Our first unit is about the Renaissance. It turns out the idea of the Renaissance is more complicated than you probably thought. In fact, whether or not there was a Renaissance is a fundamental question of Early Modern European historical scholarship.
Merriman presents a fairly uncomplicated view of the Renaissance, highlighting achievements. Like many historians, he sees the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity. This does not mean that everyone experiencing the Renaissance movement was fully modern. Rather, it means that cracks in the Medieval worldview started to open the possibility of change toward more modern concepts of history, time, and self.
But other historians contest this characterization of the Renaissance. Joan Kelly famously asked if women had a Renaissance. She concluded that they did not. The advent of women’s history was revolutionary not because it started to put women into view, but because it forced a change in how we understood history altogether. If half of the population had no Renaissance, is it right to discuss that movement as if it were a universal phenomenon?
This kind of questioning does not mean we deny that there were achievements or that there was a Renaissance for some. It does ask that we think in a complicated way about how events affected different people differently. Women’s history set the stage for other lines of questioning that have given the historical discipline texture and nuance in the past several decades.
I continue to meet historians who fall on both sides of this question: Did women have a Renaissance? They are all intelligent, humble scholars who truly think the evidence leads them to their answer. History is a living discourse, and some questions stay active for generations!
In this paper, I’d like you to engage the question of modernity. Because of the nature of the primary sources I have given you, the “woman question” will surely be part of your analysis. Using secondary sources (Merriman’s text, any lectures) and all of the primary sources (Boccaccio, Fonte, Machiavelli), ask yourself: Where do I see modernizing trends in the Renaissance? And then look for complexity. You might ask yourself some of these probing questions (or others): Who is modernizing and who isn’t? Are there different versions of modernity for different groups? How important is language in this new modern framework? What aspects of modernity are necessary and sufficient for a text to qualify as modern? What kind of self is emerging in these Renaissance texts? Is that self-modern (self-differentiating, self-creating)?
Get a high-quality paper written for you in as little as 4 hours — available 24/7.
100% original work written from scratch based on your exact instructions. We never sell prewritten papers.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.