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a. The humanistic revival of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that originated in Italy in the 14th century and later spread throughout Europe. b. The period of this revival, roughly the 14th through the 16th century, marking the transition from medieval to modern times.Renaissance period - definition of Renaissance period by The Free ...https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Renaissance+period

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Take a look at any or all of these books found at the front of the room if you don't feel like browsing more websites. Some of them have tabbed pages to check out.
- Atlas of World History
- History of the World
- Shakespeare: The Life, the Works, the Treasures
- The Shakespeare Handbook
- What People Wore
- our purple textbook starting on p. 276

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"Why Shakespeare? Because it's 2016" | Stephen Brown | TEDxStMaryCSSchool

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Did Shakespeare write his plays? - Natalya St. Clair and Aaron Williams

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What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like - and how we know

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The English Renaissance and NOT Shakespeare: Crash Course Theater #13

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William Shakespeare: Legendary Wordsmith - Fast Facts | History

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Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter - David T. Freeman and Gregory Taylor

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Pee Jokes, the Italian Renaissance, Commedia Dell'Arte: Crash Course Theater #12

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Shakespeare's Tragedies and an Acting Lesson: Crash Course Theater #15

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The Renaissance: Was it a Thing? - Crash Course World History #22

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For his new book, Dan Falk followed a group of scholars who argue, unlike most, that the playwright was up to speed with the latest astronomy

smithsonian.com

You could read the line in Hamlet about shuffling off this "mortal coil" and think it has something to do with the helical structure of DNA, says Dan Falk. But, that would be crazy, right?

Perhaps equally wild, however, is this: Many Shakespearian scholars conclude that the playwright was not conscious of the Scientific Revolution that was happening around him.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. He wrote most of his works between 1589 and 1613. What was going on at this time scientifically?
In timing with the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth this month, Falk has released his new book, The Science of Shakespeare. In it, he argues that the Bard was mindful of the developments happening in astronomy during his day and, in fact, used them as fodder in his plays.

I recently had the chance to talk to Falk, a Shakespeare fan and amateur astronomer. He shared his ideas and those of a small sect of scholars who are rethinking the playwright's grasp on science.

Shakespeare lived and worked when some very interesting discoveries were happening. These are discoveries that we now think of as key developments in the Scientific Revolution. Of course, nobody called it the Scientific Revolution back then. That term wasn't coined until maybe the 19th century. They didn't even have the word science, at least not in the sense that we think of the term today. There was natural philosophy.

What was going on in science? We can remember that Copernicus published his groundbreaking book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. That was 1543-21 years before Shakespeare is born.

There is a supernova that lights up the night sky in 1572, observed by Tycho Brahe in Denmark but also observed in England. We call it the Tycho star. Thomas Digges in England publishes an almanac in support of the Copernican system in 1576. He is expanding on an almanac originally written by his father Leonard Digges but he includes a diagram that shows the stars extending outwards seemingly towards infinity. This is something Copernicus never talked about, but here is a suggestion that maybe the universe is infinite.

Gerardus Mercator, famous for the Mercator projection, publishes his atlas in 1595. This is also the age of exploration, so we have new ideas about just how large the world is. For example, how small is the tiny island of Britain compared to the vastness of the world?

You have people like William Gilbert writing his treatise on magnetism in 1600. Aside from the first supernova, there is the second supernova. The star that we think of as Kepler's star exploded in 1604. He could not have missed that. There were eclipses of the Sun and Moon in the fall of 1605 that Shakespeare could very well have seen.
For the most part, scholars have thought that Shakespeare was largely unaware of the groundbreaking science of his day. What has been said? On what grounds do they make this conclusion?
Francis Bacon writes his book, The Advancement of Learning, in 1605, a book that for the first time was laying out the rules for science and how science ought to be done. The telescope is invented in 1609 in Holland and Galileo gets his hands on one, starts looking at the night sky, makes all these now very famous discoveries and then publishes them in a little book called Sidereus Nuncius, the Starry Messenger, in the spring of 1610.

Even if there was nothing interesting to be said between the relationship between Shakespeare and these discoveries-and I don't think that's the case-I think the fact that he lived and worked while this was happening is still a great excuse to use whatever he did write as a probe or a side door to get into this remarkable period of history.

Shakespeare doesn't talk about the so-called "new philosophy," or the new ideas of Copernicus and later Galileo. It is not mentioned overtly, like it is when you read John Donne or John Milton. John Donne has this poem, " An Anatomy of the World." The line is "new philosophy calls all in doubt." Milton is writing a half-century later, but still in Paradise Lost you have this very overt story about the differences between the two world systems and which is better.

When he does talk about astronomy, you have Julius Caesar comparing himself to the North Star. You have Romeo and Juliet analyzing the rising Sun. In King Lear, they talk about eclipses of the Sun and Moon. There are actually many references like that, but it is not immediately clear that they have anything to do with these developments in science, the new philosophy. So, you can just dismiss it as being fairly medieval or pre-Copernican.

There are several places where he'll talk about the spheres, meaning the heavenly spheres or the crystalline spheres that go back to Aristotle and are presumed to hold up the stars and planets. If you leave it at that, it's like, well, so this is all very poetic, but he clearly doesn't seem to have been engaged in science.

Eventually, we come to see these spheres as fictitious. If Shakespeare keeps talking about the spheres, does that peg him as old school? Who knows, right?
You've found a small group of scholars who believe they've found ties in Shakespeare's works to science. Peter Usher, an astronomer, for one, has an interesting interpretation of Hamlet.
In Hamlet, one of the characters says "Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres," as in, I was so shocked at seeing the ghost that my eyes jumped out of my head, just like a star might be pushed out of its sphere. That alludes to the medieval cosmology, but that doesn't mean that Shakespeare believed it. You see how tricky this is?
Usher and others, including scholars Scott Maisano and John Pitcher, also make an argument about the play, Cymbeline, that you find to be strong evidence of Shakespeare's scientific knowledge. Can you explain?
Plus, within one play, you might have a character who sees things one way and a character who sees things another way. Of course, you are left wondering, does either character represent Shakespeare?

Peter Usher has a very elaborate theory about Hamlet, in which the play is seen as an allegory about competing cosmological worldviews. There are actually three of them: the old Ptolemaic Earth-centered point of view, the new view of Copernicus and this kind of hybrid view put forth by Tycho Brahe.

Usher sees the characters in Hamlet as standing in for various astronomers or mathematicians. His starting point was the bad guy of the play, Claudius. Claudius is the uncle who has murdered Hamlet's father, the old King Hamlet, and has married the queen and taken over the throne. So, Claudius happens to have the same name as Claudius Ptolemy, the ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer who we now associate most closely with the geo-centric Ptolemaic worldview.

Hamlet stands in for Thomas Digges and the new, correct Copernican worldview. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stand in for Tycho Brahe. He finds this one-to-one correspondence between the characters in Hamlet and various astronomers and philosophers either from ancient times or who were active in Shakespeare's day.

Scholars generally say that Shakespeare had nothing at all to say about Galileo. I think that's too hasty. The obvious place to turn is this remarkable scene in Act V of Cymbeline.

I'll give you the brief version: The god Jupiter descends from the heavens. He actually comes down to Earth and the four ghosts of the protagonist's dead relatives-mother, father and two brothers-appear. The main character is British, but he was pretending to be Roman, so British soldiers capture him thinking that he is an enemy combatant. They put him in jail where he falls into a kind of a trance. He is having this dream and these four ghosts dance around him.

Does this prove anything? No. But it is very, very suggestive. We've got Jupiter and four ghosts moving in a circle. More or less in the same year that Cymbeline was written, Galileo has just published this book, Sidereus Nuncius, describing Jupiter and these four previously unknown moons that move around Jupiter. Maybe this scene in Cymbeline is Shakespeare's way of at least alluding to it. Cymbeline is a complicated play, but that scene is bizarre compared to Shakespeare's other plays. It is just a very strange thing, and at least the Galileo allusion is a kind of possible explanation for it.

How interested was he in [Galileo's work?]? I don't know. Maybe it was just one of a dozen things that he thought were topical and noteworthy at that time. This is not someone who was just sort of unaware of the news of the day. This suggests that he at least had some interest in this fascinating book written by an Italian scholar 1,000 miles away. Maybe this was his tip of the hat to that discovery.

I think discoveries like this one provided Shakespeare fodder for his plays. I think he was at least aware of some of these developments and thought, okay, that's cool. What can I do with this? He didn't obsess over it the way that John Donne and John Milton did, but that doesn't mean he ignored it either.

About Megan Gambino

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Was Shakespeare Aware of the Scientific Discoveries of His Time?

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For his new book, Dan Falk followed a group of scholars who argue, unlike most, that the playwright was up to speed with the latest astronomy

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Renaissance: Definition, Timeline & Art | HISTORY

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The Renaissance was a period of European cultural, artistic, political and scientific “rebirth” after the Middle Ages. Discover Renaissance Art, Leonardo da Vinci and more.

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The job of a renaissance court portraitist was to produce likenesses of his sovereigns to display at the palace and give to foreign dignitaries or prospective brides. It went without saying the portraits should be flattering. Yet, in 1590, Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his royal patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a heap of fruits and vegetables (opposite). With pea pod eyelids and a gourd for a forehead, he looks less like a king than a crudité platter.

Lucky for Arcimboldo, Rudolf had a sense of humor. And he had probably grown accustomed to the artist's visual wit. Arcimboldo served the Hapsburg family for more than 25 years, creating oddball "composite heads" made of sea creatures, flowers, dinner roasts and other materials.

Though his work was forgotten for centuries, Arcimboldo is enjoying a personal renaissance, with shows at major European museums. At the Louvre, a series of Arcimboldo paintings is among the most popular in the collection. Sixteen of the jester's best works, including the Louvre series, are on display until January 9 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the first major American exhibition of its kind.

"We wanted people to have the experience that the emperors in the Hapsburg court had," says David Alan Brown, a National Gallery curator. "To have the same pleasure, as if they were playing a game, to first see what looks like a head and then discover on closer inspection that this head is made of a myriad of the most carefully observed flowers, vegetables, fruits, animals and birds."

The show is also a chance to get inside Arcimboldo's own head, itself a composite of sorts. Part scientist, part sycophant, part visionary, Arcimboldo was born in 1526 in Milan. His father was an artist, and Giuseppe's early career suggests the standard Renaissance daily grind: he designed cathedral windows and tapestries rife with angels, saints and evangelists. Though apples and lemons appear in some scenes, the produce is, comparatively, unremarkable. Rudolf's father, Maximilian II, the Hapsburg archduke and soon-to-be Holy Roman Emperor, welcomed the painter in his Vienna court in the early 1560s. Arcimboldo remained with the Hapsburgs until 1587 and continued to paint for them after his return to Italy.

Perhaps not accidentally, Arcimboldo's long absence from Milan coincided with the reign there of an especially humorless Milanese archbishop who cracked down on local artists and would have had little patience for produce portraiture. The Hapsburgs, on the other hand, were hungry for imaginative works. Members of the dynasty were quick to emphasize their claims to greatness and promoted an avant-garde atmosphere in their court, which teemed with intellectuals.

Arcimboldo, according to an Italian friend, was always up to something capricciosa, or whimsical, whether it was inventing a harpsichord-like instrument, writing poetry or concocting costumes for royal pageants. He likely spent time browsing the Hapsburgs' private collections of artworks and natural oddities in the Kunstkammer, considered a predecessor of modern museums.

The first known composite heads were presented to Maximilian on New Year's Day 1569. One set of paintings was called The Four Seasons, and the other-which included Earth, Water, Fire and Air-The Four Elements. The allegorical paintings are peppered with visual puns ( Summer's ear is an ear of corn) as well as references to the Hapsburgs. The nose and ear of Fire are made of fire strikers, one of the imperial family's symbols. Winter wears a cloak monogrammed with an "M," presumably for Maximilian, that resembles a garment the emperor actually owned. Earth features a lion skin, a reference to the mythological Hercules, to whom the Hapsburgs were at pains to trace their lineage. Many of the figures are crowned with tree branches, coral fragments or stag's antlers.

The paintings were meant to amuse, but they also symbolize "the majesty of the ruler, the copiousness of creation and the power of the ruling family over everything," says Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, an art history professor at Princeton who is author of Arcimboldo:Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting. "In some ways it's just humor, but the humor resolves itself in a serious way." Maximilian so liked this imagery that he and other members of his court dressed up as the elements and seasons in a 1571 festival orchestrated by Arcimboldo. (The emperor played winter.)

This was the dawn of disciplines such as botany and zoology, when artists including Leonardo da Vinci-Arcimboldo's predecessor in Milan-pursued natural studies. Arcimboldo's composites suggest a scientific fluency that highlighted his patron's learnedness. "Every plant, every grass, every flower is recognizable from a scientific point of view," says Lucia Tomasi Tongiorgi, an art historian at the University of Pisa. "That's not a joke. It's knowledge." The Hapsburgs "were very interested in the collection of nature," Kaufmann says. "They had fishponds. They had pet lions."

Even seemingly pedantic botanical details bear out the theme of empire. Arcimboldo's composites incorporated exotic specimens, such as corn and eggplant, which sophisticated viewers would recognize as rare cultivars from the New World and beyond, where so many European rulers hoped to extend their influence.

One modern critic has theorized that Arcimboldo suffered from mental illness, but others insist he had to have had his wits about him to win and retain favor in such rarefied circles. Still others have suggested he was a misunderstood man of the people-rather than fawning over the Hapsburgs, he mocked them in plain sight. This seems unlikely, though; scholars now believe that Arcimboldo falsified his ties to a powerful Italian family in an attempt to pass himself off as nobility.

The Kunstkammer was looted during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), and a number of Arcimboldo's paintings were carried off to Sweden. The composite heads disappeared into private collections, and Arcimboldo would remain rather obscure until the 20th century, when painters from Salvador Dali to Pablo Picasso are said to have rediscovered him. He has been hailed as the grandfather of Surrealism.

His works continue to surface, including Four Seasons in One Head, painted not long before his death in 1593 at 66. The National Gallery acquired the painting from a New York dealer this past fall. It's the only undisputed Arcimboldo owned by an American museum. Originally a gift to one of Arcimboldo's Italian friends, Four Seasons may be Arcimboldo's reflection on his own life. The tree-trunk face is craggy and comical, but a jaunty pair of red cherries dangles from one ear, and the head is heaped with grape leaves and apples-laurels the artist perhaps knew he deserved.

Abigail Tucker is the magazine's staff writer.

