The Story of the Renaissance

The Story of the Renaissance

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In this comprehensive survey, William Hudson explores the forces responsible for bringing about the Renaissance, which he describes as the West's "transition from the medieval to the modern world. Hudson focuses on the one thread of continuity which he sees as both the seed and the fruit of this exciting era: This history gives the listener a lucid, perceptive analysis of the splendid Renaissance.

Published June 1st by Blackstone Audiobooks first published January 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Story of the Renaissance , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about The Story of the Renaissance. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Sep 21, Michael rated it really liked it Shelves: I went into this one blind, and was surprised that it was so robustly old-fashioned in its tone and candor.

Checking the copyright date cleared things up: Back when you could still, after a measured acknowledgement that intellectual life didn't end in the Middle Ages, suggest that humanity has experienced some progress since then on most fronts. Still, the weaknesses of old-school history are apparent in total focus on artistic, literary, and intellectual matters. There's not much about pol I went into this one blind, and was surprised that it was so robustly old-fashioned in its tone and candor.

There's not much about political history here, let alone social history, and -- rather stunningly -- I don't believe there's a single mention of disease, which was rather an important shaper of events in mid-millennium Europe. Hudson is also, to modern sensibilities, rather charmingly prudish, patriotic to the point of jingoism, and casually anti-Catholic. So you get a twofer: The style is genially professorial and easy to follow. We are repeatedly assured that we can't get tripped up on details and specifics, and then offered a list of details and specifics, but for my part that just demonstrated Hudson's likable enthusiasm for the task.

Significantly, his Story of the Renaissance still captures much of what we ought to know about that time; it isn't WRONG, but only lacking the benefit of the subsequent century of scholarship. It holds up well, and I think the worst that can be said about it is that it ends very abr Feb 01, Ray rated it did not like it. If the renaissance is your thing, this book may be of interest, but if you're a causal reader, with a passing interest in the subject, this will be a tough read.

There are a few tid-bits of interest, but it's more like a college level lecture on the subject, complicated by usage of terms, language and phrases which may have been more applicable to usage in twentieth-century England. Jun 18, Tim Houston rated it it was amazing. This book does a good job of telling the whole story of the Renaissance - the cultural situations, the politics and intrigues, as well as the art and artists and why the Renaissance still matters for us today. Nov 28, Mark rated it it was ok. It wasn't until I reached the end of this audiobook that I learned it was written in 's Great Britain.

Ah, that explains the stuffy tone and curiously English skew to the history. Still, it was a useful overview for me. Sep 02, Nicole Marble rated it really liked it. Written in , this is a thorough exposition of the change from the Medieval thinking to the Renaissance in art, literature and thought.

A bit pedantic by todays standards and totally misogynistic - but detailed and impressive. Bijou rated it really liked it Mar 08, Elise rated it it was amazing Nov 27, But in the Middle Ages things were done differently. I must impart my knowledge to others. If he was an interesting speaker, the crowd came and stayed. If he was dull, they shrugged their shoulders and continued their way. By and by certain young men began to come regularly to hear the words of wisdom of this great teacher.

They brought copybooks with them and a little bottle of ink and a goose quill and wrote down what seemed to be important. One day it rained. As an example, let me tell you of something that happened in the ninth century. In the town of Salerno near Naples there were a number of excellent physicians. They attracted people desirous of learning the medical profession and for almost a thousand years until there was a university of Salerno which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great Greek doctor who had practiced his art in ancient Hellas in the fifth century before the birth of Christ.

Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany, who early in the twelfth century began to lecture on theology and logic in Paris. Thousands of eager young men flocked to the French city to hear him. Other priests who disagreed with him stepped forward to explain their point of view. Paris was soon filled with a clamouring multitude of Englishmen and Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hungary and around the old cathedral which stood on a little island in the Seine there grew the famous University of Paris.

In Bologna in Italy, a monk by the name of Gratian had compiled a text-book for those whose business it was to know the laws of the church. Young priests and many laymen then came from all over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas. To protect themselves against the landlords and the innkeepers and the boarding-house ladies of the city, they formed a corporation or University and behold the beginning of the university of Bologna.

Next there was a quarrel in the University of Paris. We do not know what caused it, but a number of disgruntled teachers together with their pupils crossed the channel and found a hospitable home in n little village on the Thames called Oxford, and in this way the famous University of Oxford came into being.

In the same way, in the year , there had been a split in the University of Bologna. The discontented teachers again followed by their pupils had moved to Padua and their proud city thenceforward boasted of a university of its own. It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these early professors would sound absurd to our ears, trained to listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point however, which I want to make is this—the Middle Ages and especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the world stood entirely still.

Among the younger generation, there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless if somewhat bashful asking of questions. And out of this turmoil grew the Renaissance. But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene of the Mediaeval world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of whom you ought to know more than his mere name.

This man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the light of day in the year He grew up in the city of his ancestors while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis of Assisi upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross, but often when he went to school, his frightened eyes would see the puddles of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare that raged forever between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the followers of the Pope and the adherents of the Emperors.

