HISTORY
Froissart
TRAVEL
Mandeville
Polo
RELIGION
Bernard, St.
Bernard of Cluny
Jacopone
à Kempis
Thomas of Celano
Wyclif
The Renaissance. 1400–1600. The gradual increase of knowledge and better government toward the close of the Middle Ages caused a desire for higher things. This hidden desire suddenly broke loose with astonishing force when the art of printing was discovered, about 1450. Information had hitherto been spread only by word of mouth or by laboriously copying a volume by hand. The process in either case was slower than we can imagine. But now new ideas, rare books, foreign teaching could be spread broadcast like wildfire.
It also happened at just this time that Constantinople was taken by the Turks (1453). The greatest treasures of Greek literature had been jealously hidden away there for centuries. Now that the scholars had to fly for their lives they let loose a store of new thought on the nations of western Europe. Taking refuge in Italy they brought with them these rich volumes. The Italian enthusiasm and the ardor with which these discoveries were published to the world spread like fire through France and Germany and England.
Everywhere mankind awoke; never before or since have people lived so strenuously. Their newly awakened curiosity drove them round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic Ocean. Exploration and adventure, the invasion of Mexico and the Americas as well as the Orient, the search for gold and for happiness went hand in hand. At the same time Luther roused northern Europe with his demand for religious reform and founded the Protestant church. In England Shakespeare and his companions had discovered a new field of literary venture and produced plays by the hundred, many of them immortal. The modern world of action and progress had at last come of age.
The passing of the old ideals, of chivalry and monkish study, is nowhere better shown than in "Don Quixote." The love of creative art hand in hand with adventure echoes through every page of Cellini's "Autobiography." Francis Bacon discovered a new method of reasoning; Montaigne did what had not been thought of for hundreds of years, and began to study his own personality, the workings of his mind, and the problems which he found in his own life within himself; Sir Thomas More also took up a subject that had not been touched for seventeen centuries and drew a wonderful picture of an ideal government in his "Utopia." Columbus and a whole squadron of others sailed the unknown seas. The Elizabethan nobles, like Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, were poets, statesmen, courtiers, and generals all at once.
POETRY
Michelangelo
Ronsard
Shakespeare
Spenser
Villon
FICTION
Cervantes
Rabelais
HISTORY
Holinshed
Raleigh