The Italian Renaissance | Italy - The Cradle of the Renaissance (Lecture 3)
Lecture 3: The Renaissance first developed in Italy early in the 14th century because of the unique circumstances of the Italian peninsula. Unlike in northern Europe, long-distance trade in the Mediterranean had continued after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and urban life had remained strong in Italy. Because townsmen and merchants required secular learning, rather than clerical education, a powerful lay tradition of study and secular values had been sustained. In addition, the memories of the Roman Empire were everywhere to be seen. The inhabitants of the peninsula identified much more with the memories of ancient Rome or the sophisticated cities of the Byzantine Empire than with the rural, feudal culture of the north. A rich secular burgher class arose, and the division of the peninsula into a mosaic of small states allowed each to experiment with different social and political models and encouraged creative competition.
Primary Source Texts:
Kenneth R. Bartlett, “The Classical Heritage,” pp. 7–15, in The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance.
Secondary Sources:
Armando Sapori, The Italian Merchant in the Middle Ages.
Supplementary Reading:
Aziz S. Atiya, Crusade, Commerce and Culture.
Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, trans., Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World.
Lecture 4: https://rumble.com/v4wjls2-the-italian-renaissance-the-age-of-dante-guelfs-and-ghibellines-lecture-4.html
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The Italian Renaissance | The Age of Dante - Guelfs and Ghibellines (Lecture 4)
Lecture 4: The Florentine poet Dante (1265–1321) defined the transition from a medieval to a Renaissance perspective. He was educated in medieval Scholasticism, the prevailing theological and educational view that defended Christian faith as a body of certainties, truths that could be analyzed and interpreted through a rigid application of logic. Dante was equally born into a period of factional dispute between those who supported the authority of the papacy—the Guelfs—and the adherents of the Holy Roman Emperor—the Ghibellines. This division was more than one of ideology; it reflected the growing tensions between the newly enriched merchant classes, usually Guelf, and the aristocratic, established magnate families of the Ghibellines.
The Guelf victory in Florence provided the preconditions for the creation of the burgher republic in 1293 and, with it, the circumstances necessary for the institutionalization of Renaissance values. Dante’s great poem The Divine Comedy reflected the Scholastic structure of the medieval world, but he looked forward when he created individual characters seeking self-knowledge in a complex world. His own life, too, was one of engagement; an educated layman, husband, and father, his political activities led to his exile in 1301.
Secondary Sources:
George Holmes, Dante.
Supplementary Reading:
Marvin B. Becker, Medieval Italy: Constraints and Creativity.
John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216−1380.
Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule.
Lecture 5: https://rumble.com/v4wjmru-the-italian-renaissance-petrarch-and-the-foundations-of-humanism-lecture-5.html
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The Italian Renaissance | Petrarch and the Foundations of Humanism (Lecture 5)
Lecture 5: Humanism was the new perspective of the Renaissance, both as an ideology and as a method of education. It was founded on the twin beliefs that recognition of the content and style of ancient literature could improve the human condition and that the experience of life on Earth could be valuable in itself. The conscious creation of the individual personality and the acquisition of the means to define one’s experience for the benefit of others were natural consequences of this perspective.
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374) can justly be described as the father of Humanism. Petrarch was born of an exiled Florentine who sought employment at the papal court in Avignon. He studied law at the universities of Montpellier and Bologna, using as texts the precepts of Roman civil law compiled at the time of Justinian. Also, he read the Latin classics, especially Cicero, to develop rhetorical skill and knowledge of the past. Ultimately, Petrarch discovered his real vocation was poetry. His love of the Latin classics and of early Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, drove him to investigate his own motivations, feelings, and desires. His love poetry, the canzoniere, helped define modern romantic love, and his desire to know himself recovered the genre of autobiography.
Primary Source Texts:
Kenneth R. Bartlett, “Petrarch,” pp. 17–32, in The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance.
Francesco Petrarch, The Secret.
———, Selected Sonnets, Odes and Letters.
Secondary Sources:
John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216–1380.
Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch.
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The Italian Renaissance | The Renaissance - Changing Interpretations (Lecture 2)
Lecture 2: The Renaissance cannot be easily defined either geographically or chronologically. Because the Renaissance represented a set of ideas and attitudes, it became visible at different times in different places, depending upon the social, economic, political, and cultural context of each region. Furthermore, the Renaissance was the first self-conscious period of European history. It was articulated by the Italian Humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio (d. 1375), who recognized that a new world was being created, a world based partly on the experience of new groups with new aspirations and partly on the recovery of ancient models. Hence, we have come to know it as the period of rebirth, or in French, the period of the Renaissance. This lecture will define the phenomenon of the Renaissance and investigate its historiography from the 14th century to the present.