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The job of a renaissance court portraitist was to produce likenesses of his sovereigns to display at the palace and give to foreign dignitaries or prospective brides. It went without saying the portraits should be flattering. Yet, in 1590, Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his royal patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a heap of fruits and vegetables (opposite).

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Few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist and western Europe-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress. A sharp break with medieval values and institutions, a new awareness of the individual, an awakened interest in the material world and nature, and a recovery of the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome-these were once understood to be the major achievements of the Renaissance. Today, every particular of this formula is under suspicion if not altogether repudiated. Nevertheless, the term Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted period between the heyday of medieval universalism, as embodied in the papacy and Holy Roman Empire, and the convulsions and sweeping transformations of the 17th century.

In addition to Classical scholarship, the systematic investigation of the physical world, and commercial enterprise based on private capital, other important innovations of the Middle Ages that came into their own in the period included the revival of urban life, banking, the formation of states, and vernacular literatures. In religious life, the Renaissance was a time of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms, rather than the abandonment of traditional beliefs. In government, city-states and regional and national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and the papacy and obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that had covered Europe, although within states power continued to be monopolized by elites drawing their strength from both landed and mercantile wealth. If there was a Renaissance "rediscovery of the world and of man," as the 19th-century historians Jules Michelet (in the seventh volume of his History of France) and Jacob Burckhardt (in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]) asserted, it can be found mainly in literature and art, influenced by the latest and most successful of a long series of medieval Classical revivals. For all but exceptional individuals and a few marginal groups, the standards of behaviour continued to arise from traditional social and moral codes. Identity derived from class, family, occupation, and community, although each of these social forms was itself undergoing significant modification. Thus, for example, while there is no substance to Burckhardt's notion that in Italy women enjoyed perfect equality with men, the economic and structural features of Renaissance patrician families may have enhanced the scope of activity and influence of women of that class. Finally, the older view of the Renaissance centred too exclusively on Italy, and within Italy on a few cities- Florence, Venice, and Rome. By discarding false dichotomies-Renaissance versus Middle Ages, Classical versus Gothic, modern versus feudal-one is able to grasp more fully the interrelatedness of Italy with the rest of Europe and to investigate the extent to which the great centres of Renaissance learning and art were nourished and influenced by less exalted towns and by changes in the pattern of rural life.

For additional treatment of Renaissance thought and intellectual activity, see humanism and classical scholarship.

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History of Europe - Renaissance, Art, Culture

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History of Europe - Renaissance, Art, Culture: Few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist and western Europe-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress.

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By using cookbooks from the 17th century, one intrepid writer attempts to recreate dishes the Bard himself would have eaten

smithsonian.com

Enthralled by Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House stories when I was a young girl, I once made one of the frontier family's staple dishes, a cornmeal porridge called hasty pudding. One of my fourth-grade classmates peered into the bubbling mixture and remarked, "Look, it's breathing." Undaunted, I've continued my forays into historical cookery, from the Mulligatawny stew popularized by British settlers in India to an American colonial dessert called slump. While my cooking is purely recreational, it sometimes takes inspiration from my professional life as a communications associate at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The library's current exhibition, Beyond Home Remedy: Women, Medicine, and Science, which runs through May 14 and highlights medicinal remedies 17th-century women concocted to treat everything from gunshot wounds to rickets, got me thinking about cooking again. Women in England and colonial America were self-taught healers who compiled remedies along with their favorite recipes in notebooks then called "receipt" books. Handwritten instructions for making cough syrup might appear in the same volume-or even on the same page-as tips for stewing oysters.

The Folger's collection of several dozen receipt or recipe books offers a fascinating window into life during Shakespeare's era on medical practices, women's literacy and popular foods. Recipe books were often circulated among family members, and it's not uncommon to see handwriting from several individuals in one book, says Rebecca Laroche, who curated the exhibition. As I scanned the neatly hand-scripted books by housewives Elizabeth Fowler and Sarah Longe, I got the urge to try some of their recipes. We know little about these women; they were literate, of course, and because Longe calls herself "mistress" and refers to King James I and Queen Elizabeth I in her book, historians surmise that she was informed and fairly well off, though not a member of the nobility. The notebooks, however, give us glimpses of the authors' personalities.

Fowler had written her name and the date, 1684, on the cover and embellished them with swirls and curlicues. Her 300-page compendium includes poems and sermons. With an eye for organization, she numbered her recipes. Her recipe titles reflect her confidence in the kitchen: "To Make the Best Sassages that Ever was eat," she labels one. Longe, whose 100-page bound vellum book dates from about 1610, also liberally sprinkles "good" and "excellent" in her recipe titles. But she attributes credit to others when appropriate: "Mr. Triplett's Receipt for the Ague" or a cough syrup recipe "by D.R."

Mr. Triplett's elixir calls for three gallons of aqua vitae, probably brandy or whiskey, and Longe's recipe for a beef roast includes a pint and a half of wine. Alcohol was a common ingredient for medicine as well as cooking. Other culinary techniques included feeding herbs to caged birds to produce a flavorful meat and keeping fish alive in watertight barrels to ensure freshness.

To kitchen test historic recipes, I passed up Fowler's recipe "How to Rost a Calves Head," choosing instead her rabbit fricassee as a main course and Longe's "Gooseberry Foole" as a dessert. A chilled mixture of fruit and cream, fools are still popular today in England. But fricassee is a rarity in contemporary cookbooks, though English colonists brought it to America and chicken fricassee was reputedly one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite dishes. The name derives from a French dish that is basically cut-up meat cooked in a sauce. Gooseberries, a tart, grape-size fruit, are available fresh in the summer in this country but usually only in the Pacific Northwest, so I ordered them frozen from Washington State. They cost about $10 a pound, plus delivery fees. Although whole dressed rabbits are available locally in the Washington, D.C. area, I ordered pre-cut, deboned pieces (1.5 pounds for $30) from a gourmet meat retailer in New Jersey. Both berries and rabbit arrived at my doorstep via overnight delivery, packed in dry ice.

A major challenge to cooking from the days of yore is the dearth of details for cooking time, temperatures and ingredient quantities. Recipes may call for "a good store of onions" or instruct the cook to "lett it stand a great while." Fowler did not specify how much winter savory for the fricassee, and Longe did not note how much sugar or rose water for the fool. One of the best professional cookbooks of the 17th century was Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook, published in 1660. Drawing on his training in Paris and his career as a professional cook for English aristocrats, he often specifies quantities and cooking times, but that was not the case for many household recipe books. Technological limitations contributed to the vagueness of early recipes, says Francine Segan, food historian and author of Shakespeare's Kitchen. The invention and availability of such devices as kitchen clocks and oven thermometers, as well as uniform measurements in the 1800s combined with a trend to make cooking more scientific, shifted the focus of recipes from personal taste and innovation to consistent, replicable results.

Segan's personal view, however, is that's today's cooks are over-regimented. "A quarter of a teaspoon? Ludicrous!" she exclaims. "You have to be a cook and trust your palate."

So I left my measuring spoons and cups in the cupboard and went on instinct.

The gooseberry fool was surprisingly easy. For color, I opted for ripe, red gooseberries instead of the pale green that Longe used. Per her instructions I scooped "two handfuls" in a bowl and used a spoon to "breake them very small." With no guidelines for the amounts of sugar and rose water, I added what by my eye was about a half cup of sugar and several sprinkles of rose water. After the quart of cream had come to a "boyle," I added a dash of nutmeg and folded in the gooseberry mixture. The fragrant rose water mingled with the aromatic spiced cream brought to mind a passage from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Titania, the fairy queen, is lulled to sleep in a forest of thyme and wild roses. "With sweet musk-roses and eglantine / There sleeps Titania."

"Lett it stand till it bee cold," Longe's book instructed. I put the fool in the refrigerator, but during her day she might have chilled it in a root cellar or a purpose-built icehouse if she were lucky enough to afford one.

For the fricassee, I browned the pieces of rabbit in butter in a large skillet. I removed the meat, sautéed the chopped onions, parsley and thyme (a substitute for Fowler's winter savory) and returned the rabbit to the pan and let it simmer about 20 minutes. I served the fricassee with peas and mashed potatoes. The common combination of herbs, onions and butter created a stew both savory and familiar, and the rabbit reminded me of chicken, but more flavorful and tender. My dinner guests ate with gusto, using the pan juices as gravy for the potatoes. Was this comfort food circa 1684?

As a finale, the fool was not quite as successful. Though delicately spiced, the mixture never fully solidified, leaving it a gloppy texture. Perhaps I didn't boil the cream long enough. "A surprise to the palate," said one guest puckering at the unfamiliar gooseberries. In my recipe makeover for the fool, I recommend raspberries, which have a delicate balance of sweet and tartness. Because we're blessed with electrical appliances, I converted the fool recipe to a fast no-cook version. Over the centuries chicken became a popular fricassee meat and it will substitute well for the rabbit, which was common fare for our 17th-century ancestors. Fowler's recipe called for a half pound of butter, but I used considerably less to spare our arteries.

As I offer these changes, I feel as if I'm scribbling a few notes in Sarah Longe's and Elizabeth Fowler's recipe books. Somehow, I don't think they'd mind at all.

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By using cookbooks from the 17th century, one intrepid writer attempts to recreate dishes the Bard himself would have eaten

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smithsonian.com

You wouldn't think it by looking at the long line of Shakespeare biographies on the library shelves, but everything we know for sure about the life of the world's most revered playwright would fit comfortably on a few pages.

Yes, we know that a man named Will Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. We know that someone of pretty much the same name married and had children there (the baptismal register says Shaxpere, the marriage bond Shagspere), that he went to London, was an actor. We know that some of the most wonderful plays ever written were published under this man's name-though we also know so little about his education, experiences and influences that an entire literary industry exists to prove that Shaxpere-Shagspere did not write, could not have written, them. We know that our Shakespeare gave evidence in a single obscure court case, signed a couple of documents, went home to Stratford, made a will and died in 1616.

And that's just about it.

In one sense, this is not especially surprising. We know as much about Shakespeare as we know about most of his contemporaries- Ben Jonson, for instance, remains such a cipher that we can't be sure where he was born, to whom, or even exactly when. "The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position at that time," says David Thomas of Britain's National Archives. "It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him."

To make matters worse, what does survive tends to be either evidence of dubious quality or material of the driest sort imaginable: fragments from legal records, mostly. The former category includes most of what we think we know about Shakespeare's character; yet, with the exception of a couple of friends from the theatrical world who made brief mention of him around the time he died, most of the anecdotes that appear in Shakespeare biographies were not collected until decades, and sometimes centuries, after his death. John Aubrey, the noted antiquary and diarist, was among the first of these chroniclers, writing that the playwright's father was a butcher, and that Shakespeare himself was "a handsome, well shap't man: very good company, and of a very redie and pleasant smoothe Witt." He was followed a few years later by the Reverend Richard Davies, who in the 1680s first wrote down the famous anecdote about Shakespeare's leaving Stratford for London after being caught poaching deer on the lands of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote Park. Yet the sources of both men's information remain obscure, and Aubrey, in particular, is known for writing down any bit of gossip that came to him.

There is not the least shred of evidence that anybody, in the early years of the Shakespeare cult, bothered to travel to Warwickshire to interview those in Stratford who had known the playwright, even though Shakespeare's daughter Judith did not die until 1662 and his granddaughter was still alive in 1670. The information that we do have lacks credibility, and some of it appears to be untrue; the most recent research suggests that Shakespeare's father was a wool merchant, not a butcher. He was wealthy enough to have been accused of usury-the loan of money at interest, forbidden to Christians-in 1570.

Absent firsthand information about Shakespeare's life, the only real hope of finding out much more about him lies in making meticulous searches through the surviving records of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The British National Archives contains tons of ancient public records, ranging from tax records to writs, but this material is written in cramped, jargon-ridden and abbreviated dog Latin that cannot be deciphered without lengthy training. Only a very few scholars have been willing to devote years of their lives to the potentially fruitless pursuit of Shakespeare's name through this endless word-mine, and the lack of firm information about Shakespeare's life has had important consequences, not least for those who attempt to write it. As Bill Bryson puts it:

With so little to go on in the way of hard facts, students of Shakespeare's life are left with essentially three possibilities: to pick minutely over...hundreds of thousands of records, without indexes or cross references, each potentially involving any of 200,000 citizens, Shakespeare's name, if it appears at all, might be spelled in 80 different ways, or blotted or abbreviated beyond recognition...to speculate...or to persuade themselves that they know more than they actually do. Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition-that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals-and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty. The urge to switch from the subjunctive to the indicative is... always a powerful one.

Bryson is, of course, quite right; most Shakespeare biographies are highly speculative. But this only makes it all the more remarkable that scholars of Shakespeare have chosen to pretty much ignore one of the very few new documents to emerge from the National Archives over the last century. It is an obscure legal paper, unearthed from a set of ancient sheets of vellum known as "sureties of the peace", and it not only names Shakespeare but lists a number of his close associates. The document portrays the "gentle Shakespeare" that we met in high school English class as a dangerous thug; indeed, it has been plausibly suggested that it proves he was heavily involved in organized crime.

Exploring this unlighted lane in Shakespeare's life means, first, looking at the crucial document. "Be it known," the Latin text begins,

that William Wayte craves sureties of the peace against William Shakspere, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death, and so forth. Writ of attachment issued by the sheriff of Surrey, returnable on the eighteenth of St Martin .

A few pages away in the same collection of documents, there is a second writ, issued by Francis Langley and making similar charges against William Wayte.

Who are these people, each alleging the other was issuing death threats? The scholar who unearthed the document-an indefatigable Canadian by the name of Leslie Hotson, best remembered today as the man who first stumbled across the records of the inquest into the highly mysterious murder of Shakespeare's fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe -uncovered a squalid tale of gangland rivalries in the theatrical underworld of Queen Elizabeth's day.

According to Hotson's researches, Shakespeare was an energetic, quick-witted but only sketchily educated country boy-perfect qualifications for someone trying to make his way in the bohemian and morally dubious world of the theater. That world was far from respectable in those days; that is why London's playhouses were clustered on the south bank of the Thames, in the borough of Southwark, outside the jurisdiction of the City of London-and why the document Hotson discovered lies with the Surrey writs and not among those dealing with London proper.

As a newcomer to the big city, Hotson realized, Shakespeare was obliged to begin his career on a lowly rung, working for disreputable theater people-which, at that time, was generally regarded as akin to working in a brothel. Theaters were meeting places for people whose interest in the opposite sex did not extend to marriage; they were also infested with crooks, pimps and prostitutes, and attracted an audience whose interest in the performance on stage was often minimal. This, of course, explains why the Puritans were so quick to ban public entertainments when they got the chance.

