Renaissance Literature: An Introduction

Main Ideas

1. Why Call This Period the Renaissance?

The lecturer prefers “Renaissance” (“birth again”) to “early modern” because the latter highlights the period’s movement toward modernity but misses its deliberate revival of classical Greek and Roman learning.

The Renaissance has a dual character: it looks back to antiquity while also anticipating modernity. In the lecture, modernity refers to a broad period of roughly the last 500 years, associated with secularism, scientific development, humanism, and political and economic freedoms. Modernism, by contrast, refers to particular artistic movements, especially those of the early twentieth century.

2. Humanism and Changing Ideas About the Individual

The renewed study of classical texts encouraged humanism. Ancient authors were increasingly read as sources of insight into human life and society, rather than mainly as allegories of Christian teaching. Classical political thought also returned to discussion, including ideas about republican government.

A recurring theme in the lecture is the growing importance of the individual subject—a person understood as an individual in their own right. The lecturer connects this development to changes in art, religion, communications, and political and economic life.

3. Major Historical and Cultural Reference Points

The lecturer presents the following milestones as ways to distinguish the Renaissance from the medieval world:

• Linear perspective (around 1413): Associated with Filippo Brunelleschi, linear perspective created the illusion of depth by organizing space around a viewer’s point of view. The lecturer argues that this artistic technique also reflects a growing emphasis on the individual perceiver.
• Fall of Constantinople (1453): The city’s capture by the Ottoman Empire prompted Byzantine scholars and Greek texts to move into other parts of Europe, strengthening the study of Greek and contributing to humanism.
• Gutenberg’s printing press and Bible (around 1454): Movable-type printing greatly increased the speed, reach, and affordability of written material. The lecture contrasts scarce, costly manuscript books with the rapid growth of printed books.
• Florence’s Renaissance flourishing: Especially under Lorenzo de’ Medici, wealth and patronage supported artists, libraries, and humanist scholars who translated and interpreted ancient works.
• Voyages of discovery in the 1490s: These brought Europeans into contact with other societies. The lecture notes both the colonial exploitation of the “New World” and the way contact with different cultures could challenge or relativize European customs.
• Decline of feudal society: A long process around and after 1500, this decline was shaped in part by gunpowder, which changed warfare, and by capitalism, which gradually displaced feudal relationships and contributed to new social and economic arrangements.
• Luther’s 95 Theses (1517): A conventional starting point for the Protestant Reformation.
• Copernican Revolution (1543): The shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric model unsettled the idea of a fixed, hierarchical universe. It also influenced writers’ sense that established connections and orders were breaking apart.

4. The Printing Press and Communication

Printing made books and information more accessible and reduced the cost and time required to produce them. It encouraged private, individual reading, in contrast with the medieval setting in which a book might be rare and read aloud to a group.

The lecturer links print culture to the spread of the Reformation and to the later growth of literature intended for individual readers. More broadly, the lecture suggests that communication technologies influence how people understand knowledge, truth, society, and themselves. Oral culture, manuscript forms, the codex, and print are associated with different ways of relating to words and the self.

5. The Reformation and Its Ideas

The lecture highlights sola fide (“faith alone”) and sola scriptura as central Reformation principles. Salvation depends on faith and God’s grace, rather than on religious works or payments such as indulgences.

The Reformation challenged the authority of church practices and intermediaries and encouraged Bible translation into vernacular languages. This emphasis on an individual’s relationship with scripture and God is connected to the broader Renaissance movement toward individualism.

6. The Renaissance in England

The Renaissance began later in England than in Italy. The lecture links this delay partly to the Wars of the Roses, which ended with the Tudor dynasty’s rise in 1485.

• Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church of England and required recognition of his supremacy over the Pope. Thomas More was executed after refusing the oath. Henry also dissolved the monasteries and took their wealth.
• After Henry’s death, England experienced a succession of short and unstable reigns: Edward VI, the brief rule of Lady Jane Grey, and Mary I, who attempted to restore Catholicism.
• Elizabeth I’s 45-year reign brought greater stability and established Anglicanism as a middle way between Rome and radical Protestantism. Her support for the arts helped make her an important poetic subject.
  • English lyric poetry, especially the sonnet, flourished during her reign, adapting a form associated with Petrarch.
  • The first professional theatres appeared in the 1570s, supporting the development of Elizabethan drama.
• James I, Elizabeth’s successor, commissioned the King James Bible.
• Under Charles I, conflict between the monarchy and Parliament led to civil war and a brief republican Commonwealth. The monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660.

7. Renaissance Art, Poetry, and Truth: Sidney’s Argument

The lecture frames the debate over poetry’s value through Plato’s criticism of poetry:

• In the Republic, Plato objects that poetry can teach immoral behavior and may need censorship.
• His deeper criticism is that art is removed from truth: it imitates visible objects, which are themselves removed from ideal Forms. The lecturer illustrates this with the idea of a perfect “bed,” particular beds made by craftspeople, and beds depicted by artists.

In A Defence of Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney answers this criticism by arguing that true poetry does not merely copy particular objects in the world. Through imagination, it can create new examples of what is possible and embody ideals such as virtue.

For Sidney, poetry’s purpose is to teach and delight. It can make virtue vivid and emotionally compelling, helping readers imagine and imitate it. Sidney therefore presents poetry as capable of going beyond the limits of philosophy, which can describe virtue, and history, which is bound to what actually happened. Poetry can portray what could or should be.

8. Closing Points

The lecture presents the Renaissance as a period in which classical revival, new technologies, religious change, and challenges to older social and cosmic hierarchies converged.

The lecturer previews a later discussion of Elizabethan poetry, including sonnet form, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, and Spenser’s Amoretti.

Speakers and Sources Featured

Speaker

• The lecturer, identified in the video metadata as Professor Timothy H. Wilson.

Works, Writers, and Thinkers Discussed or Cited

• Plato, especially the Republic
• Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry and Astrophil and Stella
• John Donne, The Anatomy of the World
• Horace, for the principle of poetry’s usefulness and pleasure
• Walter Jackson, named in the subtitles in connection with The Presence of the Word
• Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser
• Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, mentioned as examples
• Thomas More’s Utopia and history of Richard III