The exams are marked, the grades submitted. Now I can focus on preparing for my research in Europe, since this Reluctant Scholar received a rather more generous travel grant than expected, and is feeling a little ashamed of her reluctance now. There is much to do in the next week and a half. Becoming fluent in spoken French is up there, so bring on the French films and podcasts! I am excited. I like having a mission.
Anyway, I gathered a few gems from my marking. Some of them made me laugh out loud. Some of them even come from decent essays, but their phrasing was quirky enough to amuse me.
• Pope Paul II, aka the King of Bling…
• Guidobaldo II and his protruding codpiece…
• As Petrarch was kicking off the Renaissance…
• In the Renaissance, people started to learn Greek and Latin…
• Artists competed for the most masterful masterpiece.
• As 1494 [lazily?] rolled around, Charles invaded Italy.
• The Church no longer had the last say on every aspect of life.
• Education became well-rounded.
• At a time of change, nobody wanted to be a barbarian because they were seen negatively and brutish.
• Cosimo [d. 1464] commissioned da Vinci [b. 1452] to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling [da Vinci, the 12-yr-old wunderkind! to give no credit to Michelangelo’s work in 1508-12]
• Medieval proportional disasters adorned churches…
• The Renaissance remains a relevant part of history.
A Medieval Proportional Disaster
What I find so bizarre about Renaissance Studies is that a lot of the historians and students are guilty to varying extents of perceiving the Middle Ages as a period of ecclesiastical tyranny in which the Classics were unheard of or at least substantially modified. While there is a grain of truth in the latter (though many medievals loved Classical literature), the former is so far from the truth it’s quite laughable. The Church had not grown substantially in power until about the Renaissance, and there had been a good deal of diversity within the one Church. Scholasticism, though it sadly declined, was in its hay day a brilliant tool for stimulating thought, based heavily on Classical principles.
Perspective, people, perspective. If I could recommend two books to Renaissance historians to give them some insight into the intelligence of the Middle Ages, they would probably be Marie-Dominique Chenu’s Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, and Benson and Constable’s (eds) Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Goodness, I wonder which century I specialize in….
Reluctant Scholar 