What seems certain is that the work that the young Shakespeare found took him to the shadiest part of the theater world. Most biographers suggest his first employer was Philip Henslowe, who became wealthy as much from his work as a brothel landlord as he did as a theatrical impresario. Nor was the playwright's next boss, Langley, much of a step up.

Langley, as Hotson's minutely careful research shows, had made much of his fortune by crooked means, and was the subject of a lengthy charge sheet that included allegations of violence and extortion. He was the owner of the newly constructed Swan Theater, which the Lord Mayor of London had campaigned against, fruitlessly, on the ground that it would be a meeting spot for "thieves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, cozeners, connycatching persons, practisers of treason, and such other like"-a formidable list, if you know that "cozeners" were petty confidence men and "connycatchers" were card sharps.

Langley's most dangerous opponent was William Wayte, the man who accused Shakespeare of threatening him. Wayte was noted as the violent henchman of his stepfather, William Gardiner, a Surrey magistrate whom Hotson was able to show was highly corrupt. Gardiner made a living as a leather merchant in the upmarket district of Bermondsey, but most of his money came from criminal dealings. Legal records show that several members of his wife's family sued him for swindling them; at different times he was found guilty of slander and "insulting and violent behaviour," and he served a brief prison sentence for the latter. Gardiner's appointment as a magistrate indicates no probity, merely the financial resources to make good any sums due to the crown in the event that some prisoner defaulted on them. Since they took this risk, most magistrates were not above exploiting their post to enriching themselves.

Biographers who have made mention of the writ's discovery since Hotson made it in 1931 have tended to dismiss it. Shakespeare must simply have got caught up in some quarrel as a friend of Langley's, they suggest-on very little evidence, but with the certainty that the author of Hamlet could never have been some sort of criminal. Thus the evidence of the sureties, Bill Bryson proposes, is "entirely puzzling," while for the great biographer Samuel Schoenbaum, the most plausible explanation is that Shakespeare was an innocent witness to other men's quarrels.

This seems almost willful distortion of the evidence, which seems fairly unambiguously to show that the playwright-who is named first in the writ-was directly involved in the dispute. Indeed, Hotson's researches tend to suggest that Langley and Gardiner were in more or less open conflict with each other for the spoils of the various rackets that theater owners dabbled in-that their dispute was, in John Michell's phrase, "the usual one between urban gangsters, that is, control of the local vice trade and organized crime." And since Shakespeare "was principal in their quarrel," Michell reasonably concludes, "presumably he was involved in their rackets."

Certainly, Will's other associates seem to have been no more salubrious that Langley and Gardiner. Wayte was described in another legal case as a "loose person of no reckoning or value." And though Hotson could discover nothing definite about Soer and Lee, the two women in the case, he plainly suspected that they were associated with Langley through his extensive interests in the Southwark brothel business. Shakespeare, meanwhile, was perhaps the man who supplied Langley with muscle, just as Wayte did for Gardiner. As much is suggested by one of the four principal portraits supposed to show him: the controversial " Chandos portrait " once owned by the Duke of Buckingham. As Bill Bryson points out, this canvas seems to depict a man far from the diffident and balding literary figure portrayed by other artists. The man in the Chandos portrait disturbed Schoenbaum, who commented on his "wanton air" and "lubricious lips." He "was not, you sense," Bryson suggests, "a man to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter."

There is plenty of evidence elsewhere that Shakespeare was somewhat less than a sensitive poet and entirely honest citizen. Legal records show that him dodging from rented room to rented room while defaulting on a few shillings' worth of tax payments in 1596, 1598 and 1599-though why he went to so much trouble remains obscure, since the totals demanded were tiny compared to the sums that other records suggest he was spending on property at the same time. He also sued at least three men for equally insignificant sums. Nor was Will's reputation among other literary men too good; when a rival playwright, Robert Greene, was on his deathbed, he condemned Shakespeare for having "purloined his plumes"-that is, cheated him out of his literary property-and warned others not to fall into the hands of this "upstart crow."
Sources
That Will Shakespeare was somehow involved in the low-life rackets of Southwark seems, from Hotson's evidence, reasonably certain. Whether he remained involved in them past 1597, though, it is impossible to say. He certainly combined his activities as one of Langley's henchmen with the gentler work of writing plays, and by 1597 was able to spend £60-a large sum for the day-on purchasing the New Place, Stratford, a mansion with extensive gardens that was the second-largest house in his home town. It is tempting to speculate, however, whether the profits that paid for such an opulent residence came from Will's writing-or from a sideline as strong-arm man to an extortionist.

Brian Bouchard. "William Gardiner." Epson & Ewell History Explorer. Accessed August 20, 2011. Bill Bryson. Shakespeare: the World as a Stage. London: Harper Perennial, 2007; Leslie Hotson. Shakespeare Versus Shallow. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1931; William Ingram. A London Life in the Brazen Age: Francis Langley, 1548-1602. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1978; John Michell. Who Wrote Shakespeare? London: Thames & Hudson, 1996; Oliver Hood Phillips. Shakespeare and the Lawyers. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 1972; Ian Wilson. Shakespeare: The Evidence. Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work. New York: St Martin's Press, 1999.

About Mike Dash

Mike Dash is a contributing writer in history for Smithsonian.com. Before Smithsonian.com, Dash authored the award-winning blog A Blast From the Past.

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smithsonian.com You wouldn't think it by looking at the long line of Shakespeare biographies on the library shelves, but everything we know for sure about the life of the world's most revered playwright would fit comfortably on a few pages. Yes, we know that a man named Will Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564.

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There are 200 million European starlings in North America, and they are a menace

smithsonian.com

If you live in North America, you probably recognize European starlings, those little black birds with white polka dots that chirp and chatter and, in the winter, hang out in flocks of thousands. There are 200 million of these birds on the continent, and they can be found as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico. Numerous though they are, starlings are actually non-native invasive species. And we can blame Shakespeare for their arrival in America.

Steven Marche explains in How Shakespeare Changed Everything:

On March 6, 1890, a New York pharmaceutical manufacturer name Eugene Schieffelin brought natural disaster into the heart of completely without meaning to. Through the morning snow, which congealed at times to sleet, sixty starlings, imported at great expense from Europe, accompanied Schieffelin on the ride from his country house into Central Park-the noisy, dirty fulfillment of his plan to introduce every bird mentioned by Shakespeare into North America. Schieffelin loved Shakespeare and he loved birds....The American Acclimatization Society, to which he belonged, had released other avian species found in Shakespeare-the nightingales and skylarks more commonly mentioned in his plays and poems-but none had survived. There was no reason to believe that starlings would fare any better. Schieffelin opened the cages and released the birds into the new world, without the smallest notion of what he was unleashing.

For someone who apparently loved birds, you have to admit this was a pretty daft plan. There was every reason to believe that the birds would die-it was bitterly cold and sleeting, and attempts with other species had led to dead birds. But the tiny flock found shelter beneath the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, just to the west of the park, and they survived the winter. And then they began to breed, and spread, and breed some more.

It seems that the starlings some special characteristics that gave them an advantage over other bird species, Marche writes:

The protractor muscles of their beaks allow them to pry and to probe better than other birds. They can open their bills after pushing them into the soil, which allows them to forage for invertebrates easily and in drier areas. The starling's eye have evolved to the narrow front of its face, giving it the perfect view for prying. Its binocular vision combined with its open-bill probing ability means that starlings can find insects in colder climates better than other birds, which means that starlings do not have to migrate to warmer climates in winter, which means that they can take the best nesting holes during the breeding season.

Starlings will bully other birds, kicking bluebirds, flickers and woodpeckers out of their nests. They can consume whole fields of wheat and transmit avian, animal and human diseases. A fungus called Histoplasma capsulatum can grow in the soil beneath roosting starlings; the fungal spores can become airborne if the soil is disturbed and cause the disease histoplasmosis, which, in rare cases, can cause blindness or death.

People quickly realized what a pest these birds could be and tried to get rid of them. In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1914, residents tried to scare the birds away from their nests by fastening teddy bears to those trees and firing rockets through the branches. The White House tried speakers that emitted owl calls. Columns around the U.S. Capitol were outfitted with electrified wires. People have tried shooting, poisoning, trapping, repelling and frightening the birds, but the population still grows. They have plenty to eat and lots of habitat to live on-what else does a species need?

These birds are a prime example of why it can be so difficult to control an invasive species once it has become established-no matter how many you wipe out, there's still plenty to take their place.

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The Invasive Species We Can Blame On Shakespeare

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There are 200 million European starlings in North America, and they are a menace

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The Renaissance: The 'Rebirth' of Science & Culture

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The Renaissance was a period of "rebirth" in arts, science and European society. It was a time of transition from the ancient world to the modern.

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In the 1490s, a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola arrived in Florence, Italy, condemning the city's arts and culture. A holdover from the older Medieval worldview, Savonarola understood the radical changes befalling European society. A new philosophy called humanism had come into vogue and, with it, the Renaissance was born. Aided by the development of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, humanist writers were able to influence audiences everywhere with a philosophy that stressed education and personal experience over religious dogma. In time, the Renaissance would transform nearly every aspect of European culture.

Studia Humanitatis: The Evolution of Renaissance Education

By the end of the Middle Ages, education had become almost exclusively religious in nature, with many scholars claiming that faith was superior to reason. Now, new humanist ideals led educators to develop a curriculum they called the "studia humanitatis" (study of humanities). The studia humanitatis emphasized grammar, literature, history and rhetoric, subjects most believed to enhance individual growth and reasoning. In the 1480s, Dutch scholar Rudolf Agricola brought the new curriculum from Italy and introduced it into Northern Europe, extending its continental reach.

Artistic Beauty: A New Perspective

As with learning, art in the Middle Ages had also been tightly constrained. Works generally focused on religious themes and were lacking in visual dimension. But the Renaissance discovery of linear perspective enabled artists to portray distance and proportion more realistically. At the same time, humanist ideals prompted a new celebration of the human form, most famously expressed in Michelangelo's sculpture of David. Artists also began depicting secular and classical themes, with prominent examples including Boticelli's "Birth of Venus" and Raphael's "The School of Athens."

A New Note in Renaissance Music

The Renaissance also saw new developments in musical composition and performance. Medieval sacred music had been limited to the Gregorian chant, a single melody performed in Latin without instrumental accompaniment. But the Renaissance brought the introduction of polyphony, music consisting of several melodies at once. The leading masters of polyphony included Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez, who used it to develop a new choral form known as the motet. Outside the cathedral, musical performance was enhanced by the invention of new instruments, most notably the viola da gamba and the harpsichord.

The Growth of Literature

The printing press created an almost insatiable demand for new reading materials. This demand induced writers across Europe to produce literary works of every conceivable kind. In keeping with the times, they wrote in their native languages, such as French or Italian, instead of medieval Latin. Literature now became more widely accessible across Europe. Suddenly, readers could enjoy such revolutionary works as Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Cervantes' "Don Quixote." The Renaissance also saw the flowering of English literature, most notably in the person of William Shakespeare.

Science and Technology

The Renaissance brought about a new interest in the workings of the natural world. Scientific inquiry could be dangerous, though, as Galileo learned when he disproved the Church's age-old geocentric teachings. Even so, the new spirit of curiosity persisted. Along with designing numerous theoretical machines, Leonardo Da Vinci made strides in the study of human anatomy. Geographical knowledge and map-making improved as well, enabling Columbus to make his monumental voyage in 1492. But the most significant achievement was still the printing press. It put new ideas into broad circulation and made the Renaissance a lasting reality.

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Cultural Changes From the Medieval to the Renaissance | Synonym

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In the 1490s, a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola arrived in Florence, Italy, condemning the city's arts and culture. A holdover from the older Medieval worldview, Savonarola understood the ...

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Researchers used plagiarism software to highlight similarities between Shakespeare's work and an obscure, unpublished manuscript

smithsonian.com

In the late 1500s, George North, a minor nobleman of Queen Elizabeth I's court, penned a manuscript condemning rebellions against the monarchy. A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels was never published, and since 1933 it has sat, largely forgotten, on a shelf in the British Library. But as Michael Blanding reports for the New York Times, a new book argues that this obscure manuscript inspired the work of William Shakespeare.

The book, written by Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, tied North's work to 11 Shakespeare plays-among them King Lear, Macbeth and Richard III -using WCopyfind, a plagiarism software that is more commonly deployed to catch unscrupulous students. The authors do not maintain that Shakespeare copied North's manuscript, but instead drew inspiration from its pages.

McCarthy, an amateur Shakespeare researcher from New York state, spearheaded this unusual research project. In 2006, he became interested in possible sources for Shakespeare's plays and found a reference to North in a 1927 auction catalogue that mentioned it would be "extremely interesting" to compare passages from North's Discourse to Shakespeare's work. With the help of Schlueter, a professor emerita of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and a rare documents expert, he traced the manuscript to the British Library.

Using the plagiarism software, McCarthy and Schlueter identified relatively rare words that appear in the works of both Shakespeare and North, often in similar contexts. For example, in a passage describing hierarchies among canines, North uses six terms for dogs, including the mastiff, the cur and the "trundle-tail." Shakespeare uses a similar list in both Macbeth and . The authors also cross-checked passages against Early English Books Online, a database that contains almost every English work published between 1473 and 1700. Notably, they found only one other use of the phrase "trundle-tail" in a work published before 1623 (Shakespeare died in 1616).

One of the "most compelling" connections between Shakespeare and North, according to Blanding, centers on descriptions of Jack Cade, who led a failed rebellion against Henry VI in 1450. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, the Bard describes Cade's death in grisly detail: he is found starving and eating grass, apprehended and dragged through the streets by his heels. His body is then left for the crows to eat. Scholars have posited that Shakespeare invented these details, but all appear in North's description of Cade and two other rebels. Shakespeare's Cade, the authors argue, is a composite of these three figures.

The new book adds yet another wrinkle to the debate surrounding Shakespeare's literary legacy. Many scholars and a roster of famous figures-from Mark Twain to Charlie Chaplin-have argued that the Bard did not write the plays attributed to him. Depending on whom you ask, philosopher Francis Bacon, playwright Christopher Marlowe, or the aristocrat Edward de Vere are more likely candidates. Mark Rylance, former director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, once told Robert McCrum of the that he believes "Shakespeare" was "little more than a front for a powerful literary cabal."

The matter of Shakespeare's literary inspirations may be a no less divisive topic. Rhodri Lewis, a scholar of 16th- and 17th-century literature at Princeton University, commented on Twitter that he is "very deeply skeptical" of McCarthy and Schlueter's argument. "The Lear/Macbeth and North dog lists both seem to lean on the Boke of St Albans, by Juliana Berners," he pointed out in a second post. Other scholars find the case for North's influence more compelling. According to Blanding, Martin Meisel, professor of dramatic literature emeritus at Columbia University, said in a review that McCarthy and Schlueter's book is "impressively argued."

