Chapter 2: Recovery and Rebirth: The Age of the Renaissance

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, artistic movements, and political developments from Chapter 2: Recovery and Rebirth: The Age of the Renaissance.

Jacob Burckhardt

The Swiss historian and art critic who established the modern concept of the Renaissance in his 1860 book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.

l'uomo universale

The Renaissance ideal of a universal person or well-rounded personality who was capable of achievements in many areas of life.

Hanseatic League

A commercial and military alliance of northern European trading towns founded by North German coastal cities, led by Lübeck, that maintained a monopoly on northern trade for nearly two hundred years.

House of Medici

The greatest banking family and financial empire in Europe during the fifteenth century, headquartered in Florence with interests in cloth, real estate, and banking.

The Book of the Courtier

A handbook written by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 that outlined the key attributes, achievements, and standard of conduct expected of the ideal Renaissance aristocrat.

Patricians

The highest class of Renaissance urban society, whose wealth from capitalistic enterprises in trade, banking, and industry allowed them to dominate their communities politically and socially.

Isabella d'Este

The daughter of the duke of Ferrara and wife of the marquis of Mantua, known as the 'first lady of the world' for her political wisdom, intellect, and patronage of Renaissance art and letters.

Peace of Lodi

A 1454 agreement signed by Italian city-states that ended nearly fifty years of war and established a workable balance of power along with a forty-year period of relative peace.

Niccolò Machiavelli

A Florentine administrator and author of The Prince (1513), a treatise asserting that political authority should be based on human nature and state interests rather than moral or religious considerations.

Humanism

An intellectual movement of the Italian Renaissance based on the study of classical Greek and Roman literary works (studia humanitatis), including grammar, rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and history.

Petrarch

The fourteenth-century figure known as the father of Italian Renaissance humanism, who characterized the Middle Ages as dark and promoted the search for classical Latin manuscripts.

Civic Humanism

A fifteenth-century Florentine intellectual movement that linked humanist study with civic pride, asserting that intellectuals have a duty to actively serve their state.

Lorenzo Valla

A Renaissance humanist who wrote The Elegances of the Latin Language, aiming to purify medieval Latin and restore it to the standard of the late Roman Republic and early Empire.

Neoplatonism

A philosophical system expounded by Marsilio Ficino that synthesized Christian theology with Platonic philosophy, centering on a hierarchy of substances and a theory of spiritual love.

Hermeticism

An intellectual movement revived in late fifteenth-century Florence based on writings translated by Ficino, encompassing both occult sciences (magic, astrology, alchemy) and pantheistic philosophical beliefs.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

A Renaissance humanist who composed the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which proclaimed the unlimited potential of human beings who possess free will to shape their own nature.

Johannes Gutenberg

A printer from Mainz who brought the development of movable metal type to completion and published Gutenberg's Bible around 1455 or 1456.

Masaccio

A Florentine painter whose Brancacci Chapel frescoes introduced a new realistic style marked by monumental figures, natural light, and mathematical perspective.

Filippo Brunelleschi

A Florentine architect who devised novel engineering techniques to build the 140-foot dome for the Florence Duomo and designed the classical, human-scaled interior of San Lorenzo.

High Renaissance

The final phase of Renaissance art (1480-1520), centered primarily in Rome and characterized by the idealization of nature, dominated by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

Jan van Eyck

A Flemish painter who was among the first to master oil painting, renowned for his precise empirical observation and detailed rendering of visual reality in works like Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride.

Albrecht Dürer

A northern Renaissance artist from Nuremberg who traveled to Italy and integrated Italian principles of perspective and human proportion with northern attention to minute detail.

Madrigal

A popular form of Renaissance secular vocal music originating in Italian courts, consisting of a short vernacular poem set to music using text painting.

taille

An annual direct tax on land or property in France that King Louis XI retained as a permanent source of royal income without needing approval from the Estates-General.

Court of Star Chamber

An English judicial court established by King Henry VII to control irresponsible noble behavior without using juries and permitting torture to extract confessions.

Inquisition

A court introduced into Spain in 1478 under royal control to investigate and enforce religious orthodoxy among converted Jews (Conversos) and Muslims (Moriscos).

John Wyclif

An Oxford theologian who launched Lollardy, attacking papal temporal claims and clerical corruption while advocating that Scripture be accessible in vernacular languages.

John Hus

The chancellor of the University of Prague who led a Czech reform movement against church corruption and was burned at the stake as a heretic by the Council of Constance in 1415.

Execrabilis

A papal bull issued by Pope Pius II in 1460 declaring that appeals to a church council over the head of the pope were heretical.

Nepotism

The practice of appointing family members to high offices, widely used by Renaissance popes like Sixtus IV and Alexander VI to advance their families' political and financial ambitions.