European Identity and The Renaissance (jan 1, 1430 – jan 1, 1550)

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Expanded culture production of the Italian city-states, France, the Low Countries, England, and the Holy Roman Empire. What was being "reborn" were ancient Greek and Roman art and learning - knowledge that could illuminate a world of expanding horizons and support the rights of secular individuals to exert power in it.

This dive backward in ancient culture became known as humanism, which sums up the aspiration to know more about the human experience beyond what the Christian leaders offered.

The Renaissance produced a culture of critics who went back to classical ideas in order to go forward, to address the challenges and opportunities of an expanding world. This was a movement that trickled down much to the common people, although they, too, surely were moved by the sight of the Duomo in Florence, or indirectly touched by the spread of printed books. The Renaissance transformed the European elite, however, making it more cosmopolitan and knitting together the artists and scholars who constituted "the republic of letters." By orienting the elite toward ancient models (for poetry, rhetoric, statecraft, geography, medicine, and architecture) instead of medieval ones, the Renaissance revolutionized European culture - even if it could not unify the states and peoples who cultivated it.

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