Early Renaissance and Antiquity Notes

The Revival of Antiquity

Ancient: 500 BCE – 500 AD

Cicero [lawyer]: 106-43 BCE

Plato: 427-347 BCE [Metaphysical- world of perfect forms. Political- Authoritarian ideal/against democracy  everyone has specific roles. Thomas Moore took this and wrote on the idea of Utopia. Plato (1) Taught people it was possible to reach the sublime (heaven) through the progressive refinement of the soul, (2) taught people that they could think in ideal terms about their relationships with each other. Because of these two teachings, why would you need the church?]

Lucretius: 100? – 55 BCE [Nothing will come out of nothing]

Livy: 500 BCE – 17 CE [Machiavelli drew on history of ancient rome and what we can learn from it]

St. Augustine: CE 354 – 430 [“Man the merchant hardly never can be pleasing to god” It is sinful to make money]

- After the year 1000 Age of Commercialization: Literacy and numeracy no longer belong to churchmen. Closely connected with trade. Venice, Amalphi, Genoa, Milan, Florence

Medieval: 500 AD - 1500 CE  St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis

Renaissance: 1300  Dante (1265-1321) [Inferno  Purgatorio  Paradiso : Ecclesiological framework]

• 1350  Petrarch (1304-1374) [Attempt to reach across the medieval ages to the revival of antiquity without great superstructure of the church] & Boccaccio (1313-1375) [Poem telling stories while people gripped by the plague: Decameron, also wrote the genealogy of the gods]

o The Black Death takes out 50% of population

o Papacy in Avignon causes Petrarch to conceptualize about world without church

• 1400  Bruni (1370-1444) & Poggio (1380-1459)

o People think about politics differently. Looking back to the great Roman orator.

 How did it go from the roman republic to empire to papacy to dictator  learn from history and apply it to what they want Florence to be

o Cicero becomes model of imitation; To Petrarch Cicero wanted to