Secondary Sources:
Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrews Smith, eds., Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance.
Supplementary Reading:
Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance.
Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation.
Denys Hay, ed., The Renaissance Debate.
Lecture 3: https://rumble.com/v4wjjmb-the-italian-renaissance-italy-the-cradle-of-the-renaissance-lecture-3.html
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The Italian Renaissance | The Study of the Italian Renaissance (Lecture 1)
36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture
Taught by Kenneth Bartlett, Ph.D.
Professor of History and Renaissance Studies University of Toronto
Lecture 2: https://rumble.com/v4wj8z0-the-italian-renaissance-the-renaissance-changing-interpretations-lecture-2.html
This course on the Italian Renaissance will attempt to answer the question: Why was there such an explosion of creative culture, human ingenuity, economic development, and social experimentation in Italy beginning in the 14th century? It will also address the question of why the Renaissance ended in the middle years of the 16th century. In order to investigate the phenomenon of the Renaissance in Italy, it is necessary to look at every facet of human endeavor. Thus, this series will not be a discussion of major political, military, or economic events, although these will appear, as appropriate. Rather, the course will follow the model of writing Renaissance history designed by its first great practitioner, Jacob Burckhardt, whose 1860 book-length “essay,” The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, initiated the model of cultural history, that is, looking at a period in the past from several perspectives simultaneously to produce a sophisticated, multidimensional image. Just as each tessera in a mosaic contributes to the whole, so each element in social, political, economic, cultural, intellectual, and religious history contributes to the composite picture of life in Italy in the years between the birth of Petrarch in 1304 and the terrible events of the 1520s–1540s that extinguished the flame that the poet first lit.
Lecture 1: There are many ways of approaching the study of the Italian Renaissance. My method in this course is to provide a wide perspective based on a fusion of many disciplines. This form of interdisciplinary analysis is generally described as cultural history, following the method employed by Jacob Burckhardt in his pioneering The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). This approach is similar to the creation of a mosaic, in which each separate tessera contributes to the wider image, providing for a complex and subtle understanding of a historical epoch. I have also imposed a rough chronological structure to ensure that the information progresses logically. However, given that the engagement with Renaissance values took place at different times in different places in Italy, each major center requires its own context. You will find, then, that lectures on specific city-states are interspersed with those on general currents in philosophy, education, and other cultural elements that can be seen to apply broadly to the peninsula as a whole. The aim of this series is to provide you with a multifaceted and complex image of Renaissance Italy that explains why that period remains fundamental to modern Western culture.
We begin our study of the Renaissance with Petrarch, although it is important to put his career and work into context. Consequently, we will review the general condition of Italy during the late Middle Ages and discuss why Dante (who died when Petrarch was 17) can be seen as essentially a medieval thinker. It is more difficult to identify a clear moment at which the Renaissance ends, even in Italy. I will argue that the Renaissance was, in essence, a set of attitudes and beliefs, founded on the application of ancient literature to the needs of Italians from the late 14th to the 16th centuries. For this reason, I suggest that it was the loss of confidence in those beliefs that eroded the Italians’ dedication to such principles as the dignity of man and the ability of the individual and community to determine their own history. After the French invasions and the peninsular wars, after the sack of Rome and the collapse of the Florentine Republic, and especially after the suppression of freedom of ideas occasioned by the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Boo
Primary Source Texts:
Kenneth R. Bartlett, “Introduction,” pp. 1–7, in The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance.
Secondary Sources:
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Vol. I: The State as a Work of Art, The Development of the Individual, The Revival of Antiquity.
———, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Vol. II: The Discovery of the World and of Man, Society and Festivals, Morality and Religion.
Supplementary Reading:
Margaret Aston, ed., The Panorama of the Renaissance: The Renaissance in the Perspective of History.
C. F. Black, et al., Cultural Atlas of the Renaissance.
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Classical Mythology | Roman Founders, Roman Fables (Lecture 22)
Lecture 22: Why did the Romans "borrow" so much of their art, literature, and myth from Greece? How and why did the Romans take over—and modify—the legend of the Trojan War? How does this reflect on the native Roman foundation myth of the brothers Romulus and Remus?
Lecture 23: https://rumble.com/v4qaydz-classical-mythology-gods-are-useful-lecture-23.html
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Classical Mythology | ''Gods Are Useful'' (Lecture 23)
Lecture 23: Ovid's Metamorphoses is our main or only source for many famous classical myths. Who was Ovid? What was the nature of the Roman context in which he composed his very literary, ironic retelling of these myths? Can we ever hope to recover the "original" stories that lie behind Ovid's versions?
