A History of Western Society: Printed Page 388
A History of Western Society, Value Edition: Printed Page 399
Think about the larger developments and continuities within and across chapters.
The word Renaissance, invented to describe the cultural flowering in Italy that began in the fifteenth century, has often been used for other periods of advances in learning and the arts, such as the “Carolingian Renaissance” that you read about in Chapter 8. Can you think of other, more recent “Renaissances”? How else is the word used today?
Many artists in the Renaissance consciously modeled their works on those of ancient Greece (Chapter 3) and Rome (Chapter 5). Comparing the art and architecture shown in those chapters with those in this chapter, what similarities do you see? Are there aspects of classical art and architecture that were not emulated in the Renaissance? Why do you think this might be?
The Renaissance was clearly a period of cultural change for educated men. Given what you have read about women’s lives and ideas about women in this and earlier chapters, did women have a Renaissance? (This question was posed first by the historian Joan Kelly in 1977 and remains a topic of great debate.) Why or why not?