When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father had been one before him, just as an American boy might become a Democrat or a Republican, simply because his father had happened to be a Democrat or a Republican. But after a few years, Dante saw that Italy, unless united under a single head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered jealousies of a thousand little cities.

Then he became a Ghilbeiline. He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a mighty emperor might come and re-establish unity and order. The Ghibellines were driven out of Florence in the year From that time on until the day of his death amidst the dreary ruins of Ravenna, in the year , Dante was a homeless wanderer, eating the bread of charity at the table of rich patrons whose names would have sunk into the deepest pit of oblivion but for this single fact, that they had been kind to a poet in his misery. During the many years of exile, Dante felt compelled to justify himself and his actions when he had been a political leader in his home-town, and when he had spent his days walking along the banks of the Arno that he might catch a glimpse of the lovely Beatrice Portinari, who died the wife of another man, a dozen years before the Ghibelline disaster.

He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had faithfully served the town of is birth and before a corrupt court he had been accused of stealing the public funds and had been condemned to be burned alive should he venture back within the realm of the city of Florence. To clear himself before his own conscience and before his contemporaries, Dante then created an Imaginary World and with great detail he described the circumstances which had led to his defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed and lust and hatred which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked and selfish tyrants.

He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year he had lost his way in a dense forest and how he found his path barred by a leopard and a lion and a wolf. He gave himself up for lost when a white figure appeared amidst the trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and philosopher, sent upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by Beatrice, who from high Heaven watched over the fate of her true lover. Virgil then takes Dante through Purgatory and through Hell. Deeper and deeper the path leads them until they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands frozen into the eternal ice surrounded by the most terrible of sinners, traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame and success by lies and by deceit.

But before the two wanderers have reached this terrible spot, Dante has met all those who in some way or other have played a role in the history of his beloved city.

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Emperors and Popes, dashing knights and whining usurers, they are all there, doomed to eternal punishment or awaiting the day of deliverance, when they shall leave Purgatory for Heaven. It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the people of the thirteenth century did and felt and feared and prayed for.

Through it all moves the figure of the lonely Florentine exile, forever followed by the shadow of his own despair. That was Francesco Petrarca, the son of the notary public of the little town of Arezzo. He too had been exiled and thus it happened that Petrarca or Petrarch, as we call him was born away from Florence. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Montpellier in France that he might become a lawyer like his father. But the boy did not want to be a jurist. He hated the law. He wanted to be a scholar and a poet—and because he wanted to be a scholar and a poet beyond everything else, he became one, as people of a strong will are apt to do.

He made long voyages, copying manuscripts in Flanders and in the cloisters along the Rhine and in Paris and Liege and finally in Rome. Then he went to live in a lonely valley of the wild mountains of Vaucluse, and there he studied and wrote and soon he had become so famous for his verse and for his learning that both the University of Paris and the king of Naples invited him to come and teach their students and subjects.

On the way to his new job, he was obliged to pass through Rome. The people had heard of his fame as an editor of half-forgotten Roman authors. They decided to honour him and in the ancient forum of the Imperial City, Petrarch was crowned with the laurel wreath of the Poet.

The Story of the Italian Renaissance, 2nd Edition

From that moment on, his life was an endless career of honour and appreciation. He wrote the things which people wanted most to hear. They were tired of theological disputations. Poor Dante could wander through hell as much as he wanted. But Petrarch wrote of love and of nature and the sun and never mentioned those gloomy things which seemed to have been the stock in trade of the last generation. And when Petrarch came to a city, all the people flocked out to meet him and he was received like a conquering hero. If he happened to bring his young friend Boccaccio, the story teller, with him, so much the better.

The Renaissance

They were both men of their time, full of curiosity, willing to read everything once, digging in forgotten and musty libraries that they might find still another manuscript of Virgil or Ovid or Lucrece or any of the other old Latin poets. They were good Christians. Of course they were! But no need of going around with a long face and wearing a dirty coat just because some day or other you were going to die.

People were meant to be happy. You desired proof of this? Take a spade and dig into the soil. What did you find? Ruins of ancient buildings. All these things were made by the people of the greatest empire that ever existed. They ruled all the world for a thousand years.

They were strong and rich and handsome just look at that bust of the Emperor Augustus! Of course, they were not Christians and they would never be able to enter Heaven. At best they would spend their days in purgatory, where Dante had just paid them a visit. To have lived in a world like that of ancient Rome was heaven enough for any mortal being. And anyway, we live but once. Let us be happy and cheerful for the mere joy of existence. Such, in short, was the spirit that had begun to fill the narrow and crooked streets of the many little Italian cities.

Then a clever mechanic makes the first automobile. No longer is it necessary to pedal and pedal and pedal.

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You just sit and let little drops of gasoline do the work for you. Then everybody wants an automobile. Everybody talks about Rolls- Royces and Flivvers and carburetors and mileage and oil.

Explorers penetrate into the hearts of unknown countries that they may find new supplies of gas.

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