Unit 4: The Renaissance

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, literary works, and concepts from the Renaissance lecture notes.

Mercantile

Related to commerce or trade.

Renaissance

A great cultural revival that swept through Europe between the 1300s and 1500s; meaning "rebirth" in French.

Patron

Someone who gives money or other support to a person or group.

Florence

An Italian city-state and major trading stop that became the artistic center of the Renaissance, renowned for its banking activity.

Medici family

A prominent Florence banking family who served as long-term patrons of the arts, funding the construction and artistic decoration of churches.

Humanism

A Renaissance cultural movement based on the study of classical works, emphasizing that learning leads to a better earthly life rather than merely serving as preparation for eternity.

Secularism

The view that religion does not need to be the center of human affairs, framing life as an opportunity for enjoyment and pleasure.

Vernacular

The everyday spoken language of the people.

The Prince

A political work written by Niccolò Machiavelli describing how political leaders gain, maintain, and lose power.

Individualism

The belief that the individual is more important than the larger community, which freed artists from focusing strictly on sin and encouraged creative risk-taking.

Gregorian calendar

The modern calendar developed under Pope Gregory XIII to rectify inaccuracies found in the ancient Roman Julian calendar.

Utopia

An imaginary, ideal place; also the title of a work by Sir Thomas More describing an equal community governed entirely by reason with no private property.

Desiderius Erasmus

A scholar who advocated for Jesus's life and lessons as models for Church doctrine, authored In Praise of Folly, and helped make humanism an international movement.

Satire

A genre of writing that uses ridicule or sarcasm to criticize vice or folly.

François Rabelais

A French monk, doctor, scholar, and author of Gargantua and Pantagruel who used humor and exaggeration to critique religion, education, and politics.

Johann Gutenberg

The German inventor who introduced movable metal type around 1450 and published a printed edition of the Bible in 1455.

Censor

To remove material from published works in order to prevent its publication.

Broadsheets

Early predecessors of newspapers that circulated among the public, frequently featuring woodcut illustrations.

Proportion

The architectural and artistic method of balancing parts of a design to create a visually pleasing whole.

Linear perspective

A mathematical system used to represent three-dimensional space on a flat surface, discovered by Filippo Brunelleschi.

Filippo Brunelleschi

An architect who studied ancient architectural proportions, engineered the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and discovered linear perspective.

Sfumato

An artistic technique meaning "smoky" in Italian that softens outlines and shadows to generate a visual impression of distance.

The Last Judgement

A large-scale fresco painted by Michelangelo on the rear wall of the Sistine Chapel, featuring his own self-portrait.

The Divine Comedy

A major epic poem written in Italian vernacular by Dante Alighieri, detailing an imaginary journey through hell that concludes in heaven.

Francesco Petrarch

A poet known for writing love verses to Laura who reconciled pagan classical culture with Christianity; regarded as the founder of Renaissance humanism.

Sonnet

A poetic form containing 14 lines with a fixed rhyming scheme.

Picaresque

A novel style consisting of a series of comic episodes that typically center on a mischievous character, as seen in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote.