Here is a thoughtful and informative discussion of the terms "Renaissance" and "Reformation"
from an excellent set of essays, Handbook of European History, 1400-1600,
edited by Thomas A. Brady Jr., et al. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996).
I have reproduced some of their significant explanations and arguments as found in their book.
I have retained their paragraph structure, signaled by indented paragraph beginnings.
However, for emphasis and clarity in their complex argumentation, I have sometimes broken
their paragraphs by a full line of space.
In such cases, their text continues flush left, to show it is not an original paragraph break.
Intermediate page references should make it possible
for researchers to find the original quotations in their authors' contexts.
Here is the discussion by Thomas A. Brady Jr. and others:
"THE RENAISSANCE" AND "THE REFORMATION": TWO CLASSIC CONCEPTSThe pivotal role in European history of the two centuries between 1400 and 1600
has sometimes been questioned but rarely denied. Since the middle of the nineteenth century,
two terms--"the Renaissance" and "the Reformation"--have commonly been employed to express
the historians' sense of this role.Each term can claim roots in an era it helped to organize.
Although "the Renaissance" is a nineteenth-century coinage,
the notion behind it descends from the fourteenth century. . . .Rather older than "the Renaissance,"
"the Reformation" has long expressed the sense of momentous change
that shrouded the religous schism of the sixteenth century. . . .By the mid-nineteenth century, "the Renaissance" and "the Reformation" became categories
of periodization, designating not just events or series of events but great turning points
in history. (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xiii)
Brady et al. emphasize that these terms, embedded in nineteenth-century Europe's view of itself,
carried ideological meaning for the "modernists" of the time in dividing their period from earlier
European views, usually to the benefit and prestige of the more modern period. Brady et al. say:
The changes of sensibility after 1918 made the concepts of "the Renaissance" and "the Reformation"
controversial, disputed, and ambiguous. For one thing, the rise of economic and social history
tended to carve the boundary between modern and older Europe ever more deeply into the
era between1750 and 1815. For another, the ebbing prestige of individualism and Christianity
in European high culture undermined the concepts' explanatory power.
..........................................................................................................................................
Once "the Renaissance" and "the Reformation" are robbed of their explanatory power,
what becomes of the centuries between 1400 and 1600? (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xv-xvi) . . .The most probable answer is that we can still have a Renaissance and a Reformation--
more accurately, Renaissances and Reformations--providing that we no longer force them
to serve us as the turning points from medieval to modern times.The concepts retain their value for designating respectively the literate, classicizing, urban-based,
culture of the lay elites and the great upheaval in the Christian church.Today, one speaks of Renaissance and Reformation as movements--the influence of social history--
but they are no longer grand categories of periodization.Nowadays, the place of the old revolutionary shift from medieval to modern
has been taken by a gradual, fluctuating, highly contextualized blending
of "late medieval" with "early modern," the central phase of which unfolds
in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. . . .A focus on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, therefore,
stakes out the heart of this era and emphasizes its main characteristics
rather than its becoming and passing. (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xvi-xvii)
.................................................................................................................
"The Renaissance" still means the recovery, adaptation, and expansion of knowledge
associated with the neo-classical revival, but it can no longer stand for Burckhardt's
birth of modernity in the form of individualism."The Reformation" still means the transformation and differentiation of western Christianity
during the sixteenth century, but it can no longer stand for Motley's liberation of the world
from priestcraft and superstition.Thus shorn of their former ideological freight, the concepts still retain distinct signatures
as aspects of a world which was, at the same time, late medieval and early modern.To relativize these old concepts is not to discard them, and indeed may be regarded,
in the spirit of Burckhardt and Motley, as a kind of liberation. Free from the great burden
of being "the turning point" of European history, these centuries--late Middle Ages, Renaissance,
Reformation, and early modern era--have become a conceptual bridge between the world
of pre-modern Europe and the histories of most other parts of the world.This role, which the nineteenth-century historians could hardly have suspected, has lent
the study of these centuries a remarkable energy in our time. (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xxi)
The somewhat technical discussion of these terms by professional historians is helpful for us.
They let us see how the community of scholars is handling the terms today. As we can see, the terms
"renaissance" and "reformation" can be more general than was the case in the nineteenth century.
We'll continue to work with them.
We will access and add value in the "remarkable energy in our time" for renaissance and reformation studies,
that help us inform today's information renaissance.
JEG
Posted by Jay Gillette at May 10, 2006 11:21 AM