Question

What are the main characteristics of Renaissance period?

Answer 1

The Renaissance was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a long Renaissance put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.

One of the characteristics of the Renaissance was an expanded sense of possibility. With the rediscovery of ancient learning, Western man found himself possessed of a newfound confidence in his ability to learn more about the world around him. It seemed to many that there were no limits to the knowledge that man could acquire now that he was equipped with a humanistic world view free from the shackles of medieval scholasticism—a system of learning which had become increasingly incapable of saying anything meaningful about the empirical world.

Another characteristic of Renaissance humanism was its consonance with the values and doctrines of the Church. Despite this, however, it paved the way for later generations of thinkers to develop wholly secularized academic disciplines which would no longer need to conform their teachings to the demands of official theology.

A third characteristic of the Renaissance is that its thinkers tended to believe that developing our intellectual and cultural potentialities was a way for man to honor his divine maker, making full use of the talents given to us by God. There was thus no dichotomy between the pursuit of earthly wisdom and sincere worship of the Almighty.

However—and this is the fourth and final characteristic of the Renaissance we're going to examine—this great intellectual and cultural movement unwittingly laid the foundations for subsequent generations to take humanism a step further and dispense with formal religion altogether. This drove a wedge between faith and reason, the secular and the religious, the sacred and the profane, thus creating divisions that have characterized intellectual life in the West since the Enlightenment.