In all likelihood, it will be impossible to determine whether or not Shakespeare actually read North's unpublished manuscript. The Bard, as ever, remains mysterious.

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Software Points to Possible Inspiration for 11 Shakespeare Plays

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smithsonian.com In the late 1500s, George North, a minor nobleman of Queen Elizabeth I's court, penned a manuscript condemning rebellions against the monarchy. A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels was never published, and since 1933 it has sat, largely forgotten, on a shelf in the British Library.

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Read and learn for free about the following article: Renaissance Europe

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In the 16th century, the so-called "sea monk" became the talk of Europe. Drawings of the half-man, half-fish "monster" appeared in naturalists' tomes and were circulated among naturalists and members of royal courts across the continent. It was the end of the Renaissance, when Europeans were enamoured with art, science, philosophy and exploring the natural world.

But over the centuries, the creature, and talk of it, faded into obscurity. Whatever it was, it was never definitively identified. The lack of an answer has given scientists and folklore-loving researchers something to chew on over the years.

The sea monk was first described by a French naturalist and ichythyologist, Pierre Belon, in 1553, and again by a French colleague, Guillaume Rondelet, in 1554. The creature was also included in a 1558 volume of the widely-read and respected Renaissance natural history encyclopedia, Historiae Animalium, which was compiled by Conrad Gesner, a Swiss physician and professor. These rare books are all held in the collections of the Smithsonian Libraries and have been digitized for public viewing.

The sea monk is just one of a host of creepy monsters and ghoulish visuals culled from rare and antique books and curated this month on the website PageFrights by the Smithsonian Libraries and other archives, museums and cultural institutions around the world to share for Halloween.

Sometime between 1545 and 1550, the peculiar sea monk washed up on a beach near, or was caught in the Oresund, the strait between modern-day Denmark and Sweden. The actual circumstances of its discovery have never been well-documented. None of the naturalists of the day who drew or discussed the animal had ever actually laid eyes on the sea monk specimen. It was described as almost eight-feet-long, having mid-body fins, a tail fin, a black head, and a mouth on its ventral side.

A published account in the 1770s-which drew upon the Renaissance scholars' work- described it as an animal with "a human head and face, resembling in appearance the men with shorn heads, whom we call monks because of their solitary life; but the appearance of its lower parts, bearing a coating of scales, barely indicated the torn and severed limbs and joints of the human body."

That description was unearthed by Charles G.M. Paxton, who, along with a colleague, published in 2005 a full accounting of their research into the sea monk's origins. They also offered their own take on its true identity. Paxton, a statistical ecologist and marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, says the sea monk is just one of his many forays into monster mysteries.

"For the past 20-odd years or so, I've had a strange hobby, which is exploring the hard science behind the accounts of sea monsters," says Paxton.

The sea monk intrigued him because it seemed to him that maybe, in the attempts to classify the creature, something obvious had been overlooked. For instance, "monkfish" is a common name in Britain for a fish found in the North Atlantic.

Paxton was not the first in modern times to try to determine the sea monk's identity. Japetus Steenstrup, an influential Danish marine biologist, delivered a lecture in 1855, in which he postulated that the sea monk was a giant squid, Archeteuthis dux. It wasn't too surprising, given that Steenstrup was an authority on cephalopods, and one of the first zoologists to properly document the existence of the giant squid, says Paxton.

Steenstrup gave the sea monk the name Architeuthis monachus (Latin for monk). He noted that the sea monk's body was similar to a squid; it also had a black head and red and black spots, just like a squid. He believed that some of the early descriptions mistakenly said the sea monk had scales, noting that Rondelet claimed it was scaleless-as would be true of a squid.

Paxton, however, isn't buying it. He says in his paper that while Steenstrup's giant squid was a good explanation for the many sea monsters described in the 16th and 17th centuries, "he may have been a little overenthusiastic in implicating Architeuthis as the prime suspect for the sea monk."

Others have suggested that the sea monk was an anglerfish ( Lophius), a seal, or a walrus. Another candidate is a "Jenny Haniver." That's what you call a tricked-out specimen that is fashioned into a devil or dragon-like creature by modifying a dried carcass of a shark, a skate or a ray.

No one knows where the term Jenny Haniver (sometimes Jenny Hanver or Havier) came from, but the trinkets were in existence in the 1500s, says Paxton. Even so, if the sea monk was found alive when discovered-as the accounts have suggested, it could not have been a Jenny Haniver, says Paxton. Also, the dried sharks are smaller than the sea monk.

Paxton says the most likely explanation is that the sea monk was a species of shark, known as the angel shark (Squatina), given its known habitat and range, coloration, length, subtle scales, and pelvic and pectoral girdles that might appear to be a monk's habit.

"If you put a gun to my head and force me to say what the answer is, I'd say Squatina," says Paxton. But, he says, "we can't go back in time, so we can't say for sure what the answer is."

Paxton is continuing his investigation into the sea monk, and a similar creature from that period, known as the sea bishop.

Both of those animals caught the attention of Louisa Mackenzie, associate professor of French and Italian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. The sea creatures serve as a window into Renaissance scholarship and the history of scientific inquiry, along with an animals' place in the Anthropocene world, says Mackenzie.

The fervent interest in the sea monk and other creatures in the 16th century indicates that scientific inquiry was a serious business. "We might look at these images today and find them quaint, amusing, superstitious, or fantastical-proof of how 'unscientific' Renaissance science was," says Mackenzie.

But, she argues in a recent chapter about the sea monk and sea bishop in the book Animals and Early Modern Identity, that those inquiries deserve more respect. "What I was trying to do with this chapter was to 'call out' our own tendency to not take these creatures seriously as sites of investigation," Mackenzie says.

So, did 16th century scholars and royals truly believe the sea monk was a fantastical half-man, half-fish?

Paxton says it's hard to know what they actually believed, but that some may have embraced the idea of a chimera. The naturalists most likely saw a resemblance, and then decided it was expedient to describe the sea monk in terms that would be familiar. "My gut feeling is that they weren't suggesting there was a whole society of merpeople under the sea," Paxton says.

But Mackenzie says "it's very possible that naturalists believed it to be a true hybrid, and that, possibly, it was to be feared," especially, since "theology was baked into natural history at the time."

Paxton found a report that upon hearing of its discovery, the King of Denmark ordered that the sea monk be immediately buried in the ground, so it would not, according to the account, "provide a fertile subject for offensive talk."

What kind of talk? Paxton theorizes that perhaps the sea monk could have represented some sort of primacy of Catholicism, with lots of monks swimming under the sea-given that monks were traditionally Catholic, not Protestant.

Remember, he says, that this discovery came during the time of the Protestant Reformation, when Europe was fulminating with religious sectional discord.

Paxton is moving on to his next mystery-a decidedly more ominous creature: a man-eating sea monk discovered during the medieval period.

About Alicia Ault

Alicia Ault is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wired. When not chasing down a story from our nation's capital, she takes in the food, music and culture of southwest Louisiana from the peaceful perch of her part-time New Orleans home.

Read more from this author | Follow @aliciaault

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Renaissance Europe Was Horrified by Reports of a Sea Monster That Looked Like a Monk Wearing Fish Scales

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Music in the Culture of the Renaissance on JSTOR

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Edward E. Lowinsky, Music in the Culture of the Renaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Oct., 1954), pp. 509-553

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The Renaissance - that cultural, political, scientific and intellectual explosion in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries - represents perhaps the most profoundly important period in human development since the fall of Ancient Rome.

From its origins in 14th-century Florence, the Renaissance spread across Europe - the fluidity of its ideas changing and evolving to match local cultural thinking and conditions, although always remaining true to its ideals.

It coincided with a boom in exploration, trade, marriage and diplomatic excursions... and even war. As with the Ancient Greeks and Romans (from whom the Renaissance took so much inspiration), a conquering army could bring not only a regime change but also a cultural overhaul.

The Renaissance changed the world in just about every way one could think of. It had a kind of snowball effect: each new intellectual advance paved the way for further advancements.

Italy in the 14th century was fertile ground for a cultural revolution. The Black Death had wiped out millions of people in Europe - by some estimates killing as many as one in three between 1346 and 1353.

By the simplest laws of economics, it meant that those who survived were left with proportionally greater wealth: either from fewer people inheriting more, or simply by virtue of supply and demand - with fewer workers available, wages naturally rose.

At the top of Italian society was a new breed of rulers, keen to demonstrate their wealth in a way that set them apart. Families such as the Medici of Florence looked to the Ancient Roman and Greek civilisations for inspiration - and so did those artists who relied on their patronage.

Italy was flooded with "lost" classics from the ancient world, and artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello took their tales, heroes and gods as a starting point to creating extraordinary art.

Renaissance art did not limit itself to simply looking pretty, however. Behind it was a new intellectual discipline: perspective was developed, light and shadow were studied, and the human anatomy was pored over - all in pursuit of a new realism and a desire to capture the beauty of the world as it really was.

If the Renaissance was about rediscovering the intellectual ambition of the Classical civilisations, it was also about pushing the boundaries of what we know - and what we could achieve.

Even as the artists were creating a bold new realism, scientists were engaged in a revolution of their own. Copernicus and Galileo had developed an unprecedented understanding of our planet's place in the cosmos, proving that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

Advances in chemistry led to the rise of gunpowder, while a new model of mathematics stimulated new financial trading systems and made it easier than ever to navigate across the world.

And navigate the Renaissance men did. Columbus discovered America, Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition to circumnavigate the globe.

Even as our world shrank in size and significance when placed in the context of our new understanding of the universe, so it grew in physical terms, as new continents were found, new lands colonised, new cultures discovered whose own beliefs and understandings were added to the great intellectual firestorm raging across Europe.

Radical thinkers such as the Protestant Luther and the humanist Erasmus expounded a new way of looking at the world that owed less to blind subservience to the Catholic Church and more to the possibilities inherent in the human mind.

Never before (or since) had there been such a coming together of art, science and philosophy. And never before had there been such an opportunity for it to be so widely disseminated.

The very same scientific advances that the Renaissance was developing also contributed to one of its great legacies: the printing press.

In 1440, Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the world - meaning that for the first time, books could be mass-produced. A single press could churn out 3,600 pages a day, resulting in an explosion of literature and ideas unprecedented in history.

By 1500, printing presses in Western Europe had produced more than 20 million volumes. And by 1600, that had risen to 200 million.

Luther and Erasmus became bestsellers - and later so did poets, dramatists and novelists. The new ideas of free-thinkers, mathematicians and scientists all became accessible to the masses, and art and science became, for the first time in human history, truly democratic.

The seeds of the modern world were sown and grown in the Renaissance. From circumnavigating the world to the discovery of the solar system, from the beauty of Michelangelo's David to the perfection of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, from the genius of Shakespeare to the daring of Luther and Erasmus, and via breathtaking advances in science and mathematics, man achieved new heights in this tumultuous period.

The Renaissance changed the world. You might even say it created all of what we now know as modern life.

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The Renaissance - why it changed the world

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The Renaissance - that cultural, political, scientific and intellectual explosion in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries - represents perhaps the most profoundly important period in human development since the fall of Ancient Rome.

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A new study charted how English has changed over the past 500 years, finding it to be more stagnant than ever before

smithsonian.com

The English language kicked off more than 1500 years ago with-as described in the video The History of English in 10 Minutes -the departure of the Romans from Britain. Since then, English has been in a nearly constant state of linguistic evolution, its speakers picking up phrases and words from other languages or devising new ones of their own.

A new study by University of Maribor researcher Matjaž Perc tried to quantify this lexical growth. Perc used Google's Ngram viewer to tabulate the the number of times words were used in around 4 percent of books published between 1520 and 2008.

The analysis found that in earlier days, the language changed very rapidly. Agence France-Press reports,

"During the 16th and 17th centuries, the popularity (of words) was very fleeting," Perc found. " top words in the year 1600, for example, are no longer top words in the year 1610."

As time went on, English became a bigger language, but also more formulaic.

By the 1800s the pattern started looking more as it does today, with formulaic phrases like "at the same time" or "in the midst of" featuring most prominently.

New Scientist says,

By 2008, the most frequently written five-word phrases were along the lines of "at the end of the", "in the middle of the" and "on the other side of".

The History of English in 10 Minutes
As Lifehacker points out, the research is a blow to the argument that text and internet speak is destroying the sanctity of English. Languages change, it's just what they do. Maybe what English really needs is a good kick in the pants, to shake off the shackles of the modern stagnation?

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About Colin Schultz

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.

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English Evolving Much More Slowly on the Internet than During the Renaissance

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A new study charted how English has changed over the past 500 years, finding it to be more stagnant than ever before

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What does "Renaissance" mean?

When did the Renaissance happen?

What is Renaissance art?

What does "Renaissance man" mean?

Renaissance, (French: "Rebirth") period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages and conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder. To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of Classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation.

A brief treatment of the Renaissance follows. For full treatment, see history of Europe: The Renaissance.

Origins and rise of humanism

The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the 15th century to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century, a revival in which they felt they were participating. Indeed, the notion of a long period of cultural darkness had been expressed by Petrarch even earlier. Events at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly beginning in the 12th century, set in motion a series of social, political, and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance. These included the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire to provide a stable and unifying framework for the organization of spiritual and material life, the rise in importance of city-states and national monarchies, the development of national languages, and the breakup of the old feudal structures.

While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms, it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism. Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic philosophy. Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy. Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch, and its chief protagonists included Giannozzo Manetti, Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Coluccio Salutati. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost, for many eastern scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship.

Humanism had several significant features. First, it took human nature in all of its various manifestations and achievements as its subject. Second, it stressed the unity and compatibility of the truth found in all philosophical and theological schools and systems, a doctrine known as syncretism. Third, it emphasized the dignity of man. In place of the medieval ideal of a life of penance as the highest and noblest form of human activity, the humanists looked to the struggle of creation and the attempt to exert mastery over nature. Finally, humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom. In the course of striving to recover it, however, the humanists assisted in the consolidation of a new spiritual and intellectual outlook and in the development of a new body of knowledge. The effect of humanism was to help men break free from the mental strictures imposed by religious orthodoxy, to inspire free inquiry and criticism, and to inspire a new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and creations.

