The Renaissance

The Renaissance is conventionally dated from around the middle of the fourteenth century, when Italian humanists such as Petrarch began deliberately reviving classical Latin literature and rhetoric, to around 1600, by which point its innovations in art, scholarship and science had spread across Europe and given way to the different concerns of the early modern period. It began in the city-states of Italy, particularly Florence under the patronage of the Medici family, before spreading north through France, the Low Countries, the German lands and England over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Humanist scholars searched monastic libraries and, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent Byzantine scholars west with their manuscripts, recovered a far wider range of classical Greek philosophy than medieval Europe had possessed, along with texts that Renaissance readers took to be far older than they actually were. The invention of movable-type printing in the mid-fifteenth century let this recovered literature circulate at a scale no manuscript culture could match, and the period's art, from Florence's Duomo to the workshops of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, drew consciously on classical models. Jacob Burckhardt's nineteenth-century study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy remains the foundational, if now much debated, account of the period as a distinct historical age.

The Renaissance recovery of antiquity had a decisive religious dimension. In 1462, Cosimo de' Medici commissioned the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate a manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of Greek philosophical and religious texts then believed to be the work of the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus and older than Moses, ahead of Ficino's own translations of Plato. Ficino's Latin version, printed in 1471, launched a wave of Christian Hermeticism that read the Hermetic texts as compatible with, and even prophetic of, Christian revelation, a reading that shaped esoteric thought across Europe until the philologist Isaac Casaubon redated the Corpus Hermeticum to the early centuries of the Christian era in 1614, after the Renaissance proper had closed.

Ficino's younger contemporary Giovanni Pico della Mirandola extended this synthesis by drawing on Jewish Kabbalah, arguing in his Oration on the Dignity of Man and his nine hundred theses that Kabbalistic texts, read correctly, confirmed Christian doctrine, and founding the tradition of Christian Kabbalah that later esoteric writers continued. This climate also supported practical magic and astrology as serious intellectual pursuits: Ficino wrote on astrological medicine and talismanic magic as natural philosophy rather than heresy, and the Swiss physician Paracelsus, active in the Renaissance's later decades, built an alchemical and astrological medicine that broke sharply with the medieval Galenic tradition. Hilary Gatti's study of Giordano Bruno and Walter Pagel's study of Paracelsus both treat this esoteric current as inseparable from the Renaissance's better known humanist and scientific achievements rather than as a separate, marginal history.