Super Glossary

Renaissance

Entertainment / Literature / Renaissance: There are two common uses of the word. (1) The term originally described a period of cultural, technological, and artistic vitality during the economic expansion in Britain in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Thinkers at this time and later saw themselves as rediscovering and redistributing the legacy of classical Greco-Roman culture by renewing forgotten studies and artistic practices, hence the name 'renaissance' or 'rebirth.' They believed they were breaking with the days of 'ignorance' and 'superstition' represented by recent medieval thinking, and returning to a golden age akin to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans from centuries earlier--a cultural idea that will eventually culminate in the Enlightenment of the late 1600s up until about 1799 or so. The Renaissance saw the rise of new poetic forms in the sonnet and a flowering of drama in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. The English Renaissance is often divided into the Elizabethan period--the years that 'Good Queen Bess' (Queen Elizabeth I) ruled--and the Jacobean period, in which King James I ruled. (The Latin form of James is Jacobus, hence the name Jacobean). Typically, we refer to this period as the Renaissance, often with a definite article and a capital R. You can click here to download a PDF handout placing this period in chronological order with other periods of literary history. (2) In a looser sense, a renaissance (usually with an uncapitalized r) is any period in which a people or nation experiences a period of vitality and explosive growth in its art, poetry, education, economy, linguistic development, or scientific knowledge. The term is positive in connotation. Historians refer to a Carolingian renaissance after Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 AD. Medievalists refer to an 'Ottonian renaissance' to describe the growth of learning under the descendents of Emperor Otto I. Haskins speaks of a 'little renaissance' or a 'Twelfth-Century renaissance' to describe the architecture, art, and philosophy emerging in France and Italy in the late 1100s. Even in the twentieth century, American scholars often refer to a 'Harlem Renaissance' among African-American jazz musicians and literary artists of the 1930s and an 'Irish Literary Renaissance' among Irish writers, to name but a few examples. The capitalization in these specific cases varies from writer to writer.
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