Johnson: Views of the Medieval Period/Renaissance by Erin Meyer Wilson

Church and Innovation

erin_meyerwilson — 2025-09-09 18:23:49 UTC

"...artisans engaged in the enormous building and rebuilding program that, beginning early in the twelfth century, transformed thousands of Romanesque churches and cathedrals into Gothic ones" (9-10)

Wanting to relive the glory days

2025-09-09 18:25:32 UTC

"Cultural rebirths, major and minor, are a common occurrence in history. Most generations, of all human societies, have a propensity to look back on golden ages and seek to restore them. Thus the long civilization of Egypt, neatly divided by modern archaeologists into the Old Kingdom, was punctured by 2 collapses, termed intermediate periods, and botht he Middle and the New kingdoms were infinite and systematic renaissances." (5). Why is the European Renaissance the only one we note on?

Accelerated Economy

2025-09-09 18:26:07 UTC

'Thus in the later Middle Ages, wealth was being produced in greater quantities than ever before in history, and was often concentrated in cities specialising in the new occupations of large-scale commerce and banking, like Venice and Florence. [...] As wealth accomulated, those who possessed it gratified their senses by patronising literature and the arts, and they were joined by sovereigns, popes and princes, who found ways of taxing the new wealth of their subjects' (15).

Introduction to Christian-led education during the Renaissance

2025-09-09 18:26:53 UTC

"Because of the transmission through Islam, Aristotle remained suspect in the church's eyes as a possible source of heresy, but that did not stop the great thirteenth-century Magnus and Thomas Aquinas from constructing their summae on an Aristotelian basis... the net effect being to place Christian belief on a solid foundation of reason as well as faith." (Johnson 10)

Labor saving

2025-09-09 18:27:21 UTC

"For all these reasons, there were strong incentives, which grew in the later Middle Ages, to improve labor-saving machinery and develop alternative sources of power to human muscles. Some of the Medieval inventions were very simple, though important, like the wheelbarrow." (13)

Desire to Revive Earlier Ideals

2025-09-09 18:27:45 UTC

"Rome's divinely blessed origins in verse. The empire was never quite so self-confident as the Republic, subject as it was to the whims of fallible autocrat, rather than the collective wisdom of the Senate, and it was always looking over its shoulder at a past that was more worthy of admiration and seeking to resurrect its qualities." (8)

Roman didnt try to use their resources/wealth

2025-09-09 18:29:09 UTC

Considering the wealth of the Roman Republic in its prime, its technology was minimal, barely in advance of that of Athenian Greece, and confined largely to the military sphere. Yet even in the navy, the Romans made pitifully little use of sail power, preferring oars rowed by galley slaves. (12)

2025-09-09 18:29:56 UTC

Especially in the low countries, Germany and Italy, thousands of workshops of all kinds emerged, specializing in stone, leather, matal, wood, plaster, chemicals and fabrics, producing a growing variety of luxury goods and machinery. It was chiefly the families of those worked int hos shops that produced the painters and carvers .... responsible for the huge expansion of culture that marked the beginnings of the early modern age. (16)