From Italy the new humanist spirit and the Renaissance it engendered spread north to all parts of Europe, aided by the invention of printing, which allowed literacy and the availability of Classical texts to grow explosively. Foremost among northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety. The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped spark the Reformation, from which, however, many humanists, including Erasmus, recoiled. By the end of the 16th century the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded much of Europe's energy and attention, while the intellectual life was poised on the brink of the Enlightenment.

Artistic developments and the emergence of Florence

It was in art that the spirit of the Renaissance achieved its sharpest formulation. Art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge, valuable in its own right and capable of providing man with images of God and his creations as well as with insights into man's position in the universe. In the hands of men such as Leonardo da Vinci it was even a science, a means for exploring nature and a record of discoveries. Art was to be based on the observation of the visible world and practiced according to mathematical principles of balance, harmony, and perspective, which were developed at this time. In the works of painters such as Masaccio, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian; sculptors such as Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Andrea del Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Michelangelo; and architects such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Andrea Palladio, Michelozzo, and Filarete, the dignity of man found expression in the arts.

In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important "proto-renaissance" in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew inspiration from Franciscan radicalism. St. Francis of Assisi had rejected the formal Scholasticism of the prevailing Christian theology and gone out among the poor praising the beauties and spiritual value of nature. His example inspired Italian artists and poets to take pleasure in the world around them. The work of the most famous artist of the proto-renaissance period, Giotto (1266/67 or 1276-1337), reveals a new pictorial style that depends on clear, simple structure and great psychological penetration rather than on the flat, linear decorativeness and hierarchical compositions of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as the Florentine painter Cimabue and the Siennese painters Duccio and Simone Martini. The great poet Dante lived at about the same time as Giotto, and his poetry shows a similar concern with inward experience and the subtle shades and variations of human nature. Although his Divine Comedy belongs to the Middle Ages in its plan and ideas, its subjective spirit and power of expression look forward to the Renaissance. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio also belong to this proto-renaissance period, both through their extensive studies of Latin literature and through their writings in the vernacular. Unfortunately, the terrible plague of 1348 and subsequent civil wars submerged both the revival of humanistic studies and the growing interest in individualism and naturalism revealed in the works of Giotto and Dante. The spirit of the Renaissance did not surface again until the 15th century.

In 1401 a competition was held at Florence to award the commission for bronze doors to be placed on the baptistery of San Giovanni. Defeated by the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello left for Rome, where they immersed themselves in the study of ancient architecture and sculpture. When they returned to Florence and began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the ancient world was reborn. The founder of Renaissance painting was Masaccio (1401-28). The intellectuality of his conceptions, the monumentality of his compositions, and the high degree of naturalism in his works mark Masaccio as a pivotal figure in Renaissance painting. The succeeding generation of artists- Piero della Francesca, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Andrea del Verrocchio-pressed forward with researches into linear and aerial perspective and anatomy, developing a style of scientific naturalism.

The situation in Florence was uniquely favourable to the arts. The civic pride of Florentines found expression in statues of the patron saints commissioned from Ghiberti and Donatello for niches in the grain-market guildhall known as Or San Michele, and in the largest dome built since antiquity, placed by Brunelleschi on the Florence cathedral. The cost of construction and decoration of palaces, churches, and monasteries was underwritten by wealthy merchant families, chief among whom were the Medici family.

The Medici traded in all of the major cities in Europe, and one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes ( c. 1476; Uffizi, Florence), was commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari. Instead of being painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like colour and a glossy surface. Early Northern Renaissance painters were more concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even after these achievements became widely known. On the other hand, central Italian painters began to adopt the oil medium soon after The Portinari Altarpiece was brought to Florence in 1476.

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Renaissance | Definition, Meaning, History, Artists, Art, & Facts

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The Renaissance was a period in European civilization that immediately followed the Middle Ages and reached its height in the 15th century. It is conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents and numerous important inventions.

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Back in the ninth century, the S-word referred to excrement in a matter-of-fact, not a vulgar, way

smithsonian.com

Drop an S-bomb today in polite conversation, and heads will likely turn. But back in the ninth century, "shit" referred to excrement in a matter-of-fact, not a vulgar, way. In the new book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, author Melissa Mohr explores how our opinion of this and other curse words have shifted over the years. In an interview with NPR, she delves into the history of "shit":

It only really started to become obscene, I would say, during the Renaissance. ... It basically involves increasing privacy. In the Middle Ages ... when that word wasn't obscene, people lived very differently. The way their houses were set up, there wasn't space to perform a lot of bodily functions in private. So they would defecate in public, they had privies with many seats, and it was thought to be a social activity. That you would all get together on the privy and talk while you did this. ... As the actual act became more taboo because you could do it in private now ... the direct word became taboo.

The word itself likely arose from one or all of the Old English terms scite (dung), scitte (diarrhea) or scitan (to defecate). Middle English introduced schitte (excrement), schyt (diarrhea) and shiten (to defecate). Similar terms for the same thing eventually found their way into other languages as well, such as Sheisse (german), schijt (Dutch), skit (Swedish), skitur (Icelandic) and skitt (Norwgian).

As the Online Etymology Dictionary details, "shit" as a term related to excrement dates to at least the 1580s, though people had already adopted the term in reference for an "obnoxious person" by at least 1508.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Who Needs to Wash Their Twitter Mouth Out? A Map of Profanity on Twitter
Sacred and Profaned

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About Rachel Nuwer

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Curses! The Four-Letter Word Renaissance Speakers Wouldn't Flinch At

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Back in the ninth century, the S-word referred to excrement in a matter-of-fact, not a vulgar, way

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This is the second in a three-part series about the history of health foods, from antiquity to the present day.

smithsonian.com

Medieval concepts of a healthful diet were largely based on theories from antiquity, especially the idea that the body's four humors, or bodily fluids-blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile-must be balanced through nutrition. It was believed that the humors were connected to the elements and had different properties-for instance, blood was associated with air and considered hot and moist, and phlegm was associated with water and was cold and moist. All foods were classified according to the humor they were thought to affect, and the diet was adjusted according to what fluid was thought to be lacking (or overabundant).

According to Food in Medieval Times, a 2004 book by Melitta Weiss Adamson, Arab physicians of the middle ages expanded on these ideas by also ascribing to foodstuffs an intensity, from "weak" to "extreme" (Galen, the ancient Greek physician, first described this system of " gradus" but applied it only to medicines, not foods.)

Haly Abbas, a medieval Persian author of medical texts, distinguished between "remedial foods" and "pure foods," the difference being that remedial foods "change the body until the body gains power over them and transforms them into its own nature," while pure foods "are those which the body changes and transforms into itself." His list of remedial foods included lettuce, onions and garlic.

One of the most popular books of dietetics was written by a Christian physician in Baghdad, Ibn Butlan, and translated into Latin as Tacuinum sanitatis, or "table of contents of health." It includes descriptions of the natures and degrees of various foods: cherries are considered cold in the second degree and moist in the third, roasted meat is hot and dry, and veal is hot and moist (I wonder how these were determined-I haven't been able to find any information on the subject).

According to Ken Albala's Eating Right in the Renaissance, diet books proliferated in the two centuries after the invention of the printing press, in 1440. "Courtly dietaries," intended for courtiers who were frequently required to attend lavish banquets, included both advice and recipes but were not very restrictive (some even offered remedies for drunkenness). One 15th century author, Marsilio Ficino, actually advised drinking human blood, writing, "Why shouldn't our old people, namely those who have no recourse, likewise suck the blood of youth?" This idea did not catch on, it appears.

It wasn't until the 16th century, Albala writes, that diet books began forbidding certain foods, notably cakes and other sweets, that were considered gluttonous. Other foods, like onions, leeks and garlic, were proscribed for (presumably educated) readers because they were "appropriate for barbers and journeymen."

It would be another three centuries before the modern concept of dieting for weight loss took hold. Check back soon for the final chapter in the series.

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About Lisa Bramen

Lisa Bramen was a frequent contributor to Smithsonian.com's Food and Think blog. She is based in northern New York and is also an associate editor at Adirondack Life magazine.

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The History of Health Food, Part 2: Medieval and Renaissance Periods

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This is the second in a three-part series about the history of health foods, from antiquity to the present day. smithsonian.com Medieval concepts of a healthful diet were largely based on theories from antiquity, especially the idea that the body's four humors, or bodily fluids-blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile-must be balanced through nutrition.

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smithsonian.com

Art and culture flourished throughout Europe during the Renaissance. It was the period when Michelangelo wielded his chisel, Galileo defied preconceived notions about the universe and William Shakespeare penned some of the most enduring dramatic works. It was also a period that saw the evolution of manners, as the article "Mind Your Manners" in the Spring 2011 issue of magazine will attest. Manners were a response to the violence and crude behaviors run rampant in burgeoning cities and a means of reinforcing social order and distinguishing the privileged class from everyone else. A first generation of Miss Manners-es-typically men-took up the quill. And the newly defined codes of conduct were especially important at the dinner table.

Italy more or less led the cultural revolution, table manners included. Italian poet Giovanni della Casa advised in " Galateo," his 1558 book on manners: "One should not comb his hair nor wash his hands in public... The exception to this is the washing of the hands when done before sitting down to dinner, for then it should be done in full sight of others, even if you do not need to wash them at all, so that whoever dips into the same bowl as you will be certain of your cleanliness." To the modern reader, these attitudes toward public displays of personal cleanliness might seem a little over the top; however, considering that one's hands were also one's dining utensils, this sort of advice was of utmost importance. In his study on the social customs of this period, sociologist Norbert Elias noted that "In good society one does not put both hands into the dish. It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand. ... Forks scarcely exist, or at most for taking meat from the dish."

That's right: no forks. They were initially viewed as excessively refined or, in the case of men, a sign of effeminacy. The newfangled fork custom began in Italy and was a hit, but forks were slow to catch on in Northern Europe. The use of forks to get food from plate to mouth didn't didn't gain wide acceptance until the 17th century-and even then, only the well-to-do could afford them.

Utensils such as spoons were communally used-making the etiquette of eating soups a delicate matter. "If what is given is rather fluid," Dutch theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam writes, "take it on a spoon for tasting and return the spoon after wiping it on a napkin."

But in spite of trying to polish social customs, some human behaviors were deemed permissible at the dinner table. On farting, Erasmus writes, "If it is possible to withdraw, it should be done alone. But if not, in accordance with the ancient proverb, let a cough hide the sound." Slick, no? However, lest you follow this example, modern manners maven Miss Conduct says that "civilized folk will protect others from any sounds or smells that may be displeasing."

This is not to say that all Renaissance manners are outdated. On respecting fellow diners' personal space, Giovanni Della Casa says, "It is also an unsuitable habit to put one's nose over someone else's glass of wine or food to smell it." And again, from Erasmus: "It is rude to offer someone what you have half eaten yourself; it is boorish to redip half-eaten bread into the soup." Anyone remember the "did you just double dip that chip" episode of Seinfeld? George Costanza was definitely a couple hundred years behind the etiquette curve. Even modern science shows that re-dipping partially-eaten foods is a great means of spreading bacteria. It certainly gives you an idea of what Renaissance society was trying to improve upon-and how far we've come since.

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Renaissance Table Etiquette and the Origins of Manners

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smithsonian.com Art and culture flourished throughout Europe during the Renaissance. It was the period when Michelangelo wielded his chisel, Galileo defied preconceived notions about the universe and William Shakespeare penned some of the most enduring dramatic works. It was also a period that saw the evolution of manners, as the article "Mind Your Manners" in the Spring 2011 issue of magazine will attest.

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Inside a lab in Pisa, forensics pathologist Gino Fornaciari and his team investigate 500-year-old cold cases

High on the facade of Santa Maria Antica, among soaring Gothic spires and forbidding statues of knights in armor, pathologist Gino Fornaciari prepared to examine a corpse. Accompanied by workmen, he had climbed a 30-foot scaffold erected against this medieval church in Verona, Italy, and watched as they used hydraulic jacks to raise the massive lid of a marble sarcophagus set in a niche. Peering inside, Fornaciari found the body of a male in his 30s, wearing a long silk mantle, arms crossed on his chest. The abdomen was distended from postmortem putrefaction, although Fornaciari caught no scent of decomposition, only a faint waft of incense. He and the laborers eased the body onto a stretcher and lowered it to the ground; after dark, they loaded it into a van and drove to a nearby hospital, where Fornaciari began a series of tests to determine why the nobleman died-and how he had lived.

The victim, it appeared, had suffered from several chronic and puzzling conditions. A CT scan and digital X-ray revealed a calcification of the knees, as well as a level of arthritis in elbows, hips and lumbar vertebrae surprisingly advanced for anyone this young. A bronchoscopy showed severe anthracosis, similar to black lung, although he hadn't been a miner, or even a smoker. Histological analysis of liver cells detected advanced fibrosis, although he had never touched hard liquor. Yet Fornaciari, a professor in the medical school at the University of Pisa, saw that none of these conditions likely had killed him.

Of course, Fornaciari had heard rumors that the man had been poisoned, but he discounted them as probable fabrications. "I've worked on several cases where there were rumors of poisonings and dark plots," Fornaciari told me later. "They usually turn out to be just that, mere legends, which fall apart under scientific scrutiny." He recited the victim's symptoms in Latin, just as he had read them in a medieval chronicle: corporei fluxus stomachique doloris acuti . . . et febre ob laborem exercitus: " diarrhea and acute stomach pains, belly disturbances . . . and fever from his labors with the army."

Gino Fornaciari is no ordinary medical examiner; his bodies represent cold cases that are centuries, sometimes millennia, old. As head of a team of archaeologists, physical anthropologists, historians of medicine and additional specialists at the University of Pisa, he is a pioneer in the burgeoning field of paleopathology, the use of state-of-the-art medical technology and forensic techniques to investigate the lives and deaths of illustrious figures of the past.

Its practitioners worldwide are making startling discoveries. In December 2012, a team of scientists published results from an examination of the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses III, showing that he had died from having his throat slit, likely murdered in the so-called "harem conspiracy" of 1155 B.C. This May, Smithsonian anthropologist Douglas Owsley said he'd found evidence of cannibalism at Virginia's Jamestown Colony, probably in the winter of 1609; cut marks on the skull and tibia of a newly exhumed 14-year-old girl's remains indicated that her brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles were removed after her death. Scholars have reconstructed the faces of Renaissance figures including Dante and St. Anthony of Padua based on remains of their crania (Petrarch's head, it emerged, had been swapped out at some point with that of a young woman). They are currently sifting the subsoil of a Florentine monastery for remains of Lisa Gherardini, a noblewoman believed by some art historians to be the model Leonardo da Vinci used when he painted the Mona Lisa.

