scholarly journals The Chronicles of The Renaissance Group

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Michael Joseph Giovannetti

The Renaissance, French for “rebirth”; Italian, Rinascimento, from re - “again” and nascere -“to be born”, was a cultural movement that initiated in Florence, Italy, in the Late Middle Ages and later spread to the rest of Europe, encompassing periods from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century.  This time was focused on the improvement of various disciplines, through a revival of ideas from antiquity, by employing new, creative approaches to thinking and doing.  The influence of the Renaissance movement affected art, literature, philosophy, politics, science, religion, politics and other aspects of intellectual inquiry.   What does the Renaissance movement of Fourteenth Century Italy have to do with The Renaissance Group (TRG) of 21st century America?  The times and places may be very different, but as we review TRG’s contributions to teacher education from the 1980s to the present, a time during which The Renaissance Group laid a strong foundation to shape this national consortium of colleges, universities and professional organizations, we may discover more similarities between the two entities than imagined.  

Author(s):  
James A. Palmer

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.


This introductory chapter provides an overview of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Like their European neighbors, Russia and the Ukrainian lands recorded incidents of witchcraft and sorcery from the times of the earliest written sources, and along with other Christian cultures, they formally condemned the practice of magic outside of the Church. In synch with their European contemporaries, they saw spikes in formal legal prosecution during the early modern period. In the case of Russia, this was a time of ambitious state building and expansion of the tsarist court system. Formal trials of witches there began as a minute trickle in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when they were already well underway or even inching toward an end in parts of Western Europe. Peaking in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Russian and Ukrainian trials abated only during the 1770s but did not cease altogether until the mid-nineteenth century. Witchcraft was energetically prosecuted in Russia and Ukraine after the entire notion of magic had fallen into disrepute (or even become laughable) among most members of the educated classes in Western areas.


Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.


Author(s):  
John Gillman

The Ars Moriendi, from the Late Middle Ages, has been revitalized and adapted for the 21st century. This paper examines how the model has been utilized by contemporary authors and how current memoirs on death and dying may function for clinical skill development.


Itinerario ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Antonio Annino

During the last thirty years, the nature of historical chronology has changed drastically. Fernand Braudel was among the first to show that historical time is neither uniform nor linear, but rather multiple, irregular and socially determined. However, Braudel and his followers have merely carried to an extreme a conceptual revolution already initiated by Marc Bloch in the 1920s. In his studies on the Middle Ages, Bloch identified several time scales: the linear time of Christian history, the circular time of nature and liturgy, the times of the peasant, the townsman and the merchant, and so on. In short, historical time has been transformed in such a way as to prompt a new search for direction and order in historical studies. The new concept of different and irregular time scales forces us to continually redefine the duration of certain phenomena in order to understand them. Chronologies no longer have the same enduring character that provides a definite and reassuring order for the past, as positivism and historicism had claimed to do. In order to be useful at all, chronologies have to be diverse and indicate dates demarcating durations, if only because it is now a generally accepted fact that the time scales of collective mentalities are not the same as those of the economy, politics, or demography.


PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Johnson

Waste has been a recognizable socioeconomic problem since at least the late Middle Ages. In England, because of land and labor shortages, wars, famines, and especially changes in legal and penitential discourses, waste became, by the mid–fourteenth century, a critical concept. But a fully fleshed-out vocabulary for thinking through the meaning and consequences of the practice of committing waste does not yet exist. This essay argues that two fourteenth-century poems, Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman, address the lack of such a thinking through, tackling the problem of waste in all its vicissitudes. They deploy the formal resources of poetic language—from personification to episodic structure—to draw together the various ideas of waste from other discourses and to raise medieval readers' consciousnesses about the seriousness of waste's consequences. The essay calls their use of formal resources in creating this critical discourse a “poetics of waste.”


1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorit Tanay

The ArgumentThe paper argues that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism can be applied metaphorically to clarify the changing image of music during the late Middle Ages. The paper discusses the scientific and rational strategies that thirteenth century musical theorists applied to revise earlier musical conceptualization. It highlights the thirteenth-century innovative affiliation of music with Aristotelian physics and argues that in a very subtle and seemingly contradictory way music theorists expressed the nascent awareness, if not tacit acknowledgment, of the mundane nature of music. It argues further that in the fourteenth century the issue of representing musical-rhythmical variability by means of a suitable language shifted to the forefront of musical theory and practice. The unprecedented emphasis on musical signs and their semantic behavior as well as the demand to demystify the discourse about rhythmical concepts — so as to question the necessity of metacategories — all point to an affinity between fourteenth century musical thought and postmodern sensibilities.


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