Lecture 24: https://rumble.com/v4qb2xk-classical-mythology-from-ovid-to-the-stars-lecture-24.html
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Classical Mythology | From Ovid to the Stars (Lecture 24)
Lecture 24: Ovid's influence in later European culture—including, very prominently, the works of Shakespeare—is profound and well worth tracing. Even today, classical mythology in general remains a force in high culture and pop culture alike. The whole genre of science fiction, for example, is a testament to the power of both ancient myths and the enduring mythic impulse.
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Classical Mythology | Monstrous Females and Female Monsters (Lecture 21)
Lecture 21: Among the female figures in Greek myth who break out of women's usual roles are the Amazons, a race of female warriors said to have fought such heroes as Achilles, Theseus, and Heracles. The lecture also examines another foreign woman, Medea, who is most famous for her marriage to Jason. Finally, we will discuss the possible genesis of these figures in male anxieties about the role of women.
Lecture 22: https://rumble.com/v4qauif-classical-mythology-roman-founders-roman-fables-lecture-22.html
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Classical Mythology | The Tragedies of King Oedipus (Lecture 20)
Lecture 20: The myth of Oedipus—and especially the version presented in Sophocles's unforgettable plays—has struck profound chords in 20th-century thought. Freud's interpretation is the most famous, and Lévi-Strauss's structuralist reading has also been influential. How do they appear in the light of classics scholarship? And what do classics scholars make of Oedipus's terrible tale?
Lecture 21: https://rumble.com/v4qa6ew-classical-mythology-monstrous-females-and-female-monsters-lecture-21.html
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Classical Mythology | The Terrible House of Atreus (Lecture 18)
Lecture 18: The myth of the House of Atreus is a harrowing, multigenerational narrative of cannibalism, murder, incest, and revenge. It revolves around a hereditary curse that both causes and is caused by the actions of several members of the same family, including Agamemnon, the Greek commander in the war against Troy.
Lecture 19: https://rumble.com/v4pwkyq-classical-mythology-blood-vengeance-justice-and-the-furies-lecture-19.html
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Classical Mythology | Blood Vengeance, Justice, and the Furies (Lecture 19)
Lecture 19: The House of Atreus fired the imagination of the great Athenian dramatist Aeschylus, whose Oresteia reshaped the traditional story into brilliant theater. Tragedy to the Athenians was no mere entertainment, but a collective experience highly ritualized in form and vital in function. What are the issues and emotions that Aeschylus explored in his trilogy? Do they bear implications for our understanding of the myth itself?
Lecture 20: https://rumble.com/v4pwqy3-classical-mythology-the-tragedies-of-king-oedipus-lecture-20.html
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Classical Mythology | The Trojan War (Lecture 17)
Lecture 17: So many authors drew upon the Trojan War that it became the most famous episode in all of classical myth. What drove the Achaeans on their expedition against "windy Ilion"? What settled the destinies of all involved? Was it fate? The gods? Human action? Why did the Greeks see the Trojan War as marking the divide between the Age of Heroes and the rest of human history?
Lecture 18: https://rumble.com/v4pwd4e-classical-mythology-the-terrible-house-of-atreus-lecture-18.html
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Classical Mythology | The Greatest Hero of All (Lecture 16)
Lecture 16: This lecture examines the larger-than-life deeds of Heracles, the greatest of all Greek heroes—and the one with the most contradictions. His own tendency toward excess led to the need for his famous Twelve Labors. These in turn took him farther and farther away from the center of the known world. Is he a figure for Greek culture itself?
Lecture 17: https://rumble.com/v4pvk76-classical-mythology-the-trojan-war-lecture-17.html
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Classical Mythology | Culture, Prehistory, and the ''Great Goddess'' (Lecture 12)
Lecture 12: Stepping back from Greek myth itself, you will examine the similarities between Mesopotamian myth and Hesiod's Theogony with a view to cross-cultural influences. Next you trace the influence of the two great prehistoric cultures of Greece itself, the Minoans and the Mycenaeans. Finally, you learn about the theory that there was a prehistoric "Great Goddess."
Lecture 13: https://rumble.com/v4pfvnu-classical-mythology-humans-heroes-half-gods-lecture-13.html
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Classical Mythology | Humans, Heroes, Half-Gods (Lecture 13)
Lecture 13: How do humans fit into the creation accounts of Hesiod and Ovid? The former's Works and Days depicts a deterioration of humanity over time, while the latter paints a picture very different in tone and content. Do the heroes in these stories reflect a memory of the Mycenaean Age?