But no one has made more important and striking finds than Gino Fornaciari. Over the past half-century, using tools of forensics and medical science as well as clues from anthropology, history and art, he and his colleagues have become detectives of the distant past, exhuming remains throughout Italy to scrutinize the lives and deaths of kings, paupers, saints, warriors and castrati opera stars. Fornaciari himself has examined entire noble populations, including the Medici of Florence and the royal Aragonese dynasty of Naples, whose corpses have been, in effect, archives containing unique clues to the fabric of everyday life in the Renaissance.

Such work is not without its critics, who brand scholars such as Fornaciari as little more than grave-robbers, rejecting their efforts as a pointless, even prurient, disturbance of the dead's eternal rest. Yet paleo-sleuthing has demonstrated its value for the study of the past and future. As Fornaciari has solved some of history's oldest riddles and murder mysteries, his work also holds life-and-death relevance. By studying modern killers such as malaria, tuberculosis, arteriosclerosis and cancer, whose telltale signs Fornaciari has found in ancient cadavers, he is helping to understand the origins of diseases and to predict the evolution of pathologies. "Gino Fornaciari and his team are prime movers in the field," says bioarchaeologist Jane Buikstra of Arizona State University, author of The Global History of Paleopathology. "They're shaping paleopathology in the 21st century and enriching discussion in a range of other fields, too."

Fornaciari's current "patient," the nobleman interred at Santa Maria Antica, was Cangrande della Scala, warlord of Verona, whose family ruled the city and a swath of northeastern Italy with an iron hand seven centuries ago. They reigned at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, that blaze of artistic creativity and new self-awareness that illumined the end of the Middle Ages and permanently altered human consciousness. Cangrande was a paradigmatic Renaissance man: Giotto painted his portrait, the poet Boccaccio celebrated his chivalry and Dante lauded him lavishly in the Paradiso as a paragon of the wise leader.

In July 1329, he had just conquered the rival town of Treviso and entered the city walls in triumph when he fell violently ill. Within hours he was dead. Several medieval chroniclers wrote that, shortly before his conquest, Cangrande had drunk at a poisoned spring, but Fornaciari doubted this hypothesis. "I'm always skeptical about claims of poisoning," Fornaciari says. "Since Cangrande died in the summer, with symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea, I originally suspected that he'd contracted some sort of gastrointestinal disease."

The answer to the puzzle was contained in Cangrande's body, naturally mummified in the dry, warm air of his marble tomb, making it a treasure trove of information on Renaissance existence. His pathologies, unfamiliar today, made perfect sense for a 14th-century lord and warrior on horseback. The curious arthritis visible in Cangrande's hips, knees, elbows and sacro-lumbar region indicates what Fornaciari terms "knightly markers," disorders developed by cavalrymen during a lifetime in the saddle, wielding weighty weapons such as lances and broadswords. His liver disease may well have been caused by a virus, not alcohol, because hard liquor was unknown in Cangrande's day. The knight's respiratory ailments were likewise linked to life in a world lighted and warmed by fire, not electricity. Torch-lit banquet halls and bedchambers, where chimneys became widespread only a century later, and the smoky braziers used in army tents while on campaign, caused the kind of lung damage that today could be found in coal miners.

Strangest of all, however, were the results of pollen analysis and immunochemical tests conducted on Cangrande's intestines and liver. Fornaciari isolated pollen from two plants: Matricaria chamomilla and Digitalis purpurea. "Chamomile," he told me, "was used as a sedative; Cangrande could have drunk it as a tea. But foxglove? That shouldn't have been there." The plant contains digoxin and digitoxine, two potent heart stimulants, which in doses like those detected in Cangrande's body can cause cardiac arrest. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, foxglove was used as a poison.

In fact, the symptoms mentioned by contemporary chroniclers-diarrhea, stomach pains and fever-matched those of digoxin and digitoxine poisoning. Hence, Fornaciari concluded, Cangrande had been murdered. As it happens, a contemporary chronicler reported that a month after Cangrande's death, one of the nobleman's doctors had been executed by Mastino II, Cangrande's successor, suggesting the doctor's possible involvement in a plot to kill his master. Who ultimately was responsible for the murder remains a mystery-an assertive fellow like Cangrande had plenty of enemies-although the ambitious Mastino II himself now emerges as a prime suspect."I thought the poisoning story was just a legend, but sometimes the legends are true," Fornaciari says. "Paleopathology is rewriting history!"

***

Fornaciari trained as a medical doctor, and when I met him in his office at the department of oncology at the University of Pisa, he was applying his expertise to the present, peering through a microscope at samples from biopsies performed at the nearby university hospital. "I have to distinguish benign from malignant tissues," he said, nodding to trays of samples stacked beside the microscope. "I have to be right, or there could be serious consequences for the patient-a surgeon could remove a healthy lung or breast, or leave a deadly malignancy in place."

Now age 70, Fornaciari is an exemplar of that by now endangered species, the Italian university professor of the old school, who combines an almost fin de siècle formality with personal warmth and a disarming passion for his work. The son of factory workers in Viareggio, a coastal town near Pisa, Fornaciari earned his M.D. at the University of Pisa in 1971. He's always been fascinated with the past, and from the outset of his medical training made forays into the health, quality of life and lifestyles of distant eras. During medical training he also took courses in archaeology and participated in excavations of prehistoric and Etruscan sites throughout Tuscany. In the early 1980s, the center of gravity of Fornaciari's work began to shift from present to past, as he joined Vatican researchers charged with examining the remains of several prominent saints, including Pope Gregory VII and St. Anthony of Padua.

In 1984, Fornaciari agreed to lead an investigation of the most significant noble remains then to have been exhumed in Italy, the 38 naturally and artificially mummified bodies of the Aragonese royal family of Naples-major figures in the Italian Renaissance, buried in the Neapolitan basilica of San Domenico Maggiore. Fornaciari began to collaborate with scholars in Pisa and across Italy, who coalesced into an interdisciplinary team centered in Pisa. His investigators, here and in other parts of Italy, range from archaeologists to parasitologists and molecular biologists.

"Gino recognizes the fundamental importance of historical documentation and context in ways that I haven't seen anyone else do," says Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University, a physical anthropologist who, with Fornaciari, co-directs a field project in Badia Pozzeveri, a medieval monastery and cemetery near Lucca. "He's knowledgeable in many other areas as well. He's pragmatic and interested in whatever answers the question, 'How are we going to figure this out?'"

By now, Fornaciari had become the go-to guy for old bones in Italy, and was tackling an ever-growing range of centuries-old corpses, including an entire community overwhelmed by the Black Plague in Sardinia, and a cache of 18th- and 19th-century mummies in an underground crypt in northeastern Sicily. Then, in 2002, he and his team struck the mother lode of paleopathology when they were invited by the Italian minister of culture to investigate the 49 graves in the Medici Chapels in Florence, one of the most significant exhumation projects ever undertaken. Fornaciari still leads the ongoing investigation.

***

Recently, I drove out to visit his main paleopathology laboratory, established by the University of Pisa with a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research Institute. The structure is housed in a former medieval monastery, set on a hillside ringed by olive trees east of Pisa. When we arrive, a half-dozen researchers in lab coats are measuring human bones on marble tabletops, victims of a virulent cholera epidemic that ravaged Tuscany in 1854 and 1855, and entering anatomical data into a computer database. At another counter, two undergraduates apply glue to piece together the bones of medieval peasants from a cemetery near Lucca.

Fornaciari explains the procedures used to solve historical puzzles. Researchers begin with a basic physical exam of bones and tissues, using calipers and other instruments. At the same time, he says, they create a context, exploring the historical landscape their subjects inhabited, consulting scholars and digging into archival records. For the past 15 years, they've used conventional X-ray and CT imaging at a nearby hospital to examine tissues and bones; conducted histological exams similar to those Fornaciari applies to living patients for a better understanding of tumors and other abnormalities; and relied on an electron microscope to examine tissues. More recently, they've employed immunological, isotopic and DNA analysis to coax additional information from their samples.

Work is done at many locations-here and at Fornaciari's other Pisa laboratory, and in university labs throughout Italy, particularly Turin and Naples, as well as in Germany and the United States. On occasion, when examining illustrious, difficult-to-move corpses such as Cangrande della Scala or the Medici, Fornaciari cordons off an area of a church or chapel as an impromptu laboratory, creating kind of a field hospital for the dead, where he and his fellow researchers work under the gaze of curious tourists.

The laboratory, stacked with human bones, could easily seem grim- a murderer's cave, a chamber of horrors. Instead, with its immaculate order and faint dry cedar-like scent, its soft bustle of conversation, this is a celebration of living. In the final analysis, it's a laboratory of human experience, where anatomical investigation mingles with evidence from medicine, biography and portrait paintings to resurrect fully fledged life stories.

***

Some of the most compelling tales surround the dynasties of the Aragonese and Medici. Among Fornaciari's most memorable "patients" is Isabella of Aragon, born in 1470, a shining star at the greatest courts of Italy, renowned for her intellect, beauty, courage in battle and remarkable fortitude. She knew Leonardo da Vinci; some art historians also believe she could have been the model for the Mona Lisa. She conducted famous love affairs with courtier Giosuè di Ruggero and condottiero Prospero Colonna, as well as, one scholar maintains, with Leonardo himself. Even an objective scientist such as Fornaciari isn't immune to her charms. "Knowing that I had Isabella of Aragon in my laboratory, one of the most celebrated ladies of the Renaissance, who'd known Leonardo da Vinci-he'd made the magnificent theater backdrops for her wedding feast- all this raised certain emotions."

All the more so when Fornaciari took a close look at Isabella's teeth. The outer surfaces of those in the front of her mouth had been carefully filed-in some cases the enamel had been completely removed-to erase a black patina that still covered the teeth farther back. Electron microscopy revealed parallel striations on the front teeth, indicating abrasions made by a file. The black stain, it turned out, resulted from ingestion of mercury, in her day believed to combat syphilis. Proud Isabella, jealous of her celebrated beauty, had been attempting to hide the growing discoloration associated with her disease. "I imagine poor Isabella trying to preserve her privacy, not wanting to appear with black teeth because people would know she had venereal disease," says Fornaciari.

His examination of Isabella's grandfather, Ferrante I, King of Naples, born in 1431, also produced significant results. This great lord presided over a literary salon where leading humanist scholars converged, but he was also a gifted warrior, who with astuteness, courage and calculated-or, as his critics said, sadistic-savagery, maintained the independence of his kingdom against powerful enemies, both foreign and internal. No less a figure than Lorenzo the Magnificent de' Medici traveled to Naples to kneel in submission before him. Ferrante died in 1494 at the age of 63, celebrated by contemporaries for maintaining his intellectual and physical vigor to the end of his life, although portraits completed during his later years showed that he had put on weight and occasionally appeared to be in pain.

Fornaciari debunked the myth of Ferrante's enduring good health. Although the king's mummified body had been lying in its cedar coffin for five centuries, and in 1509 had been badly damaged by a fire in the basilica, Fornaciari managed to recover a segment of Ferrante's intestine, which when rehydrated showed a pattern of yellowish spots that looked sinisterly familiar to him from analyses of modern biopsies. Extracting DNA from mummified tissue, Fornaciari found mutation in the K-ras gene-clear proof that Ferrante had suffered from advanced colon cancer, most probably a colorectal adenocarcinoma. Fornaciari had made medical history, by identifying an oncogene mutation in an ancient tumor; his results offer potentially important data for studying the evolution of the disease.

Fornaciari subsequently analyzed bone collagen of King Ferrante and other Aragonese nobles, revealing a diet extremely reliant on red meat; this finding may correlate with Ferrante's cancer. Red meat is widely recognized as an agent that increases risk for mutation of the K-ras gene and subsequent colorectal cancer. (As an example of Ferrante's carnivorous preferences, a wedding banquet held at his court in 1487 featured, among 15 courses, beef and veal heads covered in their skins, roast ram in a sour cherry broth, roast piglet in vinegar broth and a range of salami, hams, livers, giblets and offal.)

Maria of Aragon, another famous beauty of the Renaissance, noted for her proud, fiery temperament, whose intellectual circle included Michelangelo, was found to have syphilitic lesions and human papillomavirus (HPV). Fornaciari's identification of the latter in an ancient cadaver also offered new clues to the evolution of the virus.

King Ferrante II, who died young and surpassingly handsome at 28, shortly after the great Carpaccio painted his portrait, was found to have head lice, as well as poisoning from the mercury he used in an attempt to vanquish the infestation. An anonymous, richly dressed member of the Aragon family, about 27 years of age, had a fatal dagger wound in his left side, between the eighth and ninth ribs, with signs of massive bleeding.

Fornaciari also studied electron micrographs of tissue samples from an anonymous 2-year-old Aragonese child who died around 1570. He observed the lethal smallpox virus-which reacted to smallpox antibodies after centuries in the grave. Concerned that the virus could still be infectious, the Italian Ministry of Health threatened to close Fornaciari's lab and impound the tiny cadaver, until Fornaciari reported that he had already sent samples for testing to the United States and Russia, where specialists pronounced the smallpox DNA biologically inert and therefore harmless.

***

Fornaciari uncovered some of his most moving and detailed personal stories during exhumations of the Medici, begun in 2003. A driving force in the artistic, intellectual and economic life of the Italian Renaissance, the noble house helped to establish Florence as the cultural center of the Western world. The Medici were the patrons of Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Galileo Galilei. "You can't really remain indifferent to someone like Cosimo I de' Medici, one of the architects of the Renaissance," Fornaciari says. An inexperienced teenager who suddenly came to power in Florence in 1537, Cosimo rescued the city-state of Florence, turning a foundering republic at the mercy of foreign powers into an independent duchy that was once more a major player on the European stage. He founded the Uffizi Gallery, freed Florentine territories from foreign armies and built a navy, which was instrumental in preventing the Ottoman takeover of the Mediterranean Sea during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

The wealth of biographical information available on Cosimo I allowed Fornaciari to synthesize contemporary testimony and forensic investigation. Documentation concerning Cosimo and his descendants is some of the most extensive in early modern history-the online database of the Medici Archive Project contains descriptions of some 10,000 letters and biographical records on more than 11,000 individuals. Portraits of Cosimo I in museums around the world depict his evolution from a shy, seemingly wary youth in 1538 to a bearded warrior in a polished suit of armor in 1565, and an elderly, corpulent and world-weary figure, gazing absently into space, toward the end of his life in 1574. Reports by court physicians and foreign ambassadors to the Florentine duchy recount Cosimo's medical history in excruciating detail: He survived smallpox and "catarrhal fever" (likely pneumonia) in youth; suffered in later life from paralysis of his left arm, mental instability and incontinence; and had a painful condition of the joints described by contemporaries as gout.

