MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF RENAISSANCE

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF RENAISSANCE

The word “Renaissance” means “rebirth.” It is a term applier roughly to the period in European history that followed Middle Ages.

1. Humanism:
Humanism refers to glorifying the human elements in man as opposed to the supernatural or divine, on one hand, and the animal, on the other. With regard to the Renaissance, humanism had a special effect or use: it applied to those scholars who pursued the studies that helped to produce the civilized man.
Humanism, in general, is the attitude that emphasizes the dignity and worth of the individual. A basic premise of humanism is that people are rational beings who posses within themselves the capacity for truth and goodness.

2. Translations:
Renaissance introduced a great deal of translations of the classics from Latin and Greek.

3. Renaissance emphasized reason and logic rather than sensation, as the guide to knowledge and the means to solving problems.

4. Naturalism:
The shift of emphasis from the supernatural to the natural world of here and now.

5. Emphasis on the importance of imagination as the faculty that would create ideal images and not merely imitate the general qualities.

6. Curiosity and Objectivity:
It is the intense interest in the visible world and in the knowledge derived from the concrete sensory experience. The focus during the Renaissance turned from abstract discussions of religious issues to the morality of human actions.

7. Individualism:
Man was viewed not as an element in the social unit (feudalism) in which he occupied a subordinate position to the system itself, but as an individual of considerable importance in himself and in his potentialities. Man was seen as a creature capable of perfection to whom anything was possible. Shakespeare called for this same concept in his Hamlet saying: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals . . .” (Hamlet, II, ii, 286-289).