leads to dynamic flow of money which leads to this and that etc, but hard;ly enough to justify a distinct culture, more of an economic phenomonon.

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  Quote wilpuri Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-Mar-2005 at 10:43
The renaissance never really touched the common people, so a distinctive culture is not how I would describe. Life for the common agriculturalist didn't change from medieval times. Only much later did the life and mindset of the peasant change.
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  Quote druidebaron.nl Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-Mar-2005 at 12:07
Read Johan Huizinga's 'the Autumn of the middle ages'. For Huizinga, the fourteenth- and fifteen-century marked not the birth of a dramatically new era in history--the Renaissance--but the fullest, ripest phase of medieval life and thought. Although it is kind of old, from 1919, it could give you some ideas. Get the recent translation (1997), the old one is incomplete.
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  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18-Mar-2005 at 15:03

In secular art there was definitely a major move forward during the Renaissance (though there's no justification for calling it a 'Renaissance', more of a 'Naissance'). You also have the true beginnings of literature in the modern European languages. (Another 'Naissance'), and, in music, again a fresh start especially with instrumental music, though music lagged on the others somewhat.

But it depends what you mean by culture I suppose.

 

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  Quote Quetzalcoatl Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 05:50

 

 Can anyone define renaissance in a short paragraph? We hear a lot about the renaissance, but I have yet to hear a clear definition of the renaissance. And how would you distinguish this era from another period?

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  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 14:54
Thats the million dollar question. The whole idea of the Rennaisaince is born out of a few people in the 1500s or so regarding themsleves as different from those who came before them, but left it all a bit vauge. Later eras saw people trying to define the renassaince their own way leading to the somewhat hazy imagry we have today.
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  Quote Tobodai Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2005 at 03:47

I can define it in one sentance that both says what it is and shows why its ovverated, here goes:

"Let us the top 2% of society, pretend for a while that we are Greeks."

the end.

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  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2005 at 09:06
And Romans, the early Italian rennasiance was all about the Romans.
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  Quote Riain Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18-Apr-2005 at 17:40
The Renaisance is a nice term to describe a group of changes which happened in about 1500. The banking and art revolutions were one thing but the opening up of long range sea routes, creation of powerful nation states, expulsion of Muslims from Spain and the protestant Reformation all happened within a single lifetime centred on 1500ad. Perhaps the biggest factor in the rennaisance was the black plague, and demographic changes which resulted.
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  Quote Cywr Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18-Apr-2005 at 22:46
Hmm, wasn't that a little while before the rennaisance.
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