Fornaciari found that Cosimo's remains indicated he had been an extremely robust and active man, in whom Fornaciari also noted all of the "knightly markers"-sacro-lumbar arthritis, hypertrophy and erosion of certain parts of the femur, rotation and compression of the upper femur, and other deformations-typical of warriors who rode into battle on horseback. He noted nodes between Cosimo's vertebrae, signs that as an adolescent, the young duke had worn heavy weights over his thorax, most probably suits of armor. Fornaciari also noticed pervasive arthritis and ossification between the sixth, seventh and eighth thoracic vertebrae, possible signs of diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH), a disease of the elderly linked to diabetes. "We see Cosimo getting fatter in his portraits, and the presence of DISH suggests he may have had diabetes, too," says Fornaciari. "The diet of the Medici and other upper-class families often contained many sweets, which were a sort of status symbol, but often caused health problems."

Another vivid marker was Cosimo's poor dental health. The right side of his mandible is marred by an enormous gap, the result of a serious periodontal disease; an abscess had eaten away his first molar and a considerable chunk of bone, leaving a massive crater in his jaw. Fornaciari's examination of the Medici, the Aragonese and other high-born individuals has revealed appalling abscesses, decay and tooth loss, bringing home just how painful daily life in that period could be, even for the rich and famous.

Cosimo's wife, Eleanora of Toledo, was the daughter of the Spanish viceroy of Naples and related to the Hapsburg and the Castilian royal families. Her face was immortalized by the Renaissance master Bronzino, who in a series of portraits captures her transformation from a radiant, aloof young bride to a sickly, prematurely aged woman in her late 30s, shortly before her death at age 40. Fornaciari uncovered the maladies that beset her. Dental problems plagued her. Slightly curved legs indicated a case of rickets she had suffered as a child. Childbirth had taken a major toll. "Pelvic skeletal markers show that she had numerous births-in fact, she and Cosimo had 11 children," Fornaciari says. "She was almost constantly pregnant, which would have leached calcium out of her body." Further analysis indicated that Eleanora had suffered from leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease spread by biting sand flies that can cause skin lesions, fever and damage to the liver and spleen. DNA testing also revealed the presence of tuberculosis. "She was wealthy, and powerful, but her life was brutally hard," Fornaciari says.

***

Ultimately, Fornaciari also dispelled murder allegations directed against one of Cosimo and Eleanora's sons. On September 25, 1587, Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, second surviving son of Cosimo I and Eleanora of Toledo, visited his elder brother Francesco I in the opulent Medici villa in Poggio a Caiano, in the countryside near Florence. The brothers had been on bad terms for years, their relations poisoned by ambition and envy: Cardinal Ferdinando resented the fact that the coveted ancestral title, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had gone to Francesco after Cosimo's death, and violently disliked his new sister-in-law, Bianca Cappello. Her young son Antonio, fathered by Francesco and legitimized when the couple had married, seemed likely to inherit the throne eventually. This gathering seemed a chance to mend bridges between the brothers and restore family peace.

Shortly after the cardinal's arrival, Francesco and Bianca fell ill with ominous symptoms: convulsions, fever, nausea, severe thirst, gastric burning. Within days they were dead. Cardinal Ferdinando buried his brother with great pomp (Bianca was interred separately) and banished his nephew Antonio to a golden exile-whereupon Ferdinando crowned himself the new Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Rumors spread swiftly that the couple had been murdered. Cardinal Ferdinando, some whispered, had cleared his path to the ducal throne by killing the couple with arsenic, often preferred by Renaissance poisoners because it left no obvious traces on its victims. Others said that Bianca herself had baked an arsenic-laced cake for her detested brother-in-law, which her husband had tasted first by mistake; overcome with horror, Bianca supposedly ate a slice of the deadly confection as well, in order to join her beloved Francesco in the grave. A cloud of foul play enshrouded the unfortunate pair for centuries.

In 2006, four medical and forensic researchers from the University of Florence and the University of Pavia, led by toxicologist Francesco Mari, published an article in which they argued that Francesco and Bianca had died of arsenic poisoning. In the British Medical Journal, they described collecting tissue samples from urns buried beneath the floor of a church in Tuscany. At that church, according to an account from 1587 recently uncovered in an Italian archive, the internal organs of Francesco and Bianca, removed from their bodies, had been placed in terra-cotta receptacles and interred. The practice was not uncommon. (Francesco is buried in the Medici Chapels in Florence; Bianca's grave has never been found.) Mari contended that the tissue samples-in which concentrations of arsenic he deemed lethal were detected-belonged to the grand duke and duchess. The rumors, argued the researchers, had been correct: Cardinal Ferdinando had done away with Francesco and his bride.

Fornaciari dismantled this thesis in two articles, one in the American Journal of Medicine, both of which showcased his wide-ranging skills as a Renaissance detective. Tissue samples recovered from the urns were likely not from the doomed Medici couple at all, he wrote. Those samples, he added, could have belonged to any of hundreds of people interred in the church over the centuries; in fact, the style of two crucifixes found with the urns attributed to Francesco and Bianca dates from more than a century after their deaths.

Even had the tissues come from the couple-which Fornaciari strongly doubts-he argued that the levels of arsenic detected by Mari were no proof of murder. Because arsenic preserves human tissue, it was routinely used in the Renaissance to embalm corpses. Since the couple's bodies had certainly been embalmed, it would have been surprising not to have discovered arsenic in their remains. Fornaciari added that since Francesco was a passionate alchemist, arsenic in his tissues could well have come from the tireless experiments he performed in the laboratory of his palace in Florence, the Palazzo Pitti.

As a coup de grâce, Fornaciari analyzed bone samples from Francesco, showing that at the time of death he had been acutely infested with plasmodium falciparium, the parasitic protozoan that causes pernicious malaria. Fornaciari observed that malaria had been widespread in the coastal lowlands of Tuscany until the 20th century. In the three days before they fell ill, Francesco and Bianca had been hunting near Poggio a Caiano, then filled with marshes and rice paddies: a classic environment for malarial mosquitoes. He pointed out that the symptoms of Francesco and Bianca, particularly their bouts of high fever, matched those of falciparium malaria, but not arsenic poisoning, which does not produce fever.

***

Virtually anyone working in the public eye in Italy for long may run into la polemica -violent controversy-all the more so if one's research involves titanic figures from Italy's storied past. The recent row over a proposed exhumation of Galileo Galilei offers a prime example of the emotions and animus that Fornaciari's investigations can stir up. In 2009, on the 400th anniversary of the great astronomer's first observations of heavenly bodies with a telescope, Paolo Galluzzi, director of Florence's Museo Galileo, along with Fornaciari and a group of researchers, announced a plan to examine Galileo's remains, buried in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. They aimed, among other things, to apply DNA analysis to Galileo's bone samples, hoping to obtain clues to the eye disease that afflicted Galileo in later life. He sometimes reported seeing a halo around light sources, perhaps the result of his condition.

Understanding the source of his compromised vision could also elucidate errors he recorded. For instance, Galileo reported that Saturn featured a pronounced bulge, perhaps because his eye condition caused him to perceive the planet's rings as a distortion. They also planned to examine Galileo's skull and bones, and to study the two bodies buried alongside the great astronomer. One is known to be his devoted disciple Vincenzo Viviani and the other is believed, but not confirmed, to be his daughter Maria Celeste, immortalized in Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter.

Reaction to the plan was swift and thunderous. Scholars, clerics and the media accused the researchers of sensationalism and profanation. "This business of exhuming bodies, touching relics, is something to be left to believers because they belong to another mentality, which is not scientific," editorialized Piergiorgio Odifreddi, a mathematician and historian of science, in La Repubblica, a national newspaper. "Let [Galileo] rest in peace." The rector of Santa Croce called the plan a carnivalata, meaning a kind of carnival stunt.

The plan to exhume Galileo is on hold, although Fornaciari remains optimistic that critics eventually will understand the validity of the investigation. "I honestly don't know why people were so violently, so viscerally against the idea," he says. He seems stunned and disheartened by the ruckus he's kicked up. "Even some atheists had reactions that seemed to reveal decidedly theistic beliefs, akin to taboos and atavistic fears of contact with the dead. Surely they must see this isn't a desecration. And we wouldn't be disturbing his last rest-we could even help restore his remains, after the damage they undoubtedly suffered in the great flood of 1966 that hit Florence."

It's as if he is summing up his entire life's work when he adds quietly: "Investigating that great book of nature that was Galileo would hardly harm his fame. On the contrary, it would enrich our knowledge of Galileo and the environment in which he lived and worked."

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Inside a lab in Pisa, forensics pathologist Gino Fornaciari and his team investigate 500-year-old cold cases

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Contents

1. Origins of Renaissance Art

2. Early Renaissance Art (1401-1490s)

3. Florence in the Renaissance

4. High Renaissance Art (1490s-1527)

5. Renaissance Art in Practice

6. Expansion and Decline

Known as the Renaissance, the period immediately following the Middle Ages in Europe saw a great revival of interest in the classical learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome. Against a backdrop of political stability and growing prosperity, the development of new technologies-including the printing press, a new system of astronomy and the discovery and exploration of new continents-was accompanied by a flowering of philosophy, literature and especially art.

The style of painting, sculpture and decorative arts identified with the Renaissance emerged in Italy in the late 14th century; it reached its zenith in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in the work of Italian masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. In addition to its expression of classical Greco-Roman traditions, Renaissance art sought to capture the experience of the individual and the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

Origins of Renaissance Art

The origins of Renaissance art can be traced to Italy in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. During this so-called "proto-Renaissance" period (1280-1400), Italian scholars and artists saw themselves as reawakening to the ideals and achievements of classical Roman culture. Writers such as Petrarch (1304-1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) looked back to ancient Greece and Rome and sought to revive the languages, values and intellectual traditions of those cultures after the long period of stagnation that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire in the sixth century.

Did you know? Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate "Renaissance man," practiced all the visual arts and studied a wide range of topics, including anatomy, geology, botany, hydraulics and flight. His formidable reputation is based on relatively few completed paintings, including "Mona Lisa," "The Virgin of the Rocks" and "The Last Supper."

The Florentine painter Giotto (1267?-1337), the most famous artist of the proto-Renaissance, made enormous advances in the technique of representing the human body realistically. His frescoes were said to have decorated cathedrals at Assisi, Rome, Padua, Florence and Naples, though there has been difficulty attributing such works with certainty.

Early Renaissance Art (1401-1490s)

In the later 14th century, the proto-Renaissance was stifled by plague and war, and its influences did not emerge again until the first years of the next century. In 1401, the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (c. 1378-1455) won a major competition to design a new set of bronze doors for the Baptistery of the cathedral of Florence, beating out contemporaries such as the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and the young Donatello (c. 1386- 1466), who would later emerge as the master of early Renaissance sculpture.

The other major artist working during this period was the painter Masaccio (1401-1428), known for his frescoes of the Trinity in the Church of Santa Maria Novella (c. 1426) and in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine (c. 1427), both in Florence. Masaccio painted for less than six years but was highly influential in the early Renaissance for the intellectual nature of his work, as well as its degree of naturalism.

Florence in the Renaissance

Though the Catholic Church remained a major patron of the arts during the Renaissance-from popes and other prelates to convents, monasteries and other religious organizations-works of art were increasingly commissioned by civil government, courts and wealthy individuals. Much of the art produced during the early Renaissance was commissioned by the wealthy merchant families of Florence, most notably the Medici family.

From 1434 until 1492, when Lorenzo de' Medici-known as "the Magnificent" for his strong leadership as well as his support of the arts-died, the powerful family presided over a golden age for the city of Florence. Pushed from power by a republican coalition in 1494, the Medici family spent years in exile but returned in 1512 to preside over another flowering of Florentine art, including the array of sculptures that now decorates the city's Piazza della Signoria.

High Renaissance Art (1490s-1527)

By the end of the 15th century, Rome had displaced Florence as the principal center of Renaissance art, reaching a high point under the powerful and ambitious Pope Leo X (a son of Lorenzo de' Medici). Three great masters- Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael-dominated the period known as the High Renaissance, which lasted roughly from the early 1490s until the sack of Rome by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain in 1527.

Leonardo (1452-1519) was the ultimate "Renaissance man" for the breadth of his intellect, interest and talent and his expression of humanist and classical values. Leonardo's best-known works, including the "Mona Lisa" (1503-05), "The Virgin of the Rocks" (1485) and the fresco "The Last Supper" (1495-98), showcase his unparalleled ability to portray light and shadow, as well as the physical relationship between figures-humans, animals and objects alike-and the landscape around them.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) drew on the human body for inspiration and created works on a vast scale. He was the dominant sculptor of the High Renaissance, producing pieces such as the Pietà in St. Peter's Cathedral (1499) and the David in his native Florence (1501-04). He carved the latter by hand from an enormous marble block; the famous statue measures five meters high including its base. Though Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor first and foremost, he achieved greatness as a painter as well, notably with his giant fresco covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, completed over four years (1508-12) and depicting various scenes from Genesis.

Raphael Sanzio, the youngest of the three great High Renaissance masters, learned from both da Vinci and Michelangelo. His paintings-most notably "The School of Athens" (1508-11), painted in the Vatican at the same time that Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel -skillfully expressed the classical ideals of beauty, serenity and harmony. Among the other great Italian artists working during this period were Sandro Botticelli, Bramante, Giorgione, Titian and Correggio.

Renaissance Art in Practice

Many works of Renaissance art depicted religious images, including subjects such as the Virgin Mary, or Madonna, and were encountered by contemporary audiences of the period in the context of religious rituals. Today, they are viewed as great works of art, but at the time they were seen and used mostly as devotional objects. Many Renaissance works were painted as altarpieces for incorporation into rituals associated with Catholic Mass and donated by patrons who sponsored the Mass itself.

Renaissance artists came from all strata of society; they usually studied as apprentices before being admitted to a professional guild and working under the tutelage of an older master. Far from being starving bohemians, these artists worked on commission and were hired by patrons of the arts because they were steady and reliable. Italy's rising middle class sought to imitate the aristocracy and elevate their own status by purchasing art for their homes. In addition to sacred images, many of these works portrayed domestic themes such as marriage, birth and the everyday life of the family.

Expansion and Decline

Over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, the spirit of the Renaissance spread throughout Italy and into France, northern Europe and Spain. In Venice, artists such as Giorgione (1477/78-1510) and Titian (1488/90-1576) further developed a method of painting in oil directly on canvas; this technique of oil painting allowed the artist to rework an image-as fresco painting (on plaster) did not-and it would dominate Western art to the present day.

