Ch 5Changing Cultural Traditions — Class 11 History, concept-first.

From the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, towns across many parts of Europe were growing, and a distinct ‘urban culture’ took shape within them.

The earliest universities in Europe were not scattered across the continent but concentrated in the commercial towns of Italy.

The humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not see themselves as starting something new so much as restoring something old.

The Arabs’ role in this story is easy to miss, because it sits quietly between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance Italians.

Formal education was not the only channel through which humanists shaped the minds of their age. Art, architecture and books carried humanist ideas with remarkable effectiveness, reaching people who n…

The fifteenth century saw Rome rise again, and this revival was written most visibly in stone. The popes, who had regained political strength after the schism of 1378 ended in 1417, actively encourage…

The sixteenth century saw a revolution that changed how knowledge travelled: the mastery of printing. Before this, if you wanted to see a great painting or building, you had to go to Italy.

The deepest break with the medieval past lay in how people thought about human beings themselves. For centuries, feudal society had divided people into three fixed orders — those who prayed, those who…

The Renaissance ideal of the individual and the citizen was built on the exclusion of women. Public life belonged to men, and the new humanist values, for all their talk of freedom and dignity, were f…

The Renaissance was an elite affair. Trade, conquest and diplomacy tied Italian towns and courts to the wider world, and the new culture was admired and copied by the educated and wealthy.

The Christian idea of man as a sinner came under attack from an unexpected direction — science. For centuries, the Church had taught that the earth was a sinful place, and that the very weight of sin…

Galileo once remarked that the Bible, which lights the road to heaven, does not say much on how the heavens work. The point was sharp: scripture tells you how to reach God, not how the planets move.

The term ‘Renaissance’ carries a heavy assumption: that this period marked a sharp break with the past, a rebirth of Greek and Roman ideas after centuries of darkness.