Lecture 14: https://rumble.com/v4pg0ie-classical-mythology-theseus-and-the-test-and-quest-myth-lecture-14.html
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Classical Mythology | Theseus and the ''Test-and-Quest'' Myth (Lecture 14)
Lecture 14: This lecture focuses on the Athenian Theseus, who saved the youth of his city by penetrating the Labyrinth and killing the monstrous Minotaur who dwelt at its center. His story is an excellent type of those myths in which the hero must face and overcome dangers and difficulties in pursuit of a worthy goal.
Lecture 15: https://rumble.com/v4pg34r-classical-mythology-from-myth-to-history-and-back-again-lecture-15.html
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Classical Mythology | From Myth to History and Back Again (Lecture 15)
Lecture 15: The encounter of Theseus with the Minotaur raises fascinating theoretical and interpretative issues. This strange story of a man-eating half-bull imprisoned in a maze is open to interpretation from a number of viewpoints, including those of psychology, ritual, and history.
Lecture 16: https://rumble.com/v4pvfc6-classical-mythology-the-greatest-hero-of-all-lecture-16.html
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Classical Mythology | The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Afterlife (Lecture 8)
Lecture 8: This great religious ritual held in honor of Demeter and Persephone seems to have promised a happy afterlife to its devotees. After investigating it, you will examine contrasting views of the afterlife found elsewhere in Greek myth and religion, including Homer, the myth of Orpheus and its associated cult of Orphism, and teachings about reincarnation.
Lecture 9: https://rumble.com/v4ogomq-classical-mythology-apollo-and-artemis-lecture-9.html
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Classical Mythology | Apollo and Artemis (Lecture 9)
Lecture 9: Two of Zeus's most important offspring are Apollo and Artemis. Each of these twins has a characteristic set of functions and associations. Apollo, the god of reason and moderation, is also the god of disease, plague, sudden death for men, and prophecy. Artemis is the goddess of wildness and wild things, of the hunt, the young of all creatures, and of women in childbirth (though herself a virgin). Are there unified interpretations that can cover such multiplicity?
Lecture 10: https://rumble.com/v4ogqj0-classical-mythology-hermes-and-dionysos-lecture-10.html
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Classical Mythology | Hermes and Dionysos (Lecture 10)
Lecture 10: Zeus's two youngest sons are Hermes and Dionysos. The former has many roles and appears to be the god of boundaries. Why is Dionysos, the god of wine and drama, different from all the other Olympian gods? What difference does that difference make?
Lecture 11: https://rumble.com/v4ogtqu-classical-mythology-laughter-loving-aphrodite-lecture-11.html
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Classical Mythology | Laughter-Loving Aphrodite (Lecture 11)
Lecture 11: The Greek goddess of sexual desire is vividly depicted in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which tells the story of her affair with the mortal Anchises. What is revealed about the Greek view of sexuality here? How does it compare to the Roman view of passion, as seen in Ovid?
Lecture 12: https://rumble.com/v4pfoyl-classical-mythology-culture-prehistory-and-the-great-goddess-lecture-12.html
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Classical Mythology | Immortals and Mortals (Lecture 6)
Lecture 6: Hesiod's Theogony, and his poem Works and Days, tells of Prometheus and Pandora. What do these myths—of the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, and of the first woman, who unloosed evil in the world—say about the Greek view of society and of women? What sort of gods do we find in Hesiod? What sets them apart from humans?
Lecture 7: https://rumble.com/v4ogm1t-classical-mythology-demeter-persephone-and-the-conquest-of-death-lecture-7.html
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Classical Mythology | Demeter, Persephone, and the Conquest of Death (Lecture 7)
Lecture 7: One of the most famous classical myths is the story of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. Does this example of an aetiological myth shed light on gender relations and marriage practices in Athens? Does it reveal anything about the relations between humans and gods in the world of myth?
Lecture 8: https://rumble.com/v4ognb0-classical-mythology-the-eleusinian-mysteries-and-the-afterlife-lecture-8.html
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Classical Mythology | The Reign of the Olympians (Lecture 5)
Lecture 5: How did Zeus become the king of the gods? What is his role as the patron deity of justice and xenia, the guest-host relationship so important in Greek culture? What is to be made of Zeus's marriages and his fathering of other Olympians, including Athena?
Lecture 5: https://rumble.com/v4ogk25-classical-mythology-immortals-and-mortals-lecture-6.html
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