Oil painting during the Renaissance can be traced back even further, however, to the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (died 1441), who painted a masterful altarpiece in the cathedral at Ghent (c. 1432). Van Eyck was one of the most important artists of the Northern Renaissance; later masters included the German painters Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543).

By the later 1500s, the Mannerist style, with its emphasis on artificiality, had developed in opposition to the idealized naturalism of High Renaissance art, and Mannerism spread from Florence and Rome to become the dominant style in Europe. Renaissance art continued to be celebrated, however: The 16th-century Florentine artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, author of the famous work "Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects" (1550), would write of the High Renaissance as the culmination of all Italian art, a process that began with Giotto in the late 13th century.

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Known as the Renaissance, the period immediately following the Middle Ages in Europe saw a great revival of interest in the classical learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome. Its style and characteristics emerged in Italy in the late 14th century and persisted through the early16th century.

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Key features of Renaissance culture

Andrew Dickson follows the progress of the Renaissance through Europe, and examines the educational, religious, artistic and geographical developments that shaped culture during the period.

The Renaissance

Few historical concepts have such powerful resonance as the Renaissance. Usually used to describe the rediscovery of classical Roman and Greek culture in the late 1300s and 1400s and the great pan-European flowering in art, architecture, literature, science, music, philosophy and politics that this inspired, it has been interpreted as the epoch that made the modern world truly modern. But the term 'renaissance' (French for 'rebirth') was never used during the period itself - it was invented by 19th-century historians - and its remit is still hotly disputed. Did the Renaissance begin in late 14th-century Italy, during what's usually regarded as the Middle Ages, or only flower in northern Europe a century later, in the aftermath of the Protestant Christian Reformation? Does it describe a cultural, historical and economic moment, or a gradual process - and, if so, when did it end? Did man really 're-find himself', as one French historian later wrote? Or does the word describe something much subtler and more indefinable?

Carpaccio's Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge

This vivid late-15th-century painting of multicultural Venice presents a fascinating mixture of religious and worldly subjects.

Usage terms © The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge, 1494 (oil on canvas) (see also 119437), Carpaccio, Vittore (c.1460/5-1523/6) / Galleria dell' Accademia, Venice, Italy / Bridgeman Images

Rebirth and rediscovery

Though historians debate the precise origins of the Renaissance, most agree that it - or one version of it - began in Italy some time in the late 1300s, with the decline in influence of Roman Catholic Christian doctrine and the reawakening of interest in Greek and Latin texts by philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, historians including Plutarch and poets such as Ovid and Virgil. One spur was the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) to the Turks in 1453, which encouraged many scholars to flee to Italy, bringing printed books and manuscripts with them. The extraordinary flowering in visual art that occurred in the great Italian city states of Florence and Venice in the early 16th century, including artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, was another. Yet another was Johann Gutenberg's invention of the printing press around 1440, which enabled books to be mass-produced in the Western world for the first time. Aided by a quickly shifting political landscape, and an increase in trade and economic activity, these new ways of thinking began to spread northwards across Europe. The fact that it was a transnational movement, which came to touch every country in Europe, is one of the most crucial things about the Renaissance.

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Illuminated page from a late-15th-century French adaptation of Ovid's 'Metamorphosis'.

Humanism

As already suggested, education was a driving force, encouraged by the increase in the number of universities and schools - another movement that began in Italy. Gradually, the concept of a 'humanistic' curriculum began to solidify: focussing not on Christian theological texts, which had been pored over in medieval seats of learning, but on classical 'humanities' subjects such as philosophy, history, drama and poetry. Schoolboys - few girls were permitted to receive an education at this point - were drilled in Latin and Greek, meaning that texts from the ancient world could be studied in the original languages. Printed textbooks and primers enabled students to memorise snippets from quotable authors, sharpen their use of argumentative rhetoric and develop an elegant writing style - one textbook by the Dutch humanist educator Desiderius Erasmus from 1512 famously includes several hundred ways to say 'thank you for your letter'.

Desiderius Erasmus' Institutio Principis Christiani, or The Education of A Christian Prince, 1516

Title page of the 1516 edition of Erasmus' treatise on political ethics.

In Britain, humanism was spread by a rapid increase in the number of 'grammar' schools (as their name indicates, language was their primary focus, and students were often required to speak in Latin during school hours), and the jump in the number of children exposed to the best classical learning. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, Bacon: almost every major British Renaissance intellectual one can name received a humanist education. Shakespeare's plays and poems are steeped in writers he encountered at school - the magical transformations of Ovid's poetry infiltrate the worlds of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, his Roman histories are cribbed from the Greek historian Plutarch, The Comedy of Errors is modelled closely on a Greek drama by Plautus, while includes an entire section - the Player's account of the death of Priam - borrowed from Virgil's Aeneid.

Shakespeare's First Folio

The first collected edition of the works of Shakespeare, containing the 36 plays now generally attributed to him.

The Reformation

But humanism produced a strange paradox: European society was still overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, yet the writers and thinkers now in vogue came from classical, pre-Christian times. The clash was made more obvious in 1517, when a renegade German friar called Martin Luther, appalled by corruption in the Church, launched a protest movement against Catholic teachings. Luther argued that the Church had too much power and needed to be reformed, and promoted a theology that stressed a more direct relationship between believers and God.

Another central plank of his thinking was that the Bible should be available not just in Latin, spoken by the elite, but democratically available in local languages. Luther published a German translation of the Bible in 1534, which - assisted by the growth of the printing press - helped bring about translations into English, French and other languages. In turn, this increased literacy rates, meaning that more people had access to education and new thinking. But the political consequences for Europe were violent, as war raged and Protestant and Catholic nations and citizens vied for control.

The Great Bible, probably Henry VIII's own copy

An English Bible was placed in all churches in 1538.

New worlds

As much as the rediscovery of old culture was important, it's impossible to understand the European Renaissance without referring to the way in which its horizons increased - both scientifically and geographically. In 1492, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas while seeking a westwardpassage to Asia, initiating a headlong rush by European powers for resources and territory in this so-called ' New World'. Throughout the 16th century, maritime powers such as Spain, Portugal and - later - England battled for control of what became America and the West Indies, while adventurers and traders also pushed eastwards, around Africa, towards East Asia. Money was the driving force (there were fortunes to be made in minerals, spices, cloth and other goods, not to mention the slave trade), but so was political and religious ideology, with colonial expansion presented as a Christian crusade to bring enlightenment to 'uncivilised' populations. While the cost for indigenous people was vast - it is still being counted - Europe profited enormously from these encounters, with new wealth flowing into major population centres and exotic goods such as silk, spices and ceramics available for the first time.

Coloured engravings of Native Americans and Picts bound with Strachey's New World 'Dictionary' and 'History'

An engraving by Theodor de Bry depicting Native American feast day celebrations.

Geographical discoveries mirrored scientific ones. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) posited that the Earth moved around the Sun, not the other way around, as had been assumed for centuries - a theory proved through close observation by the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who also refined the mechanical clock. The magnetic compass (first used by Chinese sailors in the 11th century) was belatedly rediscovered in early 14th-century Italy, revolutionising navigation. The use of another Chinese invention, gunpowder, also spread across Europe, with a dramatic and brutal effect on warfare. And - yet again - the printing press helped in incalculable ways, spreading ideas faster and faster.

John Dee's General and Rare Memorials bound with a signed manuscript

Richly illustrated title page of The General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577) showing Elizabeth I at the helm of a ship, in charge of Britain's imperial destiny.

How did the Renaissance affect culture?

The Renaissance affected culture in innumerable ways. In painting, sculpture and architecture, Italian artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael experimented with naturalism and perspective, and pushed visual form to more expressive heights than had ever been witnessed. Writers such as Boccaccio, Petrarch and Montaigne used insights gleaned from Latin and Greek texts to develop literature that had the polish and elegance of classical authors, yet was more intensely personal than ever before. Composers including Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria and Gabrieli experimented with interweaving polyphony and richly coloured harmonies, far more formally complex than their medieval antecedents. Political thinkers such as Machiavelli honed a statecraft based on realpolitik, while thinkers such as Galileo and Francis Bacon stressed the importance of science based on real-world experiment and observation. The fact that so many of these people were polymaths - skilled in music as well as art, writing as well as science - is itself testament to Renaissance attitudes to life and learning.

Leonardo da Vinci's notebook

Da Vinci was the ultimate polymath and many of his ideas and designs are preserved in this manuscript notebook. This page is a study for an underwater breathing apparatus.

An English Renaissance

Although the Renaissance arrived in England in the mid-1500s, almost two centuries after it began in Italy, some of its greatest achievements occurred on these shores, particularly in literature. Courtier-poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser transformed Italian forms into richly flexible English verse, while composers including Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons learned from the harmonic experiments being conducted in mainland Europe to forge a harmonic language uniquely their own.

The Devonshire Manuscript

A manuscript poetry anthology, which has been described as 'the richest surviving record of early Tudor poetry and of the literary activities of 16th-century women'.

Perhaps most strikingly, playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson put their grammar-school educations to fine effect in the public theatres of London by creating drama more sophisticated and psychologically powerful than anything else in Europe. Marlowe's anti-hero Tamburlaine, a snarlingly ambitious shepherd from a central Eurasian backwater who rises to be an all-powerful ruler, is one kind of Renaissance man. Shakespeare's Hamlet - a conscience-racked Danish revenger who is educated in the Lutheran town of Wittenberg, and who delivers existential philosophy worthy of Montaigne - is another. The word 'renaissance' may be tricky to define, but the impression it left on culture is impossible to mistake.

Andrew Dickson is an author, journalist and critic. A former arts editor at the Guardian in London, he writes regularly for the paper and appears as a broadcaster for the BBC and elsewhere. His book about Shakespeare's global influence, Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe, is out now in paperback. He lives in London, and his website is andrewjdickson.com.

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Key features of Renaissance culture | The British Library

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By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Key features of Renaissance culture Andrew Dickson follows the progress of the Renaissance through Europe, and examines the educational, religious, artistic and geographical developments that shaped culture during the period.

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Accents change with time, rendering some of Shakespeare's rhymes obsolete

smithsonian.com

The stereotypical English accent of today is not the English accent of Shakespeare's time, which goes at least some way towards explaining why, when you read Romeo and Juliet in high school, half the play didn't make sense. Seriously, it's not entirely your fault. As David Crystal, a linguist from the University of Wales, explains in the video above, some of the puns, and many of the rhymes, just don't work anymore.

Here's part of Romeo and Juliet's Act 2, as it would have been said in Shakespeare's Early Modern English, as put on by the British Library Board, via the Telegraph:

According to Patricia O'Conner talking to WNYC, the modern British accent that we know and love didn't arise until the late 1700s, more than 100 years after Shakespeare's death.

Shakespeare's English was more like a mix of American English, Irish, and Australian than like the modern standard English accent, says O'Conner,

More from Smithsonian.com:
Food From the Age of Shakespeare

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About Colin Schultz

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.

Read more from this author | Follow @_ColinS_

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Hear Shakespeare As It Was Meant To Be Heard

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Accents change with time, rendering some of Shakespeare's rhymes obsolete

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The Renaissance is a name given to a period in European history between the 14th and 17th centuries. It literally translates as "rebirth", and is generally regarded as one of the most important periods in the history of humanity.

If the Renaissance was a rebirth in the sense of artists, poets, mathematicians, scientists and philosophers rediscovering the wisdom and ideals of the Ancient Romans and Greeks, it is also represents a rebirth for mankind.

It is when we, as a species, emerged from the Dark Ages into a more enlightened modern era. It represents a dramatic flowering of culture and civilisation - and its effects continue to resonate today.

The Renaissance began in the Italian city of Florence. The patronage of the ruling Medici family, a sudden influx of Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and a rise in wealth and social mobility after the ravages of the Black Death all contributed to a desire to rediscover the knowledge and attitudes of Classical civilisations.

The movement quickly spread across Europe - notably to England, where Henry VIII was an enthusiastic proponent of the new cultural ideas - and produced Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest ever poet and dramatist.

While it profoundly affected architecture, music, philosophy, politics, religion and science, the Renaissance is perhaps best known for its literature and art.

Although it looked to the ancient world for inspiration, the Renaissance was nevertheless at its heart fiercely forward-thinking. The idea was not to return to the time of the Classical civilisations but to take their desire for knowledge and beauty as a model for the advancement of mankind itself.

Under this new way of thinking, knowledge was seen as one of the primary raisons d'être for life itself - and there followed a passion to seek out forgotten books among the monasteries and libraries of Europe. With every "lost" classic rediscovered, the influence of these texts grew.

This boom in literature naturally spread to the other arts. The stories and characters of Classical mythology became subjects and motifs for painting and sculpture; and under this new intellectual flowering, art was considered a worthy intellectual practice in its own right, not simply a means of decoration.

Credit: Alamy

Renaissance art may have been influenced by the great Classical stories and legends, but it was firmly based on observation of the real world, applying mathematics and realism to enhance the beauty.

Perspective was formalised as an essential artistic technique, as was the application of light and shadow. Under the great artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli, human anatomy was rigorously studied and brought to bear on their works. Never had nature - or man himself - looked so real or so beautiful.

Paintings, sculpture and other art forms flourished as new talents, influenced by the works of men such as Leonardo and Botticelli, took up the creation of their own masterpieces, and enjoying art became seen as the mark of a cultured individual.

This same influence also brought about a revolution in science and humanism. Just as artists reassessed the way we looked at the world, so did scientists.

Explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo opened up new lands, cultures and ideas to the east and west, and when Ferdinand Magellan lead an expedition to sail around the world in 1519 - followed by the English sailor Sir Francis Drake some 60 years later - all the old ideas about the world and man's place in it were blown away.

Likewise the astronomical experiments of men such as Copernicus and Galileo: once they suggested - and then proved - that the Earth revolved around the Sun (and not the other way around, as had always been believed), a Pandora's box had been opened.

Religion was questioned in a way that it never had before. A new way of thinking called humanism emerged, centred around the attempts by man to shape and control nature - rather than simply view us, and nature itself, as merely part of God's creation.

The Renaissance laid the foundations for the modern world. Much of the period's advances in science and mathematics are the base for present-day understanding of our universe, and in the art and literature of the period we find some of mankind's greatest aesthetic achievements.

Many of the period's great figures, artists, scientists and explorers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Copernicus, Ferdinand Magellan and Shakespeare remain household names half a millennium after their deaths, bearing testament to the extraordinary power and influence of the Renaissance - perhaps the greatest flowering of human knowledge ever.

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After beginning in the Italian city of Florence, the Renaissance movement is perhaps the most important period in the history of humanity